It’s a trio of indie horror comedies in various subgenres, but do they all deliver on the humor? Let’s find out.
FOREVER HOME (2023)
This film is going for the playful haunted house vibe, but its charm is hindered by one thing—the whopping 115-minute run time. Argh!
It starts off strong with a few kids sneaking into a reportedly haunted house and discovering it is indeed haunted.
Then we meet our main straight couple, and wouldn’t you know they’re headed to the same house because they just bought it. The wife’s quirky brother shows up, and that’s when the ghosts really start to show themselves.
For most of the movie, the ghosts consist of an adult woman with a knife in the back of her head, which never gets old, two mischievous kids, and a woman playing a violin.
The couple and the brother learn that anyone who dies in the house is doomed to be trapped there forever, so they try to sell quickly. Naturally, the ghosts use their powers of spooking to scare away prospective buyers. A psychic medium is brought in, and there’s a séance.
An aggressive male ghost comes forward way into the movie and becomes the main enemy they have to contend with, leading to a possession.
There are cute, funny moments, but there’s really nothing new to the plot, and the film is way too long, so the pacing struggles. It’s also padded with too many montage sequences, like them driving to the house, them cleaning the house, and the ghosts playing silly scare games with them.
The final act also shifts tone and goes the heartfelt, melodramatic route, which feels a little out of place in an otherwise silly film, but the final scene does take place on Halloween. Yay!
THE HOUSE ON ADAM’S DRIVE (2024)
In the tradition of Black horror comedies like A Haunted House and Meet the Blacks, this possession flick comes from writer/director/star LaRonn Marzett. He’s a total cutie who has a clearly defined comedy style that he exploits here.
It’s perhaps a bit too self-indulgent at times, with some sequences going on too long, making this a 110-minute movie, but in a major meta moment near the end of the film, one of his fellow characters calls him out on milking his act and making the movie too long! Makes for a good in-joke, but if he had heeded his own script’s warning and cut some of the excessive fluff showcasing his talent from the first part of the film, the pacing would have greatly benefitted. Luckily, LaRonn is charismatic and funny, plus he has a good supporting cast to work with, so the film is a blast as he indulges in classic, satirical white/Black issues and in-your-face sex humor. Just be warned; the n word gets dropped incessantly.
The opening scene shows how brazen, confident, and comfortable LaRonn is. He and his woman are at a restaurant, he can’t pay the bill, and he hopes to secretly work off the bill quickly washing dishes or something like that. Instead, the waiter makes him a proposition he can’t refuse, resulting in unapologetically sexual gay banter, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.
A series of scenes follows featuring LaRonn interacting with other characters, which is where his overindulgent shtick stretches out the runtime, but 45 minutes in we get to the point—desperate to make money to appease his woman, he dresses as an 80s adult film star, complete with Jheri curls and short shorts, and goes to a house where he thinks there’s a porno being shot.
He discovers he has accidentally committed himself to working an exorcism…of a white girl that has been turned into a Black girl by a demon.
You can imagine the racial comedy that ensues. The white priest he is assisting plays a great straight character against his over-the-top performance, making them a perfect comedy duo. When the priest eventually gets shirtless to fight the demon, I was kind of hoping that whole porn job was going to come back into play, because they would be sizzling hot together.
The film is a hoot despite the long length, and there are fun pop culture references, including nods to Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, and Ghostbusters, plus the final exorcism battle rises to Evil Dead 2 levels. I hope LaRonn makes more horror comedies in this style, because I’m so there for it.
ALL YOU NEED IS BLOOD (2023)
Although it’s not really the same and nowhere near as good, the structure of this minimalistic zomcom reminded me of One Cut of the Dead.
The opening scene, which is set 30,000 years ago with cave people establishes that there’s a meteor that turns you into a zombie if you touch it. There’s absolutely no need for this scene beyond starting things off with zombie action.
Next, we meet our main teen kid. He’s an aspiring filmmaker, lives with his unsupportive dad, and speaks to the urn that holds his dead mother’s ashes and speaks back to him…a plot point that seems like it’s going to be of some significance but instead is completely forgotten.
The main kid’s best friend is a mute kid, and they want to enter a film festival to win some money, but the festival is only for horror movies, and he doesn’t want to make horror movies.
However, just as two girls arrive at his house to audition, including Mena Suvari, a meteor lands in his yard, and his dad touches it and turns into a zombie.
Before you know it, they realize they can use his zombie dad to make a horror movie. It’s a cute concept with plenty of opportunity for some humor, with things spiraling out of control as more and more people are bitten and the “cast” of zombies grows, but despite a lot of heart clearly being put into the film, it tends to get slow in the middle and isn’t quite as funny as it could be.
Things pick up in the final act, mostly because there’s a sudden burst of zombie action as we see the results of all the incidents they’ve been filming. There’s even some good gore. However, things get really weird when one dude turns into a sort of final boss with a turtle head.
