I Hate-Watched House Of Darkness!

I am quite possibly the worst person in the world to bring into a conversation about “guilty pleasures.” Most people hear the term and list cheesy, mainstream trash or camp classics they find “so bad it’s good.” Other people will defiantly claim that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure in entertainment, and demand we rebuke whatever classicist, rockist, bourgeois sensibility tells us to feel bad about what we enjoy. Like a Debbie Downer Goldilocks, I note that a true “guilty pleasure” in this era would be a creative work that got its hooks in us before we knew the creator was an unrepentant predator. Or a beloved movie where we ignore that one guy in the ensemble turned out to be a creep. It might even a song or a comedy we dug before we knew how toxically retrograde the humor or the perspective was. A “guilty pleasure” isn’t the Macarena. A “guilty pleasure” would be if I tried to rewatch The Ref over Christmas, believing Denis Leary, Christine Baranski and Judy Davis shouldn’t have to pay for Kevin Spacey’s crimes.  A guilty pleasure would be digging on Bowie’s “China Girl” or dancing to anything by Mystikal. This generally kills the conversation before someone can ask if we’ve seen The Room. But if it didn’t, I’d probably bring up James Franco. And that should do it.

A guilty pleasure I indulged this week was watching Neil LaBute’s new movie House Of Darkness. A playwright turned director who blew up in the ‘90s with In The Company Of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, LaBute’s trademark was chamber pieces that showed how cruel men could be with each other and especially women, though those women were often more resourceful and intelligent than initially assumed. Critics thrilled at the irony that he was Mormon, and a one-woman play named Medea Redux got him punished by the LDS Church. Actors scrambled to take on the juicy, monologue-heavy roles he crafted, and his early movies launched Aaron Eckhart’s career. Even after his flop 2000 comedy Nurse Betty (featuring Renee Zellweger, Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock!), his name held a lot of weight on stage.

Then he remade The Wicker Man. The original 1973 film is a dark comedy about a pious policeman searching for a missing girl on a proudly pagan island off Scotland. And yes, it’s a comedy. I don’t care if flutes and maypoles creep you out. Any movie where the hero’s folly is refusing to have sex with a naked, writhing Britt Ekland, instead racing around an isle telling everyone how wicked they are, is a comedy. But LaBute’s 2006 version strips out the religion and has Nicolas Cage wandering loudly (so loudly) around an island in the Pacific Northwest, where the matriarchal bee-keepers in residence respond to his extralegal demands for information with dismissive obtuseness. After much hollering and half-assed jump scares, the horrible, idiotic truth is revealed and - if you’re smart enough to be watching the Unrated cut - you get to see Cage announce the bees are in his eyes. Instead of copping to a lack of experience with suspense filmmaking, LaBute explained his changes by saying the battle between the sexes is older than religion. I sadly can’t find the source I’m paraphrasing, but anybody paying attention to LaBute won’t have a problem believing he said it.

His next play still got Tony nominations, and he directed Chris Rock again in a remake of Death At A Funeral. But by 2016 he was show-running a Syfy show about Van Helsing and in 2018, the MCC Theater ended a 15 year relationship with him, not coincidentally in the thick of the #MeToo moment. In 2019, he wrote & directed the pilot for a Netflix “miniseries” called The I-Land that was initially announced as a new series. I can’t remember if I watched one episode or two, but it felt like people suffering from concussions improvising a Lost episode, and the 8% on Rotten Tomatoes was well earned.

I figured that would be the last time I’d watch anything LaBute had anything to do with, but then he went and made a horror movie with Justin Long, released the same year as Barbarian. While I had no expectation to enjoy it half as much as I enjoyed Barbarian, I swallowed my pride and admitted I really wanted to see it for myself. Plus it was on Hulu. And so began the "guilty pleasure."

Not because it was good. Nope. While House Of Darkness reveals right away that LaBute has learned how to put something ambiguous and spooky in middle distance, as is the style of this time, his sensibility has changed not a whit otherwise. Long’s hapless Hap meets Kate Bosworth’s femme probably-fatale Mina at a bar (hey, like the epilogue of LaBute's Wicker Man with James Franco!) and drives her to her giant spooky castle in the woods. They have a very long, awkward but flirtatious conversation before finally going inside. As she leaves to get drinks, our hero decides to call a boorish drinking buddy they left behind, soon crowing about his impending sexual escapade with this lovely rich stranger, apparently indifferent to the walls having ears (was texting not an option!?). Mina returning many minutes later with his Maker’s Mark, the awkward flirtation begins again, loaded with intimations of sexual danger and desire and all the other power play nonsense LaBute learned from David Mamet.

The mysterious woman’s mysterious sister Lucy shows up and Mina leaves to get more drinks. I don’t know if Mina is taking a massive dump every time she disappears or what, but she’s gone long enough for Hap to fall asleep, have a spooky dungeon dream, and then engage in yet another sexually fraught conversation with Lucy after a house tour. Once Mina’s back from a BevMo eight miles away with their drinks, the ladies endlessly needle Hap the sap about his horniness, Hap either defensively noting he’s just a guy or making clear he assumes a three-way is coming. It isn’t, because this is another story about a schmuck’s sexism revealed by a venus fly trap that’s arguably crueler than the guy deserves.

My guilt comes from paying witness to LaBute artlessly indulging this kind of sexist “man shit, woman shittier” fantasy yet again, especially now that there’s good (if still ambiguous) reason to believe the guy shouldn’t be running a film set (you better believe I gave it a thumbs down on Hulu!). The pleasure was marveling at just how committed he must be to this banal, cliche shtick. The actors did their jobs fine enough, though with Long far more effective as a much bigger creep in Barbarian, I couldn’t help but wish Nicolas Cage was on screen to turn things up a notch or five. The rumors never blew up after the MCC split, so I won’t even give the actors much flack for being involved. Apparently Long & Bosworth became a couple after making this and mazel tov. But House Of Darkness was simply Yet Another Neil LaBute Play with enough visual horror added for a producer-pleasing trailer. As for his actual playwriting career, it looks like LaBute's new one has only been performed at the (I kid you not) Gaslight Theater in St. Louis. So far.