The plot unfolds something like this: A family of four is moving into their grandmother's mansion to in order to take care of her now that she's getting older. Unbeknownst to this family, the ghost of their eldest child has come along, and she is not here to play.
Oh, didn't we mention?: There are some seriously confusing scenes at the beginning of this movie, and it takes a good 20 mins before those scenes are (barely) addressed again. But it turns out those scenes were about the eldest child of this family dying in a car accident. When did she die? They never really get into that, but they do continue to cryptically bring up all the ways their family has been effected by her death in ways that hardly make anything clearer for the audience.
This is a family murder movie: The beginning of this flick (and the title) set this up as a straight forward haunted-house movie, but pretty quickly we discover this is a one-family-member-murders-the-rest-in-cold-blood movie.
By "pretty quickly", we mean really quickly: There's hardly enough scenes with the grandmother to establish her relationship with the family before she dies in front of all of them. Each day after that seems to lead to another family member's death.
The asinine amount of deaths occurring in the family is not lost on the family members, but it also kind of is: There's a long drawn out scene with the parents of this family arguing about who's done the brunt of the work that comes with a family member dying (who's packed all the dead family member's clothing for donation, arranged all the funerals, etc.). They literally argue about who's going to pack up the belongs of the latest dead family member, and resolve that conflict, but never mention how wild it is that so much of their family has dropped dead this week.
Foreshadowing?: During the move-in montage, the father of this family sets up a row of electric kitchen gadgets and turns each one of them on with increasing (and inexplicable) glee. Later on in his death scene, it's clear to the audience for at least 5 mins that he's going to be electrocuted in the bath. You have to wonder; was that the world's most awkward attempt at foreshadowing?
Ad libbing?: There's a gratuitous amount of what seems to be ad libbing in every scene where one adult talks to another. It plays like they needed to pad the run time, but it adds a level of confusion I didn't know could exists in a film.
Still, it's boring: We might be selling this one harder than it deserves, because although it's pretty asinine, it also feels really long and repetitive between the fun stuff.
Better with a group: If you have some bad movie loving friends, this would be a good movie to watch with that crowd. There's enough “did that just happen” scenes to make it fun, but it's just slow enough to be easy to talk over while not missing anything important.
Yup that's: Ruth Gordon and Valerie Harper.
Standout performance: The girl who plays the middle sister gives the best performance in this film hands down. She plays a wide range of emotions that shift from moment to moment, and she makes it seem effortless on her part. It's a shame she didn't appear in much else.
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