The Girl on the Third Floor
In our debut episode, we tackle The Girl on the Third Floor, a movie about a philandering ex-businessman who moves into a house that really hates toxic masculinity. Wrestler-turned-wooden-actor CM Punk stars in this horror movie for the #MeToo era, but can he body slam his way out of all these plot holes?
The Girl on the Third Floor is available on Netflix.
Matt: Home repair, sinful lusting, and way too much ooze: we’re talking about The Girl on the Third Floor and it…was…horrifying.
[Music]
Sadie: Welcome to So Horrified. The show where we talk about scary movies that are horrifying for all the wrong reasons. We’re your hosts, Sadie…
Matt: And Matt.
Sadie: And before we get into our awful movie to talk about, let’s talk about something good. What’s something good, a nice palette cleanser, that you’ve seen this week?
Matt: Um, I was pretty impressed with the first couple episodes of The Outsider that we watched.
Sadie: Yeah, that was really good.
Matt: We waited until it was, you know, all the way finished with the season before we started it, as we normally do.
Sadie: I don’t like to wait.
Matt: Yeah. But we like to binge and so, yeah, we started it and we’re, what, like two into it now I think?
Sadie: Something like that,
Matt: Maybe three? But it’s been, yeah, very good. Very good.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: Hopefully it finishes strong.
Sadie: Yeah, it was awesome.
Matt: Stephen King things have a tendency sometimes to not do that.
Sadie: Right, right. I’m gonna be a little different and throw this out there because it does not sound like something good and it is not rated good, but that movie The Bye Bye Man…
Matt: Yeah!
Sadie: Which sounds horrible, okay? And we actually watched it planning for it to be…
Matt: Part of the show.
Sadie: An episode, right! Because it had…it came up on a list of worst horror movies, and it had all these really bad reviews. And maybe now you’re just not gonna trust us. I don’t know, but watch it and tell me that it is not a decent horror movie.
Matt: It’s not…it’s not the best thing you’ve ever seen in my life, but it’s definitely–
Sadie: It’s not Girl on the Third Floor.
Matt: It’s better than the ratings that it gets, and it’s better than this stinker of a movie that we saw today.
Sadie: Right. It has decent acting. It’s got the kid from Big Love, played the son in Big Love.
Matt: Has, uh, Carrie-Anne Moss.
Sadie: Yeah, Trinity.
Matt: Faye Dunaway, for some reason.
Sadie: Yeah, Faye Dunaway, which was a nice surprise. And it–it actually caused me to jump a couple times. It had some nice surprises, some decent–
Matt: It definitely kept my interest the entire time and–
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: It didn’t feel right, devoting an hour to making fun of a movie that, at the end of the day, wasn’t that bad.
Sadie: No, really, what it would have been is an hour of me going ‘how did this movie get lower ratings than Girl on the Third Floor?’ because that’s what I’m most outraged about, to be honest.
Matt: So, uh, that brings us to today’s movie which is: Girl on the Third Floor. A movie about a man who moves to a house in order to renovate it to prepare it for his wife and his coming child. The house itself is haunted. There is a ghost woman that seduces the man into cheating on his wife and craziness ensues from there.
Sadie: Pretty much.
Matt: All right, so, let’s get into it.
[Music]
Matt: It’s a WWE Wrestler leading this movie. And then the next billed person was introducing…somebody. Sarah the–the…
Sadie: Yeah, who plays a Sarah.
Matt: But, as an introduced, this is her first movie.
Sadie: The actress’ name is also Sarah.
Matt: Yeah, it did not give me high hopes going into it.
Sadie: That her name was Sarah?
Matt: No! Introducing [laughter] how dare they…Although the actress’ name is Sarah, too, and that usually worries me when they name them the same thing because it makes me think that they couldn’t remember two names.
Sadie: Well, one of our favorite shows of all time is The Office, and they have multiple characters named after the actors.
Matt: That’s true.
Sadie: So–
Matt: Plus, my number one favorite show of all time is Who’s the Boss, and Tony Danza, in every role he’s ever been in–
Sadie: People, his favorite show of all time is not Who’s the Boss.
Matt: It’s not.
Sadie: We’ve been together five years, over five years, and I’ve never once heard you talk about that show.
Matt: It’s a secret. [laughter]
Sadie: Or watch it so I call that a lie.
Matt: What, uh, what is this movie about to you, Sadie? [laughter] Besides fixing drywall and stuff like that for a good solid 20 minutes of the movie.
Sadie: Yes.
Matt: The first…he’s just fixing stuff.
Sadie: This movie to me is–is, I want to say, but I don’t want to like sound like I’m making light of the Time’s Up or #MeToo movement. So I don’t want–
Matt: I don’t think anyone’s gonna–
Sadie: To come across that way, but this movie is like Time’s Up for straight white men in this house. Well, not, because there’s a black guy who–
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Sorry, spoilers! But there is a line, there is…maybe it’s Time’s Up for straight men in haunted houses because there’s a line, not to jump too far into it, but there is a line in the movie that I had to quote because it just was shocking to me. They ask if the main character is gay, and he’s like, ‘No, why did you ask me that?’ and he goes, ‘That house is bad news for straight men.’
Matt: That was a weird exchange with that weird, homophobic bartender guy that was just like, ‘Ain’t queer, is yah?’
Sadie: And I think he was asking to try to see if he was safe because of the whole ‘house is bad news for the straight men.’
Matt: A lot of people in town seem to know that this house is…something weird goes on in this house. I guess a lot of people have moved in and out of it but nobody’s ever explicit about what is actually going on inside this house.
Sadie: And just that exchange shocked me when he was like, ‘The house is bad news for straight men.’
Matt: [laughter] For straight men.
Sadie: I just don’t feel like I’ve ever watched a haunted house movie where they were like, ‘if you’re gay, you’re okay.’
[Laughter]
Matt: If you’re a woman, no biggie. Straight men, run.
Sadie: Not to jump to the end, and we can talk about the end later on, but at the end, I have questions about that but, yeah, that straight men, it really comes for you…
Matt: This spares nobody: dogs, best friends, all of them.
Sadie: But yeah, I’ve just never heard a house that haunts based on sexual orientation and gender.
Matt: Yeah, all right, so let’s kind of set up…I guess what’s going…so this guy, Don, moves to this house with his dog. His pregnant wife is back somewhere else and he’s fixing up this rundown house for his family to come move into. Don is a butthole. [laughter] He’s not a good dude at all.
Sadie: He’s not likeable, he’s not a good actor.
Matt: Yeah and this I–I wrote down in here that this is the scene that made me think it, when he’s FaceTiming with her on the phone, but, the movie at this point kind of alternates between these kind of cool looking like shots of the marbles rolling on the floor from their perspective and these long wide shots and then just this weird stuff that looks like it’s from a made-for-tv movie out of, like, 2003.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: And it just can’t pick a lane of how serious it’s gonna take itself and how much quality, I guess, there’s gonna be in it.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: But it bumps back and forth a lot between looking really, really cheap and looking like somebody actually spent some time and effort on it.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: The acting never…so much…doesn’t bounce back and forth, it stays on one side.
Sadie: Okay, just, while we’re on the scene, I’m sorry this is totally opposite, but I wanted to…what is with all the mirrors? They never addressed that. And there’s this one room with, like, 20 mirrors up against the wall.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: And I kept…I was like, ‘that has to be something important.’
Matt: Like a mirror dimension, he has to go through them or break them or do something to them.
Sadie: Yeah, like the ghost gets trapped in it or something because–
Matt: No, you see spooky shit in them every once in a while.
Sadie: It’s just not a normal thing to have in a house that you go and you’re fixing up, is like, 20 mirrors on the ground with already 10 mirrors hanging up.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: It’s just…and that, I’m sorry, that I saw that, but yes.
Matt: And that just gets added, ultimately, to the list of things that are never truly explained about what’s going on or how any of this is supposed to be happening in this house. They have a little exposition preacher come by every once in a while and sort of catch you up on what’s been going on for the last 30 minutes.
Sadie: Right, well…and, yeah, so he–he moves into the house and meets this girl and immediately cheats on his wife.
Matt: Immediately cheats on his wife.
Sadie: Immediately, without hesitation. I wrote that down. I was like, ‘well, damn! That didn’t take long.’
Matt: The first person that says hi to him.
Sadie: He’s like, ‘oh yeah, we’re gonna bang.’
Matt: ‘Why don’t you come back later? We’ll get drunk, and we’ll fuck on the bed that’s supposed to be for me and my wife.’
Sadie: It’s just bananas to me how quickly that happened, and then weird shit starts to happen in this house. A lot of it’s centering around this girl who keeps showing up in dangerous things, so that’s, yeah. And a very long way for us to say what this movie’s about.
Matt: And our lead CM Punk; the equation that I wrote to get to him was that he’s like Jon Hamm plus Michael Phelps. He’s gonna love the big and the kind of droopy jaw .
Sadie: I saw the Jon Hamm thing, but I wasn’t sure who he was a mixture with.
Matt: Yes.
Sadie: And that’s a good one.
Matt: Plus tattoos.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: Minus charm, minus acting. [laughter] And that’s how you get this guy.
Sadie: Yes, yes! Yeah, I was gonna say kind of like the discount store Jon Hamm.
Matt: Yes.
Sadie: That–that isn’t nearly as either classy and charming like in Mad Men even though that character was a dick also named Don.
Matt: Right.
Sadie: But–but, he was very charming and charismatic or, like, a bunch of the other roles he’s played, not nearly as just, kind of…even when they’re dopey and–and…I don’t know, not with it…he’s still, you know, kind of endearing and charming.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: It doesn’t…he doesn’t have any of Jon Hamm’s likability. [laughter] Jon Hamm has played jerks before, and we still love him.
Matt: Yeah, he’s still charming and witty even if it’s terrible things.
Sadie: And suave and stuff. And you’re like, ‘uh, okay, like you suck.’
Matt: i can see why all these women keep falling for you
Sadie: yeah exactly this guy it’s like what? like
Matt: It makes me not even care that his sockets are leaking this weird, white, thick goo. As he’s renovating his house, everything seems to be just dripping with fluids.
Sadie: Always. And he never calls a professional! Like, I’m sorry if we just bought–
Matt: Yeah, he calls his buddy over, eventually, that Milo guy.
Sadie: Right, who seems to be more her buddy, like his wife’s friend.
Matt: Oh, is he? I thought they worked together.
Sadie: Because, I think at some point he says like, hey, oh maybe that’s what it was. Maybe he’s like, ‘I’ve worked with your wife a long time’ I thought…
Matt: No, I think him and Milo worked together at the…oh, whatever trading firm that it turns out that he stole a bunch of money from.
Sadie: Oh. I don’t know. He might…I felt like he said, ‘I’ve been friends with your wife for a long time’ or something like that.
Matt: I feel like–
Sadie: I liked him.
Matt: He should have been around a lot sooner, I think. He doesn’t show up for a long time.
Sadie: He was a good actor.
Matt: Spoilers: he gets murdered very quickly, and he was, yeah, he–he was a decent actor and–
Sadie: Yeah, he was a better actor. He was much more likeable–
Matt: Than the main character!
Sadie: He was funny.
Matt: Yeah
Sadie: He, yeah.
Matt: He’s a voice of reason.
Sadie: I had the exact same thought.
Matt: Hey, don’t cheat on your wife, you scumbag!
Sadie: I had the exact same thought. I was like, this guy should have been the lead role or even the wife who comes in at the end is a much better actress, like, actor, and I really…if it had been his friend guy and the wife, it would be a different story. We may not be talking about it on this podcast. I mean, we probably would, to be fair, but–but–
Matt: It would have gotten a better score.
Sadie: Yeah. It would have done better, wouldn’t…um, but, yeah, there’s… oh! And did we already pass the part, I wasn’t paying attention, where he looks around, he’s like, ‘who paints a room pink?’ Is that that unusual?
Matt: Lots of people! Anyone with a little girl probably paints a room pink.
Sadie: Right, I mean, you don’t have to…I painted Harper’s room dark blue to look like the night sky and put stars up when she was born but, you know…
Matt: It needs to be pink.
Sadie: It’s still–
Matt: She’s a girl!
Sadie: Shut up! [laughs] Still, often…in fact, I think the room she’s in now is pink, like a light pink like. It’s not that unusual, man, like–
Matt: Who does that?
Sadie: Okay, and now we’re come…we’re coming up to the scene where I–I just, it’s still so weird to me, and it’s just, if you, if you’ve watched the movie, I feel like you’ll remember this. You remember this moment, and if you haven’t watched it, I feel like you’ll see what I’m talking about, but, like, choose to watch.
Matt: There’s a tiny bowling alley–
Sadie: Yeah, with, like, three lanes.
Matt: That is somewhere.
Sadie: And it’s, and it has a bar.
Matt: It has a packed bar at some point.
Sadie: But, like, yeah, this conversation, it just seems kind of out of the blue when he’s asking him if he’s gay. And definitely has some homophobia going on.
Matt: Yes.
Sadie: But then when he just so blatantly is just like, ‘the house is bad news for straight men’ and I was just like [Matt laughs] like I know I’ve already talked about…I don’t want to drill it anymore, but it’s just so outrageous to me. It was very weird.
Matt: They don’t explain that. It’s not like the ghost comes out and is like, ‘you know, I’ve let women and gay men live here.’
Sadie: Right.
Matt: For some, you know, she has some sort of backstory where a straight man wronged her or something, but it never really paid off, it’s–
Sadie: Because, spoilers, she attacks the wife at the end. And the dog. I’m like, so–
Matt: Dog’s a straight man.
Sadie: It’s just, well, I just mean that it doesn’t seem to be that exclusive to just straight–I feel like the straight men thing had to do with when she was saying, like, it turns out–so again, spoilers–
Matt: I think he was trying to figure out if this guy was a queer in his town and just if he needed to run him out of town or not. That was his way of doing it.
Sadie: I don’t know, but it turns out, at the end, we find out that this house used to be, or, well, they even say it then, that the house used to be a brothel, right? And this girl that he–he cheats with, who seems to just…we don’t know, is she a ghost or she just a creeper? But it turns out she’s the ghost of one of the–
Matt: I guess a ghost?
Sadie: Prostitutes.
Matt: But with like a physical body?
Sadie: Yeah, because he can touch her, he has sex with her, like–
Matt: She picks up a hammer.
Sadie: She kills people, yeah, but she…because it was a brothel like a hundred years ago.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: So–so she had…and she said she worked there so she would have to have been a ghost and–
Matt: Like a zombie, it just doesn’t decompose.
Sadie: But, um, she kind of explains that she doesn’t…that all these men who used to come and watch her in the shows didn’t try to save her or do anything about how the guy there was abusing her and hurting her and–
Matt: [unintelligible] children, I guess.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: Splitting their faces open, if that was one of the ghosts.
Sadie: Apparently, yes. And he set the place on fire with her in it, I believe, is what she had said and then–
Matt: I guess, but the house is okay.
Sadie: But, yeah, the house is okay.
Matt: It doesn’t look like it’s been burnt down.
Sadie: But, yeah, she’s like, I was, you know, just mad that these–these guys who supposedly loved her and watched her all the time weren’t there for her when she needed them most. That no one asked about where she had gone after she died, no one came looking for her, no one cared and–
Matt: So now I must kill.
Sadie: Straight men and anyone they’re associated with which, again, so…
Matt: Anyone.
Sadie: Seems like it’s not that much of a qualifier that we don’t have to…yeah, I don’t know, that just was odd.
Matt: Anyone who knows a straight man is a potential target. So, basically, anyone.
Sadie: Right–right. So most of my notes, to be honest, are questions. And most of them did not get answered.
Matt: Yeah, I ended up with a lot more questions than I started the movie with.
Sadie: Right? Like, almost all of my reactions were questions. A lot going ‘what? what just happened? how does that work?’ And some just going, ‘what the fuck?’
Matt: Yeah, most of them go unanswered. I don’t know. The first scary thing that happened, I think, is after he sleeps with the girl that just shows up at his back door.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: He goes to take a shower, and the weird white goo that’s infesting the house blows all over his face.
Sadie: Right. And apparently that was…right, yeah.
Matt: Very suggest–
Sadie: Very, very suggestive.
Matt: It’s just constantly dripping this weird, weird stuff.
Sadie: It goes between this black ooze and this thick, white kind of gelatin.
Matt: It’s cum. [laughter] It’s cum. Let’s not mince words, we know what it is.
[laughter]
Sadie: So gross.
Matt: But, yeah, the first time that I was like ‘whoa!’ is when he was in the shower. [laughter] It just, like, blech! all over him.
Sadie: Which my question, there…I was like who, if you’re taking your first shower in a house that you just bought, who doesn’t turn the water on to see if it’s working first?
Matt: And let the old shit run out of the pipes.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: This house is a billion years old.
Sadie: That’s…I know that’s a random question, but yes, it just kind of splooges all over his face.
Matt: But, yeah, and up to the point where this girl arrives, you don’t really get an indication that he’s such a jackass of a man.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: He’s just this dude that showed up and fixed a house, and he talks to that preacher lady for about five minutes and says, ‘my wife’s coming’ and all that. And then, as soon as this girl shows up, he’s like, ‘come inside! We’ll drink these drinks, we’ll smoke this joint, and immediately have sex.’
Sadie: Right.
Matt: And he feels nothing about it. He feels…he looks at the dog because the dog’s like ‘rr-rr?’ and kind of gives him a look and he goes, ‘what? I earned that.’
Sadie: Yes! Yes! Oh, that line!
Matt: How?!
Sadie: Oh, it was so gross. ‘I earned that.’
Matt: By fixing up a house?
Sadie: I wrote that down. I was like, that’s disgusting. Oh my gosh, I hate this guy.
Matt: Like, this is supposed to be the person that we’re rooting for, I guess, the entire movie.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: And he…mm-mm, I don’t like him.
Sadie: I think he was supposed to…like, the most…I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re supposed to be rooting for him or we’re supposed to kind of see–
Matt: I think what happened is–
Sadie: We end up rooting for his wife, to be honest.
Matt: The way they sold him this movie is you get to be the good guy and the bad guy.
Sadie: At the same time.
Matt: For the first, like, half of the movie, we’re supposed to root for you, and then you kind of slip into madness, and then you fully become like this bad ghost cut-up guy at the end.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m a wrestler! I’m gonna stretch my acting chops!’ [laughter] And do all of that.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: And then I’ll be able to get any role I want for the rest of my life.
Sadie: [laughter] Right.
Matt: [whispers] Um, it didn’t work.
Sadie: It didn’t, no. He’s not good, at all. Um the dog’s a better actor, to be honest.
Matt: Well, this part, they give this close-up on the dog for like 45 seconds of when he’s having sex with the lady; the dog is just sitting outside the room barking like ‘arf! arf!’
Sadie: Right.
Matt: For an insanely long amount of time.
Sadie: Well, and you finally…there’s something you’re supposed to see, this movement behind his head.
Matt: Yeah, there’s something behind it walking around, I guess.
Sadie: And I think it’s the little girl. I think we find that, I think that’s who it was, but it takes forever for that to rev–and it doesn’t even fully…you just kind of see, like–
Matt: You know what I thought happened?
Sadie: Uh-uh.
Matt: I thought the dog’s agent made them guarantee a monologue [laughter] for the dog, and so that’s him saying, ‘you shouldn’t be doing this, Don! You’ve got a wife!’
Sadie: ‘You know better!’
Matt: ‘You’ve got a baby on the way!’
Sadie: Yes.
Matt: ‘Don’t break this family up! It’s all I have!’
Sadie: Like, um…
Matt: I think the dog, though, at this point, I thought the dog might be the hero of the movie because he was the only person that I liked or gave a shit about because, so far, we had the dude. We had the preacher lady and seemingly evil seductress chick and the dog. And the dog is the only voice of reason until Milo shows up.
Sadie: Yeah. I was gonna say, and then the dog gets replaced with Milo, so, like, again, spoilers if you haven’t watched this movie. I’m just gonna do a blanket one that we’re gonna say spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, go watch the movie and then listen to this but–
Matt: You’re already 20 minutes in.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: I think we’ve spoiled it enough.
Sadie: But the dog dies. The dog is killed.
Matt: In a pretty horrific fashion.
Sadie: Horrific and nonsensical, like, I don’t understand. He was–
Matt: She put him in the dryer, turned it on–
Sadie: Yeah, but when he opens it, it looked like maybe it was just…how I saw it–it looked like the dog had broken into pieces.
Matt: Um, yeah. I don’t know. that–that’s what would happen to a dog in a dryer. It could just suffocate, get hot–
Sadie: I don’t think it would at all. Right, I don’t like it. Probably get some broken bones, but I don’t feel that it would rip into a bunch of little pieces. And then this cop comes.
Matt: It would probably fuck your clothes up if it could shred a dog.
Sadie: The cop comes and looks at it and then shrugs it off, and it’s basically like–
Matt: Yeah, the police don’t care that she put a dog in a dryer. Somebody did it!
Sadie: They’re like, ‘you know what? We don’t, you know, we don’t have any sign of forced entry. There’s not really a sign of a struggle.’
Matt: The guy himself, even to his credit, says, ‘the dog didn’t turn the dryer on once he jumped in there, right? So somebody did this!’
Sadie: Right, yeah, that seemed very odd to me.
Matt: Cop did not care.
Sadie: I’m like, I’m sorry, that seems like a very serious offense. He’s telling you the name, he’s telling you what happened with her. I feel like that should be investigated. [laughter] Maybe it’s because he’s a bad actor so they were like, this is not convincing at all.
Matt: Well, they kind of set it up in a way that a lot of movies do where that cop comes back to investigate something later and is killed, and you’re like ‘oh, the incompetent cop got killed.’ But, does he show back up? I don’t think the cop ever comes back.
Sadie: No, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t…I thought…that’s what I thought for a second, that you were saying he shows back up and gets killed. And I was like ‘wait, I do not remember that happening.’
Matt: Well, yeah, because by the end of the movie–again, massive spoilers–the wife is the only one alive still.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: And nobody says like, ‘hey where’s Don?’
Sadie: Yeah, and–
Matt: They skipped that whole part of her life. They just ‘six months later.’
Sadie: Keeps living in the haunted house with her baby.
Matt: Yeah, and the vents.
Sadie: I’m sorry. I don’t feel–
Matt: Like, did she do that on purpose? Pick this house knowing that he would be living in there still? Or is that supposed to be, like, I wonder if they’re setting up–
Sadie: What do you mean pick this house? I mean, I think she just stayed in the house.
Matt: Right.
Sadie: So she didn’t…the house had already been picked. I just don’t get why she didn’t move out of it.
Matt: That’s what I’m saying.
Sadie: Oh, okay. When you said pick this house–
Matt: When you stay in it, you’re choosing to not live anywhere else on Earth besides the creepy old house you almost died in.
Sadie: Sorry, you’re right. Okay when she picked to stay, yes, no, that did not make sense to me. And I don’t understand if it was like–
Matt: Does she know that Don’s there?
Sadie: A financial reason? And, yeah, does she know that Don is still living in the walls basically?
Matt: That’s just how…she–she still misses him, I guess.
Sadie: Oh, and like, I don’t know, it was–
Matt: It fell off the rails pretty quickly and stayed there.
Sadie: And he starts throwing…he–the ghost of Don–is in these walls at the very end, and he starts dropping marbles–
Matt: The marbles! That’s the little girl’s thing!
Sadie: Down to the baby which definitely would kill a baby!
Matt: Yeah, that’s gonna choke that baby! Don’t do that to the baby!
Sadie: Unless he was trying to make him a ghost to be like ‘I want my ghost family. I want to have a ghost family. I want my little ghost baby.’
Matt: ‘My ghost family forever.’
Sadie: But it’s so–
Matt: That’s gonna be the sequel: Girl on the Third Floor 2: Ghost Baby.
Sadie: It would be Girl on the Fourth Floor for the sequel.
[Laughter]
Matt: Or second.
Sadie: Or the second.
Matt: Go down a floor.
Sadie: Go down.
Matt: Yeah, starting to take over the house.
Sadie: That makes sense. That makes sense. Um, okay, and so, yes, as he’s here–we keep jumping to the end, but that’s just because this movie doesn’t make sense, and it’s hard to talk about some things without going to the end.
Matt: And acknowledging the fact that none of this goes anywhere or pays off in any way.
Sadie: Right, Right. Like, we don’t–the house is just oozing and gushing fluids, like these black drippy fluids and the–the white creamy ones.
Matt: The white creamies! [laughter] Don’t forget about the white creamies!
Sadie: [laughter] And then marbles start to come out of the wall, too.
Matt: Out of everything, light fixtures and outlets.
Sadie: And, in fact, they had fixed one light fixture that, at one point, when it pushed a marble out, very much looked–
Matt: Like it was pooping out a marble,
Sadie: Oh, I thought it looked vaginal and like it was giving birth to a marble.
Matt: Is that not how you make a baby? Do babies not get pooped out?
[Laughter]
Matt: What just happened? My life is shattered now.
Sadie: I can’t. I, no, that is not how it happened.
Matt: Go to the hospital and poop that baby out.
Sadie: That is not how it works. Um–
Matt: Gross.
Sadie: Oh my god. [laughter]
Matt: I could handle it if it was just a little poop.
Sadie: Shut up! [laughter]
Matt: Okay, all right, so should we talk about, uh–
Sadie: Well, I wasn’t–I don’t feel like it’s ever explained why the walls and the light fixtures and everything are gushing and oozing. I don’t–
Matt: I guess the house itself is alive and evil now. I guess because of all the shady shit that happened in it? Question mark?
Sadie: I don’t know. Question mark, yeah, because it, they seem to be–
Matt: Oh, fucking finally. Milo’s here.
Sadie: Yay!
Matt: The only good character.
Sadie: I like Milo. I was so upset when he died.
Matt: Well, and really, like, they should have had him show up a lot sooner and help fix the house more, and, like, build up his friendship with the guy more so you give a shit when he actually gets killed off.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: 10 minutes after he actually arrives.
Sadie: Right, the only reason I cared when he died was, I was like, ‘oh man finally a character I like.’
Matt: And they could have made you like him a lot more, I felt like, if I had been around more, and he was the most interesting one.
Sadie: Right, but they do, after each one is killed, the bodies end up getting put in the walls.
Matt: Yes.
Sadie: And, um–
Matt: Because what better place? The cops will never look there.
Sadie: Right, and I don’t know if that is, what they’re, like, is supposed to be what made the thing seem to come alive because, at one point, it looked like it had skin.
Matt: Yeah, I guess all the dead bodies in the walls are making the house become–
Sadie: Right, and even by the dead bodies being related to all the ooze which–
Matt: Are we still calling it ooze?
Sadie: I am calling it ooze, baby. I’m calling it ooze.
Matt: You know what it is.
Sadie: But towards the end, he starts hammering at the walls with a hammer and chunks fall off, and then it looks like there’s this skin–
Matt: Sinewy, weird organ stuff behind it that’s, like, pumping and pulsing–
Sadie: Pulsating, yeah!
Matt: It’s actually got innards growing in it, and I don’t know what’s going on with the house at that point, if he’s imagining it, if it’s actually got this kind of stuff in there? I don’t know.
Sadie: Right, right, because then the wife shows up and it–
Matt: She sees it, too, doesn’t she?
Sadie: No, when she shows up, she sees where the hammer marks were in the wall, but it just has regular–
Matt: Well, she ends up seeing Milo’s face in the wall and freaks out.
Sadie: Oh, that’s right, she does end up seeing it after, I guess, after she interacts with the–
Matt: And, I must say, they did Milo so dirty in that, A. they kill him very fast, very unceremoniously. They just bash his little face in with a hammer and then it, they make it look like he just left so Don doesn’t know that he’s dead. And he’s talking to his wife and he said, ‘we had a real killer weekend’ and then the wife says something about, like, ‘how’s Milo? You didn’t work him to death, did you?’ And I was just like, fucking groan, no!
Sadie: [laughter] Yeah
Matt: That’s what this movie is in a nutshell.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Trying to be clever and trying to be subversive but it’s none of those things.
Sadie: Right, and I feel like they were trying to have some kind of metaphor and it…none of it’s coming through clearly, at all. When Don decides, after Sarah keeps coming around, and he threatens her, and then she comes back, or whatever, I felt like he lept to murder very quickly.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: With very little hesitation.
Matt: It’s like, ‘my wife can’t find out about this so I’m just gonna bash your head in.’
Sadie: Yeah, he’s just like, ‘you killed my dog, you made me mad, I’m gonna’–
Matt: I don’t know how he was able…so she’s a ghost but she can have her head bashed in with a rubber hammer.
Sadie: I mean, I guess if you can have sex as a ghost, you can have your head bashed in.
Matt: And then, because she does just disappear, so–
Sadie: No she comes…the ghost girl comes back. Oh yeah, the body disappears.
Matt: Yeah, he tries to put her in the wall, and then she’s just gone. But, yeah, I don’t get the rules around her. If she’s just…she’s not a hallucination, because the wife sees her too, right? And Milo definitely sees her.
Sadie: Right, because she kills him, yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I don’t get what her, for lack of a better word, superpowers are.
Sadie: She’s a ghost that sometimes can have a body and sometimes not.
Matt: Interact with physical things and–
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: And be seen when she wants to be.
Sadie: Exactly.
Matt: And be felt when she wants to be.
Sadie: And have contemporary clothing, not clothing–
Matt: Where does she keep getting those clothes?
Sadie: And multiple outfits.
Matt: Where did those come from?
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Or does she just materialize some new clothes on top of herself?
Sadie: That’s what I wondered, too, because I was like, her outfits keep changing, which seems odd for a ghost because, normally, they seem to just stay in the same outfit all the time. And the outfits are from the contemporary era, not from the, you know, 1920s or whenever she was in there.
Matt: Well, and so Sarah, the–the creepy ghost lady, died, she said, in the fire. Is that how she died?
Sadie: I think it was a fire. Or he maybe he killed her and maybe he did put her in the walls? I don’t remember now. Now I can’t remember at all, and then little girl was killed by…he–
Matt: Chopped her up and stuff, I’m guessing, because her face is all–
Sadie: Well, she said he…I don’t remember what she said he did to her. And then he left her by the railroad tracks, and she said that, um–
Matt: Got hit by a train?
Sadie: I guess. I don’t know, she just said he put her to the rail. They don’t explain any of this, because I did not understand why the girl’s face was not a face, it was just gashes.
Matt: Yeah, well, and because, yeah, Sarah can apparently control her appearance and put on clothes and not be burned and whatever.
Sadie: Right, so why can’t the little girl?
Matt:Why can’t she fix the little girl? Or does she choose to be that way because it’s scarier for people that move into the house?
Sadie: Yeah, and I just don’t…it does, it looks like someone took an axe to a face but just…or even just like a thumb that like–
Matt: [laughter] Like a thumb that got mangled in a saw.
Sadie: I’m sorry, not only was it just like axe marks, but it looked like there was never a face there at all. Like, there is no hint of a face underneath these gash marks.
Matt: It’s just a pile of nonsense on top of the shoulders.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Yeah, I did not like the little girl. I don’t…I mean, there’s a shot, I guess, when they’re showing you that the weird little balcony was where people would watch everyone in the brothel have sex. But he gives the little girl, the guy in the plague doctor mask gives her a bag of marbles, and I guess that’s why there’s marbles everywhere all the time?
Sadie: That’s what I was thinking, is that…but he gave her marbles, and he’s the one who killed them.
Matt: But then one marble goes inside Don and is crawling around in him and stuff.
Sadie: Then a bunch of them do.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: That’s how she kills him and turns him into this vengeful ghost.
Matt: But they don’t do that to everybody.
Sadie: No.
Matt: No, they’re the little marbles that bump into everybody’s feet and, for some reason, only go inside his skin. And his dumbass, as it’s traveling up his leg, he puts the knife behind it and follows it up his legs.
Sadie: All the way up.
Matt: Instead of cutting a slice past where it’s going–
Sadie: So gross.
Matt: And letting it get there. Oh, Don, you deserved it.
Sadie: It was pretty gross.
Matt: He definitely deserved everything that he got right? Don?
[Pause]
Sadie: I mean–
Matt: For poor choices and for just overall being a terrible guy.
Sadie: I don’t like to say someone deserves death.
Matt: He’s not dead. He got eternal life. He gets to haunt that house forever as Creepy Scary Gash Man.
Sadie: But I didn’t have strong feelings about his death other than ‘ooh, this is really gross to watch.’
Matt: It didn’t tear me apart inside.
Sadie: Right, but, and, I mean, he did, yeah, he did think, he just heartlessly killed this girl and like…
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Um…
Matt: And, yeah, just immediately it’s like, goes to murder as soon as he cheats on her. And it’s like, ‘hey, I don’t want to do that anymore.’ And she’s like, ‘no we’re doing that some more.’
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Straight to murder. Straight to burying her in the walls.
Sadie: Right, as if he’s done this before and is a professional actor.
Matt: Right.
Sadie: Which he did not look like he knew what he was doing.
Matt: No, he was a finance guy!
Sadie: As far as all the other, yeah.
Matt: They said he stole a bunch of old people’s retirement funds.
Sadie: He stole a whole bunch of money, right.
Matt: And somehow avoided jail time, and that’s why that guy at the very beginning showed up.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: That was…he was a prosecutor or something.
Sadie: Some federal agent or something. I don’t remember.
Matt: He never comes back, I don’t think.
Sadie: That’s another thread that is so loosely woven.
Matt: Why does he have to be a criminal? I guess just to make him a bad person.
Sadie: Yeah I–
Matt: Slightly.
Sadie: I don’t know and like–
Matt: Why does this finance guy have all these crazy tattoos? That’s just, you know, that they can’t, you know…I’m sure there’s a finance person out there that’s all tatted up, but, like, something that they should talk about.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Acknowledge at least of, like, yeah, you’ve got two full sleeves and shit all over your chest and neck, you work in finance, yeah, Lehman Brothers or something.
Sadie: And they say something about the wife having money.
Matt: Yeah, don’t know why.
Sadie: But they don’t explain why.
Matt: What she is? Like, is she a doctor? Does she just come from a rich family?
Sadie: Yeah, I don’t remember that.
Matt: How did they meet and fall in love?
Sadie: And I still, I want to know, this is what I started to say earlier and I forgot is, I was very curious as to why if, when we bought our house, we moved in and the walls were oozing black stuff–
Matt: Black cum.
Sadie: I would call somebody, I would like–
Matt: I would call Roto-Rooter and say, ‘hey, come get this black cum out of my walls.’
Sadie: But, I mean, you know what I mean, like, if there’s just ooze coming out of stuff all the time–
Matt: Yeah, no, that’s a problem. That should have come up in the inspections.
Sadie: You would call a professional.
Matt: Well, she even says to them, when they discover the little peeper balcony on top of the brothel, that she’s like, ‘you didn’t see this when you inspected the house?’
Sadie: And I get the inspection not getting of, like, the ghost can control when it’s there and not.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: But, I just mean, why would your first instinct not be to call a professional?
Matt: He wants to do it himself. He’s a man, that’s why.
Sadie: He wants to de-ooze his house himself. A problem I’ve never heard of a house having.
Matt: And she keeps asking, like, ‘are you sure that you’re able to do all this?’ He’s like, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it, baby. I’m doing it for you.’ It’s, he just wants to flex his man muscles and walk around in his tidy whities it’s on the phone.
Sadie: Yes, his very revealing tidy whities.
Matt: They do a lot of weird FaceTime conversations, so a lot of time in this movie is spent with people looking straight down the barrel of the camera and talking to each other, and I don’t like it.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: That’s something that you would see in a found footage type thing or something like that, but they keep going back to it, and I don’t get why they don’t just have them…I don’t know, on the phone in their separate places and film them talking on the phone instead of having the clearly fake-looking FaceTime on their phone. I don’t like it and, also, the– they have a tendency to want to give CM Punk all these close-ups and to react to bizarre things that are happening.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Like, they really need him to just emote.
Sadie: And his reactions are so bad.
Matt: And he can’t do it. He’s just stone-faced and dead behind the eyes for the entire movie.
Sadie: Or when he does do a reaction, it always looks like he’s on the brink of laughing.
Matt: Right, like, he didn’t take one bit of this seriously.
Sadie: He’ll open his mouth wide and just be like ‘ahhhh’ and like have a weird smile on his face as he’s doing it. It’s very…it’s very odd.
Matt: When he discovers the dog in the dryer, there’s no urgency to it. Like, he doesn’t know if it was just put in there or not and he just slowly, one step at a time, kind of saunters over to it and slowly opens the door to the dryer and then, I guess, calls the police and the police don’t care.
Sadie: Right, they, yeah, the police shrug it off they don’t seem to care. And the…I don’t know. Yeah, you’re right. Like, he…and I also thought it was odd how, I mean, I guess because the dryer was on, and he knew the dryer wouldn’t be on. But if I was looking for a dog, my dog, and the dryer was on, I guess he wouldn’t have been doing laundry so there’s no reason for…I just feel like it was weird that he immediately put his hands to his face of like, ‘oh no. I know what this means. Oscar’s in there!’ Not Oscar, Cooper.
Matt: It is weird that the dryer is the one appliance in this weird broken down house that’s working perfectly. Like, you had to get that set up first. Gotta be able to dry my clothes.
[Laughter]
Sadie: Right, yeah. There’s so much about it that doesn’t really make sense. And so the preacher lady–
Matt: The preacher lady is one of those things for sure.
Sadie: Right, and she says at the end that basically it’s like the house is testing them. And so like, I guess the reason he started having all this bad stuff happen to him is because he failed the test by sleeping with that woman, the ghost woman, when–
Matt: I didn’t get any of that, no.
Sadie: When he knew. Yeah, when she’s talking to–
Matt: I couldn’t figure out what the hell her whole deal was. Like, was the–the church haunted too? Because she’s like, there’s, you know, there…they have things and I have things or something like that. How does she know all of this?
Sadie: Right, and it said…she said something about the house watches…um, she’s like, ‘I watch the house, and the house watches my house.’
Matt: My house or something.
Sadie: Which seemed, I was like, I don’t understand. Do the ghosts want…?
Matt: And do ministers usually live at the church? Because, when she asked…when he asked where she lives, she pointed at the church and she’s like, ‘i’ve lived here since ’84.’ I don’t feel like Protestant ministers live at the church.
Sadie: I don’t feel that’s a thing. But, yeah, at the end, when the wife is trying to figure out what’s going on, she, well, unlike right here, she’s saying about men being steadfast under trial, and that’s her way of hinting at…because she’s not allowed to outright tell it, the house won’t let her apparently.
Matt: Yeah or what? Like, what happens to her?
Sadie: I don’t know. She does not say that to not say that.
Matt: Because she seems kind of sinister when she’s talking to the wife later on, like, I thought she was going to be trying to keep trapped the wife and, oh, there comes the poop marble!
Sadie: Well, like I…it seemed like she was, at the end, she was being all, I don’t know, weird and–and vague with the wife, and then the wife goes in and sees what happened to Don, and sees that stuff’s going on and gets out, and she’s like ‘I couldn’t tell you before, the house won’t let me. It’s a test and, you know, if you pass the test, then you’re okay.’ And I think that the wife supposedly passed the test, i’m guessing, by–
Matt: Because she didn’t fuck Sarah?
Sadie: Or, I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s because she didn’t forgive Don? Because, remember, Don came out and at first he was like ‘forgive me.’
Matt: They gave her a ticket to the weird creepy sex show and she was like ‘no! stop this!’
Sadie: Yeah, maybe that’s what it was. And she was like ‘stop it!’ and trying to save Sarah.
Matt: She actually gave a shit about somebody.
Sadie: Oh, I bet that’s what it was.
Matt: That was probably her test, I guess.
Sadie: I was trying to figure out what the test was that she passed because the minister was like ‘yeah, you’re fine now.’
Matt: Well, now there’s only more unanswered questions about this movie that don’t make any sense.
Sadie: Yeah, at least there’s…that’s what the test is supposed to be and why Sarah is so angry at all the people who come in there, I guess. But like…
Matt: Well, one of my big questions at the end is just why is no one looking for Don? Why has nobody questioned the wife in connection to Don’s disappearance? Like, he made himself known in town: the bartender guy saw him, the cop saw him, and then he’s just gone forever and nobody says anything.
Sadie: And no one seems to be looking into Milo’s disappearance.
Matt: Yeah, ‘I’m going out there to visit Don’ and he never comes back.
Sadie: Right, and then sends weird text messages from his phone.
Matt: Yeah, I guess that…I guess Sarah did it, so she can text.
Sadie: Sarah did it.
Matt: So she’s a ghost that can text.
Sadie: She has a lot of things she can do.
Matt: She has a lot of very weird, undescribed powers.
Sadie: Right, and like–
Matt: But, yeah, we…I don’t understand if his wife knows that Don is in the house at the end. Like, did she stay there because he’s still there and she wanted to be with him, like she forgave him? Or is it a surprise that he’s there haunting them?
Sadie: Right, I don’t know. I feel like it was–
Matt: Trying to kill their baby with marbles.
Sadie: Right. I–I don’t know if she knows. I don’t know. That is an unanswered question. When I saw that I was like ‘why on earth would she stay there?’
Matt: I feel like it’s a better answer if she doesn’t know, but yeah. I don’t understand why she would remain in that house.
Sadie: Right, it’s a better answer, but not entirely.
Matt: There’s no good one.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: But we can find the least bad one, I guess.
Sadie: Right. Right.
Matt: The rules are, yeah, poor dog.
Sadie: I know. I did feel bad about the dog, yeah.
Matt: But, yeah. The cops definitely don’t care. It seems the whole town knows that something is wrong with this house, but nobody’s allowed to really explicitly state what it is.
Sadie: Yes, because no one gives him an outright warning.
Matt: Because, somehow, the house has control of the town?
Sadie: They’re all like ‘yeah, you’re living there’ but they don’t try to tear it down. I’m sorry! If there was a house where people kept going in and dying, I feel like–
Matt: Yeah, or fleeing in terror or something. Yeah, just stop letting people buy that house!
Sadie: Right, tear it down or let it rot.
[Laughter]
Sadie: I mean, I would think if a house was deadly, then, yeah.
Matt: I also thought it was a very odd choice to have our main character die with like 30 minutes left in the movie. 25 minutes left, something like that. And then just shift and be like, she’s the main character now. This woman that’s only shown up on FaceTime conversations every 20 minutes of the movie.
Sadie: Right, it suddenly becomes about her.
Matt: You really have to care about her now, and she’s going to be the one to solve all of these problems.
Sadie: Well, and to be fair, I did kind of care about her. I liked her better. [laughter]
Matt: I mean, yeah, I would have rather the whole movie have been about her instead of him.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: If she had been there the whole time, it probably would have been better.
Sadie: I feel…I mean, they obviously made that choice for a reason, I just don’t know what that reason is. I can’t understand why you’d want your movie to be–
Matt: Yeah, I’m baffled by a number of the choices they made in this movie.
Sadie: Focused on this awful guy and see very little of the likeable woman.
Matt: Right.
Sadie: And then just show her at the end because, yeah, when he died, I was like ‘oh, this must be almost over. Oh, wait, no, there’s still like half an hour left.’
Matt: There’s a good chunk of time left.
Sadie: I don’t get to sleep yet.
Matt: And he’s just clearly dead. He got cut to ribbons.
Sadie: Right. Like, the marbles not only went under his skin, it seems they ripped out of his skin.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Which, we don’t see that happening, but we see him crawling out of the closet all bloody and with rips.
Matt: That would have been far too expensive to show for this movie.
Sadie: Yeah, yeah. The, yeah, I’m sure this was not a big budget movie, but whatever budget they had I think went into the special effects for the oozing house.
Matt: To have the wall’s innards.
Matt: Yeah, it–it should have gone somewhere else. Maybe writing, maybe actors.
Sadie: Right, yeah.
Matt: Something like that.
Sadie: Like, at least your lead actor being–
Matt: Fake dog blood.
Sadie: An actor like–
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Um, it seems odd that it wasn’t–
Matt: Oh, there’s just, oh, it’s so bad.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: It was…it was tough getting through. It took so long to get started and then it kind of…stuff started happening and then none of it paid off and none of it made any sense. Like the girl with the split face. Was she one of the prostitutes at the brothel?
Sadie: She was the little girl at the brothel that the guy went and gave marbles to, but in the pictures, if you saw the picture, she drew drawings on the wall or whatever, and they look very suggestive. Walking hand in hand with him naked–
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: At one point and so–
Matt: So it’s like she was like an object for him.
Sadie: I feel like he was probably abusing her, and I mean–
Matt: I mean, he definitely was…if he was making her live there at all–
Sadie: That’s true. That’s abuse no matter what. And so that’s who I believe the little girl is, the girl with the slashed face.
Matt: And so the creepy plague mask doctor guy…is that…every time…at the end, when Sarah is giving her big exposition and saying ‘he did this, and he cut her’ that that’s the he she’s speaking of.
Sadie: Yes.
Matt: We don’t ever see his face or find out who that is?
Sadie: Uh-uh.
Matt: He just owned the house and started the brothel and built all this stuff.
Sadie: I guess, yeah. No, they don’t show us who he is. They don’t. There’s no big reveal.
Matt: Man, that would have been a creepy ghost to have running around the house is the plague mask. Like, if he’s popping around corners and stuff. Why don’t I see him?
Sadie: It was very.
Matt: They never show how he died or anything. I guess so. I guess he doesn’t haunt the place.
Sadie: Mm-mm.
Matt: But, boy, he should have.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: Like, that would have been a much better, scary thing than a little girl with a split open face.
Sadie: Right, well, I mean, I don’t know. When she attacked him with the marbles, I mean if every death scene had been like that, it would have been crazy pants. Like, I feel like that would have…that was a more interesting-to-me method of killing somebody in that I haven’t really seen that in the movie before with the marbles. It kind of made me think of the scarabs and uh The Mummy though.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: That, like, crawl under the guy’s skin.
Matt: Well, and, was it just me or is it the end when we get our new main character of his…I can’t remember the wife’s name, I just keep calling her the wife.
Sadie: Bunny is what he called her. I don’t think that’s her name.
Matt: I know that’s Tiger and Bunny they called each other.
Sadie: He called her Bunny.
Matt: Liz. That’s her name, becuase Milo says Liz is rich, so when Liz shows up and she’s the main character and she sees this weird creepy sex show going on, that’s, I guess, a hallucination or a bunch of ghosts or whatever. She takes her time getting out of that house. Like, I know that Don’s missing, but creepy stuff’s been going on for a while. This is extra, extra creepy, and she just kind of saunters around this, and then she gets to the front door and Sarah says something to her, so she turns and leaves the front door and goes to respond. And it’s like ‘get the fuck out of this house lady! Are you out of your mind?!’
Sadie: Like there’s obviously–
Matt: I guess maybe that was her chance, that she wanted to help that little girl.
Sadie: I think that was, yeah, she wanted to help. I think that’s what her test was was, to see if she would actually…since Sarah talks about how no one, no one tried to help her, no one. That he used to abuse her all the time and that no one came looking for her after he killed her.
Matt: I may have just not been paying attention, but what I know, at the end of the movie, so they–they bury the body of the split face girl. They find her body in the walls and bury it, right?
Sadie: Yes.
Matt: And that releases her ghost from the house.
Sadie: I think so, yeah.
Matt: Do they do the same thing to Sarah?
Sadie: No, that would have been Sarah because Sarah was the one buried in the walls because she said that the little girl was–
Matt: Oh, put by the railroad tracks.
Sadie: Put by the tracks, yeah.
Matt: So Sarah would be gone.
Sadie: Yeah, no idea about the little girl.
Matt: But the split face girl would still be there?
Sadie: Yeah, I don’t understand that.
Matt: And Don definitely is still there.
Sadie: So maybe she does know that Don’s there if she knows that burying the…Sarah’s ghost–
Matt: She has the method to get rid of them.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: It’s just like ‘we did one, it was kind of a pain in the ass, we’ll just live with the ghosts.’
Sadie: Right and be like ‘okay, it’s fine.’
Matt: ‘Hopefully my baby doesn’t choke on any marbles.’
Sadie: ‘That my husband likes to throw at her or him.’
Matt: We’ll put the crib right under this vent even though we know they like to hang out in the vents and stuff like the outlets.
Sadie: Yeah, it’s…I don’t know. That was very strange.
Matt: None of it, none of it made sense.
Sadie: No, I know we’ve said that a lot, but that’s because none of it made sense.
Matt: Including when–when Sarah’s giving her exposition to Liz about where she came from, sort of, and how this came to be. She says that ‘my body was not allowed to leave the house’ or never left the house. ‘He made it so my body’ but when we first meet her, she’s outside of the house, she’s in the backyard. But–
Sadie: Maybe she counts that as the house.
Matt: That’s part of the property.
Sadie: Right, she goes to the property lines.
Matt: She’s got a deed, like a little electric dog fence set up.
Sadie: Exactly.
Matt: So that she can’t go out.
Sadie: I cannot go further than this.
Matt: Because, yeah, she always pops up out of the backyard the first couple–
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: But then she says she can’t leave the house.
Sadie: Yeah. I’m guessing it’s the–the property line, I think, is what they must be counting.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Because, yeah, which is weird. Yeah, it should be the house. You said the house, you didn’t say ‘I can’t leave the yard.’ The area…the–
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: You know. Um. Oh, and here he is getting attacked by the marbles.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: And, yeah. Oh, that’s right. It’s not that the marbles came shooting out of him, it’s that he cut himself up.
Matt: They went to his throat.
Sadie: With his box cutter.
Matt: Trying to get them out.
Sadie: That, yeah, trying to get them out, he started cutting at them, um, and that’s how he ended up all cut up and just–
Matt: And, yeah, cut up and dead with half an hour left.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: And now we just have to introduce somebody else.
Sadie: He crawls into the closet.
Matt: This is…this was one of the more gruesome parts.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: When he does that to himself, when he’s cutting off his…cutting pieces out of his throat and out of his eyes and out of his legs and stuff, that part was a little gross. It got me.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: That was legitimately a little bit creepy.
Sadie: Yeah, there was–
Matt: That was about it though.
Sadie: There were some kind of gross effects.
[Laughter]
Sadie: Um, sometimes.
Matt: The ooze, as mentioned.
Sadie: And here comes Bunny.
Matt: Yeah, Bunny comes to save the day. But all in all, I don’t think that they really had a plan for the…it–it was one of those written/directed/produced/edited by one guy type things.
Sadie: Yeah.
Matt: And I feel like maybe somebody tried to give him notes of like ‘I don’t think any of this makes any sense, buddy.’ He’s just like ‘nope, I did it all myself, it’s fine.’
Sadie: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: ‘It’s going out like this.’
Sadie: ‘No, I proofed it, I edited, I–’ yeah, that’s why you should always have someone else proof your work. That’s our lesson for today.
[Music]
Sadie: And now we’ve come to our Best/Worst segment where we look and see what the critics have to say. What the best reviews are out there and what the worst reviews are out there. So the most outrageous part about the critic reviews, before we begin, is that on Rotten Tomatoes, this has a score of 81%.
Matt: Yeah, I was utterly shocked to find out that it was that high.
Sadie: And, I wonder, maybe that’s because only like three people rated it.
Matt: It had a decent amount…the–the thing…skimming through it that I was noticing is that a lot of people were kind of putting this, uh, making it into this feminist movie where, you know, the man gets what’s coming to him and the woman gets to be the hero, which it sort of is.
Sadie: It definitely wanted to have that theme.
Matt: Well, and that, on its own, doesn’t make it a good movie, either.
Sadie: It just didn’t do that well enough.
Matt: You do that, and everything else is still terrible, then it’s not good.
Sadie: It’s still terrible. Right. So it also had an audience score of 25% on Rotten Tomatoes and on IMDB it had 4.7 out of 10. And so, one of our qualifying raters is that it’s under five points, on IMDB, out of 10. So this week, I get to do the happier thing…although this isn’t really exactly happy, I guess, for this video.
Matt: You get to defend this piece of trash.
Sadie: I get to defend the movie. I get to give some positive reviews. So first, from LA Times Noel Murray: “The film’s bifurcated structure is cumulatively effective, especially given that it re-centers the narrative on a wronged woman rather than her thoughtless rage-filled man. And the veteran genre producer Stevens makes an impressive directorial debut here, smartly turning the sourness at Don’s core into all manner of viscerally disgusting rot and goo.” Lots of rot and goo.
Matt: Yeah. Everybody seemed to really love that about it. The reviews–
Sadie: Yeah, that was gross.
Matt: There’s just enough shit oozing out of the walls for me.
Sadie: From Roger Bert.
Matt: rogerebert.com
Sadie: Oh, that is not what is written. It’s Rogerbert.
Matt: Close enough.
Sadie: Okay, I was, no, I was just, I was confused. I was like, have I been saying it wrong? Okay, sorry. From rogerebert.com, Simon Abrams, he says, “He constructs a spare but sturdy narrative about the power that men hold over women, even when they appear to be sharing. Stephen slowly and subtly unpacks that heady, provocative conceit with care and in a way that makes his directorial debut feel like the arrival of a major new talent.” Whose? Whose new talent?
Matt: Yeah, a lot of them were praising the direction, especially of, like, this was a really well-directed movie, I can’t wait to see what this guy does in the future, and–
Sadie: I will give them…there were some creative shots that were really cool.
Matt: It had moments, for sure, but it definitely wasn’t a complete package.
Sadie: But the fact that the main actor was so bad and the script and everything else really soured me.
Matt: Yeah, part of directing is also getting decent performances out of people.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: Not just framing the shot. So let’s move on to the bad reviews because those generally fall more in line with what we think about these movies. So, let’s see. From LA Weekly Asher Luberto says, “If your eyes aren’t already shut from watching an hour of inexcusably slow-paced construction then get ready for some long-awaited cinematic justice as Don rots like the bugs in the opening scene. Sadly, it comes too late, and the renovations needed here have nothing to do with the house. 10 minutes in and the laundry list of cliches start to pile up: wandering into basements, talking walls, and the question of whether those walls are actually talking or someone is losing their mind. Audiences have seen all of this countless times before.” Apt.
Sadie: Yes, Yes.
Matt: And from Slant Magazine, Steven Scaife says, “As a critique of toxic masculinity, the film feels thin. A bad man is punished and then various hasty third act monologues neatly lay out not only the story behind the house but the nature of Cox’s transgressions and the perceived wokeness of his resulting punishment. Girl on the Third Floor demonstrates Steven’s visual promise as a horror director, just not so much as a writer. Like Ari Astor’s Midsummer, it’s loud and obvious about declaring its themes as if to distract from their ultimate shallowness, their general absence of psychological complexity or probing truths about humanity.” Now–
Sadie: Wait, what?
Matt: Yeah, as a quick aside, Midsummer was pretty fucking good.
Sadie: Right. He compares this piece of shit to Midsummer.
Matt: I agree with his points except for the one where it’s anything like that.
Sadie: Right, like, that was a really good movie.
Matt: And I’m sure there’s people out there that will disagree and say that we’re idiots for thinking that, but, I don’t know. I–I genuinely enjoyed that movie.
Sadie: And I feel that lots of people enjoyed that movie. It got rave reviews.
Matt: So that is Best and Worst for this week.
Sadie: All right, now it’s time for my favorite: [sing-songy] Sadie’s Rabbit Hole! Where we talk about some trivia about this movie.
Matt: I’m ready.
Sadie: So, here.
Matt: I need to know everything about this movie, or I won’t enjoy it.
Sadie: Well, I don’t have everything, but I do have some decent stuff.
Matt: Okay.
Sadie: So the most exciting part to me, that’s what I’m going to start with is that it was filmed at a reputed haunted house in Frankfurt, Illinois. An article from the Chicago Tribune talks about it. If you want, if you’re out in Frankfurt, Illinois, and you’re searching, the address is 207 Center Road. They published it in the article, so I’m not giving away things…I didn’t go all stalker.
Matt: [laughter] You’re not inviting vandalism on this house.
Sadie: And, no, I didn’t go try to find it. No one lives in, and apparently no one has lived there, for a long time. While filming, some crew did report hearing steps in the attic and door knobs twisting when no one was there.
Matt: Buuuuuuullshit.
Sadie: The producer who said this said that it’s…and first of all, excuse you!
Matt: I’m a genuine haunted house skeptic, so anytime I hear stories like that, I’m like ‘did you really?’
Sadie: Excuse you!
Matt: I’m very much a skeptic of horror movies and, or not of horror movies, I’m sorry, of ghost stories and haunted houses and things like that, where people claim that they heard this thing after learning that the house is haunted. I–I don’t know, I just, I never fall for that kind of stuff.
Sadie: I am a very open-minded…that I personally have never experienced anything like that, but I am like Mulder in that I want to believe. And he’s my Scully. In this situation.
Matt: I do rock a tan pant suit. [laughter]
Sadie: When it comes to aliens, we are reversed, but–
Matt: Excuse me.
Sadie: [laughter] When it comes to hauntings.
Matt: Aliens are 100% real, by the way.
Sadie: Oh, okay, we’re not going to get into the alien debate again.
