Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A House on the Bayou’ on Hulu, a Ludicrous Home-Invasion Horror-Thriller

Blumhouse delivers us another potential low-cost/high return outing in A House on the Bayou, a domestic drama that turns into a home invasion thriller with supernatural red herrings – OR ARE THEY? – thrown in to keep us on our toes. It stars Paul Schneider, Westworld’s Angela Sarafyan and Eternals breakout Lia McHugh as a dysfunctional family of city slickers seeking some quiet refuge in the country, and running into local hayseeds who maybe don’t take so kindly to people like them. Question is, will this worn-out scenario yield anything unexpected?

A HOUSE ON THE BAYOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: John (Schneider) and Jessica (Sarafyan) are on the rocks. She knows he’s been cheating and all he can say in reply is the usual cliches: “This is not what it looks like,” “I can explain,” etc. She’s angry as heck, but she doesn’t want a divorce. She wants to keep their family together, so she gives him three ultimatums: One, kick the other woman to the curb. Two, don’t let their 14-year-old daughter Anna (McHugh) know he’s a cheating cad. And three, they’re going on vacation together! THAT’LL solve their problems, I bet. They hop in the car for a drive to the Bayou, a mystical place of swamps and voodoo and the like, and the whole way, she snipes at him and he cowers like a sheepish puppy. Fun for the whole family!

They pull up to a remote locale where cell phone service is nil – a point we don’t learn until later in the movie so it can be a convenient plot device – and there lies a big old beautiful house with a big pool and everything. Jessica is a real estate agent who has to shoot a walking tour of the home, so she brings along a video camera, and its mere existence in the movie is foreshadowing of its eventual use as another plot device. The house also has a secret room that’s not on the blueprint and it’s locked and they can’t find the key and surely it’s just a storage room, surely. At this point, one inevitably asks, Does the place have taxidermy on the walls? You know it.

Anyway, Jessica orders John to fetch some veal cutlets from the store down yonder and he says he doesn’t like veal cutlets and neither does Anna so how about we make burgers but she wants some veal cutlets so he and Anna head down to get some veal cutlets. Wouldn’t you know it, the store has a special on veal cutlets, and also wouldn’t you know it, the store is run by Isaac (Jacob Lofland), who seems real nice and creepy and Southernly hospitable as he raises his eyebrows at young Anna, and his gruff Grandpappy (Doug Van Liew), who looks like Uncle Jesse Duke if he had less of a Willie Nelson vibe and more of a Kalifornia thing going on.

Isaac is suspicious as a pig out of its poke and the other characters don’t know it, but we do, because he gets his own John Carpenter ripoff musical cues (at least it’s not plucked banjos). John buys some hamburger and they leave and when they get back he lies and tells Jessica they didn’t have veal cutlets. DING DONG does the doorbell and there’s Isaac, inviting himself and Grandpappy over for dinner, because he met them at the store and they have some yummy veal cutlets they could make because they just got a big shipment of them. It’s a weird proposition and Isaac has all those ominous ’80s synths following him around but Jessica is too nice to say no, and also, she probably can’t resist sticking it to John for being a selfish j-hole yet again by lying about the veal cutlets. And oh, by the way, Grandpappy wrote YOU ARE BEING WATCHED BY THE DEVIL at the bottom of John’s receipt. But Isaac and Grandpappy walk right through that plot hole and come over and get on with frying up the veal cutlets and obviously playing some kind of funny game, making this dysfunctional-family vacation even more uncomfortable, and I’ve never seen a movie that hinged so heavily on veal cutlets as a plot device. At least it has that going for it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Funny Games with a whiff of Deliverance and maybe a hint of Amityville comprise the laughably generic House on the Bayou.

Performance Worth Watching: Nobody here has much of a character to give a crap about. But when Sarafyan grits her teeth and grabs a hammer – not sure what type of hammer, but it looks like some type of peen hammer to me, gotta love a good peen hammer – you better look out.

Memorable Dialogue: Grandpappy sums up the grand moral arc of what happens in this moronic story – and I’m decontextualizing to avoid spoilers here – when he says, “It’s a matter of degrees.” Oh, and it’s also the movie’s biggest unintentional laugh-out-loud moment.

Sex and Skin: None. TBGKBPTTF: Too Busy Getting Kerslammed By Plot Twists To F—.

Our Take: A House on the Bayou is one of those movies where you hope the deus ex machina is a meteor landing on the house and killing everyone except the children. Every character in this movie is imminently punchable. John and Jessica are a maddening couple whose passive-aggressiveness has gone nuclear, so they’re such a joy to be around. Marriage counseling for them would be like trying to quell a tsunami with a kitchen sponge. The Anna character soaks up phony compliments from total creepos like nobody since Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, but she’s only 14, so spare her from cosmic cataclysm, please. Isaac is so obviously psychotic, he rings every warning dinger in the tri-state area, except the dingers of the protagonists, of course. And Grandpappy is named Grandpappy and prefers to be called Grandpappy, like a total maniac, and together with Isaac, forms a duo well-versed in gaslighting everyone within earshot with their vaguely sinister bullshit.

And then there’s the plot. Hoo boy. Swiss cheese city. We’re catching rain in a colander here. It offers us utter nonsense, then explains away some of the nonsense with a whopper twist, then replaces the explained-away nonsense with more nonsense, then whams us with another twist. Writer/director Alex McAulay stirs some aggravated outrage by making us wish the protagonists would make a single logical decision, and winds up the suspense by insinuating that the antagonists might be more than just your run-of-the-mill hillbilly slash-’em-ups – like they’re sin-eaters or demons in human form, something like that. There are scenes in which people give long speeches that are surprisingly coherent, considering they’re the moron characters in this movie, and especially considering their guts are falling out. The third act delivers a series of scenes, each progressively dumber than the preceding. One doesn’t ask a movie to necessarily adhere to the logic of our reality, but an internal logic of its own. This movie has no such thing beyond “Hey, strange stuff happens in the Bayou.” Unforgivably ludicrous stuff, too.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The best scene in A House on the Bayou is when poor young Anna gets a nosebleed and faceplants smack into her veal cutlets. It perfectly illustrates the experience of watching this movie.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.