SUBURBAN GOTHIC
USA, 2014
Director: Richard Bates Jr.
5/10
After the outstanding "Excision" (Review here), one of the most remarkable debut features in recent years, I was immensely excited for "Suburban Gothic", the second feature by seemingly uber-talented director and writer Richard Bates Jr. Unfortunately, it's one of this year's absolute biggest disappointments, a hardly entertaining horror-comedy about a job-seeking college-graduate who is forced to move back to his parents' house which is which is haunted by restless ghosts.
There are lots of funny and amusing moments, thanks to fab performances by Matthew Gray Gubler, Jack Plotnick or the great Ray Wise who constantly deliver lots of terrific one-liners, but there are also shitloads of horrendously dull and boring scenes, due to Bates Jr.'s surprising inability to create any form of tension or scariness.
The story is so unoriginal, predictable and lackluster, it's shocking [or like Imdb-user 'your crowbar' mentioned: "(...) I couldn't believe it came from the same man who wrote "Excision"] . The whole thing would have worked way better without any horror-elements as straight satire on the 'burbs and the American Way of Life. Also, the usage of really cheap-looking CGI is distracting and took me out of the movie many, many times. If you don't have the budget to create believable CGI, then just don't use CGI for fuck's sake.
As I mentioned, the acting is great, though there are too many cameos that are completely wasted. It's great to see so many legends (John Waters, Jeffrey Combs, Muse Watson - ignoring the utterly pointless Soska Sisters cameo), but I wanted to see more of them instead of getting bored by generic shots of black computer-generated fog or unfunny levitating computer-generated children's heads. Fingers crossed Bates Jr.'s next film will be a whole lot better than this...
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