Movies
Home Sick (V)
“HOME SICK may have had a long hard road to its DVD release but the journey is absolutely worth the wait. It’s not the best low budget horror film to ever come along but it definitely hits a home run with the special effects work—which in comparison to its budgetary brethren is severed heads above the rest.”
Every so often a film comes across my desk that has a story behind it. In the world of first-time features and microcinema those stories are generally “labor of love” type chronicles that hinge on a few key repeating elements that usually involve the copious abuse of credit cards, friends and family to propel the filmmaker’s visions forward. HOME SICK is almost one of those type of movies…but with a twist.
Shot in 2003 by recent film school graduates E.L. Katz (Writer/Producer) and Adam Wingard (Director) the film finally makes it’s way to home viewers eyes. Katz and Wingard have moved far beyond this initial feature with Katz Producing Tobe Hooper’s 2005 film MORTUARY and the pair reuniting last year to shoot the new film POP SKULL. So, with that kind of lag time the question becomes ultimately what to make of their long-shelved premiere project?
Surprisingly, despite the delays HOME SICK boasts some serious gore, an overly strange sense of the macabre and a few standout performances from an array of horror veterans. Of course, like all low budget features the film also has a few characterizations that will leave you shaking your head at their ineptitude. Additionally, the title HOME SICK doesn’t provide any huge revelation about what the film has in store for its audience. What the project is really about is a friendly reunion that goes horribly awry.
When Clair comes home, her friend—and Brad Pitt wannabe—Mark takes her over to a pal’s house for a little get together. A mysterious party crasher (Bill Mosley) arrives and forces the kids to watch him slash his forearms with razor blades all while provoking the partygoers to tell him who they hate most in the world. When Mosley departs, the friends soon discover that a Giallo-styled, black-gloved, killer is slashing his way down their self-described hit list…and thanks to one of the idiots stupid little joke, it appears that they’re all next in line!
In addition to Mosley, the film also features Horror Princess Tiffany Shepis whose character of Candice provides a good 30-minutes of bizarre behavior and requisite toplessness before being dispatched of in a decidedly gruesome manner. The other notable star of the film is Tom Towles (later of the Rob Zombie oeuvre, but at the time this film shot, probably best remembered as Otis in HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER). Towles’ character of Uncle Johnny is such a crazed backwoods redneck wacko that it’s hard to believe that Katz and Wingard weren’t basing his character on the HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES legendary Firefly clan. The rest of the cast is serviceable at best but, at worst, they are typified by Matt Lero’s performance as Tim—which consisted of a barrage line deliveries dryer than the Sahara desert. It’s almost as if Lero is purposefully acting as if he is repressing all emotion and enunciating every period in every sentence on the page. If that was the intention—and considering how much better everyone else is in the film—it well could have been. I can only ask why in the world someone would let him do that for the better part of 80-minutes. It was painful…in the bad way.
Painful in the good way would be the best way to describe the effects work by Jonathan Thornton who worked on Herschell Gordon Lewis’ sickie sequel BLOOD FEAST 2: ALL YOU CAN EAT. Thornton makes sawed up feet and severed heads just stream sanguinary rivers of grue. His success is never more evident than in the torture of Shepis character—a scene that literally made me wince.
HOME SICK may have had a long hard road to its DVD release but the journey is absolutely worth the wait. It’s not the best low budget horror film to ever come along but it definitely hits a home run with the special effects work—which in comparison to its budgetary brethren is severed heads above the rest. Fans of the Rob Zombie oveure will enjoy Mosley and Towles’ minor moments in the film. And no one I know would kick Tiffany Shepis outta bed. The plot is homage to the Giallo thrillers of the 70’s but the execution is all new millennium DIY technique (although the film was shot on 16mm as opposed to digital video). We already know that Katz and Wingard have gone on to bigger and better things, so the other interesting point that HOME SICK offers is the opportunity to see what these two were doing when they first got their hands bloody in the world of features. Totally worth it in my book. Check it out for yourself!
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus took the literary world by storm back in 2023 with the release of his hit novel Whalefall. A terrifying yet intimate survival thriller with mythological undertones, the book was almost immediately bombarded with offers from movie studios wanting to adapt its claustrophobic imagery to the big screen.
Fast forward to June of 2026, and we finally got our first glimpse at Brian Duffield’s long-awaited adaptation of Whalefall, starring Austin Abrams as our unfortunate lead who gets swallowed alive by a sperm whale. While this two-and-a-half-minute teaser only covers the beginning of the story, it’s already been making waves online (and in-person at select 4DX promotional screenings) as one of the most stressful cinematic experiences of the year.
In fact, my own wife had to cover her eyes and exclaim, “You’re definitely not dragging me to watch this one” when we saw the whale’s jaws begin to close in on Abrams, with this incident alone already leaving me convinced that this will likely be one of the biggest genre hits of the year. With that in mind, I’d like to invite you to take a closer look at the teaser in order to break down interesting details and get a better idea of what’s in store for genre fans when the movie finally comes out this October.
Of course, as usual, don’t forget to comment below if you noticed something we didn’t!
Now, without further ado, here are five things we learned from the Whalefall trailer!
5. Austin Abrams Performed Many of His Own Stunts
Much like in his previous film, No One Will Save You, Duffield insisted that this visceral experience should be grounded by our main character’s believable reactions, regardless of the plot’s effects-heavy setup. That’s why the camera always makes sure to linger on Abrams through his diving mask, so we know that it’s really him going through this ordeal alongside the audience.
While plenty of CGI was used in order to bring this larger-than-life story to the big screen without killing our leading man, Abrams apparently insisted on performing many of his underwater stunts himself (several of which are visible in the trailer) – much to the chagrin of a worried Duffield and the flick’s stunt coordinator, Shauna Duggins.
4. The Film Seamlessly Transitions Between the California Coast and Underwater Sets
Duffield obviously wasn’t about to drag his crew out to the middle of the ocean and shoot inside a real sperm whale, but it’s reassuring to see the filmmaker blend on-location footage with the underwater tank segments and the literal belly of the whale set.
There may be plenty of CGI stitching these elements together, but the trailer shows us that only the truly impossible shots are completely digital, meaning that the filmmakers didn’t take the easy way out when it came to adapting this unique story.
3. The Whale is Only Part of the Story
Book adaptations tend to leave out inner monologues and the occasional flashback in order to streamline the narrative (which is one reason why it’s so difficult to translate Stephen King novels to the big screen), but a claustrophobic parable like Kraus’ Whalefall would get a bit dull after a while if the whole thing was entirely set within the creature’s stomach.
That’s why it’s such a relief that the trailer hints at how Duffield will also be adapting many of the book’s introspective moments chronicling our protagonist’s harsh upbringing under his troubled father. Not only do these inclusions give the audience some much-appreciated breathing room, but they also give Josh Brolin a chance to shine as a truly complicated character.
2. The Movie is Keeping the Book’s Scientific Accuracy…
While Kraus’ novel was inspired by a viral video of kayakers nearly being swallowed by a humpback whale, the writer ended up consulting with marine biologists about exactly what kind of situation might lead to a whale actually eating a human being alive.
The answer was surprisingly specific, as cetaceans are almost universally known to be friendly towards humans. However, even a gentle giant can make mistakes, and as we see in the trailer, Abrams’ unpleasant fate is more of an accident than anything else – with the massive sperm whale only trapping the poor diver in the first (and thankfully acid-free) chamber of its stomach due to a mix-up involving a giant squid.
Fortunately for the film’s special effects artists, they can now reference the first-ever footage of a real-life sperm whale chowing down on one such squid, as this freaky recording was released late last year.
1. …With a Catch!
Duffield may be doing his best to recreate the grounded (or is it submerged?) thrills of Kraus’ novel, but there are limits to what can be depicted onscreen while still guaranteeing an entertaining movie. That’s why it’s no surprise that Whalefall will take advantage of certain cinematic parlor tricks as the director tests the limits of both physics and biology so we can actually watch his movie.
For starters, the innards of the whale itself have been greatly exaggerated so there’s enough space to make out the action, and in the spirit of movies like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, there also seems to be plenty of non-diegetic lighting meant to show us what’s going on even if Abram’s character wouldn’t necessarily be able to see anything.
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