The Hoard (2018)

(On Cable TV, October 2019) As someone whose deadpan style of humour is often mistaken for sincerity, I feel particularly uneasy at criticizing The Hoard for being far too restrained in its comedy. A low-budget Canadian mockumentary depicting a reality show going horribly wrong, it’s inanely successful at replicating the overdramatic aesthetics of cable reality TV. Mashing together three kinds of shows, The Hoard posits a fictional “Extremely Haunted Hoarders” show that features paranormal investigators, hoarding counselling experts and a good old home renovation crew. They all come to a small Midwestern town recognized as the hoarding capital of the United States in order to clean out three houses belonging to a man with an affinity for buying stuff at estate sales. The muddled TV Show premise somehow blends that with paranormal mysteries and “renovate or demolish” decisions, but the point here is to blend subgenres to provide enough plot for 90 minutes. It does take a long time for The Hoard to get anywhere close to cruising altitude and feel as if it’s finally paying off for viewers: The first half feels like a bizarre half-committed pastiche of cable TV shows without much in terms of laughs or horror. The premise doesn’t make sense, the spooky patter is overdone and even being familiar with the way reality TV is constructed and shown (pretty much a prerequisite for watching this film) doesn’t quite make it more approachable. The third quarter of the film does get unexpectedly funnier, though, as the three plot strands of the film go off flying in increasingly stupid directions, the implied horror of the first quarter finally shifting into territory where the horrific is explained into comedy. But The Hoard remains sold as a horror film, and perhaps unfortunately the last fifteen minutes finally rush to provide the blood, gore and senseless deaths that justify the label but don’t exactly improve the results. Having gone from conceptual satire to humour to horror, The Hoard ends with a lot of messy, unrealized potential. There are plenty of paths either not taken or not left alone, with a few intriguing ideas mentioned but not used effectively. There’s even an entire facet of reality TV show left unexplored: the production, with cameramen curiously sticking around from multiple angles even when there’s a murderous psycho swinging an axe around. The Hoard isn’t a complete waste of time (writer-director Jesse Thomas Cook is clearly improving upon his previous Monster Brawl) but it’s a disappointment nonetheless. Even the deadpan humour often proves to be, well, not funny.