The Perfect Host
Director: Nick Tomnay
Writer: Nick Tomnay, Krishna Jones
Cast: David Hyde Pierce, Clayne Crawford, Nathaniel Parker

Plot:
John (Clayne Crawford) just robbed a bank but things went pretty badly. Now he’s shot and the police know who he is and are on his trail. Desperately he tries to talk himself into somebody’s house to hide out there. When he comes to Warwick’s (David Hyde Pierce) house, he seems to find his in through a postcard. Warwick is in the middle of preparing a dinner party that John apparently busts. But John seems to have stumbled on the wrong party and the tables are quickly turned.

If you overlook that this film makes no sense whatsoever and seriously suffers from coincidences to make the story work at all, it is pretty entertaining, especially because David Hyde Pierce just seems to be having the time of his life with this role.

[SPOILERS]

The film’s center piece is the dinner party that is completely insane and really funny. And that would have worked very well if the writers had just left well enough alone. But they try to twist the plot again and again and again and after about the third twist (if we’re being very generous) the movie just stopped making sense.

It’s already a huge coincidence that a criminal on the run would end up in the house of an insane person who is throwing a dinner party for his imaginary friends. But that that insane person would turn out to be the police officer responsible for his case who plants fake postcards in his own letterbox to lure in people (apparently it is very dangerous to have postcards in your letterbox because it will happen that somebody uses them to gain access to you and your house), abuse them for a night and then not kill them? I’m sorry, my suspense of disbelief really doesn’t go that far.

And there are quite a few ways you could have set up the same situation without resorting to that many coincidences. It just seemed to be laziness on the part of the writers to use this premise.

But if you manage to overlook the flaws in the logic, this movie is fun. The pacing is excellent, David Hyde Pierce is great and Clayne Crawford is sexy as hell (related: all those nice tattoos!). The film could have been better, but it’s nevertheless good to watch.

Summarising: Fun, just don’t question it too closely.