Realty Bites. And stabs. And slashes.
OPEN HOUSE
1987/18/91m
“Now it’s open season for murder.”
A.k.a. Multiple Listings (!?)
Director/Writer: Jag Mundhra / Writer: David Mickey Evans / Cast: Joseph Bottoms, Adrienne Barbeau, Barry Hope, Robert Milano, Rudy Ramos, Darwyn Swalve, Page Moseley, Lee Moore.
Body Count: 9
“See the thriller of the year on home video.” Right.
A pretty good opening is not enough to salvage this badly scripted and cut together crap with a dog-food-eating killer murdering real estate ‘bitches’ and their clients around Los Angeles. Why? You wouldn’t believe how desperate the motive turns out to be.
Bottoms is a critically-maligned radio psychologist who receives calls from an opinionated aggressor who thinks the victims deserved all they got. His girlfriend – Adrienne Barbeau, why is she in this?? – the owner of the city’s most successful real estate agency. Gasp.
There’s dumb behaviour a-plenty, like a pair of early victims cowering in the corner of a bathroom that has a visible escape route, and there’s s stupid subplot about a rival firm trying to kill Adrienne’s business. If this is supposed to serve as a red herring then it fails even to get off the blocks.
It’s as if the writers rearranged their blind twists as they went along. The killer, whose face is kept off screen until the last few minutes, turns out to be who everyone in the cast thought it was, obliterating any trace of mystery they’d tried to construct.
There’s also the needless misogynistic vein: Most of the fatalities are women but the killer has no reason for targeting a specific gender, leaving a sense of “women shouldn’t have successful careers” emanating from it.
A rotten score irritates throughout like some cheesy soap opera and the end stoops to ripping off When a Stranger Calls without any shame. This flick comes from a bad neighbourhood and should stay there festering.
Blurbs-of-interest: Joseph Bottoms had already been in 1984’s Blind Date; Mundhra directed the equally lame Hack-O-Lantern; Page Moseley was also in Edge of the Axe.
At least it gave a plunger double murder, even if it was almost entirely off-screen.
I also found the final confrontation hilarious, with the killer somehow surviving being shot in the head (complete with fucking brain matter splatter visible and everything) but then just immediately dies from falling off of a balcony.
“Most of the fatalities are women but the killer has no reason for targeting a specific gender”
He did rant that the real estate agent who he lost his house to was female… which is a pretty weak explanation for the gratuity of the women’s deaths (especially the electrocution one).