House at the End of the Street

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2012
Country of origin:	USA / Canada
Director:	Mark Tonderai
Genre:	Scare free zone
Starring:	Jennifer Lawrence, Elisabeth Shue, Max Thieriot
Rating:	2/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1582507/
Tagline:	Fear reaches out... for the girl next door.
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

Another ‘spookfest’ from the Hollywood ‘scare’ machine.

The plot:
A mother, Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) and her daughter, Elisa (Jennifer Lawrence) have a troubled relationship.
Moving into a new home in a new town, they hope for a new beginning.
Arriving at the house for the first time, they are surprised to find that the abandoned house that they have heard about is right at the end of their back garden(!). The reason the house is abandoned is simple: a young girl committed double parricide several years ago, and nobody wants to live there.
Late at night, Sarah notices a light on in the supposedly abandoned house, and discovers that the brother of the killer is still in residence.
And maybe the tale, that began all those years ago, has a fresh chapter about to be written.

This is so generic, if I were you I’d take along a paint it by numbers colouring book to complete instead of watching the damned film, as a sarcastic comment on the paucity of imagination on display here.
Every step of the way, you know exactly what’s going to happen, at least a few minutes before it actually happens and it is even possible to predict, on occasion, the precise camera shot that’s going to be used, and when.
This is ‘horror’ directing as seen through the eyes of an autistic child, rigidly sticking to the rules, terrified to try anything even remotely different or new just in case the world fucking caves in.
And it’s a real shame, principally as it is a criminal waste of two very fine actresses, in Lawrence and Shue, and is perhaps demonstrative of the absence of decent roles for women in Hollywood movies.
Lawrence, of course, is best known for her starring role in The Hunger Games and, here too, she is a pearl in a pile of shit, her talents far in excess of the absolute tripe she is having to deal with.
And director Tonderai knows better, so shame on him, as he was the man behind the lens for the very slick, very effective chiller-thriller Hush a few years back, a movie that had you on the edge of your seat throughout, unlike this which simply had me pining for the end credits, which seemed to take an absolute fucking age to arrive, despite the fact the film is just shy of the hour and a half mark.
Desperately tedious, afflicted with a dose of ‘if I make it emo it might seem cool’ this is as angry as I’ve been after seeing a film at the cinema for quite some time, mainly as it smacks of a genuine waste of potential.
It’s a two out of ten movie, in truth, but I’ve awarded a bonus mark for the presence of Lawrence and Shue.
It’s shit.