For my movie binge in October, I began planning months ahead to ensure I had plenty of new films to watch: at least one for every day of the month. As I was searching Instagram through hashtags, I found several posts containing the slasher film ‘The Hoot Owl’. Its title and artwork were incredibly intriguing, however, I was unable to find it anywhere. After some effort, I was able to get in touch with the filmmaker and we had some talks. He then offered to send a copy for review. While I have been in possession of it for a month, I refrained from watching it until October so I could incorporate it into my binge. I want to give a huge thank you to Jason Von Godi for sending this over because I really enjoyed myself while watching it.
The movie revolves around a young couple that bought an old house online claiming it to be a fixer-upper without seeing it. This couple is seeking fresh beginnings after a miscarriage and calls over some friends to help scrub and fix the house. What his wife does not know however is that the house is sat on the site of gruesome murders, and a couple of children went missing weeks before. While the group tries to have fun and fix the house, they are slowly being picked off by something, or someone, who has been living in one of the barns on the property.
I was very excited to watch this one after seeing the trailer and artwork and was genuinely highly anticipating the film. It turned out to be quite good and I was really impressed with the film. I spoke about the film on social media and had some good chats with some of my friends regarding the movie, the baby scene, and the state of modern indie horror. To be honest, I did assume those who saw it found at least some good things to appreciate it. This unfortunately, was not the case.
As I was doing research for this review, I noticed the film was on Tubi and that a lot of users had gone on sites such as IMDB and review-bombed it. While I am sure not every bad review was done by trolls, I can only assume that a majority of them came from people who had a lot of time on their hands because, in all honesty, the film was very much enjoyable.
The acting in this one is great. I really loved the characters the film gives us, and the cast did wonderful with it. All of them seemed very comfortable in front of the camera, and their delivery of the lines suited the film perfectly. Even though a few scenes felt like they had some mindless bickering and casual conversation that was a bit too over the top, the cast’s performances were amazing.
This one was intriguing, though the plot certainly isn’t novel. They had a bearable idea, and thus they managed to deliver. I appreciate that they didn’t bank on inventing the next legendary horror saga or try to think outside the box. They aimed to create a film that horror genre fans would enjoy and I believe they did. It is just that the movie is a little one-sided with most of the film devoted to character and backstory building instead of getting to the horror part of the story. This would usually be an issue for me but I found myself caring for the characters. This combined with the compelling performances made it quite pleasant. Good pacing could be attained if those scenes were trimmed down, but I did not mind the extra bulk. I have the line that the killer’s identity is never fully shown to us but the snippets of it we do get to see are at best shallow and that is my biggest problem. These days slashers are practically made famous because of the plethora of famous killers and their potential in one or many movies and this one unlike other films seems to have every frame figured out except the killer.
In conclusion, gory murders and surrealistic practical effects mark the film’s success. The deaths were well executed and the effects fit wonderfully, although they could have gone all out on the gore. To summarize, The Hoot Owl is a solid example of a slasher film and it brings the blood. The killers need more work, but the character development and the backstory are excellently crafted. I did enjoy this. So for those who are interested, I do recommend it.
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