Housebound follows an often shaky local tradition of up-and-coming Kiwi directors making horror movies as their feature debuts.
Fortunately, director Gerard Johnstone is already a seasoned pro in many areas. He directed an wrote The Jacquie Brown Diaries, possibly the last decent satire we'll ever see on local television, as well as giving the makers of Seven Sharp a kind of staff manual.
Still, it's quite a leap from in-joke media mockery to making a haunted house movie that people will pay good money for.
Leap accomplished, with seeming ease. Housebound may have occasional outbursts of splat-stick involving nasty weaponry such as a clothes rack and a cheese grater, but it's also our best big-screen comedy in years.
Mainly because the laughs are neatly grounded in character, whether it's Morgana O'Reilly's surly Kylie Bucknell, the troubled young crim given home detention for her latest escapade, Rima Te Wiata as her chatterbox mum Miriam, or Glen-Paul Waru as Amos the security guard, charged with monitoring Kylie's ankle bracelet who turns expert neighbourhood ghostbuster.
