It
is like a digital update on the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” but with a psycho
killer. A nebbish college student’s high school crush is now an “angel” in a
twenty-four hour live-cam website. Appearing in a secret hedonistic McMansion, she
will naturally attract the wrong sort of attention in Trevor Matthews’ Girl House (trailer here), which opens tomorrow
in select markets and launches on VOD, where it logically belongs.
Strictly
speaking, the Big Brother-style pad
Kylie Atkins is about to move into is not one hundred percent porn. There is
also a heavy girlfriend-experience component. That is why her boss is so sure
the naïve country girl will be such a hit. Of course, he is right, but one of
her biggest fans is a mentally disturbed IT guy known by his screen name, “loverboy.”
Actually, his first choice was psychostalker666, but that handle was already
taken.
Meanwhile,
thanks to a horndog roommate who thinks he’s Jamie Kennedy, mild mannered Ben
Stanley learns his former infatuation is now naked on the internet. Since they
both go to college in the North Carolina hills (that well known hub of porn
production), he contrives to run into her and ask her out. Despite some
uncomfortable conversations about her afterschool job, romance starts to
blossom, but it is only a matter of time before loverboy traces the secure
location of Girl House and heads off on a murderous rampage.
Girl House is the sort of
film that pretends to give us a stern talking-to regarding our porn-obsessed
voyeurism, but really offers a transparent promise of naughty gawkery it never
fully delivers on. At least as slasher films go, it is consistently
professional, with no distractingly awkward line readings or woefully cheesy
effect stinking up the joint.
Ali
Cobrin is reasonably competent and likable as the white bread Atkins, while
Adam DiMarco’s Stanley is predictably but annoyingly clueless and ineffectual.
Likewise, as the maniac, white Boston rapper Slaine really just serves as a
poor man’s Pruitt Taylor Vince or Vincent D’Onofrio. Frankly, Chasty
Ballesteros is criminally under-employed as Atkins’ new housemate Janet. With
her martial arts background established, she would have been a more credible
and empowering opponent for loverboy—and there are also her obvious strengths
in front of the camera.
