#166 -- Occupant (2011)

Director: Henry Miller
Rating: 3 / 5

This is one of those movies you have to be patient to enjoy, because the pacing is pretty slow. It's not so much outright horror as it is psychological, because it follows the mental downfall of a man who was once completely normal. It's the story of Danny Hill. His grandmother died from a heart attack, and Danny was then entitled to receive her rent-controlled apartment. Well, not really. Technically, he would have to have lived with her to be entitled to the apartment. But the doorman and a lawyer really want him to have the place, for some reason. The lawyer said that under normal circumstances, the apartment would have been worth 10,000 dollars a month, though that doesn't seem quite right to me. Anyways, Danny's grandmother payed a little under 700, and the plan was to have that lease agreement continue for Danny. The only problem was that the landlord really didn't want that to happen. The lawyer lied and said that Danny did, indeed, live with his grandmother for a month before she died; that way, he would be entitled to it. But they said that he could not, under any circumstances, leave the apartment until everything was settled. The doorman did everything for Danny, so he never had to leave his apartment. He needed to barricade himself in there, because the landlord wanted to kick him out. The lawyer told him that, if he left, they wouldn't let him back in. So Danny was pretty much a prisoner in there, with his only companion being a cute little kitty named Ziggy. But being cooped up in that apartment all alone drove Danny a little bit crazy. Okay, maybe a lot crazy.

He eventually started to believe that everyone was out to get him; everyone was trying to take his home away from him. He was determined to keep that from happening. He ran razor wire all through the apartment and made some really bizarre weapons out of household items. He also rigged a door to the ceiling with nails all over it. All he had to do was cut the rope and the door would come swinging down, impaling whoever was in its path. Danny also killed anyone who came into the apartment, but by then he was too crazy to even remember killing them.

I thought this was going to be a ghost story, because the info on Netflix said something about Danny being sure he wasn't alone in the apartment. But it turned out that Danny just went crazy. I wasn't disappointed by the way it turned out. The ending was pretty good, and the guy that played Danny did a wonderful job making me believe he was nuts. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but I did enjoy it. Like I said, though, it's slow. Throughout the whole thing, I wasn't really sure which direction it was taking. Sometimes I was sure it was just a man losing his marbles, but at some parts, I was sure that Danny was right about being tricked. Why would they work so hard to give him a 10,000 dollar apartment for 675? I figured there had to be something wrong with it; but it turned out, they were just trying to help him. Anyways, it was a pretty good movie, though it takes a little bit of patience to enjoy it.