PLOT: A nineties TV family finds their home invaded by Russian gangsters. The family’s useless patriarch, Bernie (Nick Frost), a devout Christian with long-suppressed psychotic tendencies, must unleash those urges to save his family.
REVIEW: It happens every year. There’s always at least one movie at Sundance every year that tests my commitment to sitting through pretty much everything I see. This, however, was a tough one. I haven’t had this much of a difficult time with a Sundance movie since The Greasy Strangler, with it being a grating, 85-minute joke that goes on at least 80 minutes too long. It’s a slog.
Directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil are trying to make a provocative midnight movie, with it opening on a nun being violently gunned down before transitioning to a videotaped nineties sitcom. It centers around the Christian family who – natch – are Christian, with their bozo dad as the helpless head of the household. As soon as the usually great Nick Frost started doing his southern-accented Christian schtick, I worried Krazy House would be bad – and I was right.
Everything about this film is a disaster right from the start. The pseudo-sitcom gimmick is unfunny and was done much better in the classic viral video Too Many Cooks. Frost is doing his best, but the material gives him nothing to work with, as the sitcom gimmick goes on for about forty minutes, while he spends at least another 20 minutes of the movie strung up on a cross (don’t ask) mugging with reaction shots to the chaos around him. Frost drops the accent and re-emerges as a more crazed, badass version of his character (which he seems much more comfortable playing) in the last ten minutes, but by then, the film has devolved into a hopeless satire with nary a laugh in sight.
It’s incredible how many talented people are wasted on this, with Alicia Silverstone deserving far better than Frost’s always-shrieking wife. She and Frost have never been this grating on screen. The movie is going for a bonkers, transgressive vibe, with Entourage star Kevin Connelly turning up late in the game as Jesus Christ himself (he’s actually not bad), with a scene where a man gets violated with a Jesus figurine included. But it’s all just crass exploitation without any substance. Indeed, there’s a place for crass exploitation, but it needs to be backed up by entertainment value. Krazy House is so abysmal that it almost became an endurance test. Frankly, the press screening I saw inspired many walkouts.
Indeed, one wonders why what might have made a moderately amusing short was given the feature-length treatment and how it ever got into Sundance in the first place. Writing such a negative review is shameful; I hoped this would be good. Nick Frost is a great guy, and he and Silverstone deserve much better material. Some folks might enjoy this as a weird midnight movie, but there are many better types of wannabe cult movies than this that never get a platform like Sundance to launch from. Seek those out instead.
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