Trespassers (Movie Review)

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

PLOT: After years apart, two high-school friends reunite on a dessert vacation with their significant others. Once the foursome settles into a modern luxury mansion, their lives are threatened by a gang of ruthless home invaders.

REVIEW: A year after helming his directorial debut THE QUEEN OF HOLLYWOOD BLVD, DP-cum-writer/director Orson Oblowitz links up with fellow sophomore scribe Corey Deshon for their first-ever genre outing, TRESPASSERS, generically renamed from HELL IS WHERE THE HOME IS – a grisly if nonsensical endeavor that favors style over substance and viscerally gruesome violence over its unlikably one-dimensional caricatures masquerading as protagonists. With its vaporous plot that laboriously stretches to its skimped 83-minute timeframe, it’s ponderous stretches of inaction on the way there, and its incoherently dissatisfying denouement, TRESPASSERS boasts the rare distinction of having its director sort of outshine and overachieve the scripted material en route to crafting a competent piece of middling entertainment. That is, the one-note story makes little sense, the main characters are almost entirely detestable, and yet, through sheer technical style and visual trickery, Oblowitz elevates the material a single notch above unwatchable cliché. In the end, TRESPASSERS is a mildly recommendable home invasion thriller that neither tills new territory nor deathly bores along its well-worn path. See it for the highly stylized violence if nothing else!

In the Mojave Desert, married couple Sarah (Angela Trimbur) and Joseph (Zach Avery) intend to patch their tattered relationship by spending time together in a plush luxury mansion with every modern amenity one could imagine. We sense the tension between the two, which slackens a bit with the arrival of Sarah’s childhood bestie, Estelle (Janel Parrish) and her coke-headed alpha-male boy-toy Victor (Jonathan Howard). With nothing to do but entertain each other in a giant modern playpen, the two couples begin swilling booze and snorting coke until things get so out of hand they don’t seem to notice each other swapping sexual partners. Soon, Joseph has sex with Estelle, while Victor bangs Sarah in the Jacuzzi. The inevitable rue ensues, further fracturing the bonds between each couple. But then a strange lady called The Visitor (Fairuza Balk) shows up at the doorstep claiming to be a neighbor whose car just broke down. Why then, if she lives so close by, does she need to use their landline rather than simply walking to her own house is a question that is risibly never raised, which all but ensures The Visitor is lying. This tends to sap the suspense and makes matters feel predictable, even if The Visitor’s ultimate fate stands out as one of the movies most memorable moments. The foursome doesn’t quite trust the Visitor, and when the power goes out and her broken down car suddenly vanishes, suspicions are further raised.

With the power going out for the second time, Oblowitz uses the opportunity to infuse the color scheme of the film with a stylish neon tint of hot reds, cold blues, medium magentas and glowing greens that gives the film a consistently interesting aesthetic. Still, with only a backup generator, I have no clue where these neon light sources are supposed to come from, save from the gumball-strobe of a cop’s Crown Vic. When the cops do show up, led by the immediately suspicious Sergeant Daniels (Carlo Rota), the foursome must cooperate with the law even when they fail to do so with each other. One of the things I liked about this flick is the way in which the foursome must face off with their home invaders – a gang of bandana-masked Mexican thugs – as well as contend with the petty, drug-fueled infighting among themselves. The very us-against-them dynamic becomes complicated by the us-against-us conflict that grows as the movie progresses. Moreover, the violence inflicted on behalf of both conflicts – the infighting and outfighting – is exacted with an unrelenting hardcore barbarity most gore-hounds will delightfully revel in. There are not only brutal bouts of onscreen carnage; there is also a liberal amount of concomitant grue to satiate even the thirstiest of bloodhounds. Unfortunately, because the antipathetic characters are so one-dimensionally thin and irredeemably unpleasant, it all becomes one large exercise in style rather than a compellingly dramatic horror tale we care to see end in a happy fashion.

Subtextually, where the movie misses the mark is in its half-baked attempt to explore why, in the current culture of modern America, why nobody opens their door to trust strangers anymore. The heightened paranoia and inveterate fear people live in nowadays cripples the sense of community and unification. Had the script plumbed this salient subject further to really examine the root cause of such a topical phenomena, perhaps the movie would overcome its poorly caricatured leads en route to becoming something far more substantive. Alas, like almost every other strong suit the movie has (including the original title), this angle is scratched altogether in favor of more gratuitous violence, albeit in stints that are quite harrowing. Perhaps most damming though, when it comes time to explain the reason why the gang members have targeted this house and these couples to begin with, nothing about it rings true or remotely convincing. Part of this is due to the sheer opacity of the exposition; part of it comes from no longer caring about the main characters’ fate by this point. Whatever the exact formula, the feeling one may get when watching TRESPASSERS feels similar to the way I felt during THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT – the director is more talented than the screenwriter and does all he can to escalate the script’s deficiencies. The result’s worth a watch, but just by the skin of its teeth!