Tokyo Home Stay Massacre (2020)

Directed by Kenta Osaka [Other horror films: N/A] & Hirohito Takimoto [Other horror films: N/A]

This was pretty much an abomination in every way.

For one, much of the movie is in Japanese with hard-coded captions, which is fine. Here’s the embarrassing thing – apparently half the time, whoever made the captions doesn’t know how to use an apostrophe without it causing a glitch in the text. It happened multiple times throughout the movie, and it was just hideously amateur.

But that’s the movie for you. For the first 45 minutes or so, the movie was bad, no doubt about it, but in the final 25 minutes that things take a really terrible turn. The film decides to go all-out, over-the-top comedy, with synchronized Japanese cop twins who use swords and are just 100% too goofy for anything that’s good. There’s blood splatter on the camera, something I’ve always hated. Basically, as soon as one of the characters has a stupid line about having a Green card, what little potential (and I do mean little) this film has goes out the window.

Obviously, they intended to go that stupid zany route at the end. That’s fine. That’s the choice of those involved in the movie. The thing is, while things were a little off at times, that humorous feeling isn’t present until the last third of the film, and for me, that was a very bad turn for the film to make, as that over-the-top goofy idiocy void of anything redeemable isn’t my cup of tea.

Playing the central characters, Alex Deryez, Diana G., and Will Harrell were all pretty bad, Deryez probably being the worst (his acting is legit terrible). Diana G. almost had something interesting going on with her character, but it didn’t really go anywhere, and given the context of the film as a whole, it wouldn’t have mattered if it did. Harrell was semi-respectable, but it doesn’t amount to anything.

Miyatani (who played the oft-exuberant father figure of the house) was sort of fun toward the beginning, and he’s perhaps the most consistent throughout the film, as even toward the end, I can dig what he was doing. Umiyushi (the sister) was under-the-radar and quiet, but okay. Umiyushi (the brother who acted like a rabid dog) was horrible. Kanta Nonaka and Yuuko Kawashima (the synchronized cops) made me want to kill myself.

That said, I almost never blame poor performances for bad movies, and despite how bad some of these performances were, I’m not starting now. Tokyo Home Stay Massacre had potential with some aspects (such as the torture sequences in which a hammer is used to remove teeth and a guy had some toenails pulled out), but they did so much wrong that I honestly just want to forget I gave this a watch.

At the time of this writing, this movie is available free on Tubi. If you’re interested in checking it out because my review can’t properly explain what a mess this movie was, please go ahead, because I just can’t anymore.

0.5/10