I can hear you right now saying “Lillian, you moron, this isn't a Grindhouse movie.”  Sure, you think you know so much.  It just so happens that I KNOW most people wouldn't classify this as a Grindhouse flick, but if you want to read my reasoning behind thinking this movie belongs in the neo-grindhouse category, then keep reading. If not, go wander off and iron your socks.  I don't really care either way (except that if you iron your socks and melt them because they're made of synthetic material, it serves you right for being such a know-it-all snob).

Tell me what about this movie doesn't sound like the setup for a grainy, schlocky, cheaply made grindhouse shocker: a woman and a man, characters we don't really get to know very well, arrive at an isolated house in the boonies for what is supposed to be their last night as a couple for awhile.  They're going to be taking a break (though the details behind why this is happening are fuzzy).  The man decides to leave to buy cigarettes (really he needs to go for a drive and think, too) and suddenly the house is beset by a strange group of three people who seem to take pleasure in tormenting and frightening the man and woman in the house for no other reason than the sadistic joy they derive from the act of mentally torturing people.  After a night of horror, two neighborhood kids come to the isolated house only to make a grisly discovery.

This movie would have been right at home in 1974 or so, hanging on the coattails of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a movie to which it owes a lot of its feeling and spirit.  The events in this movie are timeless.  We don't really get a sense of exactly when all the movies' events are happening.  Sure, all those people who can look at a vehicle and instantly tell me when a movie was made would be able to tell you approximately when this movie was set (or they think they can
do that, since they won't shut up when I'm unlucky enough to have to watch a movie with them in theaters) but I don't know much about cars, so for me, the movie was fairly timeless.  People drive from place to place a few times, but there's no quick cutting between scenes (making the movie look like an overblown music video) which is so popular with today's hip horror directors.  There's no overtly hip dialogue, either, the people in the movie actually talk like people, which is a
refreshing change from watching a movie where practically every line seems designed to later become a catch phrase.  I miss hearing my characters talk to each other instead of to the audience (wink wink, nudge nudge, we're in a movie and we know it, aren't we cool?)

Nowadays movies insert flashbacks (with quick cuts and split-screen and lots of other hip techniques to remind us of how cool they are) but this movie simply places us in a situation and shows us just enough of what happened before to allow us to wonder about what exactly got these characters to where they are, which adds to the feeling of being off-balance and wrong.  Movies of the 1970s were willing to take this risk, they were made for a few thousand bucks and thus they didn't care about making back a huge budget, they just wanted to tell a story.  They were raw and real.  This movie owes more to that tradition than to the self-aware horror movies of recent years.  Because we don't know what exactly is going on at any given moment, we're just as discombobulated, confused, and frightened as the characters in the movie when everything starts turning to hell all around us.

Since the isolated house was the summer home of the man's family when he was growing up, it is full of old fashioned things, like an old record player and a collection of old records that play to great chilling advantage throughout the course of the movie.  The old country songs that make up the bulk of the soundtrack bring back memories of listening to classic country radio when I was a kid, and they add to the sad, nostalgic feel of the movie.  There's no tie-in to a catchy soundtrack here, just some haunting, cracking records playing too loud in a house that is too still on a night that is too quiet, and that is chilling in a way that big explosions and expensive special effects can't hope to achieve.  So much of the elements of this movie are simple and understated.  I'm a huge fan of gore, but what little gore there is in this movie is highly effective because it seems to out of place in this peaceful setting and we don't really know why it's happening in the lives of these people, who while they do seem at odds with each other, seem like nice enough people who
don't deserve to have all these horrible things happen to them.

We don't really know why the intruders are doing what they're doing. At one point, the woman asks one of “The Strangers” why they're doing all this, and the killer, a young girl, replies “'cause you were home.”  If that doesn't hearken back to the “anything goes” attitude of the killers in 1970s cheapie shockers, I don't know what does.  It carries a disillusioned feel reminiscent of real-life killers such as Brenda Ann Spencer (when asked why she went on a shooting spree at an elementary school in 1979, she replied "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.")  That's all the explanation we get.  There's no convoluted backstory involving revenge (you ran over my cousin years ago, so now we're killing you, or I raped your mother years ago and she became pregnant with you, now I'm returning to claim you as my daughter, or I'm your twin brother coming to kill you because mom always loved you best) and no one runs through the woods or up the stairs in high heels, leading the audience to scream at the screen and be taken out of the moment.  Two people arrive at a house, are systematically tormented and tortured and their lives are destroyed, the end.  I don't know if the filmmakers were trying to tap into a larger tradition of grindhouse movies, but they managed to do just that, and for that, I'll forgive any of this movie's shortcomings some boneheaded moves on the part of the main characters, a few too many similarities to recent French films that shall remain nameless) because they unsettled me, brought me into the movie, and then left me shaking at the end.  Well done.

The movie begins with the standard “The following movie is based on actual events” introduction, which brings back memories of rolling my eyes at movies like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Last House on the Left” (when that warning appears on the screen
during the commentary track for LHOTL, director Wes Craven says “This was a complete lie, folks”).  It was a gimmick that worked back then because it made viewers think the events in the movie could really happen to them, and it's one more thing that ties this movie into a greater tradition of movies that exist solely to unsettle and unnerve we the viewing audience.  I mentioned this movie to a friend of mine, and she said it scared her more than other movies did, because “All
this stuff starts happening to these people, and you don't know why.” Why?  The better to scare the shit out of you, my dear.