If you can get past how creepy/twisted the plot is, the dialogue is gold. Parker Posey at her best.

On Thanksgiving 1983, twenty years after US President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the wealthy Pascal family of Virginia prepare for a stormy reunion. Recently released from a psychiatric institution, attractive Parker Posey (as Jacqueline "Jackie O" Pascal) takes center stage. She remains there, for the most part. Arriving home is Ms. Posey's twin brother Josh Hamilton (as Marty). His surprise for the family is fiancée Tori Spelling (as Lesly), a donut shop clerk. She arouses attention from the twins' younger brother Freddie Prinze Jr. (as Anthony). We know there are going to be some serious sexual problems when family matriarch Genevieve Bujold tells Ms. Spelling her twins are so close, "Jackie's hand was holding Marty's penis when they came out of the womb."...As you'll see, she has a hard time letting go...Mark Waters took this story from Wendy MacLeod's play, without giving us many reasons why it shouldn't have remained there. The inserted footage of the real Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom Posey emulates, reveals the actress' hair and make-up are off the mark. The pink outfit with "pill box" hat is recognizable, though. Other than that, Posey offers an interesting but insensitive characterization. It is not impersonation and the association of President and Mrs. Kennedy with this family's insanity lacks depth. It's happenstance. The film is promoted as a comedy, with the quotes "Dark, Clever Comedy!" (GQ Magazine) and "Bitingly Funny!" (Elle) prominently featured. However, the film is not very funny. The comic aspects likely worked better in the stage production.**** The House of Yes (9/12/97) Mark Waters ~ Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr.

House of Yes starts weird, gets unpleasant, then malicious, then off the charts icky, then it becomes nasty, etc.. Presumably it does this in a very conscious attempt to become a cult movie with the blackest humor in about twenty years. And if you can make it all the way through, you're the hippest viewer left standing! some reward. It's such a harangue that sensitive viewers will be turned off, anti-social viewers will be happy to see middle-class values punctured, and thoughtful viewers will just see it as a machine for provocation. The story is an escalating series of irritants: A girl waits for her brother to visit from college. We learn she has pretty bad taste, but that's excused because she's insane. But she's insane because she has an incestuous relationship with her twin brother. But her twin brother shows up with a fiancée. Then, amateurish verbal tics start to accumulate, upstaging the material (She's not a fiancé, she's a fee-OHN-SAY). Then the girl humiliates the fiancé, with about thirty cruel remarks. Then the girl and the twin brother let their sexual boundaries lapse in front of the others, and start touching inappropriately. etc. That's about the first half an hour. All of this heads nowhere... except to a reenactment of the moment she almost killed him reenacting the Kennedy assassination.It's very difficult to put your head into the mind of its makers and imagine who the target demographic is for this; which means it's extremely hard to imagine how it got made... how someone sat through the play and thought, "Incest... humor... psychosis... this will make a terrific movie!" The stagey script makes annoying use of a cutesy device where characters repeat lines twice, or even three times before they can move on. A character will say "Marty's coming home." the 2nd character will say, "Marty's coming home?" and then back to character one who says "I said, Marty's coming home." This becomes irritating extremely fast. Three minutes don't pass without a repeated line. It's like listening to people act out a flowchart.I used to think the humor in this outweighed the Ick factor (it's why I own a copy) but then I grew up. This was my first Parker Posey movie. And as always, she's sly and memorable. But now after seeing her other movies, this is really a piece of nastiness. It's made competently for a low budget, but it's almost mannerist in how off-putting it is. I'm not a believer in the idea that I need to like the characters in a piece, but I haven't seen a decent movie yet where I actively dislike everyone on screen.

This is one of the most perverse and disturbing black comedies I've seen. And also one of the most well written, well acted and hilarious. I enjoy watching a film that is like watching a stage play (which of course this was based upon). Parker Posey is great as always, as well as everyone else. I thought Tori Spelling was surprisingly good as the "innocent" yet "not so innocent" fiancée. This is the best "dysfunctional family" film I've seen. An extremely offbeat and very funny...satire? Not for everyone, but much more intelligent and clever than most movies today. A great and very underrated film. And I might add, one of the best films of the 1990's.