Horror Pre-Season: The House at the End of the Street

I'm going to be back-publishing this entry so it's chronologically near when I actually watched the movie, so that it fits into the pre-season and doesn't bloat the 28 movies in the actual October viewing list.


Hoo, boy.

House at the End of the Street is a psychological thriller directed by Mark Tonderai and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Shue, and Max Theiriot.  It was filmed mostly in mid-2010, and originally intended for release in April 2012 before being moved to September 2012.  What's interesting about that is that had it been released in April, another Jennifer Lawrence movie would have still been playing in theaters.  The Hunger Games was released in March 2012 and made an absolutely absurd amount of money, also making a massive star out of the then relatively unknown Lawrence.  They then enacted a 6 month advertising campaign heavily focused on letting us know Jennifer Lawrence is in this movie, also moving the thriller's release into that late-September to early-October timeframe I mentioned in The Possession's review.

It's quite clear that this movie was never intended to have such a major release, but decided to capitalize on its star's suddenly heightened profile.  The major problem again is the characters don't feel real.  This time I don't think it's a problem of acting, I think the writing is just poor.  The things people do just doesn't make sense, their motivations are practically non-existent and the relationships absolutely don't work.  A significant amount of the first act is devoted to showing off Elissa's (Lawrence) multiple artistic and devious talents and how utterly charmed her life is.  Instead of the traditional new-kid difficulties settling in and problems fitting in at a new school, Elissa immediately makes friends with everyone.  Getting invited to a massive drinking party with all the "popular" kids seemingly on the first day, and being invited to join a band by the second day.  She plays guitar, keyboard, sings, has a popular myspace music page, looks amazing, lives in a gorgeous house and the only enemy she has is the slimy alpha male that tried to force himself on her but had the decency to stop when asked.  The only tension seems to be between her and her mother, who she deliberately antagonizes presumably because of some past faults or indiscretions which are never elaborated on and just mentioned as existing in passing.

Also, I'm pretty sure there was a bit that included the phrase "trying to do this mom thing" 3 times in as many minutes.  The mom also said that Elissa liked to "make projects" out of people or "fix" them and tended to "find the most damaged" person around so many times I lost count.  It almost felt like lines where just copy-pasted around.  To say the movie repeated itself is an understatement.

The look of the film jumps from ultra-realistic handheld camera to this repeated shot where the camera cranes from below a character up past them and then shoots them from some point above the house to this "artsy" style with psychedelic colors, POV shots, and fast cuts.  It's jarring, but the worst part is that all of it fails to convey internal geography.  I don't know where locations are in relation to each other, and I don't even know what houses are shaped like.

As to the plot, if you're at all familiar with the Paul_Millander plot from season 2 of the original CSI series, that's basically what's going on.  There are some twists to get there but it's pretty predictable.  There's also a bit of some other TV plot in there, but I can't actually remember enough specifics about it.  And that's the problem, really.  This is a 100 minute long movie that tried to create an effective mystery centering around a serial abductor.  They've tried to include a well-characterized lead character, add a lot of psychosis to the antagonist and create a complex plot of misdirections to avoid their twists being obvious.  This is something TV shows have been able to do really well recently, since they have a few episodes to do it.  The movie tried to do a lot, but managed its time poorly and wound pulling out a lot of random "oh yeah...his parents also did meth!" things that came out of nowhere, didn't add much, and were sometimes inconsistent with previous scenes.

I don't know why I was expecting a lot out of this movie, but I really feel let down and the problems were so myriad and obvious I felt really bad about seeing it.