A House In The Hills

Waitress/struggling actress Alex Weaver (Helen Slater) holes up for the weekend in a lavish Hollywood Hills house to study her script for a Monday morning callback for a role on the "Days of Love" TV soap opera. Upon her arrival, Sondra Rankin (Elyssa Davalos) takes Alex on a tour while husband Ronald (James Laurenson) waxes poetic about his greenhouse full of roses, including a prize-winning hybrid he has developed. The Rankins take off for their cruise to Catalina, prompted by recent murder of Patty Noubauer (Taylor Lee), who lived in the house next door.

Posing as a termite exterminator, Mickey (Michael Madsen) invades the house and, with Alex pretending to be Sondra, takes her hostage. A minor-league thief, Mickey is two days out of prison after being set up by Ronald, who hired Mickey and his brother Deacon to steal Sondra's jewelry. The safe was empty, and Ronald killed Deacon. Mickey fled but was caught, and Ronald pocketed the two million dollars in insurance for the "stolen" gems. Now Mickey wants half. Over the next day and a half, Alex and Mickey play cat and mouse; Mickey finally realizes that Alex is not Sondra, and the pair fall for each other, making love in the greenhouse. New neighbor Willie (Jeffrey Tambor) visits and is put off by Alex and Mickey; he returns later, this time as the crazed killer who mistakenly murdered Patty, thinking she was Sondra. Mickey subdues him, but when the Rankins return home, all hell breaks loose.

Ronald tries to figure out how to get away with killing Mickey and Alex, while Sondra--finally fed up with her husband--believes Alex when she says she's Ronald's pregnant girlfriend. Sondra frees Willie to help her get Ronald, and in the resulting melee, Ronald--trapped in the basement with Sondra--kills Willie. Mickey packs up Ronald's prize rose bush and leaves, bidding goodbye to Alex, who drives off just in time to get to her audition. Some time later, Mickey watches a TV newsbreak, which explains that Sondra will testify against Ronald in Willie's killing, then cuts back to Alex in the soap role she won. On-set, Alex receives one of Ronald's prize roses, sent by Mickey.

One seldom sees a movie collapse so completely, at such a precise point, as A HOUSE IN THE HILLS. That point is the second appearance of Willie, now a fullblown psychopath, leading, with the return of the Rankins, to a scene of Jacobean excess that quickly becomes comical. This is unfortunate, because it erases the quality of the first half of this picture, co-written by director-co-producer Ken Wiederhorn and Miquel Tejada-Flores. Up until that point, Wiederhorn--whose early promise (SHOCK WAVES, EYES OF A STRANGER) seem to have led to dreck (MEATBALLS, PART II, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, PART II)--directs the cat-and-mouse gamesmanship of Mickey and Alex with some flair, even making it believable that they could fall in love so quickly. These sequences also skillfully incorporate some playful real-life vs. acting antics, as Alex and Mickey assume a variety of roles. That both characters strip away their illusions to reach a kind of self-revelation. ("You're a waitress. I'm a thief," says Mickey, "That's all there is") is sadly soon forgotten by the movie.

This first half of HOUSE is enjoyably performed by Slater and Madsen, but the rest of the performances are weakly one-dimensional, although director Wiederhorn is amusingly on-the-mark bland in a few bits as the TV newscaster. However, as a thriller HOUSE is hopeless, far-fetched, and almost perfectly incoherent, asking us to believe--among many other things--that Willie, who has apparently never seen the woman (Sondra) he seeks to kill (why?), wanders into the wrong house to kill the wrong woman (Patty), then stalks Alex whom he believes to be Sondra. Even for a psychopath this is poor planning; he should have either secured a photo or invested in an eye check-up and glasses. As a (first half) love story, HOUSE is charming and adroit; as a (second half) thriller, it is obnoxious. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment