The sitcoms of yesteryear, filmed in front of a live studio audience rather than accompanied by a laugh track, have never personally been my cup of tea. Yet, when they are recaptured perfectly through the lens of a new take rather than retreading well-worn grounds, the bottled sitcom concept can lead to exciting new horizons. Look no further than the hugely successful WandaVision for a fresh spin; that series expertly used decades of content to morph stylish, meta context stitched into the vintage aspirations. In a similar vein, directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil provide a Dutch take on the sitcom by injecting a dose of horror. Evolving from an uber-cheesy riff on the nuclear family to a gory romp of survival, Krazy House unsuccessfully attempts to overstuff its demented Easter basket with extraneous garbage.
Claiming to be filmed “in front of a live studio audience,” Krazy House has it all. Its cast walks in to uproarious cheers, set to a cheesy theme song that perfectly encapsulate the zany tone. Interestingly, the “actors” are simply the actual actors portraying the characters in the movie we are watching, and they never break character during the runtime. They always maintain the Christian family unit, both for better and for worse. The Christians consist of: religious father figure Bernie (Nick Frost, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), who stitches Jesus-sweaters and longs for everybody else to participate in his worship; businesswoman mother, Eva (Alicia Silverstone, The Lodge, Perpetrator); teenage science-obsessed son, Adam (Walt Klink, Rabbit Hole, Lieve Mama); and boy-obsessed, desperate for attention daughter, Sarah (Gaite Jansen, Jett, Peaky Blinders).
Can the overacting be excused due to embracing the tonal shifts around every corner? Performance choices certainly gel with what would be expected from this type of television program. The slapstick humor near the beginning threatens to be destroyed at times by VHS-asides of carnage and mayhem featuring the actors losing their grip on sanity. That is just the tip of the iceberg here. Eva becomes injured and bed-ridden. If the setup was strange already, it zooms into hyperdrive when three Dutch workers (Jan Bijvoet, Chris Peters, Matti Stooker) arrive at the doorstep of the Christians. Hired to fix the burst pipes in their home, these men begin systematically destroying all that the Christians hold dear. The days zoom by, from Good Friday to Silent Saturday to Easter Sunday.
Somewhere along the way, Krazy House shifts from a campy comedy to a preposterous one. One of the men seduces Sarah, whilst another molds Adam into a crack-inclined drug addict desperate for his next fix to see a magical green alien. Bernie hallucinates a version of Jesus (Kevin Connolly, Entourage, He’s Just Not That Into You) that further fuels Bernie’s blind faith. Audiences may get a chuckle or two out of the increasingly bizarre situations, or the evolving family dynamics as all four of them become practically entirely different people. As with any horror/comedy, one’s milage may greatly vary.
In the end, most of this amounts to very little. There is a bloodbath and eventually a finale that goes full-tilt bonkers in a way that feels too try-hard for my personal taste. Progressively getting wilder as it goes would have been a good call, but the very concept just does not quite work. Why not have more fun with the sitcom concept, actors playing heightened versions of themselves, or at least embrace the fact that a live audience supposedly was watching? Too many sequences are missed opportunities. This is no dig whatsoever to the cast: everyone has entirely committed to the schtick, and have a blast doing it. Less an Easter miracle than a misguided attempt at blending horror/comedy, Krazy House should be torn down and rebuilt with a stronger foundation.
Book a stay in the Krazy House, coming to Dutch theaters on Thursday, May 16th.
