Killer Pad

Another entry in the directed-by-Freddy-Krueger calatogue. My roommate and I found this one while cruising on demand at 1am.

Three best friends are awarded a big cash settlement when their collectively owned dog is accidentally castrated at the groomers'. They use the money to move out of their parents' home and into a large house in Hollywood Hills. On the way to their new permanent address, 666 Perdition Road, they run across Angel, a Mexcian groundskeeper. "The devil is here!" he warns them, but since they don't speak any Spanish, the trio thinks he's confessing a profound love for hot sauce. In an effort to make the most of their amazing new place, and in hopes of scoring with hot chicks, the boys decide to throw a kickass party. When people start dying, the guys write the deaths off as mysterious accidents until one of them eventually comes face-to-face with the Devil and a gate to hell opens up in the living room. The only way of defeating the evil is to sing a holy song. Unfortunately, they aren't very good singers.

Killer Pad is, I have to admit, pretty funny. And stupid. But the funny wins out in the end. Robert Englund proves entirely capable of directing comedy-horror, or what I like to call comror, something that I would imagine is hard to do. Though comedy and horror both draw on emotional responses to absurdity, they exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. However, badly done horror often results in an amused response from a would-be terrified audience. And Hitchcock often said he thought of Psycho, a genre staple, as a comedy. So when comedy and horror are brought together, a fine balance must be reached between the funny and the scary.

In the case of Killer Pad, the funny is of the slightly stupid and juvenile variety, replete with fart jokes and people getting bagged. I try not to hold myself or the movies I watch to too high a standard, but I could have lived without the recurring bare midget ass and I don't think the film would have suffered from that loss.