Mediocre TV-thriller
regular Busfield stars as a technology designer whose family moves into
a test house he’s created. The house has a female personality of
its own, and one that constantly irritates his family. It chooses
their diet (not taking into account any personal tastes), their music (not
bothering to consider that, if the house was properly soundproofed, nobody
else could hear their choices anyway) and really, their entire lives.
Busfield is too busy trying to sell the concept to developers to notice
the glaringly obvious bugs that any rational businessman would have at
least attempted to weed out of the system. The family’s estranged
daughter shows up and the computer house distrusts her as it begins to
get closer to Busfield and oddly jealous of Busfield’s wife (Dale in a
performance better than the movie deserves).
All this would be fine, of course, if it led up to anything. The pacing is way too slow to ignore the plot holes the size of Cuba, and scenes seem desperately stretched out in order to make a feature-length film instead of the mildly interesting half-hour “Twilight Zone” episode this should have been. Why, for example, does an omniscient computer need to listen in on a phone line to hear a call? And couldn’t it cover up the evidence of it doing so? The disembodied voice comes off as more irritating and stupid than scary, and any bizarre psycho-sexual relations between it and Busfield are quickly dropped (this is a network movie, after all). It’s 2001 meets The Amityville Horror, though neither zen like the former nor sleazy like the latter.
So, basically, a whole bunch of stupid characters wander around an oddly-empty and blandly-shot house with a less-than-scary female voice watching over them. A couple sub-plots involving the daughter’s asshole boyfriend and a nice local cop (who, guess what, once dated the daughter… guess who she ends up with?) add nothing but clichés to an already-useless film. It's boring, useless crap that I want eaten by wolves.
Sorry, I’m probably going off a little bit more than I need to here, but charging full price for this crap instead of the now-common $15-$30 price range for non-cable TV fare deserves it. If you really want to see something that would make a great double feature with the similar Busfield-starrer Strays, wait until this shows up on TV again in two to three days. This is nothing but two hours of filler that’s served its purpose and now needs to be banished to the bowels of late-night cable forever. I have no idea why it's rated R.