A mother and daughter move to a new town and find themselves living next door to a house where a young girl murdered her parents. When the daughter befriends the surviving son, she learns the story is far from over.
To watch the trailer, click below.
House at the End of the Street (2012) Trailer
There will probably be some spoilers in this review, so if you haven't watched the movie and still want to, stop here! If you still want to know what I think of the film, but don't want to know any of the spoilers, go to the In conclusion part of this post at the very end.
The film stars Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games, X-Men First Class) as Elissa, a teenage girl who moves to a new house with her mother, Sarah, played by Elisabeth Shue (Hollow Man, Leaving Las Vegas). They can only afford this huge house because of the house next door to them (practically in their back yard). A few years before, Carrie-Ann, the daughter of the house, killed her parents and disappeared into the woods. Some said she drowned in a creek, although there are rumors that sometimes you can see her running around in the woods. The only remaining member of their family is Ryan, Carrie-Ann's brother, who still lives in the house when Elissa and her mother move in. Ryan is played by Max Theiriot (Jumper, The Pacifier).
Ryan is a pariah in the town because of what happened with his family. He has no friends or family. One night, Elissa goes to a party with a guy she met at school, Tyler. He turns out to be a douche and tries to force Elissa to make-out (and probably something a little more dirty) with him. She does the typical, "stop, what are you doing, you jerk" routine before pushing him off her and storming out of the house. She calls her mom on her cell while she starts walking home. A car pulls over with a guy in it and he asks her if she wants a ride. At first, she tells him no, but it starts raining, so she gets in.
He introduces himself as Ryan. By now, Elissa has already heard the rumors. She blurts out that his parents died. He talks about how lonely he is because of the murders, and you start to feel bad for the guy. This begins the relationship between Elissa and Ryan.
Elissa's mother finds out that she spent time alone with Ryan and doesn't approve. She says that Elissa is always trying to change or help someone who is damaged. Her mother invites Ryan over for dinner and bluntly tells Ryan that he is not to be alone with her daughter. Elissa finds a way around this by forwarding all the calls to their house to her cell phone.
Elissa and Ryan's relationship turns romantic when Elissa kisses him. They start making out, but then Ryan forces her to leave out of nowhere.
It turns out that Ryan has been keeping Carrie-Ann in the basement all these years. Earlier, Ryan had told Elissa the story of Carrie-Ann; that one day they were swinging while their parents were smoking crack upstairs and Carrie-Ann fell off the swing. She hit her head and got brain damage because her parents didn't go to her when Ryan yelled for them. She didn't recognize anyone anymore and began to attack them. That's why she killed her parents. There are various points in the movie where Carrie-Ann escapes and Ryan has to catch her.
After Ryan apologizes for pushing Elissa out so suddenly, she invites him to her school's battle of the bands, where she is singing. He accepts and they agree to meet at the school. That night, Carrie-Ann escapes and runs into the woods with a butcher knife. Ryan runs after her and catches her, but not before she scares the crap out of a girl in a car with her boyfriend. While the couple is looking around, wondering what it was that scared the girl, Carrie-Ann is wiggling around, trying to escape Ryan's arms. You can tell his grip on her is very tight because his hands are almost entirely white with strain. Carrie-Ann pulls really hard to one side, causing Ryan's grip on her to break her neck.
Ryan loads her body into the trunk of his car and takes her to a remote place in some woods to bury her. Afterwards, he goes to a diner to, presumably, think about what he'd done. A waitress sees that he's upset and tries to cheer him up with a free slice of pie or cake (I can't remember which, but it doesn't really matter). While this is happening, Elissa is getting ready for the battle of the bands.
Ryan pulls up to the school, where Tyler, the douche who'd tried to force himself on Elissa, was waiting with his five douche friends. They taunt him but he ignores them. Elissa and Ryan talk backstage for a minute when one of Elissa's friends runs in and tells Ryan that his car is being smashed by the douches. Ryan runs out and sees them damaging his car. The douches then leave the car and decide to damage Ryan instead. There's a fight sequence, and it ends with Ryan and Tyler on the ground fighting. Ryan grabs Tyler's leg and breaks it. You hear the loud crack! and everything. Ryan gets up and runs away, realizing what he did.
