Our House [DVD] [2003]

After buying the house, they move in, adding their own personal touches to the place. When the couple go upstairs to give their tenant a gift, they discover that she is surprisingly spry, running about, doing the river dance and taking part in a brass band. Will this women try her hardest to make Nancy and Alex's lives hell, and make them move out?

Could this at first hysterical situation, go as far as murder? You will have to rent or buy Our House and see!

Drew Barrymore has to be one of my all time favorite actresses. I think that she can do anything she wants to, and I believe that her talent can span from heart breaking emotional scenes to side splitting performances. In Our House (Duplex) Drew plays Nancy Kendricks, it is a performance that is very funny and interestingly layered, instead of just playing the character completely straight, she strives to add a lot of different dimensions and aspects to her role. This defiantly enters on her comedic range of acting and it is really good, it is like she doesn't have to put any effort into being this great, she has been in the business for a very long time and knows exactly what she is doing. Not one of her best performances, but still pretty good.

Ben Stiller is really not one of my favorite actors, I am not a fan of slapstick humor and that Dodgeball was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, but credit where it is due he does bounce off all the cast very well and is very funny. I didn't find him as breathlessly natural on screen as Barrymore, but he did at least try and work with his role, and managed to show, suitable hilarity at the whole situation and is on a constant height of deliria. Again not an astounding performance, but it is quite a lot of fun and provides plenty of laughs for everyone.

By far the best performance comes from Eileen Essel as the evil Mrs. Connelly. It is one of the funniest performances I have ever seen. It is genius because she manages to make you, empathize, but hate her at the same time. I thought it was amazing, funny, genius and completely accurate, as I know a fair few people who act just like that. One of the evilest characters in cinema, kind of becomes loveable.

I have to say that I really, really enjoyed Our House. I thought it was dark, clever and hysterical. I don't think that I stopped laughing all the way through. There is something very masterful about the way it is constructive and there are a lot of lasting images in this.
Danny Devito has quite an impressive and varied backlog of directorial work. Things like Death To Smoochy and Throw Momma From A Train. All of his work are dark comedies and I think they are all very good. He has a real good touch for making movies of this genre, this movie has a wonderful quirkiness to it and is like I said before masterfully set out and really well thought about.

This isn't a new concept, or a particularly inventive one so the script writers had to make it really over the top to get a reaction, which is what they succeeded in doing. They just thought of every wacky and stupid thing they could possibly fit into one script and hoped it would work which it did. It did because they didn't forget to build all the characters up, there is a huge amount of character development throughout the whole thing and the story has good foundation because the scene is set very early on, so all the wackiness can take place after. It really is a very funny script, with good, solid characters and a great story.

As production Values go Our House is pretty good, the house is really beautiful and the camera work, is little less than perfect. All the set pieces are very well planned out and all the elaborate gags are produced well. Also at the very beginning we have an animated introduction, which is very funny and really well made. This serves as a introduction to the madness straight away.

One of the biggest problems with Our House, though was that it is based on one idea and one idea alone, even though they take it through different routes, it does become a tad bit boring because it seems, like it is just going to be good physical comedy. When you have a whole movie just on one core idea, it can become slightly predictable.

Our House does also have some slight pacing problems, but nothing too bad.

Overall I really enjoyed Our House and thought it was immensely entertaining. Brilliant acting, great direction and some well planned physical comedy made it a great little flick. Sadly, it does try and base a whole film on a central idea and has very slight pacing problems.

Are There Any Special Effects On The DVD? Yes but nothing very special to talk about. There are three deleted scenes, one awful and a commentary/behind the scene's documentary.