Audience Member
One of the Z grade classics! I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to write something about this nonsense! Thankyou, Rotten Tomatoes!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Said to be the single worst Australian film of all time, I had to witness Houseboat Horror to see if it was worse than anything that Baz Luhrmann had ever made.
While still better than both Australia and The Great Gatsby, the latter of which is not an Australian film but is considered one by many, Houseboat Horror is a film where it is easy as hell to identify why people call it the worst Australian movie of all time.
To put it bluntly, Houseboat Horror depicts the negative side of Australia, which in its own right is actually hilarious. The entire cast in the film are a bunch of near-talentless bogans who couldn't act better than Klinton Spilsbury with the only appeal coming from any of them being small. There is nothing you can expect from cast members like these because it is clear that they are inexperienced and untalented people who have to improvise their paper-thin dialogue which is composed mainly of stereotypical Australian terms, senseless responses to questions as to their motives and above all lines which remind audiences painfully that the actors are aware that they are in a movie such as "Lovely scenery here." The dialogue is awfully laughable, as are the actors with the only appeal coming from them being the unintentional humour stemming from their lack of talents, the faces they make which suggests that they have no idea what is going on, and the female nudity. At least Houseboat Horror doesn't lack nudity, and it has more than enough bad acting to pass itself off as a bad comedy alongside the hilarious script, so while Houseboat Horror is a truly dreadful film, it successfully passes for being so bad that it's good.
Following the slasher formula, Houseboat horror falls into the category of one of the worse slasher films of the 1980s' due to a lot of things, such as the fact that the motives of the killer are senseless while the film plays with the idea about who the killer could be for the majority of the start of the film and later revealing that it is a guy who simply hates filmmakers since some others years ago left him in a fire. Houseboat Horror reveals just how stupid slasher films are as a genre by showing the lack of sense that anybody put into writing or directing such a blunder, and it could pass of successfully as a serious satire of the genre although that clearly wasn't the intention of directors Kendal Flanigan and Ollie Martin who took the film way too seriously when making it and forgetting that they were making a piss-poor slasher film. Audiences are likely to find themselves asking more questions after seeing Houseboat Horror than the filmmakers did when they created it.
There is enough deaths in Houseboat Horror to satisfy some slasher movie fans, and the film is at least memorable for some death scenes such as a woman being killed with a horseshoe through the eyes or a woman being stabbed through the mattress in her bunk bed and violently bouncing up and down. And the quantity of blood and gore is decent even if nothing in the film makes sense. So combining the quantity of blood and gore with the nudity in the film, Houseboat Horror should please fans of the genre if they are willing to lower their standards below direct-to-DVD sequels and mockbusters to witness the truly dreadful feature that is Houseboat Horror.
One hilarious of Houseboat Horror is the simple fact that the directors shot the film at Lake Eildon to attempt to use the beautiful scenery of the location, yet in the process managed to make it look ugly due to the grey skies and the poor lighting as well as the weak visual quality of the cinematography. Lake Eildon is a beautiful place, yet in a manner copying Friday the 13th Houseboat Horror manages to succeed at making its lake a place of ugly sights. Whether this is intentional or not is debatable, but considering that the characters take notice to the "lovely scenery" while viewers are not likely to, I think it is safe to say that the directors were attempting to use the sites for visual appeal but failed immensely.
And the musical score in Houseboat Horror is unbelievable repetitive and tedious, likely to annoy even the most tolerant film lovers. It screeches into the ears of the viewers and fails to really establish any intensity whatsoever, so it is completely unnecessary and not of any benefit to the viewing.
And one of the most laughable aspects of Houseboat Horror is its terrible continuity. In random scenes some actors are dressed in something which they are not in the next, and in one scene a bottle of milk his half full and then nearly empty in the next. The filmmakers clearly must not have structured they way they were filming Houseboat Horror well at all, because if they did they would realise that a film is supposed to travel in a single direction and not scatter all over the place so that in one scene people are being killed in the poorly lit darkness of the set while in the next which supposedly takes place at the same time, a topless woman is reading in her bed during the broad light of day outside. The continuity in Houseboat Horror is truly awful and makes it good for a laugh. And the ridiculous product placements in the film are so overdone that it is hilarious, particularly the amount of Victorian Bitter cans.
In the end, Houseboat Horror is a hilarious unintentional comedy but terrible slasher film due to the fact that the actors are improvising terrible generic Australian dialogue, the killer has ridiculous motives, the beautiful scenery of Lake Eildon is made to look ugly and the simple fact that nobody in the film ever had the intelligent experience it took to make a comprehensible film, not even a slasher. So the film is better than Australia and The Great Gatsby due to the entertainment value that comes with its poor quality which is good to watch with friends so you can laugh at and mock the film.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A straight to video slasher that is as piss-poor as you might suspect based on the title, it still has some amusing moments (though unintentional), so if you go into it with the right frame of mind and friends, you can get a few yucks out of it.
A hair metal band travels into the outback on a houseboat (duh) to film a video, only to find a killer waiting for any hapless tourists who come along.
Rental at best, unless you just love the 'so bad it's good' school of viewing.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/07/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Houseboat Horror has the distinct honor of being infamous known as the Australia's Worst Movie Ever. I'm willing to content that by going beyond just Australia, for this movie was just unbearable. Houseboat Horror is about a large group comprised of a rock band, groupies, and a film crew enlisting a few Houseboats to go out on a lake vacation to shoot a music video. Sure enough, there's a killer afoot who was badly burned during his own video shoot as a child and naturally, he feels as though he needs to kill everyone involved in this new shoot. One of my major golden rules of movie watching is to NEVER give up and stop the movie. You do that, and then you have no right to rate a film. Well, with this one, I came closer than I ever have before to turning it off early. This film is shot on video in the 80's, so the quality is damn near below home video, as is the acting (though lead Alan Dale has gone on to be somewhat successful surprisingly. I'm sure he keeps this film hidden from people) and the music (Oh God, the music!). The video they wind up shooting is probably the most entertaining part of this film, as I haven't laughed that hard in awhile. The kills are lame and uninventive, while the effects are laughable as well. There's a decent abundance of nudity, but unfortunately, they pick some of the ugliest girls to get naked. This is definitely one of the worst films I've seen in a long time. Atrocious.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/21/23
Full Review
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