Tyler's friends are pissed that he broke Tyler's leg, so they decide to go find Ryan at the only place he could go: his house. Elissa grabs Ryan's keys, which fell down during the fight, and takes his car to his place. She finds the douches lighting what looks like a toilet paper roll (but it can't be because TP doesn't break glass) on fire and throwing it in a window. It catches the curtains on fire, but Elissa makes it inside and stomps out the flames before they can catch anything else.
Elissa is running her vest - which she used to put out the fire - under the water in the sink when she spies an empty tampon and contacts box in the garbage. That's a little weird to have in the garbage when there are no women living in the house. (A little note here: my boyfriend whispered to me after she found the tampon box, "She probably thinks he sticks them up his butt or something." Sorry, that made me laugh and I had to put it in here.) She shrugs and puts them back in the garbage when she hears something banging downstairs.
Now, this is a little confusing, so read this slowly and try to keep up with me because I don't know how to explain this very well. The room that he had been keeping Carrie-Ann in is under the house. This is the route one would take to get to the room: Go downstairs into the basement, move the rug on the floor to expose cellar doors, go down into the cellar to find a purposeless hallway, at the end of the hallway there is a door. This is Carrie-Ann's room. Ryan always keeps it locked from the outside so that Carrie-Ann won't get out and kill someone. He keeps the key on the top of the doorframe.
Elissa follows the sound of the banging down into the basement. You think she's going to go to the rug on the floor when she opens the dryer and realizes that the banging was Ryan's shoes being tossed around in there. She laughs to herself and goes to turn around when her eye catches something metallic sticking out the edge of the rug. Upon closer examination, she discovers that there is a door under the rug. She opens the doors and goes down into the cellar. She discovers the door and (very slowly, I might add) walks to it. She tries the doorknob, but it's locked. She thinks to try the doorframe and, sure enough, there's the key.
Elissa opens the door and Carrie-Ann tries to attack her right away. Before she can get to Elissa, though, Ryan tackles Carrie-Ann to the bed. As he's strapping her back down, he yells at Elissa to go upstairs and he will explain everything when he gets up there.
She reluctantly goes upstairs and starts running the tap (to either wash her face or get a drink, but we don't know which). She sees the garbage and decides to go through it again. The contacts box had been folded in half and when she unfolded it, it turned out to be colored contacts. One big characteristic of Carrie-Ann is that she had really, really blue eyes. The contacts were "true blue".
As soon as she sees this, we cut to Ryan, who is still strapping Carrie-Ann down to her bed. The camera goes around the room as he talks to her and we see a Penn State hoodie draped across a rocking chair in the corner of the room. The waitress who served him that free dessert was wearing this when she served him.
Elissa finds a wallet with the waitress' ID in it in the garbage. She's now put two and two together: Ryan has captured a girl and is dressing her up like his sister. As soon as she gets the garbage back in the can, Ryan emerges from the basement. The wallet is still on the counter. Elissa gives some bogus excuse about needing to be home for her mom and tries to walk out, but Ryan isn't buying it. He grabs the back of her head while she's trying to walk out and slams it on the door, knocking her out.
Now, when Elissa first made it to Ryan's house, her mom called to make sure she was at home because her mom is a doctor and Tyler had just come to the ER with his broken leg. Remember that Elissa forwarded all the house calls to her cell phone. When Ryan hit Elissa's head on the door, she dropped her cell and it went under a little part of the counter, hidden. Elissa's mom called the house phone again while Ryan was downstairs with Elissa and when it went to voicemail, it played Elissa's cell phone voicemail. Elissa's mom asked her cop friend to go check on Elissa right after the phone call she had with Elissa earlier. She calls the cop and asks him to go by Ryan's house first because Elissa had forwarded all the house calls to her cell.
