Homecoming may be amiable for the movie-goer who has yet to see a movie, but for everyone else, it’s a hard flick to sit through. It doesn’t help that the inspiration for director Morgan J. Freeman and writer Katie L. Fetting was culled from some of movie-dom’s best modern thrillers like Misery and Fatal Attraction. It helps even less that Mischa Barton’s (TV’s The OC) take as the crazy-go-nuts psychopath is listless and dull. Generally speaking, if the appearance of a movie’s villain makes you want to check your watch and breathe a heavy, heavy, oh-so-heavy sigh, then chances are pretty good that the movie isn’t very good. But it could have been.

Shelby (Barton) is still in love with her high school sweetheart and football star Mike Donaldson (Matt Long) even though he broke it off with her when he went off to college. To prove it, she talks about him incessantly and is expanding her house so that the non-existent couple can raise a family in it. Nobody in the small Pennsylvania town seems to think anything of it. Wacky Shelby.

Deep in debt after running her bowling alley into the ground after her mother’s death, Shelby’s home is in disrepair and she’s avoiding that massive amount of bills on her coffee table. It’s also cold out so a horror movie was bound to happen. Shelby can’t be bothered with running a business and paying nasty bills. Mike is coming back to town to retire his high school jersey. The trouble is, while Shelby is pining for Mike, Mike has been dating Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup), a psych major, which one may think would be integral to the story…but it isn’t.

Upon arriving into town, Mike is told by his brother, a former athlete who blew out his knee and is now one of two cops in the town and harbors deep, deep resentment towards his college-attending and successful brother, that Shelby is looking for him. And she still thinks they are, as the ’50s kids say, an item. Oh, that wacky Shelby.

Mike’s high school buddies are going to their bowling alley hangout and Elizabeth wants to see where her beau used to, as ’90s kids say, hang. Mike has a bad feeling about it. It doesn’t matter and they go anyway.

As expected, Shelby pounces on Mike in the backroom. “We’re over Shel,” Mike levels her with.

It’s all good now. Shelby even wants to buy Elizabeth a drink and exchange stories regarding Mike’s penis. Elizabeth, drunk off her arse and not ready to met Mike’s parents in her condition, intends to stay the night, by herself, in a hotel. The problem is that there are no rooms at the inn.

Elizabeth, still a bit tipsy, starts to hitchhike her way to the nearest hotel five miles away. Instead, she’s run-over by a distraught Shelby who is still stinging from Mike’s rejection.

When Elizabeth wakes up, she finds herself in Shelby’s house, strapped to a bed with an IV attached to her arm. Due to a busted leg, Elizabeth can’t walk. Thanks to Shelby re-breaking her foot and drugging her, she’s in no condition to do much in the second act. Unfortunately for the audience, Shelby is just fine. She even does a gratuitous underwear scene…so there’s that.

Matt Long and Jessica Stroup are pretty decent in Homecoming. While the script is stiff and wooden (not a deal breaker for horror-thrillers), the possibility of a salvageable film may have been a reality if producers would have forsaken the need of having “a name” attached to the project and instead chose another unknown actress with chops. Rehashes of existing stories aren’t in themselves a bad thing if they can be done in an imaginative way, even with marginal acting. Look at Avatar. Or don’t.