‘House Of ‘ A House Of Horrors
“The House of Yes” is an ode to repartee. From start to finish, Mark Waters’ debut film zings with witty dialogue. Some of the lines merely whisper by as passing amusements; more of them are laugh-out-loud hysterical. This sustained levity is all the more amazing considering the subject matter at hand: incest and the Kennedy assassination.
The staging of the Pascal family Thanksgiving, based on a Wendy MacLeod play, owes a lot to the morbid humor of “The Addams Family.” The film is set almost entirely in the Pascals’ old dark house in the Washington suburbs, right next door to a Kennedy estate, on a stormy night.
The central attraction in this house of horrors is Parker Posey. She won a special award at the Sundance Film Festival for her role as Jackie-O, an unbalanced, obviously brilliant young woman whose faulty wiring is forever tied up with that fateful November day.
Posey has made her living playing eccentric characters in low-budget independent films, and this may be her career-topping role. No character could be more outrageous than Jackie-O, and no one else could have portrayed her as wonderfully.
What’s mentally wrong with the character is never clearly defined. The Pascals are one of those rich, old-world families who would never discuss such impolite topics out loud. They merely quip and snip around it. But as the mother (Genevieve Bujold) says drolly in her sultry French accent, “A person can die a slow death from being snipped at.”
The only one who can calm Jackie-O down is her twin brother, Marty (Josh Hamilton), but he ruins a long-awaited homecoming by showing up with his new fiancee, Lesly (Tori Spelling, whose father’s production company, coincidentally or not, helped finance the project). Jackie-O screams, and then breaks into shrill, nervous laughter. And we know all is not normal with the relationship between these two siblings.
Lesly is set up as the anti-Jackie-O, and there is actually no bigger gulf a director could exploit than the one between Tori Spelling and Parker Posey.
xxxx “The House Of Yes” Location: Lincoln Heights cinema Credits: Directed by Mark Waters, starring Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Genevieve Bujold Running time: 1:27 Rating: R