Model House (2024)

Model House Review

For a horror/thriller about a bunch of vapid models thrown into a house together forced to join their non-existent wits to survive, Model House, in theory, sounds like a blast for the correct subset of viewers. Movies in this genre with simplistic premises thrive or die at the mercy of their cast and director, where leaning into the ridiculousness often nets the best results. Unfortunately for Model House, only about half the cast feels like they are not phoning it in, and writer/director Derek Pike has little interest in exploring anything about these characters other than their hot bodies. Only one single character gets even the slightest modicum of development; when the final girl can be spotted from a mile away, the fun at hand becomes decidedly less so. Without the willingness to play with its silly premise and a lack of engaging kills, Model House should be torn down and rebuilt with better parts.

The recent death of supermodel Bella Baylor takes the world by storm. How could someone with over two million followers be taken from us so swiftly? Model House opens with Bella’s abrupt death, seeming to emphasize that it will play into the larger whole eventually. Not long afterward, we meet our ditzy cast. The only one worth noting has significantly less followers than the others, is very shy, and has an alcoholic drunk for a father: Zoe (CoryAnne Roberts, America’s Next Top Model). She meets up with several other models at a house deep in the woods, secluded and rather inviting for home invaders. Model House briefly plays with the social media angle and the emptiness that comes with trying to maintain the most followers. Unfortunately Derek Pike confuses incessant sounds of incoming DMs with giving an actual commentary on what these social media vices mean inthe long term.

The tone frequently shifts throughout , taking far too long for anything of merit to actually occur . Before home invaders with eerie Infinity Pool-esque masks, two other boys pop by the house to distract the models from their social media obsessions. Trudy (Kyra Santoro) has her ex-boyfriend, Steve (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment, The Haunting of Molly Hartley), show up, promising to be a new and improved version of the man she previously knew . Hottie neighbor (Ryan Merriman, Halloween: Resurrection , Final Destination 3) comes to complain about the noise the models are bringing to the neighborhood in hopes that they will keep it down for awhile . By the time Model House gets around to masked invaders holding the girls at gunpoint , over half of the runtime has already been explored.

The people under the masks are Scout Taylor-Compton (Rob Zombie’s Halloween, The Long Night) and Chris Zylka (Shark Night, Piranha 3DD), both seasoned actors in this genre who do what they can with such minimal and underwritten material. Almost all of these characters are one-note, so when they die it doesn’t mean anything. It might be the direction’s fault for not having any real intensity or suspense throughout; a few scenes play out how they were meant to but the rest just sit there, especially in the saggy first half. If we’re supposed to actually care about anyone other than Zoe I’m sorry that never happens; things just happen on screen without being entertaining at all, even slightly. And none of this pizazz-less-ness is more apparent than a final act that feels like barely trying.

Model House could have been much better if only it embraced its own ridiculous premise instead of being nothing more than a series of scenes meant to titillate by putting hot women together in hot tubs or doing viral dances. There are pornos with more plot! Slotherhouse and the semi-recent Slumber Party Massacre remake worked because they were meta about how ridiculous they were; playing a horror flick this superfluous straight makes hardly a lick of sense at all—though thankfully Model House is only an hour-and-twenty minutes long!

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