Boarding House
Reviewing movies is easy. It all boils down to one simple thing, is the damn thing any good?
Then along comes Boarding House and screws it all up. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO THINK ABOUT IT!
Claiming to be the first ever film shot entirely on video Boarding House may be the story of a haunted death house and it's new inhabitants, it also may be about nothing of the sort. That's the joy/agony of Boarding House, even if it knew what it was about it just isn't going to tell you. You could watch the film forwards, backwards, stick another film on half way through, it won't make a jot of difference. And you know what? I applaud it for that (only because I am genuinely scared that the movie may come and get me).
If there is any horror to be found here, it is to be found in director/star John Wintergate who parades around for much of the movie bedding the seemingly endless cast of women and dressing like this.
The female inhabitants of the Boarding House are many, they fight, love, sit around the pool, have pie fights and strip off a lot, unsurprisingly a quite significant chunk of running time is spent with these women. With regard to the plot, it pops by every once in a while sits by the pool and then just falls asleep, conversations seemingly related to the plot are forgotten only to be picked up again some twenty minutes later as if nothing else has gone on, some things are totally ignored and more often than not the cast simply refuse to react to what is happening onscreen, it's as if someone filmed between scenes instead of bothering with the film. A woman hallucinates she has a pig face, but nobody seems that bothered, someone screams the place down after encountering some devilish thing and all her room mates can do is ask her if she wants some pizza. Our studly leading man can make soap levitate with the power of his mind and after telling someone it's easy to do they can do it instantly and join forces with him in the dry ice laden finale.
I know this all sounds worse than Coneheads but I'm not so sure, whether the film subliminally brainwashed me or whether the shoddy 80's video graphics that attempted to show me the credits scorched part of my brain away: but Boarding House may also be the future of cinema, years from now I envisage it being rediscovered and a whole genre boom being directly attributed to it. A kitchen sink of a movie, that delivers all an audience could ever want and dropped off in a package that makes David Lynch appear king of linear cinema.
All hail John Wintergate and roll on Boarding House 2!
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