Short Docs program – The House is Innocent (Nicholas Coles, 2015): USA

Reviewed by Wayne Derossett.  Viewed at the 2016 Santa Barbara Film Festival, Wednesday, Feb. 10 in Metro 2.

No subject matter could be more of a surprise.  This 13 minute film highlights the macabre story of a house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, CA used by a serial killer, who buried her aging victims in the yard and continued to collect their social security checks.  Now, here’s where the fun part starts.  After processing as a crime scene and going to auction… the house found new owners.  Who would buy such an infamous house?  Meet Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams.  At only $215,000, they couldn’t pass up a bargain, and then proceeded to spent a good deal fixing the place up.  Oh, did I mention, the new owners are hilarious?

This film is full of unexpected laughs.  Call it morose, call it off-beat, call it gallows humor — it’s still hilarious!

The two new owners do not at all shy away from their new found semi-celebrity status.  And they freely admit “they’re a little weird.”  They give tours of the house.  They post creepy signs on the front fence playing with the location’s morbid reputation, and I do mean creepy, but creepy in a good way.  They show all the visitors where the seven bodies were buried, some below their nicely appointed new patio.

During the film, Tom explains that he remarried after his first wife died, and Barbara quickly points out, “He had nothing to do with it!”  The audience bursts into laughter and now the trap is set.  Nothing is said without a snappy comeback, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the end.

Curiously, the rest of the short docs program regaled us with other death related themes; Alzheimer’s, a Love Story (Le et, al,, 2015) a man dying with degenerative disease is taken care of by his male life companion, The Crossing (Koop, 2015) where a train crossing gate attracts suicidal people, The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano (Seftel, 2015) about a photographer who is obsessed with a chronic preoccupation of death depicts various imagined scenarios with prosthetic make-up and gory scenes in carefully composed pictures, and Spearhunter (Roffman and Poling, 2015) A game hunter claims to be “the world’s greatest spearhunter” because he was the only one.   Also included in this Short Doc series; Free to Laugh (Everly, 2016) about comedy club for therapy of ex-cons, and Mr. Overton (Cooper, 2016) a story of a rather healthy 109 year old man, who is the longest living WWII veteran.