Director – Larry Yust, Screenplay – Howard Kaminsky, Bennett Sims & Larry Yust, Producer – Marshall Backlar, Photography – Isidore Mankofsky, Music – Bernardo Segall, Special Effects – Donald Courtney, Art Direction – John Retsek. Production Company – Cinema Entertainment Corporation.
Cast
Paula Trueman (Mattie Spencer), Frances Fuller (Emily Wilkin), Ian Wolfe (Mr. Loomis), William Hansen (Mr. Sandy), Ruth McDevitt (Mrs. Loomis), Peter Brocco (Mr. Blakely), Linda Marsh (Miss Pollack), Douglas Fowley (Mr. Crawford), Kenneth Tobey (Construction Boss)
Plot
The aging residents at an apartment building have been served with a notice to move out because the building is scheduled for demolition. So far, the tenants have refused to do so. When Mattie witness one of the workers at the construction site for the new building across the street fall to their death, she has an idea. The seniors sneak into the construction site and begin sabotaging equipment with deadly consequences for the workers in the hopes this will shut down the construction. As their eviction and relocation nears, the seniors begin to kill those responsible.
Homebodies was the second film from the almost completely unknown Larry Yust. Elsewhere, Yust directed Trick Baby (1969) and Say Yes (1986), neither being widely known, as well as wrote the screenplay for The Favorite (1989). He did intriguingly write direct short films made on two classic horror stories with an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1969) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr Heidegger’s Experiment (1969).
There are not many horror films about the elderly, although 2022 did see a surprise spate of ones with the German-made Old People (2022) and the Spanish-made The Elderly (2022). Before that, one would have to go back to the genre of Grand Dame Guignol films that began with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which featured performances from aging Hollywood actress going mad and over the top.
Homebodies immediately impresses one. Larry Yust charts out a particular world – a rundown Cincinnati apartment building (although the city where things are taking place is never specified). The tenants are drawn in sharp, terse characterisations. There are some very good performances from in particular Paula Trueman, who becomes the most extreme of the elderly, and Ian Wolfe, probably the best known of the actors with roles in Star Trek (1966-9) and George Lucas’s first film THX 1138 (1971).
Seniors plot murder – (l to r) Paula Trueman, William Hansen, Ruth McDevitt and Ian Wolfe
The film does an excellent job portraying their able wittedness of the seniors and their attachment to the building. This is contrasted against Linda Marsh as the manager overseeing their transfer with often callous disregard of their sentimental attachments and circumstances. Homebodies goes a long way towards portraying the plight of the elderly and engendering sympathy for what they have to deal with – far more effectively in fact than George Romero’s big statement film The Amusement Park (1975) that was made around the same time.
It is some way into Homebodies before it slides over from a gritty realistic depiction of life in an apartment building into being a horror film. There are the scenes of the accidents – the expression of fascination on Paula Trueman’s face as she watches a man riding on a crane hook fall to his death, followed by their sabotage of the elevator cage and it coming down in sparks. The most malicious of these set-pieces is the one where Douglas Fowley (who gives a performance of real venomous anger) is captured and first strung upside down by his feet and then imprisoned and wet cement poured in to bury him.
