Home Sweet Home

Being one of the very few slasher films to be graced with a female director, disappointingly, this neither benefits the film nor brings anything new to the genre’s table. Director Nettie Peña had previously served as editor/associate producer on the XXX rated Dracula Sucks (1978), but Home Sweet Home proved to be her last feature film to date.

With its implicit Thanksgiving theme, the film starts brightly with a swift one-two double murder, but progressively dips from then on, slowly relegating itself to the lower tiers of ‘stalk ‘n’ slash’. The kills are unimaginative and fairly bloodless, and amazingly, have there ever been so many car breakdowns in a single movie!?!?

“Hey, ya wanna beer?” are the last words uttered by the boozing driver before he’s throttled to death by escaped mental patient Jay Jones (Jake Steinfeld, a former Hollywood star fitness trainer). Jones, a muscular, man-mountain who’d previously killed his parents, steals his victim’s car, mows down an aged pedestrian and heads out of town.

Meanwhile, Jennifer (Colette Trygg) and Scott (David Mielke), a pair of young lovers, arrive by car at the Bradley’s isolated country ranch for a Thanksgiving meal celebration — a celebration soon to be awash with fatalities with the arrival of the maniacal Jones. Head of the household, Harold Bradley (Don Edmonds, director of the notorious Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks) is soon dispatched, crushed under Jones’ car bonnet. Next to go — garrotted from behind — is Wayne (Charles Hoyes), swiftly followed by Gail (Leia Naron) and Bradley’s girlfriend Linda (Sallee Young; Deranged).

And so the narrative continues, until the inevitable final female in peril and patently ludicrous “killer’s still not dead” coda tacked onto the end.