After a woman is fatally shotgunned in her sleep, her belongings are dumped into a curbside cardboard box marked “Free to a Good Home.” Kameron and Scott Hale’s Free to a Bad Home follows a possessed ring plucked from said trashed stash as it moves from person to person to person, telling three stories in total.
Amy (Miranda Nieman) is given the ring in marriage, as the jewelry is surreptitiously swiped by her beau, even after watching her recoil by feeling “bitten” by trying on a necklace from the box. This intriguing-enough setup leads to undue padding and an anticlimactic conclusion.
Next, a burglar (Jake C. Young) finds the ring after silently exploring a targeted house for 10 minutes, flashlight in hand. Eventually, the ring is taken by his sister, Julia (Olivia Dennis), who heads to a costume party with three friends — cue an eight-minute drive, complete with eyedropper drugs. Once there, the ladies wander for eight more minutes before running across anything resembling a story point. That gives way to a lengthy monologue and more confusion than the scene’s neon-dream lighting can mitigate.
The cursed-object concept has been done before, none as ineffectually as Free to a Bad Home. As the previous two paragraphs hammered home, nearly nothing happens in the segment, individually or in total. Although the Hales found a credible method for threading one central character to the next, none is developed enough to merit focus. Each story seems to have been built with a clear beginning and desired ending, but little attention paid to plot the all-important middle. In concocting the passed-property gimmick, the Hales gave themselves a fuse they never get around to ignite. —Rod Lott