Review of House at the End of the Street (2012) by Jesse O — 26 Feb 2013
If you want to know how much effort it takes to make Jennifer Lawrence look bad, then look no further than this film. And I mean bad as in not extraordinarily talented, which she has proven since the beginning of her career, and not making her look unattractive, which really is impossible to do.
And yet, even with all that, Jennifer STILL remains the only highlight in what ends up being a very incompetent film, though it's REALLY not her best work. The writing is beyond terrible. The dialogue is so bad that it makes James Cameron look like the Coen brothers.
Even if the dialogue had been decent, the story is so poorly executed and put together that it would have still been terrible if the dialogue had been at least good. The characterizations are terrible.
There's no one really that likable in the entire film. And the acting is piss-poor all around. Though the worst of them all has to be, by far, Max Thieriot with his wooden delivery and lack of charisma.
His character was, probably, supposed to be the most sympathetic in the entire film but the writing and the acting made feeling sympathetic for Ryan an impossibility. If you knew nothing about films, you couldn't even tell that this was a horror movie.
The scares were practically non-existent in the first 40 minutes, where the film is really a poorly written teen romance, and even after that there was nothing particularly interesting or suspenseful about the film.
The third act is also completely anti-climactic. There was no real satisfactory "vengeance", probably because this was PG-13 horror which, in this case, is really lame. At least if the film had some decent gore, but not even that.
So this film has the unenviable distinction of pretty much failing at everything and doing nothing ABSOLUTELY right, other than casting Jennifer Lawrence, who is really the only highlight of the film despite the screenwriters' constant attempts to make her look bad.
Awful, just avoid this film at all costs.
This review of House at the End of the Street (2012) was written by Jesse O on 26 Feb 2013.
House at the End of the Street has generally received mixed reviews.
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