I give Dream Home credit for being a mostly African-American horror movie without revolving around a stereotypically “urban” storyline involving gangstas, or even a stereotypically “rural” storyline involving voodoo. I also give it credit for being only 70 minutes long. Beyond that, it’s garbage. I suppose the cover art is pretty cool, but the house in the story looks nothing like the one on the cover, and there’s certainly no little kid on a bike, so since it’s so misleading, the cover is, in truth, garbage as well.
Dream Home is a standard haunted house flick about a newlywed couple, Darren (Corey Stills) and Faith (Chantelle Winchester), who buy a creepy old house holding a deep, dark secret, blah blah blah, some weird people pop up with cryptic messages, blah blah blah, they discover the painfully obvious fact that these people lurking around are in fact ghosts, blah blah blah, big reveal, blah blah blah, I want to shoot myself in the head. Bad movie! Bad movie!
Still, I admit I had a morbid curiosity in this film based on sheer train wreck-dom. The acting is embarrassingly junior high school, and the script may be kindergarten. While I’m glad that these black folk aren’t all “Woot! There it is!” and “Who dat is? Dat’s jus’ my baby daddy,” it goes to the opposite extreme and is instead overly stiff, with lines like “I can’t for the life of me figure out why I would feel that way!”
Even the sound is ridiculous, as evident in one scene that supposedly takes place deep in the woods, although you can clearly hear traffic noise in the background. Moreover, for a horror movie, Dream Home is remarkably tame. It’s not rated, but if it was, it would be hard-pressed to get even a PG-13; there’s no gore, no nudity, not even any profanity beyond “hell” — which is where this movie belongs.
And now, aspiring actors, a seminar on “the reaction shot.” Subtlety, thy name is Dream Home:
