{"id":36055,"date":"2016-02-22T14:36:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T22:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/?p=36055"},"modified":"2016-03-20T03:42:29","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T10:42:29","slug":"short-docs-program-the-house-is-innocent-nicholas-coles-2015-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/?p=36055","title":{"rendered":"Short Docs program – The House is Innocent (Nicholas Coles, 2015): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Wayne Derossett.\u00a0 Viewed at the 2016 Santa Barbara Film Festival, Wednesday, Feb. 10 in Metro 2.
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No subject matter could be more of a surprise.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now, here’s where the fun part starts.\u00a0 After processing as a crime scene and going to auction… the house found new owners.\u00a0 Who would buy such an infamous house?\u00a0 Meet\u00a0Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams.<\/span>\u00a0 At only $215,000, they couldn’t pass up a bargain<\/em>, and then proceeded to spent a good deal fixing the place up.\u00a0 Oh, did I mention, the new owners are hilarious?<\/p>\n

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This film is full of unexpected laughs.\u00a0 Call it morose, call it off-beat, call it gallows humor — it’s still hilarious!<\/p>\n

The two new owners do not at all shy away from their new found semi-celebrity status.\u00a0 And they freely admit “they’re a little weird.”\u00a0 They give tours of the house.\u00a0 They post creepy signs on the front fence playing with the location’s morbid reputation, and I do mean creepy, but creepy in<\/em> a good way<\/em>.\u00a0 They show all the visitors where the seven bodies were buried, some below their nicely appointed new patio.<\/p>\n

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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!”\u00a0 The audience bursts into laughter and now the trap is set.\u00a0 Nothing is said without a snappy comeback, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the end.<\/p>\n

Curiously, the rest of the short docs program regaled us with other death related themes; Alzheimer’s, a Love Story<\/em> (Le et, al,, 2015) a man dying with degenerative disease is taken care of by his male life companion, The Crossing<\/em> (Koop, 2015) where a train crossing gate attracts suicidal people, The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano<\/em> (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<\/em> (Roffman and Poling, 2015) A game hunter claims to be “the world’s greatest spearhunter” because he was the only one.\u00a0\u00a0 Also included in this Short Doc series; Free to Laugh<\/em> (Everly, 2016) about comedy club for therapy of ex-cons, and Mr. Overton<\/em> (Cooper, 2016) a story of a rather healthy 109 year old man, who is the longest living WWII veteran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Wayne Derossett.\u00a0 Viewed at the 2016 Santa Barbara Film Festival, Wednesday, Feb. 10 in Metro 2. No subject matter could be more of a surprise.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,3,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/81291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36055\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}