House of Yes starts weird, gets unpleasant, then malicious, then off the charts icky, then it becomes nasty, etc.. Presumably it does this in a very conscious attempt to become a cult movie with the blackest humor in about twenty years. And if you can make it all the way through, you're the hippest viewer left standing! some reward. It's such a harangue that sensitive viewers will be turned off, anti-social viewers will be happy to see middle-class values punctured, and thoughtful viewers will just see it as a machine for provocation. The story is an escalating series of irritants: A girl waits for her brother to visit from college. We learn she has pretty bad taste, but that's excused because she's insane. But she's insane because she has an incestuous relationship with her twin brother. But her twin brother shows up with a fiancée. Then, amateurish verbal tics start to accumulate, upstaging the material (She's not a fiancé, she's a fee-OHN-SAY). Then the girl humiliates the fiancé, with about thirty cruel remarks. Then the girl and the twin brother let their sexual boundaries lapse in front of the others, and start touching inappropriately. etc. That's about the first half an hour. All of this heads nowhere... except to a reenactment of the moment she almost killed him reenacting the Kennedy assassination.
It's very difficult to put your head into the mind of its makers and imagine who the target demographic is for this; which means it's extremely hard to imagine how it got made... how someone sat through the play and thought, "Incest... humor... psychosis... this will make a terrific movie!" The stagey script makes annoying use of a cutesy device where characters repeat lines twice, or even three times before they can move on. A character will say "Marty's coming home." the 2nd character will say, "Marty's coming home?" and then back to character one who says "I said, Marty's coming home." This becomes irritating extremely fast. Three minutes don't pass without a repeated line. It's like listening to people act out a flowchart.
I used to think the humor in this outweighed the Ick factor (it's why I own a copy) but then I grew up. This was my first Parker Posey movie. And as always, she's sly and memorable. But now after seeing her other movies, this is really a piece of nastiness. It's made competently for a low budget, but it's almost mannerist in how off-putting it is. I'm not a believer in the idea that I need to like the characters in a piece, but I haven't seen a decent movie yet where I actively dislike everyone on screen.
It's very difficult to put your head into the mind of its makers and imagine who the target demographic is for this; which means it's extremely hard to imagine how it got made... how someone sat through the play and thought, "Incest... humor... psychosis... this will make a terrific movie!" The stagey script makes annoying use of a cutesy device where characters repeat lines twice, or even three times before they can move on. A character will say "Marty's coming home." the 2nd character will say, "Marty's coming home?" and then back to character one who says "I said, Marty's coming home." This becomes irritating extremely fast. Three minutes don't pass without a repeated line. It's like listening to people act out a flowchart.
I used to think the humor in this outweighed the Ick factor (it's why I own a copy) but then I grew up. This was my first Parker Posey movie. And as always, she's sly and memorable. But now after seeing her other movies, this is really a piece of nastiness. It's made competently for a low budget, but it's almost mannerist in how off-putting it is. I'm not a believer in the idea that I need to like the characters in a piece, but I haven't seen a decent movie yet where I actively dislike everyone on screen.