Habitat (1997)

I hesitate to post this here as this movie doesn’t entirely qualify for this site, but I felt compelled to, as I was led astray by the brief movie description that Netflix had for this “gem” from the 90’s. I also wanted to review this as Jeff had mentioned the dearth of horror movies from that decade in a conversation I had with him recently.

Netflix’s description of the film:
“With the Earth's ozone layer completely depleted, people must remain indoors, safe from the sun's deadly rays, in this sci-fi horror flick. Scientist Hank Symes (Tcheky Karyo), however, thinks he has a solution: a genetically altered ecosystem. But when Hank's bizarre experiment mutates both he and his family into otherworldly creatures and transforms his house into a living, breathing monster, no one is safe.”

The category that www.imdb.com has the film under is sci fi/fantasy, hmm.

Well it took waaaay to long to get to the horror elements of the movie. The movie starts as the main characters (the Symes family) are moving to a new home in a new town where scientist/hippie visionary dad can set up his new lab and hippie mom (Alice Krige) can support him and prance around in her see-through clothes.

Well, day one of moving in and dad’s new lab in the basement goes all cablooie and dad gets absorbed (literally!) into his work and becomes part of the ecosystem the house develops after the lab meltdown. The house goes all primeval forest-like. Everything is wet, and not in a good way. And dad is a swarm of bugs or something.

Well junior can’t seem to settle in, no thanks to the jerk-ass gym/boxing coach and his jerk-ass student protégés who fancy themselves the school bullies. Well they suck at it, as do just about all of the actors who aren’t the protagonist family in this movie. But he does have the hots for the coach’s daughter (Laura Harris, the snotty hottie in Dead Like Me and a lead in The Faculty), which pays off with a nice skinny dipping scene late in the movie.

So anyhew, the snooping jerk-ass locals start getting all tresspassy and affected/attacked by the dad-o-sphere jungle. Sure enough, the authorities get called in and attempt to capture/contain the problem. This does not go well. The few comparatively decent gory/horror scenes happen during this sequence. Mom gets absorbed by the house and becomes a magic swarm of flies like dad and they fly off together. Junior and coach’s daughter get immunified against the harsh effects of the ozone layer-free sun (thanks to dad-jungle) and run off to have adventures and shit, like Cain in Kung-Fu.

This Canadian production spent most of its budget on the house-jungle, which was actually semi decent. There were some CGI effects but they looked about 10 years out of date for the year in which it was made. A large portion of the movie was a crappy high-school drama. The storyline of the movie came off as a message/lesson type, but by the end of the movie, it trails off into nothing.

So on the down side you have a plethora of crappy writing, bad acting (and not so bad its good), painful CGI, and on the up side you have a pretty neat dad-jungle set and Laura Harris’ breasts.

2 Georges