DVD Review – Squatters (2014)

Squatters tells the tale of two tramps, Kelly (Gabriella Wilde) and Jonas (Thomas Dekker). They spend their nights sleeping on the beach and their days stealing food to survive. Jonas discovers that a wealthy couple are going on holiday leaving their luxurious beachside home unattended to. The pair break into the home and assume the couple’s wealthy lifestyle of expensive booze, fast cars and fat wads of cash. Kelly becomes familiar with the family by falling down a rabbit hole when watching their home movies whilst Jonas looks to make the most of this opportunity and starts selling off anything valuable he can get his grubby hands on. But suddenly their new lifestyle comes to a screening halt when the couple return home early from their vacation.

Director Martin Weisz (The Hills Have Eyes 2) delivers a lacklustre tale of drifters getting a taste of the good life. My expectations of this film were looking for a more sinister tone to the film, I expected the drifters to be more like most movie drifters, evil creepy bastards! But these two are more needy emo types, the worst kind.

Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss will comes across as the only noteworthy star appearing in this direct-to-DVD feature. He comes across as the quirky, too cool for school dad. Hell, his character even loves Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. To be honest one of my highlights of the film was when the film stopped and they showed up a couple minutes of The Kid playing in a cinema.

The film runs for 106 minutes and it feels overlong, at one point in the second act I thought they had just completely forgotten about Thomas Dekker’s character. Unfortunately we then get a ‘gritty’ subplot where Jonas gets into trouble with a camp Jason Statham style cross-dressing mobster.

Squatters is a strange film, well, it’s strange calling this a “film”; stuff happens, it goes in strange directions and hell it decides to get overly violent for no reason really!

DVD Special Features? Don’t be silly! This is a direct-to-DVD, be lucky that we got previews of other movies.

1/5