Last year, I was approached by HaleHouse Productions, a company led by the Ohio filmmaking and brotherly duo of Kameron and Scott Hale, to review their first feature, Entropy. It was a small indie shot with a bunch of friends over the course of the COVID-19 lockdown, and I appreciated the artistic aptitude of ganging together during such trying times, but ultimately I found the movie’s flaws to be too overwhelming. I was slightly surprised when HaleHouse reached out to me a year later and solicited another review for their next horror movie, Free to a Bad Home. After all, I had been critical about their earlier film, but they said they appreciate reading the reviews, and this has always been my aim when I write these critiques for Ohio-made indies, to try and provide a professional review with clear and coherent constructive criticism and earned praise. So I figured why not, and I watched Free to a Bad Home, and now I’m wondering if HaleHouse is still going to seek out my opinion when it comes time for movie number three. 

I was happy that the Hale brothers (credited as both writers and directors) took the anthology route because, greedily, it means more stories to be told, and it also conveniently allows the audience to leap to another story if the current one wasn’t exactly firing. It’s a numbers game: rather than hoping for one story to entertain, now we have three shorter stories to hopefully engage and entertain. However, the needs of telling a short are still very similar to that of a feature-length screenplay; you still need interesting characters, you still need a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and you still need to use your time wisely, whether it’s a five-minute story or a two-hour one. While Free to a Bad Home divides its time between three smaller tales, and one perfunctory wraparound, I can’t say the movie still knows what to do with its 80 minutes (divided by three). Any horror movie needs adequate time to establish mood. There are plenty of movies that are nothing but a mood piece, like David Lynch or the recent indie breakout Skinamarink, where the intent to present an experience that detaches the audience from the known and places them into a limbic middle zone of uncertainty and dread. Storytellers are going to need some time to establish the main characters, their dilemmas, the setting, and where and when things are going peculiar or wrong. Watching Free to a Bad Home, it felt like each segment had an idea but left it frustratingly vague and with regrettably little development to carry it.

Ignoring the wraparound, the first segment is about Amy (Miranda Neiman) overcoming loss while visiting her old home. She spends a lot of time walking around, hearing strange noises, and getting lost through drinking. Her sister comes around too. It lasts around twenty minutes and much of it hinges upon the very ending twist, which explains what happened to her husband and why it is weighing so heavily on Amy. Except the preceding twenty minutes doesn’t feel like we’re getting more intrigue or insights into Amy or even her fraying psychology. She’s seeing weird visions of a guy in bed sheets and a strange sinkhole in the woods, but a lot of the running time is sitting and waiting. We understand she’s in some stage of mourning. This isn’t really further developed after being established, and that’s the issue with many of the segments. It’s an idea, and there’s a conclusion that is generally predictable, but we’re missing the middle. You could include the first three minutes, the last three minutes, and cut out the in-between, and the “Amy” segment would play out the exact same way. The problem is that the end is too obvious to simply keep the character in a holding pattern for so long with only minimal action. The character is very much sitting around and waiting, and so are we for too long. It’s structured like a haunted house story where a woman is coming undone. Except we don’t get better insights into this person over time, nor do we get increasingly scary haunting or her unraveling mental stability. 

The second segment follows Ryan (Jake C. Young) breaking into a home and taking just the most absolutely leisurely time looking for anything of value. We spend nearly ten minutes just watching this guy walk into a room, look around, and then leave to go search in another room. I think the drawn out time is meant to heighten the vulnerability of our thief, making the audience worry that he’s spending too long and is more likely to get caught. First of all, that requires me to find this character likable or interesting to care if he avoids exposure and arrest. This could happen if somehow during these ten minutes we’re learning about dear old Ryan. Maybe we see his problem-solving skills, maybe he gets an inopportune call that he tries to get out of but reveals his own status of financial insecurity, and maybe he even encounters evidence of the family that lives here and makes comment, like he’s a disgruntled employee trying to take what he feels is deserved from a wealthy executive. Anything other than watching one guy walk into several rooms and look around for valuables. At long last he finds something unexpected, a woman named Camilla (Roni Locke) chained to a mattress. Rather than pretend to be a traumatized victim of trafficking, which would be the easy assumption, this woman declares herself a demon who will help Ryan open the family’s expensive safe. However, if he were to release her, she promises to kill the family next door. Do we know anything about them? No, not really, but the devil’s bargain is established: personal gain for the death of strangers. Once again, the ending seems obvious given the lack of substantial character development. The hook is the offer from the evil entity and the cost of his own selfishness, but this hook is diminished when we don’t exactly get any personal struggle wrestling with the decision or its horrific outcome.

