Director: Victor Zarcoff
Year: 2016
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: Slumlord; The Landlord
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
After moving into a new house, newlyweds move into the property they have access to unaware their landlord is spying on them through an unseen hidden camera system watching their every move and must try to defend themselves when he puts their lives in danger.
Review:
This was a pretty underwhelming and not that interesting effort. What little that works for this one is relegated mainly to the idea of the couple being spied on. The voyeuristic tendencies at play here, mainly from the constant usage of closed-circuit cameras placed throughout the house that are strategically placed to capture anything and everything that goes on from infidelity to regular married life and everything in between, are all well-established here. As their intrusion is a realistic possibility and the sanctity of privacy being violated is easily established, this creates some decent attempts at suspense throughout the first half leading to the dark, gruesome confrontations in the finals when it's so exposed and gets resolved.
Outside of this, though, there's not a whole lot to like here. The most glaring thing here is that this one requires the couple to be blindly stupid to miss the obvious and keep the film going. That the landlord is a genuine and off-putting creep, not just from the sweaty and greasy appearance but standoffish persona for someone in his line of work, really makes it hard to believe they'd go through living there. That becomes all the more obvious when they start noticing irrefutable unnatural items, like the locker staircase door, strange pet behavior, and the general reaction to anything he does, which are all ignored or swept aside to keep the film going which is hard to get past.
That also extends to the guy himself who's quite hard to get any kind of fear from. There's nothing here about what the motive for this actually is, switching up constantly from wanting to spy on her because she's hot and attractive, wanting to because she's there, a sense of jealousy over their lives, or just being plain lonely, is all other with but instead gets pushed aside for being straight-up weird. As there's nothing but lake extramarital shenanigans or bland relationship drama, there's never a chance to do this as the utterly sluggish pacing dulls everyone so that can't happen. The film picks up at the end with the brutal confrontations once it all gets brought out but that's too little too late to save this one.
Overview: *.5/5
A fine idea but too problematic to be more than that, this one has a nice idea that gets undermined by the slew of flaws on display which overwhelm everything else. Those who are curious about this one or are intrigued by it and not mindful of the flaws should give it the most chance but most others out there who are turned off by this one should heed extreme caution.
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