The cop makes it to Ryan's and knocks on the door just after Elissa wakes up and Ryan explains everything to her. Carry-Ann didn't get brain damage when she fell off the swing. She died. Ryan's parents blamed him and beat him all the time. They sent him away to his aunt's for a while. He snuck out one night and went to his parent's house dressed as Carrie-Ann and killed them. He got back to his aunt's before the bodies were discovered so no one knew it was him. He inherited the house and little bit of money from his parents, so he and his aunt moved into the house. His aunt had a stroke and died, and since then he has been kidnapping girls and keeping them in his basement, dressing them up like Carrie-Ann because he can't live without her. He tells Elissa that he is going to make her his new Carrie-Ann, that way he can have both Elissa and Carrie-Ann.
Elissa is tied up in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and the waitress - still dressed like Carrie-Ann - is tied up on the bed. Ryan goes upstairs to talk to the cop. The cop asks him if Elissa is there and he says no, then they talk about the incident with Tyler. As the cop is walking out, he sees the waitresses wallet - which is obviously a girl's wallet - on the counter, but he doesn't say anything about it. Once he steps out the door, Elissa's phone - which is still under the counter - starts ringing. Her mother tried calling her phone again. The cop hears it and stops. Ryan knows he's heard the phone, so he turns off the light. The cop knows something is up now that the lights are off and comes back into the house with his gun drawn.
As this is happening, Elissa is trying to get out of her ties. There's a big battle between the cop and Ryan, but Ryan ends up stabbing and killing the cop. Ryan then goes downstairs to check on Elissa. At this point, Elissa has kicked over the lamp in the room so that it is laying across her lap. The light bulb is directly on the tie on her left arm. It is burning the tie and her skin. She gets out of that tie and is trying to undo the right tie as Ryan starts coming downstairs. She gets out of the tie just as he opens the door and uses the door to knock him to the side. She runs out the door, grabs the key, and locks it from the outside.
She, of course, trips while running down the empty hallway before going up the stairs and into the basement. She closes the door to the cellar and moves the dryer on top of it. She runs to the basement door, but it is locked from the other side. Ryan has made it out of Carrie-Ann's room and is trying to break open the cellar doors. Elissa finds the garage and gets into a car parked in it. As she's looking around for the keys, she finds a bottle of chloroform and a rag. Suddenly, Ryan is at the side of the car and reaches in, grabbing the rag out of her hand and holding it to her face. She passes out.
When Elissa wakes up, she is in the trunk of the car. The body of the waitress is right beside her. While this is happening, Elissa's mother has shown up at Ryan's house, looking for Elissa. She knows that Elissa is there, but Ryan keeps telling her that she isn't. Just as she is about to leave, she hears Elissa screaming for her help. Elissa had broken out of the trunk and broke the glass out of the window in the door to the garage with a hammer. She heard her mom talking to Ryan and screamed for her. Her mom pushes her way past Ryan and into the house. She is making her way to the garage when Ryan stabs her. Ryan puts her in the basement and goes after Elissa. Elissa runs into the basement and sees her mom. She grabs the gun and flashlight that the cop dropped when he was stabbed.
She hides behind some shelves as Ryan comes into the room. He is talking to her while he's looking. He decides to turn off the lights. Elissa tries to use the flashlight to see, but the batteries are dying so it only works half the time. You can't see anything except for when the flashlight decides to work and you can only heaar Elissa's breathing. This goes on for about two minutes. Finally, the flashlight turns on just as Ryan attacks Elissa. She fires the gun multiple times and shoots Ryan. Elissa then turns on the light and Ryan tries to attack her again, but her mom has woken up and knocks him out.
We cut to a later date, where Elissa and her mom are moving out of their house. Earlier in the film, when Elissa and Ryan were getting to know each other, he took her to a tree near his house. He told her what his mom once said to him: that everything has secrets that are obvious, you just have to know how to look at things to find them. He asks her what she sees when she looks at the tree and she tells him she just sees a tree. He then tilts her head a little bit and asks her, "Now what do you see?" She sees a face. Elissa returns to this tree just before they leave.
Her mom joins her and asks what she's looking at. Elissa then shows her mom what Ryan showed her before, tears running down her cheeks as she does.
We cut to Ryan, who is now in a mental hospital. We enter his thoughts (at least, that's what I assume this is showing). He's remembers his mom and dad bringing a birthday cake out to him, singing happy birthday. When it shows Ryan, he is dressed up like a girl. His mom is singing, "Happy Birthday, Carrie-Ann..." Ryan then says that he isn't Carrie-Ann, that his name is Ryan. His mom hits him hard across the head.
And that is the end of the film.
House at the End of the Street (2012) Trailer
There will probably be some spoilers in this review, so if you haven't watched the movie and still want to, stop here! If you still want to know what I think of the film, but don't want to know any of the spoilers, go to the In conclusion part of this post at the very end.
The Film
The entire movie is about an hour and a half long. Let me tell the first thing that bugged me: more than half the movie was just build-up. For an entire hour, my boyfriend and I moved around in our seats, yawning and trying not to fall asleep while the story unfolded. I'd expected another movie where our heroine is trapped in a house with a psycho for the majority of the movie, but no. Not this time.The film stars Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games, X-Men First Class) as Elissa, a teenage girl who moves to a new house with her mother, Sarah, played by Elisabeth Shue (Hollow Man, Leaving Las Vegas). They can only afford this huge house because of the house next door to them (practically in their back yard). A few years before, Carrie-Ann, the daughter of the house, killed her parents and disappeared into the woods. Some said she drowned in a creek, although there are rumors that sometimes you can see her running around in the woods. The only remaining member of their family is Ryan, Carrie-Ann's brother, who still lives in the house when Elissa and her mother move in. Ryan is played by Max Theiriot (Jumper, The Pacifier).
Ryan is a pariah in the town because of what happened with his family. He has no friends or family. One night, Elissa goes to a party with a guy she met at school, Tyler. He turns out to be a douche and tries to force Elissa to make-out (and probably something a little more dirty) with him. She does the typical, "stop, what are you doing, you jerk" routine before pushing him off her and storming out of the house. She calls her mom on her cell while she starts walking home. A car pulls over with a guy in it and he asks her if she wants a ride. At first, she tells him no, but it starts raining, so she gets in.
He introduces himself as Ryan. By now, Elissa has already heard the rumors. She blurts out that his parents died. He talks about how lonely he is because of the murders, and you start to feel bad for the guy. This begins the relationship between Elissa and Ryan.
Elissa's mother finds out that she spent time alone with Ryan and doesn't approve. She says that Elissa is always trying to change or help someone who is damaged. Her mother invites Ryan over for dinner and bluntly tells Ryan that he is not to be alone with her daughter. Elissa finds a way around this by forwarding all the calls to their house to her cell phone.
Elissa and Ryan's relationship turns romantic when Elissa kisses him. They start making out, but then Ryan forces her to leave out of nowhere.
It turns out that Ryan has been keeping Carrie-Ann in the basement all these years. Earlier, Ryan had told Elissa the story of Carrie-Ann; that one day they were swinging while their parents were smoking crack upstairs and Carrie-Ann fell off the swing. She hit her head and got brain damage because her parents didn't go to her when Ryan yelled for them. She didn't recognize anyone anymore and began to attack them. That's why she killed her parents. There are various points in the movie where Carrie-Ann escapes and Ryan has to catch her.
After Ryan apologizes for pushing Elissa out so suddenly, she invites him to her school's battle of the bands, where she is singing. He accepts and they agree to meet at the school. That night, Carrie-Ann escapes and runs into the woods with a butcher knife. Ryan runs after her and catches her, but not before she scares the crap out of a girl in a car with her boyfriend. While the couple is looking around, wondering what it was that scared the girl, Carrie-Ann is wiggling around, trying to escape Ryan's arms. You can tell his grip on her is very tight because his hands are almost entirely white with strain. Carrie-Ann pulls really hard to one side, causing Ryan's grip on her to break her neck.
