The House of the Devil

The House of the Devil
Ti West's "The House of the Devil" sent chills down my spine. The film is a perfectly pitched old-school horror homage to a '70s/'80s-era of cinema that should have been. Jocelin Donahue plays Sam, a college sophomore who takes on a high-paying babysitting job in a creepy mansion on the night of a full lunar eclipse. Former Warhol Superstar Mary Woronov is wonderfully sinister as the matron of a cult of Satan worshipers who have special plans for Sam. An unintended cousin to Scott Sanders' lovingly executed Blaxploitation homage "Black Dynamite," "House of the Devil" is an entertaining work of disciplined filmmaking where emotion, period, style, social conventions, and fear squeeze together in a knockout punch. Between Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" and "House of the Devil," Halloween at the movies is looking especially good this year.
Rated R. 93 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)