"Watch your toes, Ma..."      

HOME FRIES (PG-13) 

Reviewed November 28, 1998 - Check out the Home Fries Website.

If the only thing you knew about Home Fries is what you'd seen on its preview trailers, then you'd probably expect it to be one of those sweet, small-town romantic comedies with a slightly Southern bent.  Sally (Drew Barrymore) is a drive-through window cashier at the local Burger-Matic.  Eight months pregnant by a married philanderer (whose identity she has not revealed to the town), Sally is determined to be a good single mother to her child-to-be.  Then she meets Dorian (Luke Wilson), a polite and soft-spoken Air National Guardsman who decides to take a job at the same Burger-Matic.  Sally likes Dorian.  Dorian likes Sally.  Boy oh boy, could this be love?

Well, that's sort of how the trailers go, anyway.  But wait!!  Wasn't Home Fries actually written by "X-Files" producer Vince Gilligan?  Yes, yes it was...and it shows. 

Sugary sweet trailers aside, once in the theaters it doesn't take long to realize that Home Fries is actually a very dark and twisted comedy.  The philanderer who fathered Sally's child is Henry Lever (Chris Ellis), a manager at the town's cigarette manufacturing factory.  Dorian is Henry's stepson, a twenty-four year old combat helicopter pilot who, along with his brother Angus (Jake Busey), uses said helicopter to run Henry's car off the road one night, leading to a nighttime chase that results in Henry's death by heart attack.  We soon learn that the brothers' behavior was actually spurred on by their vengeful and manipulative mother (Catherine O'Hara), a woman who, upon inflicting the ultimate punishment on her cheating husband, now seeks to exact the same punishment (death) on the woman her husband was cheating with.  That woman, of course, happens to be Sally, who as we mentioned before, is developing a budding romance with Dorian, dead Henry's stepson.  See, one big twisted circle...

For some reason I'm having a hard time figuring out what kind of film Home Fries is supposed to be.  On the one hand, it has a sweet, romantic sentimentality that's well-delivered by Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson.  On the other hand, it is also littered with all kinds of highly dysfunctional individuals, most of whom deserve to be either in prison or in a mental institution. 

Sometimes funny but sometimes overly-sinister, Home Fries is a film that attempts to walk a very fine line between "dark" and "comedy," and does so with mixed success.  Though the overall effect is a film that is generally watchable, this is also a film that is likely to miss its target audience just ever so slightly to the right or left (depending on where you're sitting).  The discrepancy between the Home Fries presented in its preview trailers (a folksy, feel-good comedy) and the true Home Fries we see in theaters (a dark, sinister comedy) should be a warning to all viewers.  Buyer beware: the film you see in the preview trailer may be more sinister than it first appears...

Responses from cyberspace--thanks for writing!

Eoakwell@BTInternet.com gives this movie  stars. (12/12/00)

rustilynn@yahoo.com gives this movie  stars: "Though I found the helicopters a bit hard to believe, I found Luke Wilson and Drew Barrymore very likable. Over all, I thought the movie was cute, even if it didn't quite succeed with its dark comedy goal." (4/3/99)