"I like the way you see things... I like the way you see me."
House at the End of the Street (2012) is poorly reviewed horror film that is a little confused about what it’s trying to do/be. Elissa and her (newly?) divorced mother just moved away from their previous home in Chicago, into a house somewhere (?) in the woods, they find an house that’s apparently really cheap because next door, years ago a little girl killed both her parents then went missing. Elissa soon discovers the girl’s brother still lives in that house and is treated like crap by everyone in the town.
The film has a good twist, not a great twist mind you, and nothing that hasn’t been done before but it’s at least decently carried out. And although it’s not written well but I also appreciated the attempt to build up and develop the back story and characters.
I found the acting of the two leads to be pretty decent. I really like Jennifer Laurence and this is her first attempt at being a scream queen, I think she did pretty well, but the poorly written script holds her back quite a bit. I was actually really taken by Max Thieriot’s performance as the surviving brother Ryan. He really showed a lot of great subtlety and some good range with very little dialogue. And the two of them have some really decent chemistry onscreen, that’s probably what I liked most about this film. (Pretty bad if I'm saying this and we're only in The Good!
The camera work/editing is interesting, it does some interesting things which I appreciated but often they landed too far off the mark and just seemed like “let’s do this" or "it’ll be cool if…” decisions rather than decisions with any meaning behind them.
The worst thing about this film is it’s about as subtle as a sledge hammer to the skull. House at the End of the Street takes place in a world where people just blurt out things randomly to move the story along, no build up, no reason, no attention to how people actually talk and almost worse there’s many times during this film where people just kind of walk into other peoples houses and do whatever they want. Hey filmakers, I don’t know if you know but… THE WORLD DOESN’T WORK THIS WAY, and it’s also super distracting. Script falls back on a whole lot of horror film clichés (including jump scares, reason-less shakey camera, torture porn settings, serial killer-isms etc.) like so much so that it really just loses itself. A majority of the film plays out closer to a drama that’s just shot like a horror film then the last third of the movie is stuffed full of horror clichés so much so that it’s actually amusing how unoriginal it is. This just all adds up to really lazy writing.
Also negative points because the film builds you up to believe that it’s going to have some profound message (or at least something to say) about bullying and picking on people but then it just drops all that and turns the victim into another faceless psycho. Yay.
Another big problem I had with this film is it just feels like it was trying too hard to be clever, this film attempts to build a “new” Norman Bates or Jason and someone somewhere must have thought that would be a profound thing, the rest of us can see through that.
Sorry to say there’s really nothing I could find magnificent about this film, unfortunately it’s another case of trying too hard to be more than it is.
House at the End of the Street isn’t a horrible movie, but it’s not great either. If it just tried to do it’s own thing more, I think it would have been a lot more successful. Learn from this horror movies, you can’t find success copying what others before you did. 2/5 Stars.
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