Grandmother's House

 Holy crap, we have struck... something. This is the sort of thing that makes trawling the further reaches of the streaming lists worthwhile.

 Grandmother's House is an obscure indie horror movie that's kind of breathtaking in its singular shittiness, a perfect storm of ineptitude, enthusiasm and wrong-headedness; The mythical so bad that it's... well, still pretty fucking bad, but in interesting and very funny ways. 
 If you're in the right frame of mind, it's an absolute blast; Friends and alcohol absolutely recommended.

 Siblings Lynn (Kim Valentine) and David (Eric Foster) have just lost their father. As orphans (their mother having died a few years prior) they're sent to, well, Grandmother's House, to be cared for by their maternal grandparents (Len Lesser and Ida Lee); They'd lived there as kids, but after mom died dad took them to the city.
 The first night at the house David sees Grannie and pop-pops dragging a woman's body into the basement. David is discovered as gramps is going to butcher the woman, so he gets killed too.
 But no! It was all a nightmare. Or was it? The young woman from the dream (prolific Z-movie actress Brinke Stevens) exists and seems to be making her own way to Grandmother's House; She's first seen almost causing a bus crash by jaywalking, then she's picked up by a green van.

 The next day the kids are taken to a pool. David sees the mysterious woman from his dream, but more importantly, Lynn reconnects with a rakish young gentleman: Kenny (Michael Robinson).
 The dude deserves his own paragraph; his seduction techniques rely on eye fucking Lynn, then when she acts mildly embarrassed, diving underwater and ogling her even more from every angle. The camera, of course, leers right along; this was pretty uncomfortable as I thought the character was meant to be fifteen or so, but let's give the script the benefit of doubt and say she's supposed to be nineteen, same age as the actress playing her.
 In any case, she calls him out for being a pervert, so he lunges and forces his tongue down her throat. And... she seems into it.
 (Later on, a friend asks Lynn what rating she'd give Kenny - she says "an eight... but that's only because I've never given anyone more than an eight." Given her tastes, maybe it'd take a Harvey Weinstein to break that record.)

 Anyhow. As the family make their way back to the farm, they pass by a bunch of policemen fishing an old man's corpse out of a nearby pond - an abandoned green van nearby. This would make for an effective thriller, if the movie knew how to milk tension better.
 Soon after a neighboring family pops over for a barbeque. David and another kid go off to play with fireworks (and cause a pretty great-looking explosion). When they get back, David sees grandma and grandpa dragging... a young woman's body - the one from his dream, even.
 The old timers suspect he's seen them, so there's a bit of a cat-and-mouse chase as David sneaks around gramps, who makes a show of maybe not having the best of intentions. That's even before he grabs his gun.

 And now I'm going to spoil the shit out of a mid-movie twist, so skip to after the picture if you're not into that sort of thing: As it turns out, it looks like it's the woman, the supposed victim, who's a complete psychopath, and the grandparents were trying to protect the kids from her. And don't worry, there's a few more left turns ahead.

 There's more chases as David and Lynn try to outwit their pursuer, leading to the film's best-looking scene as the kids run through an orange grove pursued by an antique truck. It's dumb as all hell, and never convincing, but it does look good.
 And it all ends with yet another twist that's so out of the left field and... I don't want to say bold, it's more like holy shit this completely ignores any good storytelling sense and completely derails the movie; It made me burst out laughing, so I'm all for it.

 It's madness. Poorly paced madness with a lot of filler and more plot holes than plot, but it's still got enough crazy shit and energy to be fun in a way many -most- of these movies are not.

 Acting-wise, the kids actually do relatively well - they over-emote, but hey, child actors. As for everyone else... holy shit are they bad.
 Kenny can't even walk convincingly, his every action so mannered I honestly wondered if his character is supposed to have some sort of mental problem. The grandparent's acting is broad and hammy as hell, like something out of a pantomime. As for the mysterious woman, the faces she pulls are something to behold, for sure; I've seen Stevens elsewhere, and while she's never struck me as a good actress, well, she could only improve after this.
 Even minor characters are memorably bad - the family friends that pop over? The patriarch is introduced waving a huge barbeque sausage, screaming "What does this remind you of?" It's like the characters all came out from the "I'd buy that for a dollar!" show in Robocop.

 Director Peter Rader makes some weird choices, but the filmmaking is actually all right. There's some good scenes here, a couple that even manage a measure of suspense. Niko Mastorakis produces, and his trashy sensibilities show through a little bit, I think.
 The music is all cheesy synths and clean guitars (regular Mastorakis collaborator David Zimmer wisely chose to stay the hell away.) I have no idea if it was done to save on costs or if there was some sort of problem, but all the lines of dialog are dubbed in, and it gives this Z- grade movie an even lower-rent feel.

 Despite the film being rated R (justifiably so), most of the movie plays like a shitty thriller aimed squarely at kids. It hews to David's point of view pretty closely, and a lot of the tropes are of a piece with other kid's movies of the time. It even maintains bloodshed to a minimum - this would easily pass as PG-13 if it wasn't for the adult situations and that crazy-ass ending. Everything feels miscalculated, and the film's... unique storytelling style makes it fairly unpredictable. Part of its natty charm.

 It's got all sorts of cool little things interspersed within the crap; The bit where David goes off with his dipshit friend feels pretty naturalistic and well observed, it captures 80's fashion in that unsanitized, unglamorous way only z-movies seem to manage, and some of the production design is pretty good, too - I liked the house's backyard, full of monolith-like rusted engine parts. And that title sequence!

That moon rises as the credits go on. Classy!

 Most of all, it shares that drive to entertain, that gleeful B-movie energy that Mastorakis's films have. I can't say it succeeds on its own terms, but it absolutely succeeds on mine.