The final segment is the longest, nearly half the total running time, and we follow Julia (Olivia Denis) who is going with her older sister and her friends to a Halloween party. There’s the start of something here with a younger sibling eager to grow up and hang out with older peers, with the drawback of getting into trouble in the pursuit of being seen as cool. Except none of the four characters we follow to the party really distinguish themselves as people. We spend more time watching them do acid in the car, slowly, than we do anything else. It’s a full ten minutes of watching ladies drop drugs into their eyes while moody neon lighting bathes their skin and the synth score rings. We’re clearly going for an immersive mood here but the drug usage, so heavily covered, isn’t ever conveyed in plot or perspective. When the characters arrive at their party, we don’t see any hallucinations or hear anything amiss, which could have been more visually interesting as well as ratchet up tension that things are unwell. Instead, the ladies attend a very sparsely attended gathering where they unveil a smiling corpse and then take turns projectile vomiting onto the body. Then the women are chased and easily dispatched. The end. 

So what do all the story segments have in common? There’s plenty of idle waiting. There’s a real dearth of characterization outside whatever the initial premise might afford. There are specific stylistic fixations that are often to the detriment of pacing and story, like the low-light investigation of Ryan and the trance-like neon dream of the ladies tripping on eye drops. There are also obvious endings that don’t feel any better realized or subverted or better set up. Every anthology collection is going to be a mixed bag depending upon your personal tastes, but there’s a certain safety in numbers. I didn’t love all 26 segments on 2012’s The ABCs of Death but there were enough that tickled my fancy, likewise with the many V/H/S collections. However, each of the three anthology tales in Free to a Bad Home suffers from simply not having enough to do. 

There are concepts here that can work. The idea of an anthology movie following a cursed object is a fine starting point, almost like the horror equivalent of 1999’s The Red Violin, an underrated indie that traced the adventures of a special violin through centuries of owners. The idea of a criminal coming across a caged demon who tempts them with a Faustian bargain is good. The setup of a younger sibling wanting validation and tagging along for something they are unprepared for, that’s a strong starting point for a night of unexpected terror. A woman alone in her old home and haunted by her memories is a familiar but potent starting point for horror. These core ideas can work but not one is given substantial development to make them matter.

If you wanted to trace the lineage of a cursed object, I think it would have been more creatively fulfilling to tell your stories in distinctly different time periods, highlighting shifting values but also the different appeals this haunted object might have had depending upon the times. Imagine a woman coming across a cursed piece of jewelry in 1890 or 1950 versus modern-day. There’s nothing in any of the three stories that ties them to a specific time period, so why not venture into other times to give a larger sense of history and the ramifications of this curse? As a low-budget indie, I understand the production reasons why the three stories are all contemporary, though the movie opens with a quick succession of suicide and murder in two earlier time periods. Creatively, the movie feels too easily satisfied and needed to push its ideas and horror further. As it stands, Free to a Bad Home feels like a collection of disappointing shorts rather than one single story disappointment, which oddly enough makes the movie feel even more disappointing. 

For being a small indie Ohio production, there are some impressive artistic values. The cinematography by William E. Newton (Black Wolf) can be occasionally entrancing, like during the drug-addled driving sequence that is a little too in love with its protracted mood. The practical makeup effects are sparing but can be unsettling and effective, most notably during a coda where a woman picks at a very open wound on her face and works it to disgusting lengths.

Free to a Bad Home doesn’t separate itself from the glut of cheap horror movies with half-formed stories. Rather than squandering one story over the course of 80 padded minutes, now it’s squandering three-ish stories over the course of 80 padded minutes. I’m a little surprised there isn’t more horror as well, whether that’s conventional exploitation elements like gore and sex, or simply just constructed and sustained sequences of terror and dread. For genre fans with a love for DIY indie spirit, there may be some entertainment to be had with Free to a Bad Home. You can tell the Hale brothers and their small crew have their passions for the material. I only wish more scrutiny and perhaps outside assistance in the writing and development of future tales to make the most of the potential. Free to a Bad Home is available on Tubi and other streaming services, making the title even more apt. For me, there was just too little going on creatively to maintain my ongoing interest and waning attention. 

Nate’s Grade: D+