It seems someone has immense faith in director James Bamford. After making a career out of performing stunts to later directing episodes of mainly DC Comics associated television shows, Hard Home is his fourth film to be released this year. That the first three, above all Air Force One Down, Jade and Shadow Land were all inferior films in many respects, well that’s a different story.
Here he is employed writing a screenplay by Mark Shea Price, whose filmography includes short length programs such as The Mayans Were Right and Raised by Fish. It begins with Mary (played by Simone Kessell, from Terra Nova, and Yellowjackets) who goes out for a jog in the woods and is suddenly exposed to a man with a Polaroid, a very dangerous man who, in his case, is played by Andrew Howard from True Memoirs of an International Assassin and Bates Motel, who seems to have a fascination with her for having been on a borderline grave removing vegetation from an abandoned site.
He seems to brush off the maced but just when he is about to finish her off, she manages to inject him with something deep into his body which knocks him out. After which she tosses him into her Land Rover and drives off to her gated, smart high tech mansion which she has designed and built. Apparently, he is the serial killer nicknamed Diablo, and he was responsible for the murder of her daughter Kelly (Rosie Day, The Convent, Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon). So in the story, she intends to turn herself into a modern version of Jigsaw with plans of using the security features of the house.
Very little into the film and here we have a traditional plot development of the killer where the police have been searching for him for years and even when he is captured, it is by a person who is not an expert but just knows how to be in the right place arguably at the right time. It’s almost as big a cliche, a mother artist serial killer child who slaughters other women due to abusive childhood. It also goes on melodramatic points much too heavily. There is Kelly with some health problems on crutches, finds out that she was first recommended for the new risky procedure for her problem and then the moment we see her all healed, she is dead at the hands of Diablo.
Arguably the largest issue though, is that Mary, is not satisfied to simply keep him locked in the basement while she cuts off portions of him, like in everything from 7 Days to 3: An Eye for an Eye or Spit on Your Grave and all the different remakes and sequels. Rather, she has all turned her home into a puzzel with walls that are made of newspapers that report on his activites, his live news broadcasts and pictures of his activities and agonising or in some cases, fatal mechanisms.
Now, she has a shrine to her daughter in the room and sits before a cluster of screens, and while she doesn’t directly interact with the images of him on the monitors, she does use the security to move him around the room and can briefly press an electric shock button. She may not share the same level of psychopathy as he does, but she is definitely not functioning at full capacity.
I do not know what Diablo’s move on the screen was intended to accomplish, but for some reason I never thought this scene was intended to frighten me or to initiate any tension. In fact, I find it rather dull because, even if one can argue that he is as much a victim of his mother as his victims are of his torture, he’s certainly not winning anyone’s sympathy. If watching him endure pain is your goal, it may be worth your time, otherwise its quite routine.
Only when he has hurled a stone to defeat her high tech measures and to go for the kill at her does the situation appear to be a bit interesting. But even that is forever ruined by Mary’s background aggressive investigation of Agent Wall (Rachael Adedeji, R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned, Hollyoaks), pushing her spouse Robert (Joseph Millson, Fyre Rises, Dragonheart Vengeance), and more and more conflicts of young Diablo crying from chaos of his mother.
Daphne Cheung, who appears as Jiao, Mary’s neighbor and a secondary character, was stretching it in her portrayal. It seems as if the only reason Jiao was incorporated into the story was to find a quick last minute escape for the writer’s block the story had gotten itself into its final portions.
Moreover, there’s an aspect of both racism and classism to Hard Home that is quite difficult to ignore. In one of the scenes, there is an extremely wealthy white woman who through some bizarre circumstances tries to save white women in America from a Latino serial killer and day laborer. This is because the black FBI agent who has been allocated to the case is shown to be unsuccessful in tracking him down. Shall we even mention the film’s only other non white character Jiao, who is literally made such a whiny Karen that her number has been flagged by 911. So now she doesn’t get responses to her calls. The film is layered with such despicable uses of cliches if anything it’s the icing on the horrible cake of stereotypes that the film is.
Suffice to say, Hard Home is difficult to watch, and not for the right reasons. What I do find amusing is that the distributor had a good enough reason to delay sending out review copies of the films until the release date and that was lack of positive review expectation but they sent these copies.
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