Ryan loads her body into the trunk of his car and takes her to a remote place in some woods to bury her. Afterwards, he goes to a diner to, presumably, think about what he'd done. A waitress sees that he's upset and tries to cheer him up with a free slice of pie or cake (I can't remember which, but it doesn't really matter). While this is happening, Elissa is getting ready for the battle of the bands.
Ryan pulls up to the school, where Tyler, the douche who'd tried to force himself on Elissa, was waiting with his five douche friends. They taunt him but he ignores them. Elissa and Ryan talk backstage for a minute when one of Elissa's friends runs in and tells Ryan that his car is being smashed by the douches. Ryan runs out and sees them damaging his car. The douches then leave the car and decide to damage Ryan instead. There's a fight sequence, and it ends with Ryan and Tyler on the ground fighting. Ryan grabs Tyler's leg and breaks it. You hear the loud crack! and everything. Ryan gets up and runs away, realizing what he did.
Tyler's friends are pissed that he broke Tyler's leg, so they decide to go find Ryan at the only place he could go: his house. Elissa grabs Ryan's keys, which fell down during the fight, and takes his car to his place. She finds the douches lighting what looks like a toilet paper roll (but it can't be because TP doesn't break glass) on fire and throwing it in a window. It catches the curtains on fire, but Elissa makes it inside and stomps out the flames before they can catch anything else.
Elissa is running her vest - which she used to put out the fire - under the water in the sink when she spies an empty tampon and contacts box in the garbage. That's a little weird to have in the garbage when there are no women living in the house. (A little note here: my boyfriend whispered to me after she found the tampon box, "She probably thinks he sticks them up his butt or something." Sorry, that made me laugh and I had to put it in here.) She shrugs and puts them back in the garbage when she hears something banging downstairs.
Now, this is a little confusing, so read this slowly and try to keep up with me because I don't know how to explain this very well. The room that he had been keeping Carrie-Ann in is under the house. This is the route one would take to get to the room: Go downstairs into the basement, move the rug on the floor to expose cellar doors, go down into the cellar to find a purposeless hallway, at the end of the hallway there is a door. This is Carrie-Ann's room. Ryan always keeps it locked from the outside so that Carrie-Ann won't get out and kill someone. He keeps the key on the top of the doorframe.
Elissa follows the sound of the banging down into the basement. You think she's going to go to the rug on the floor when she opens the dryer and realizes that the banging was Ryan's shoes being tossed around in there. She laughs to herself and goes to turn around when her eye catches something metallic sticking out the edge of the rug. Upon closer examination, she discovers that there is a door under the rug. She opens the doors and goes down into the cellar. She discovers the door and (very slowly, I might add) walks to it. She tries the doorknob, but it's locked. She thinks to try the doorframe and, sure enough, there's the key.
Elissa opens the door and Carrie-Ann tries to attack her right away. Before she can get to Elissa, though, Ryan tackles Carrie-Ann to the bed. As he's strapping her back down, he yells at Elissa to go upstairs and he will explain everything when he gets up there.
She reluctantly goes upstairs and starts running the tap (to either wash her face or get a drink, but we don't know which). She sees the garbage and decides to go through it again. The contacts box had been folded in half and when she unfolded it, it turned out to be colored contacts. One big characteristic of Carrie-Ann is that she had really, really blue eyes. The contacts were "true blue".
As soon as she sees this, we cut to Ryan, who is still strapping Carrie-Ann down to her bed. The camera goes around the room as he talks to her and we see a Penn State hoodie draped across a rocking chair in the corner of the room. The waitress who served him that free dessert was wearing this when she served him.
Elissa finds a wallet with the waitress' ID in it in the garbage. She's now put two and two together: Ryan has captured a girl and is dressing her up like his sister. As soon as she gets the garbage back in the can, