HOUSE CALL (1996) (DE FLAT) (1996) A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2001
In the last decade Hollywood, in desperate search for any original idea, turned to Old Continent and many films originally made in France, Denmark or Holland got their American versions. However, this process never went in single direction. Lack of stars, budget and other resources didn't prevent European filmmakers from creating their own versions of popular Hollywood films. HOUSE CALL, Dutch thriller directed in 1995 by Ben Verbong, is one of such examples.
Protagonist of this film is Roos Hartman (played by Renee Soutendijk), single mother who just moved into the large apartment complex near the sea in order to work as a resident physician for other tenants. Soon she becomes a witness to the gruesome murder of another tenant, but she is unaware of killer's identity. While police suspects her mysterious but good-looking neighbour Eric Coenen (played by Victor L"w), Roos Hartman begins romantic relationship with him. However, after a while some details emerge and Roos begins wondering whether she made a right choice or not.
Even the least experienced viewers wouldn't fail to notice a great deal of similarities between HOUSE CALL and SLIVER, one of the most underrated erotic thrillers of early 1990s. Director Verbong and writer Jean van der Velde almost shamelessly copy situations, characters and even some particular scenes from Noyce's 1993 film. Naturally, that means that the entire plot development is, more or less, quite predicatble. To make things even worse, Verbong is not Noyce and Dutch actress Renee Soutendijk is not in the same league as Sharon Stone, so the viewers would quickly lose interest for this film. Because of that, HOUSE CALL looks like a cheap and unsuccessful attempt of reaping the fruits of someone else's labour.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
Review written on September 22nd 2001
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax E-mail: dragan.antulov@st.tel.hr http://www.film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29566 X-Language: en X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 2/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews