Lies to you about the visuals it is presenting. House at the End of the Street is a laughable horror movie that drove Jennifer Lawrence to deny press interviews with her it’s so bad. She filmed it just before getting cast in “The Hunger Games,” if she had waited until after signing, she would have never done the movie at all. Expository dialogue is reiterated a stupefying number of times. But what bothered me is that it steals scenarios from adult foreign thrillers from the last decade. Maybe nothing you’ve seen, but still, the borrowed aspects is bad taste freeloading.
There are only so many times you can see one person run from a house, and a secondary person run out without the two parties seeing each other. Context is everything, and I’m telling you the context makes this movie stupid. A few years back, parents were murdered in cold blood by their own daughter (who went missing). The house has spooked the neighbors since then, but it is indeed occupied by the son Ryan (Max Thieriot). Lawrence, the new girl in town, is somehow attracted to this strange, lonely boy who is a pale carbon copy of Wes Bentley in “American Beauty” (1999).
Honestly, Lawrence is such a natural at settling into new environments. And at singing! She has a guitar and woos the boys (She primes for a “Battle of the Bands” contest). As an actress, and a physical presence, Lawrence has a helluva lot more magnetic force than Kristen Stewart. It is believable that she makes friends fast. All the other school boys act out in violent envy for her affections. What is this? “Straw Dogs” (2011)?
On a dumb movie night, you might find yourself enamored by Lawrence while snickering at everybody else in the movie (including Elisabeth Shue as nattering mom, Gil Bellows as the feckless town cop). But it just gets too boring in the last third, withstanding multiple resurrections of the girl Carrie Anne(!), residual chase scenes and bearing the goddamn falsified information perpetrated by the screenwriter.
Dear Screenwriter: You can’t present a scene from an omnipresent standpoint, featuring certain characters involved with terminal action, and take it back later and say it didn’t happen that way. At least present the information through the subjective POV of an unreliable character that’s not objective.
101 Minutes. Rated PG-13.
HORROR / BOO / FRIDAY NIGHT SUCKFEST
Film Cousins: “Swimfan” (2002); “The Secret in Their Eyes” (2010, Argentina); “Michael” (2011, Austria); “The Skin I Live In” (2011, Spain).
