Open House

If you hate realtors and love Adrienne Barbeau, you must watch Open House.  And I do love Adrienne Barbeau.  Always nice to see her show up (as with her recent turn on Sons of Anarchy – short-lived thought it may have been).

Adrienne plays a successful realtor. This is late 1980s Hollywood so women realtors are, naturally, a threat to everything!

Her boyfriend is a therapist who hosts a radio call-in show. He is all about “protecting the callers’ privacy”. Because calling into a radio therapist (if he’s even a doctor I don’t know) is of course clearly protected by doctor-patient privilege although all 38 of your listeners heard the conversation in public. It’s just good TV.

And someone is killing all the realtors!

Lots of bad acting, lots of really odd gay references that made me wonder what the hell was going on with that (as in: “is someone just randomly casting his boyfriends?”), the soundtrack is an amazingly muddied bunch of weirdness ranging from elevator music to 70s porno track, the acting is overdone, the special effects aren’t very good, the story makes no sense.

So, if you hate realtors and you love Adrienne Barbeau, you’ll probably like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you only mildly dislike realtors and think “who’s Adrienne Barbeau”, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you enjoy condiments with your food, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you’ve recently inhaled oxygen into your lungs, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you like seeing an overweight bully realtor try and take on Adrienne and her agents and who ends up in a dog collar while taking a whiz before he’s killed, you might like this move. Probably. No guarantees.

The killer turns out to be something of a surprise and, since I know you’ll never watch this movie if you haven’t already seen it, the killer is a homeless guy (I did not know there were homeless people in the 80s, so I did learn something <sarcasm tag>) who moved into a home that wasn’t really abandoned, but it wasn’t occupied either, and then “those damned realtors—oh you realtors!!! <angry fist>” tried to sell his house and he had been “taking good care of it”.

So it’s about homeless people having the right to move into homes that aren’t occupied and, if a realtor tries to sell it, to kill all the realtors in creatively stupid ways.

I did not understand this movie. It was mildly entertaining. I blame the laundry fumes.