Matt: That’s a whole different rabbit hole.
Sadie: That is, we’ll save that for an alien abduction…for your favorite The Fourth Kind movie.
Matt: Don’t give me that.
Sadie: I could go on about that. Anyway, so yes, some crew reported hearing steps in the attic and doorknobs twisting. The producer who said that is a skeptic like you, Matt, and said that they had a lot of late nights there so, you know, maybe people were just hearing something but, apparently, there has been lore around this house for a long time. No one’s lived in it for a long time. Someone who used to live in the neighborhood said that, shortly after they had moved in, his daughter went…not into that house, but into a house nearby. His daughter went upstairs, and he heard her screaming, and so he ran up there and she showed where she could see through the mirror where, on the window to the outside, it was fogged up and there was a little girl’s handprint from the outside. And the legend around the house apparently is that in the early 1900s, so kind of similar to the movie, although the movie is not based on anything true, any kind of true story, legend is that–
Matt: What?!
Sadie: [laughter] In the early 1900’s, two young girls died inside, one of illness and one of a vicious murder, leaving it ripe for hauntings. Just saying. I watch a lot of Ghost Adventures. [laughter] Vicious murders make for good hauntings.
Matt: Just not good haunting movies.
Sadie: Well, not in this case. And so, a little of other trivia, the lead character Don, who we talked about a lot, the actor Phil Brooks (also known as CM Punk) and we called him that a lot in our talks about him.
Matt: CM Punk!
Sadie: He is a retired wrestler but currently competes, so I don’t know. I mean, I guess in UFC you’re not considered a wrestler, you’re a mixed martial arts fighter.
Matt: He’s not like a theatrical pro wrestler anymore. I think he does actual fights now.
Sadie: I did not know there were different classes in that, but, yes, he currently competes in the UFC and is a commentator [laughter] for [laughter] let me say, a cage fight fury championships.
Matt: I just feel the need to take a moment and explain to you that there’s a very big difference between wrestling like The Rock used to do, where they’d have a script–
Sadie: Right.
Matt: And they’d pretend to fight each other and throw each other through tables. And then the UFC, those people are actually getting beat about the head and face.
Sadie: Well, yeah, but then there’s also like…I dated a guy who wrestled in high school for a little while, and they did real wrestling. So I didn’t know if UFC still called it wrestling, but we’re the real wrestlers, like–
Matt: No, because they punch and kick and shit, too.
Sadie: Okay, so they’re fighters, I guess, or–
Matt: Yes.
Sadie: Okay, all right. So he’s that, um–
Matt: [chuckle] He’s all of that.
Sadie: He also is well-known for this big-ass Pepsi logo tattoo on the side on his arm. And so, in the movie, at one point he is called Coke which is not his actual last name, but they called him that as a little wink to the fact that he has a giant Pepsi logo, on his arm, which is a weird thing to include in your movie.
Matt: That’s a good example of the humor they tried to go for in this movie.
Sadie: That is prime Girl on the Third Floor humor.
Matt: If there was a sound effect for these jokes, it would be the [high-pitched note getting lower, then explosion]
Sadie: [laughter] And apparently they originally were going to title it Girl in the Third Floor Window, and they changed it to just Girl on the Third Floor.
Matt: Because she’s never in the window.
Sadie: Cause she’s never in the window, i’m guessing.
Matt: There aren’t windows up there.
Sadie: That’s what I was thinking.
Matt: There’s a creepy sex gallery.
Sadie: The article I was reading about the haunted house came out as they were wrapping production, and it was still called Girl in the Third Floor Window. I was like, maybe when they were editing, they were like, ‘oh shit, she’s never in the window. Why did we call it this? We boxed ourselves into something.’
Matt: Any more trivia?
Sadie: No, that’s all I’ve got for you today for [sing-songy] Sadie’s Rabbit Hole.
Matt: We are now out of the rabbit hole.
[Laughter]
Sadie: Welcome back.
Matt: Now it is time to give this movie a rating. We rate our movies on a scale of one to five somethings. That ‘something’ will change with the movie, depending on the themes and the things that stick out to us about each movie.
Sadie: One being the best, so the least worst.
Matt: One is a movie that’s still pretty decent, five is the most horrifying of the horror movies. And remember, horrifying is not exactly a good thing for us in this show.
Sadie: Right. Horrifying for all the wrong reasons, as we say, as I said at the beginning.
Matt: So this week, for this movie, what are we gonna rate it? On a scale of one to five whats?
Sadie: Hmm…
Matt: Hmm…oozing somethings.
Sadie: Oozing outlets.
Matt: Oozing outlets or spurting shower heads.
Sadie: Spurting shower heads. Um, balcony creepers.
Matt: Gaping plot holes.
Sadie: Ooh, I like that. I like that one: gaping plot holes. Unanswered questions.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: I like the gaping plot holes.
Matt: We could use that.
Sadie: Okay.
Matt: All right.
Sadie: Let’s do that.
Matt: So what do you got on a one to five gaping plot holes, one being a decent movie and five being a giant pile of trash.
Sadie: Yeah. Oh, and we’re also gonna give our alternate titles that we’ve come up with, that we think are more accurate titles to what the movie brings. So I rate this as, I don’t know, like a 3.5 maybe.
Matt: Okay.
Sadie: Because the acting was mostly horrid.
Matt: Mostly, yes.
Sadie: The best friend was good, the wife was pretty good, but neither of them were utilized for enough of the movie. And I liked that they tried to have some kind of feminist theme going. They just failed so badly at it. And the main character is so unlikable that I’m just like ‘why am i watching this?’ And such a bad actor. I’m sorry, you are not Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Matt: No charm. No charisma.
Sadie: Right. Oh, and my alternate title: The House of Ooze.
Matt: The House of Ooze.
Sadie: The House of Ooze.
Matt: I would have been more interested in that movie, then.
Sadie: Right.
Matt: It just sounds better.
Sadie: And I would have been less surprised by how much ooze there is.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: All right yours.
Matt: I’m gonna give it an even three, right down the middle. I felt like there wasn’t…it definitely wasn’t good or anything close to being a decent movie. And it wasn’t comedically bad so that it kept me paying attention. It wasn’t a so bad…it’s good, kind of, you know, The Room type deal. So, yeah it just kind of lives in that middle ground of a time waster. [laughter]
Sadie: Right of something awful.
Matt: Right.
Sadie: And what’s your alternate title?
Matt: Um…The House with an Upsetting Amount of Gross Bodily Fluids in its Walls. [laughter] It’s kind of clunky. We’ll focus group it. [laughter] But…
Sadie: We may need to work on that one, yeah.
Matt: It’ll look good on a poster. We make, like, kind of word art out of the shape of the house with the extraordinarily long title.
Sadie: Well, that is all we have for you today on Girl on the Third Floor which, if you have not already watched it, you can watch it on Netflix to get a feel of what we were talking about. Or you can skip out, that’s okay, too.
Matt: I will not be offended if you don’t watch this movie.
Sadie: Right. However, if you want to get up to speed with us for next week’s podcast, we will be watching and talking about Death House.
Matt: [ominously] Death House.
Sadie: Also available on Netflix.
Matt: Yeah, we’re–we’re trying to stick to Netflix for the time being because we feel like that’s what most people have and that makes it easier for everyone, too
Sadie: And they have a lot of bad horror movies.
Matt: They have a lot of bad horror movies.
Sadie: There’s a lot to choose from.
Matt: But, yeah, catch it on Netflix. It stars a lot of people from other other horror movies. They tried to do a ragtag group. Let’s listen to a clip.
Clip: [female voice] Our goal is to eradicate evil. [male voice] I will fuck you in hell. [female voice] Did Sieg ever mention Death House to you? Ever any talk of the five evils? [male voice] I know this house is insane, and I know that you have to be careful.
Matt: All right, so, next week we will be watching Death House.
Sadie: Yes. Be sure to check out our Facebook page: I’m Horrified. Like it. Follow it. Leave us reviews.
Matt: Yeah.
Sadie: Uh, share with your friends.
Matt: All of that.
Sadie: Yeah, do all those good things.
Matt: Find us on–
Sadie: Talk us up.
Matt: All your favorite podcast platforms, and subscribe and–and rate the show. It really helps us out.
Sadie: Yep, and we’ll–we’ll see you next week.
Matt: Next week for [ominously] Death House.
[Music]
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