Experimentation is essential to filmmaking, but not all experiments are successful. Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil’s Dutch action-horror comedy Krazy House is a catastrophic flop. What should have been a 20-minute Adult Swim special is dragged into a 90-minute absurdist bore that attempts to roast corny 90s sitcoms, religious zealotry, and sunshiny dispositions. It’s a shame because there’s genuine ambition behind the uncanny setup of a studio-audience program morphing into scathing darkness à la Kevin Can F**k Himself — but Haars and Kuil churn their ideas into an unfunny, sensory-numbing, downright affronting tonal slurry.

What Is ‘Krazy House’ About?

Nick Frost stars as Bernard ‘Bernie’ Christian, an obsessively religious homemaker who wears self-knitted sweaters bearing Christian symbols and lives by God’s code. He’s also the star of a sitcom called Krazy House, which the film presents as if we’re watching on our hometown boob tubes. Bernie’s breadwinning wife Eva (Alicia Silverstone) works her ambiguous corporate gig, daughter Sarah (Gaite Jansen) desperately wants a boyfriend, and son Adam (Walt Klink) chooses science over theology. Their household is an exaggeration of Family Matters and Full House life lessons, while Bernie absorbs the jester-like qualities of a Steve Urkel, complete with an audience-echoing catchphrase: “Oh gosh, what a mess!”

Central conflicts arise from Bernie’s inability to empower and support his family. Faint attempts at humor stem from Bernie’s out-of-his-league wife stomaching his “invention” of scrubbing brushes on his shoes or Adam’s mockery of God’s will as Bernie responds with bible verses — until the Russians show up. The hapless and uncoordinated Bernie destroys his family’s kitchen, and almost immediately, a trio of grunty Eastern European workers rings the doorbell. Those trained by Adult Swim’s deconstructions of familiar television tropes know something isn’t right. That becomes apparent as Pjotr (Borgman’sJan Bijvoet) and his sons — Dmitri (Chris Peters) and Igor (Matti Stooker) — start to demolish Bernie’s entire house without any protest from the lord-loving pushover.

‘Krazy House’ Doesn’t Have a Compelling Story to Balance Its Absurdity
Image via Sundance 

Krazy House mistakes stupidity for satire, down to Frost’s horrendous American accent pushed past Bernie’s blocky dentures (story reasons). Set design models after Married With Children and Everybody Loves Raymond, but Bernie’s antics are ten times dumber than anything Al Bundy did or Ray Barone said. Haars and Kuil inflate sitcom silliness into a nonsensically useless multiplier, which is the point, but that doesn’t mean it has to be funny. Frost has made a career out of dark comedies, both violent and terrifying — but his leading role as Bernie Christian is a comedic black hole. The concept’s inability to be anything more than senseless shock-value slop is inescapable, rendering actors caught in the live show’s purgatorial episode structure performatively impotent.

Haars and Kuil interrupt early scenes with subliminal shots of a blood-covered Bernie, teasing the rampage to come later. It’s the Adult Swim of it all, trying to mess with the audience like Casper Kelly’s stealth yule log horror film — or like Quentin Dupieux’s commentative take on midnight movies, Rubber. The problem is that Haars and Kuil don’t have a compelling story to balance their in-your-face blasphemy or the Russians’ lock-and-loaded home invasion brutality. Krazy House never establishes itself as an enjoyable sendup of generational TV icons, so the graphic body horrors and offputting animal abuse hit like an insult. Storytelling is wreckless and offensive for a laugh, failing the first rule of exploitation filmmaking — you better have something to say. Haars and Kuil push boundaries for the sake of watching your reactions, fluent in the wasteful cinematic vocabulary of — excuse my language — edgelord bullshit.

‘Krazy House’ Just Wants to Provoke Without Any Purpose
Image via Sundance 

On paper, Krazy House sounds like the brand of extreme weirdness that works for me. I love how the aspect ratio changes from television formats to widescreen dimensions, ditching accents, and washed-out studio lighting. In practice, I was checking my watch after an excruciating five minutes. Haars and Kuil string a series of horrible events together for no reason other than because they find them … amusing? Bernie’s hallucinated conversations with Jesus (Kevin Connolly), “gum baby” pregnancies, and self-harm are all played for laughs, and I get that’s the point — sitcoms often softened life’s hardships – but Krazy House doesn’t have a single subversive bone in its foundation. Its filmmakers aren’t provocateurs; they’re children who learned how to curse for the first time. Nothing makes sense; they just want to stack a body count and offend the innocent.

Krazy House is “krazy” for all the wrong reasons. Haars and Kuil want to be these Cecil B. Demented type industry anarchists, but their execution is as impactful as Tom Six’s latter The Human Centipede sequels. There’s nothing revolutionary about the film’s revulsions or exceptional about its obscenities. Even at the lord’s runtime of 90 minutes, Krazy House depletes its core gimmick in a matter of seconds. Nothing about the third act’s shootouts and even poorer comedic tastes become something noteworthy, devolving into a second coming of Too Many Cooks infamy without angels rejoicing. It’s the epitome of going down swinging, and while you can’t fault anyone for trying, you can shake your head in disapproval.

Krazy House is out of its mind for all the wrong reasons, failing its satirical approach to turning American sitcoms into horror comedy with heavy Adult Swim influences.ProsNo matter the result, we love an experimental try. ConsA pitch-black sense of humor isn?t funny.The recreation of sitcom silliness is only ever awkward.Random acts of violence are only random.Offensive for the sake of being offensive.For a movie with assault rifles, hallucinations, and Jesus Christ played by an Entourage cast member, it?s flat and boring.

Krazy House Set in the 1990s, Krazy House follows religious homemaker Bernie and his sitcom family. When Russian workers in Bernie’s house turn out to be wanted criminals, Bernie has to man up and save his imprisoned family, while slowly going crazy.Release Date January 20, 2024 Director Steffen Haars , Flip van der Kuil Cast Nick Frost , Alicia Silverstone , Jan Bijvoet , Gaite Jansen , Walt Klink , Chris Peters , Matti Stooker , Kevin Connolly , John Jones , Jacob Derwig , Victoria Koblenko , Greg Shapiro , Lolu Ajayi , Jaap Hilhorst , Jules Seegers Runtime 90 Minutes Expand

Krazy House is now available to rent on VOD services in the U.S.

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