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  • Writer's pictureKelly M. Hudson

To Grandmother's House We Go!



I saw Grandmother’s House when it came out on video in the late 80’s and I remember really liking it, finding it to be one of those cool, hidden gems most people didn’t know about. It rang with echoes of Flowers in the Attic, as I remembered, and was quite scary. I recently scored a DVD copy of it and threw it in, just to see how accurate my memories were. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose…


The film opens on a funeral, as we see David (Eric Foster) and Lynn’s (Kim Valentine) father being laid to rest. Apparently, their mother died years earlier and now the two kids, Lynn around 16 and David hitting puberty, are being shipped off to live with their Grandmother (Ida Lee) and Grandfather (Len Lesser), parents of their deceased mother. Grandmother’s house is somewhere out in the countryside, so it seems, but also very close to a beach with palm trees (?). Grandmother and Grandfather are an odd pair; she talks like she’s a belle from the South and he sounds like a Brooklyn gangster. A strange woman appears (Brinke Stevens) who tries to get the attention of the kids. When Grandfather brains the lady and sticks her in the basement, that’s when things start getting weird. What are the grandparents up to? And what is the mystery behind this peculiar lady?


Sorry to say, it isn’t much. There’s a lot of chasing around, the grandparents getting dispatched pretty early, along with a few peripheral characters. The Woman kills them all and goes after David and Lynn and most of the movie is a protracted battle between the two parties, with lots and lots of running. Before this, we get a swim meet that means nothing, underwater bikini leering, egregious use of rocket-propelled fireworks (that works into the later plot), and a couple of surreal, strange dreams. This movie tries to be a lot of things at once and really just ends up being somewhat tedious. It’s not horrible, and viewed as a made-for-TV-movie, it ain’t bad at all. Still, coming from the decade that brought us Jason and Freddy and brought back Michael and Leatherface, it’s really tame. Brinke Stevens is good and creepy in moments, and the kid actors are just fine, but mostly it’s a lot of smoke and very little fire. The most interesting thing about this movie is that it was directed by Peter Rader, a man who would go on to (infamously) direct a little box-office flop known as Waterworld.


Most of the time, my memory holds up pretty well. This time it did not. No biggie. Grandmother’s House is a decent little thriller, but nothing to get excited about. If you want to see a curio from the 80’s that carries a bit of atmosphere and some touches of dread, you could do much worse. But then again, you could do much better, too.

Two Stars out of Four


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