Review: 'House At The End Of The Street' Is Like 'Twilight' Meets 'The Devil's Rejects' (And Totally Awful)

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by Drew Taylor
September 21, 2012 8:03 AM
10 Comments

All of the promotional materials for the woeful new horror film "House at the End of the Street" promote it as your standard cheap-o chiller – a plucky blonde with a fondness for clingy cotton T-shirts, Jennifer Lawrence is doggedly menaced by backwoods psychos after leaving her urban upbringing for a life of rural serenity. Except that's not what it is. No. It's far, far worse. Instead, "House at the End of the Street" is like one of the "Twilight" films mixed with "The Devil's Rejects," full of half-baked psychology, borderline inept filmmaking, and an undercurrent of deeply ugly misogyny that is scary, but not in the way the creative team intended. Forget about what happens in the movie, the mere act of watching "House at the End of the Street" is an act of torture.

After a title sequence deeply indebted to "Se7en," we get a brief prologue that we can barely make out because of a number of twitchy editorial effects that (mercifully) more or less end here, save for a party scene that looks like it was lifted out of "Project X." In the prologue, a young girl, her hair in her face (which makes her look like a Japanese ghost or a guitarist for Hoobastank), brutally kills her parents with a hammer, the feathers of the bed glacially drifting down to the carpet, spattered in blood. (It might be giving the filmmakers too much credit to suggest that this is a "True Romance" reference, but hey, we just did.) We then flash ahead four years later and Lawrence, as high schooler Elissa-with-an-E, and her mother Sarah (Elisabeth Shue), newly divorced, move in across the street from the murder house.

At a potluck the neighbors throw for the new arrivals, Elissa and Sarah are filled in on what happened in the house and the rumors surrounding the home's lone inhabitant – Ryan (Max Thieriot, ready for his Tiger Beat cover). He was away from the home when the murders occurred and is currently fixing up the house to be sold. The neighbors are very grumpy that the house's mere existence is driving down property values in the neighborhood, and spin tales that the murderous young girl actually fled into the woods, where she could still be living now. Sarah is repulsed but Elissa is intrigued. Maybe this boy is being unfairly vilified and actually is a kind soul?

The next section of the movie plays like one of the "Twilight" movies in the sense that Elissa – who sings and plays keyboards and is all hyped up about performing in the high school's battle of the bands – and Ryan start falling for each other. They take walks through the forest and really get each other, despite the quite obvious presence of danger surrounding Ryan. This is deepened when, about forty-five minutes in, we see that Ryan is keeping his psychotic sister chained to a bed in the house's sub-basement, bringing her milk and cookies and occasionally injecting her with some unidentified serum. The movie poses the idea that maybe Ryan is still a good guy. His sister is mentally unwell and he's doing his best to take care of her, away from the prying eyes of the townspeople, who will quickly label her a loon and, in the tradition of small town mobs, burn down the windmill, er, creaky old farmhouse.

Of course, one night the sister escapes with a knife and, in trying to subdue her, Ryan accidentally kills her. Things start to take a turn for the weird, here, and don't let up until the preposterous climax, which involves the aforementioned sub-basement, an intrepid sheriff played by Gil Bellows (where has that guy been?), and all sorts of PG-13 rated torture-y violence that's reminiscent of Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects," if that film were robbed of context and charm. It's during this prolonged climax that the movie goes from being inoffensive but humorless and terrible to being an outright assault, clumsily staged and photographed and thematically repugnant, a deeply misogynist twist on what it means to be a "kept woman."

"House at the End of the Street" had some pretty tantalizing beginnings. It was originally supposed to be a collaborative horror movie, written and directed by "Donnie Darko" filmmaker Richard Kelly and Jonathan Mostow, who helmed the creepily effective "Breakdown" (before drifting into more conventional studio material like the comic book-y Bruce Willis robo-noir "The Surrogates") and still retains story credit despite being surgically removed from the final film. At the time, the two directors promised one of the scariest horror experiences in the genre, and we believe they could have delivered.

When the movie begins, there's actually some pretty good banter between Shue and Lawrence, mostly about the absent father, who was some kind of rock musician. There are some deeply unsettled feelings between the two women and it's a pleasure to see them spar, sometimes with a kind of barbed wit, other times with more active resentment. Either way, the actresses equip themselves gamely and it does provide some kind of emotional bedrock to develop any kind of horror movie tableau on top of. What director Mark Tonderai and screenwriter David Loucka have decided to do, instead of anything remotely interesting, is engage in all the worst instincts of horror filmmaking, both in content and form. We get leery shots of Lawrence's cleavage, but it also gives us women who are tortured, kidnapped and injured simply because they're women. In a weird way, the Lawrence character is like an inverse of Joss Whedon's standard female lead – she's a woman who starts out strong but gets progressively weaker as the story moves along. "I'm sorry I couldn't keep you," a villainous character, mired in quack psychology that seems to shift depending on what the narrative requires, snarls towards the end of the movie. It sums up the movie's thoughts on women: they're objects, to be admired and placed on a shelf, to be enjoyed periodically but not heard from or listened to.

You can tell that "House at the End of the Street" was made a while ago – Lawrence's face is more cherubic than in this past spring's "The Hunger Games" and characters use an iPhone that’s at least three generations old. Someone must have gotten the sensation that Lawrence was headed for superstardom and knew that, if they released it after she hit, it had a chance of making some money. It still does stand a chance to make some cash, but we assure you, it's not worth taking a trip to down to the "House at the End of the Street." Something horrible might have happened there, but it can't be worse than this movie. [D-]

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10 Comments

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alphabet | September 21, 2012 1:39 PMReply

yeah, this never looked good - why the crap did you guys give it so much coverage leading up to the release?
Josh | September 21, 2012 2:36 PM

The Playlist loves to annoy their readers with pics from House at the End of the Street, endless Taken 2 clips and deleted scene news from Breaking Dawn Part 2. It is is what they do and post by post, it destroys the Indiewire brand.
winston | September 21, 2012 9:06 AMReply

Was it a great movie? Of course not. But I'm actually fascinated by the paint-by-numbers nature of some of the reviews. First you bemoan that it's (gasp!) derivative. What an insightful point. Who could have possibly guessed? Then you get upset that it (double gasp!) engages in standard horror film tropes and cliches. Wow! Give yourself a cigar. And to top it off, you actually worry about the moral. In a horror flick. Wait, this is not Citizen Kane? I've been duped! Hate to break this to you, but all that audiences care about is if it delivers some entertainment. They already assume it's going to be stupid, cliche-ridden, derivative. But is it entertaining? Read your whole review and you don't so much as say. But you do bore us with complaints about misogynism in a girl in distress horror movie. It's like a different language.
Anyway, just fyi, the film was made way back in 2010 when Lawrence was a struggling actress.
Winston | September 21, 2012 12:25 PM

(Continue)...Just a silly horror film.
Winston | September 21, 2012 12:23 PM

I guess I hit the mark. But you are just looking out for the young girls who you think are too stupid to know a silly movie when they see it. How nobel. And Lawrence has made six movies since this one. Maybe if you bothered to learn something about the film's history you would not have blown a gasket. What about any of this led you to have the slightest expectations? The two years it was on the shelf? The small budget? The undistinguished director and screen writer? It's a harmless film despite your amusing sense of outrage and surprise that a silly horror film could be (gasp again! Jj
Drew | September 21, 2012 11:44 AM

You're right - I should let the ugly misogyny of the movie slide because it's a horror movie and it's supposed to be entertaining and wheeeeeee! The fact that it's a PG-13 movie makes it even worse because really young girls are going to be watching this and thinking that it's cool. It's a shame that after "The Hunger Games" she has to be reduced to just another victim, whose soft spot for the handsome dude next door almost gets her killed.
Archer Slyce | September 21, 2012 8:34 AMReply

Well everybody expected it would be bad. The cinematography and PG13 rating were good signs of what to expect... and yeah tank tops. Still I'll go on record saying that the promotion for HATES (!) was far less annoying than the one for the next American horror story season (how many clips/teasers 21 ? 22 ?). So yeah I don't really understand all these articles and all the sneering either. Ah I guess now Kevin can say "Toldya so" !
Josh | September 21, 2012 8:05 AMReply

The Playlist had a total hard-on for this movie -- not unlike MTV. No other site I know posted more crappy clips and music videos and more. Surprised you didn't give it a good review to not make yourselves looks like idiots for hyping it up so much.
jt | September 21, 2012 8:32 AM

Playlist is a movie blog. They should post movie clips, whether the films are good or horrid. Their are times when the Playlist writers will trash movie trailers or the storyline of films. Besides, the trailer and storyline of this film seemed ridiculous from the very beginning. I am shocked that people expected this film to be good.
Mike | September 21, 2012 8:09 AM

Yikes, you're right. I just counted. They posted over a dozen articles about the movie. Embarrassing.