Culture Blues

Tribeca 2011: The Bleeding House

For the next month, Jeremiah and Jeff will be spending almost all of their free time watching and reviewing movies from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's about to get indie up in here!

Can a horror movie succeed when the most frightening thing about it is the way its villain talks?

In The Bleeding House, southern gentleman Patrick Breen arrives at the secluded Smith residence in his Panama suit, carrying an ominous medical bag. A charming sociopath with a murder philosophy rooted in Biblical blood-letting, Breen gets more than he bargained for from the Smith family, specifically from teenage daughter Alexandra Chando, a haunted teen with a lock on the outside of her door and a penchant for pinning dead bugs to her bedroom walls.

Breen is wonderfully creepy as a serial killer whose unerring politeness carries over even to how he dispatches his victims. Yes, he brutally slashes the occasional throat, but Breen would much prefer to use a torture-porn device that smacks of southern hospitality. First time writer/director Philip Gelatt has written a juicy part for Breen. Too bad that doesn’t extend to the rest of the cast. So focused is Gelatt on Breen’s copious amounts of speechifying that he neglects to scribble even a few cursory scares into The Bleeding House.

I suppose there’s some allegory to be gleaned from The Bleeding House – it’s a film steeped in Americana, from its ostracized Smith family to their folksy tormentor – but it’s a misguided horror film that eschews scares for the sake of flimsy commentary. The climactic battle between two psychos as they hash out their homicidal philosophical differences might appeal to those who think Showtime’s Dexter is a work of high art, but for the rest of us The Bleeding House is but a sleepy attempt at a horror flick with only a single bravura performance to recommend it.

VERDICT:  Skip it.

Nice suit.