Review of House at the End of the Street (2012) by Keenan S — 12 Jan 2014

House At The End Of The Street is an absolute disaster that will forever be a black eye on the blossoming career of its talented lead actress, Jennifer Lawrence. Thankfully, she seems to be at a point in her career where she is getting top notch scripts instead of being stuck in garbage like this.

However, it begs the question of why she even signed onto this turd since within the same year this film came out was the same year she starred in critically-acclaimed hits like The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook.

Though the film is quite awful, I will say that Jennifer Lawrence's performance is one of the very few redeeming qualities of an otherwise dreadful, cliche-ridden, unscary, and boring-as-fuck horror/thriller.

The film already has a bland premise that has been done to death involving a single mother and her rebellious teenage daughter moving into a new house that is right next door to where a double homicide occurred and now the son of the murdered couple lives there.

Nobody really trusts the son and nobody knows what happened to the mentally ill daughter who murdered the couple. If you've seen any film with an even slightly similar premise, you already know what happens.

There's nothing wrong with using familiar ideas, but there is a problem when the old ideas are not presented in interesting ways. I loved films like Sinister, The House Of The Devil, and The Woman In Black - all of which used old horror film ideas, but I felt that they succeeded and made these old ideas feel fresh and scary again.

House At The End Of The Street does not succeed in any way in reviving old ideas and becomes a tiresome film so thoroughly predictable you'll see things coming from a mile away. Naturally, as is the course of many modern horror films, there is a plentiful abundance of mundane jump scares, which negates any suspense and has no desire for build up and making the audience watch patiently.

This is a horror flick for viewers who enjoy their horror spoon-fed to them and don't like slow building horror films. It's ready-made crap. However, I have enjoyed many badly-reviewed horror films, including a number of modern ones that are criticized for the same reason.

However, this film has no energy, and due to its PG-13 rating (It's still a PG-13 level of horror even if you watch the so-called "unrated" version), it ensures there is no gore, no titillating sex or nudity - nothing.

Nothing is here that would allow the film to be salvaged as trashy fun. Instead, the film is content to not only be a mundane ripoff of Psycho, but also inexplicably a mundane ripoff of Psycho II (Which, unlike this film is very underrated).

It's a film with no creativity, no energy, no trashy thrills, dreadful visuals, no scares of any kind, no meaningful story, no interesting spin on tired ideas, bad direction, terrible dialogue, and generally awful acting.

Avoid this film, even if you're someone like me who enjoys a lot of bad horror flicks.