The Midnight section here at Sundance can be a mixed bag. For every solid entry, like It’s What’s Inside (which just landed at Netflix), there is a true turd in the punchbowl like Krazy House. From Dutch comedy directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, this demented, bloody, unfunny riff on ’90s sitcoms is painful to watch, and had vast swaths of our screening’s audience fleeing for the snowy streets of Park City.
Don’t get me wrong, there are about ten good minutes here when Krazy House reaches its freakishly violent and blasphemous peak, but the rest is empty shocks and lame payoffs. Nick Frost and Alicia Silverstone play Bernie and Eve Christian, sitcom parents in the comedy mold. Bernie is, in a word, pathetic. He can’t do anything on his own, walks around in shoes with brushes on them, and causes accidents everywhere he goes. Eve is the steadfast matriarch, the breadwinner, and the one who can do all of the things Bernie can’t. Their kids, gum-chewing horndog Sarah (Gaite Jansen), and science nerd son, Adam (Walt Klink), aren’t interested in their father’s attempts to convert them by making everyone wear handmade sweaters with Jesus on them.
This is all pretty brutal. The filmmakers shoot authentically in four-camera sitcom format and aspect ratio, complete with studio audience and laugh track, but any attempt to skewer the sanctity of the American sitcom family is lost in a hail of bad jokes and grating characters. When a trio of sketchy Russians arrives, led by Piotr (Jan Bijvoet) and including his two dim-witted sons, they literally begin tearing the Christians’ world apart, drywall, pipes, flooring, all of it. And you know what? All of Bernie’s prayers go unanswered. As he trails around getting bullied, his son gets hooked on meth, his daughter has sex with one of the Russians and gets pregnant, and Eve, a victim of Bernie’s clumsiness, gets injured, hooked on drugs, and loses her job.
Krazy House spends an interminable amount of time slogging through the sitcom satire, while teasing the satanic side buried deep under Bernie’s extreme piety. It lasts so long you might start to think the violent turn won’t happen at all. But even when it does, none of it matters or has a lasting impact. If the film is trying to say anything, it might be a commentary on how thoughts and prayers are utterly pointless. In fact, Bernie doesn’t man-up and start fighting back until he gets fed up exchanging hollow platitudes with Jesus Christ (played by Entourage and Unhappily Ever After actor Kevin Connolly), jabbing him in the head with a spike.
Alicia Silverstone is one of the few highlights, offering some twisted takes on the perfect sitcom wife and mom. But even then, it’s in service to pointless movie that makes 86-minutes feel like a lifetime. Nick Frost, who I love in pretty much everything, gives a performance so irritating it’s not a bad thing when Bernie is nailed to a cross for about 30 goddamn minutes, giving us nothing but wide-eyed reaction shots to the unfolding carnage. It’s a blessing, you might say, but the true miracle is that Krazy House made it this far at all.