Sundance 2024 Review: KRAZY HOUSE, Crude, Uninspired Satire Fails to Bring the Pain

The simple, straightforward idea of actor-comedian Nick Frost (At the World’s End, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) in full-on berserker mode all but sells itself.

On the strength of that idea alone, failure should be the least likely of likely options. Unfortunately, Krazy House, the latest film from writer-directors Steffen Haars and Flip Van der Kuil (New Kids Nitro, New Kids Turbo), fails on practically every level, promising far more than Frost-in-berserker mode and somehow delivering almost nothing across a tediously self-indulgent, bloated, sub-90-minute-running time, and blood- and gore-splattered Frost wasting his considerable talents to no discernible avail.

Haars and Van del Kuil wrap the promising concept of Frost-in-berserker mode around a fictitious 90s Christian-themed sitcom centered on the Christian family. It’s both what they believe and practice and also their surname.

Frost essays Bernie Christian, an affable, Southern-accented house husband who manages to ruin everything he does or touches. His wife, Eva (Alicia Silverstone), earns a generous salary as a businesswoman of some kind. Bernie and Eva share two children, Sarah (Gaite Jansen), a typically moody, rebellious teen with a bizarre chewing gum fixation, and Adam (Walt Klink), a nerdy high-schooler with a chem lab in his room and a not-so-hidden anti-Christian streak.

Given the reactionary nature of the sitcom, though, the Eva-Bernie role reversal isn’t something to be celebrated or held up as an ideal. Instead, it’s the exact opposite. Bernie’s daily fumbles aren’t just due to his clumsiness or incompetency, but to attempting to fill a role meant exclusively for biological women.

For all of the sitcom-within-the-movie digs at Christianity of the evangelical kind, it’s so broad and obvious to be the subject and object of humor, presumably meant to lampoon regressive, right-wing views about men, women, and their respective gender roles fixed by nature and God.

From that description, it’s hard to know who would watch this 90s-era sitcom, but given that, Haars and Van del Kuil spend so little time exploring this particular “comedy” and its rules or parameters, background or context, that audiences shouldn’t either. It matters even less when a trio of unhygienic Russians, Pjotr (Jan Bijvoet) and his two sons, Dmitri (Chris Peters) and Igor (Matti Stooker), appear at their door, looking for construction.

After an initial back-and-forth that ends with Bernie’s rejection of their offer, he relents almost immediately, allowing the Russians into his home and in the process, turning Krazy House into a home-invasion thriller (“thriller” being used descriptively here as Krazy House itself contains few thrills).

Tensions inevitably — albeit slowly — rise between the white, All-American, Christian family, and the dirty, swarthy, unwashed Russian one, though Haars and Van del Kuil drag out the proceedings, stretching out what passes for a plot for more than an hour before the put-upon Bernie, finally gives into his baser instincts and decides it’s high time to go medieval on Russian rears. By then, it’s far too little mayhem and far too late for Bernie’s righteous rampage to have any meaning, let alone any real impact on audiences eager for onscreen bloodsport along with their broadly blasphemous, quickly tiresome anti-evangelical satire.

That leaves Frost and company painfully flailing in every conceivable direction as they try mightily to liven up a joke-deficient screenplay and stumble headlong through the motions — and emotions —as the home invaders inevitably shift from minor nuisances to existential threats. Supposedly, it’s only a matter of screen time before the equivalent of hell descends on the Christian family and they, just as inevitably, return the non-favor, but Haars and Van del Kuil, lacking the courage of their convictions (whatever they might be), and delivering to audiences what they implicitly and explicitly expected from a film called Krazy House.

Krazy House premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.