I Like My Houses Murderery and My Mental Patients Charming

Last weekend, I saw the film Dream House. If you have seen The Amityville Horror, The Shining, Shutter Island, or The Number 23, then you have also seen the film Dream House.

My immediate thought upon exiting the theater: At least Daniel Craig got a wife out of the movie. And a hot wife, too!

As I’m sure I’ve said before, I’ll pretty much see any horror movie. There are only a few things that are beyond my tolerance level, and even those I usually end up watching anyway, because I’m a sick, twisted individual. I think there’s only ever been a couple times in my life I’ve been so disturbed by a movie image that I wondered why I was subjecting myself to this horrid torture. The first was during the opening of the film, Ghost Ship, where about forty people are cut in two by an errant guide wire, and then flop around for a few minutes before they die. Even writing that makes me want to grab my stomach and go “eeeee!” I think the second moment may have been during Piranha 3D. There were so many mangled legs and torsos and decapitated heads and dismembered members, that I had to stop for a moment and think, “Really? You couldn’t go on in life without seeing a piranha eat its way through the back of a porn star‘s head?” But other than that, I’m up for anything. Except maybe The Human Centipede. That's just nasty.

Dream House, however, wasn't nasty, or gory, or disturbing. It was just boring. Even the handsomeness of James Bond couldn't save it. SPOILER ALERT. I’m about to tell you exactly what was so bad about it, so if you’re going to ignore me and the reviewers who gave it a whopping 8% on rottentomatoes.com, then maybe you should go back to playing words with friends on your iPhone.

This movie is very difficult to describe, due to its awfulness, but I’ll give it the old college try.

Daniel Craig decides to give up his cushy job as a publisher to build a dream house with his family and write a novel. Only none of that is real! He murdered his family for no reason, and then forgot about it and was really in a mental hospital. But they had to let him go because there was actually no evidence he actually committed the crime. And now he’s seeing either the ghosts of his dead family, or just hallucinating because he’s crazy pants. Only that‘s not entirely true either, because some other dude killed his family, and he just forgot that, too! But not Naomi Watts’ character, the kindly neighbor across the street. She never gave up hope that her best friend Daniel Craig was magically not the murderer after all, which he wasn’t. The movie ends with Daniel Craig staring at a bookstore window, where his novel he wrote "Dream House" is now a bestseller. Really, Dream House? A published novel balances out family murder? This is almost as bad as A Beautiful Mind where they claimed love cured schizophrenia.

There was a half-hearted attempt to throw in some creepy visuals, like a millisecond shot of the two daughters blending into the wallpaper in a ghostly fashion, as he realizes they are in fact, either spirits or delusions. The house shifts back and forth from moldering pile of wood to cozy fantasy home. Other than that, the only scary parts of the movie was the horrid dialogue.

Oh, the dialogue! Not since poor Natalie Portman in the new Star Wars movies have I ever seen such a abysmal case of good actors gone bad. I don’t like to throw around the word atrocious, because it makes me look like a pompous twit, but the dialogue in Dream House was atrocious. And unnatural. I think maybe the film was written by a robot, and not David Loucka as the internet claims. It relieved me to learn that both Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig were unhappy with how the film turned out and threatened not to do press for it. That’s scruples for you!

If there is one silver lining of this film, is that it made Rachel Weisz leave her fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, who I have never forgiven for creating the movie Pi.