The “home invasion” genre goes back many decades. For a quirky entry in this vein, we head to 2024’s Crumb Catcher.

Newlyweds Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck) go to a remote location for their honeymoon. However, their hopes for a peaceful vacation soon go awry.

Two employees from their wedding reception – waiter John (John Speredakos) and bartender Rose (Lorraine Farris) want to blackmail Shane for actions he doesn’t recall. This leads to tension as the plot deepens when their ulterior motive emerges.

Though he created his first short back in 2010, Catcher represents writer/director Chris Skotchdopole’s first feature effort. Does it imply a promising future for the filmmaker?

Not really. While Catcher comes with some positives, it never blossoms into anything particularly memorable.

Indeed, Skotchdopole’s cinematic history seems to foreshadow the film’s main flaw: it just doesn’t feel like it contains enough content to fill 102 minutes. Instead, it comes across like a short extended to feature length.

This doesn’t make Catcher a poor experience. However, it just lacks the momentum it needs to fully engage the audience across its full running time.

Though I initially described Catcher as a home invasion movie, it tends to lean more toward a tale of unwanted guests who refuse to leave. Granted, it comes with darker elements – especially related to the manner in which John and Rose attempt to blackmail Shane – but the antagonists don’t seem as aggressive or threatening as one would expect from a thriller.

That makes Catcher lack a lot of real tension. Yeah, we get that Shane needs to accommodate the pushy visitors to keep his secret, but nonetheless, it becomes tough to really invest in any drama.

Given that Skotchdopole clearly intends Catcher to follow a somewhat satirical bent, perhaps he didn’t really mean for the film to come packed with suspense. However, the movie doesn’t veer into black comedy nearly enough to make it satisfactory in that domain either.

Which leads me back to the original sin I detected here: the manner in which Catcher comes across as a story better suited to run maybe 20 minutes and not 103 minutes. Skotchdopole simply can’t find nearly enough interesting material to occupy all that celluloid.

The actors do fine in their roles. Garay and Peck make Shane and Leah look like a couple without a great future, but I appreciate the way in which the movie doesn’t paint them as giddy newlyweds, as it adds an interesting slant.

As our “villains”, Farris and particularly Speredakos camp it up, and that means they can feel like part of a different movie at times. However, I don’t blame the actors, as I suspect they did what Skotchdopole wanted them to do.

And that brings us back to the film’s erratic tone. Catcher flits from satire to relationship drama to thriller without much clarity.

I respect the ambition involved. However, Skotchdopole just doesn’t show the ability to meld these elements in a satisfying manner.

Catcher does eventually move closer to the violent thriller domain, and that manages to perk up the previously sluggish events. These elements can seem a bit gratuitous, especially because it requires the antagonists to suddenly change too much.

All of this leaves us with a moderately watchable tale but nothing more than that. Catcher just feels like it struggles to find enough material to take up 102 minutes of screen time.

Crumb Catcher appears in an aspect ratio of 2.00:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. For the most part, visuals were positive.

Overall sharpness seemed fine. A little softness impacted a few nighttime shots, but in general, delineation remained appropriate.

I saw no moiré effects or jaggies, and edge haloes didn’t appear. Print flaws also never became a factor.

The film tended toward subdued hues that mixed teal and amber. These colors remained restrained and looked fine given stylistic choices.

Blacks seemed dark and tight, and low-light shots brought us positive clarity. This became a satisfactory presentation.

Heavy on atmospherics, the film’s DTS-HD MA 5.1 added a little kick to the proceedings. Action shots showed nice involvement, and a few other sequences opened up the mix well enough. The movie lacked many standout auditory moments, but the soundfield created a decent sense of place.

No issues with audio quality emerged. Speech was natural and smooth, while music offered good range and dimensionality.

Effects came across as accurate and tight. Again, the track lacked a lot to make it excel, but it fit the story well enough.

As we head to extras, we start with an audio commentary from writer/director Chris Skotchdopole. He brings a running, screen-specific look at story/characters, cast and performances, sets and locations, photography and editing, music, and related domains.

Although the chat covers a good array of topics, Skotchdopole fails to bring much life to the film’s creation. We get useful material on occasion but he goes AWOL too often and he just doesn’t deliver a particularly engaging track.

A featurette called Catching Crumbs goes for 37 minutes, 48 seconds. It brings info from producers Chadd Harbold, Brian Devine and Larry Fessenden, cinematographer Adam Carboni, home owner/art curator Cannon Hersey, co-producer Cameron Crews, crumb catcher designer James Siewert, and actors Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, John Speredakos, and Lorraine Farris.

“Crumbs” looks at the project’s roots and development, story and characters, cast and performances, photography, sets, locations and production design, Skotchdopole as director,

As bland as the commentary is, “Crumbs” becomes much more compelling. It delivers a surprisingly honest look at the production and becomes a winning documentary.

In addition to the film’s festival trailer, we get two short films from Skotchdopole. The disc features 2010’s Camp Out (12:55) and 2016’s The Egg and the Hatchet (20:58).

With Camp, adolescent Miller (Jonathan Clemente) avoids his own birthday party as part of his struggle to come to terms with his parents’ divorce. It becomes an intriguing exploration of youthful angst.

Hatchet features a young couple who find it tough to communicate. The woman comes across as intensely immature and obnoxious, and her hipster boyfriend doesn’t fare much better.

Both are so awful that Hatchet becomes an exercise in “cringe”, as the kids say. I don’t know what Skotchdopole wanted to say with the film, but I hated the time I found myself stuck with this annoying couple.

As a mix of satire, relationship drama and thriller, Crumb Catcher boasts potential. However, the filmmakers can’t make these elements mesh, so we end up with a somewhat disjointed and bloated movie. The Blu-ray brings pretty good picture and audio along with a mix of bonus materials. While it comes with positives, Catcher doesn’t quite connect in the end.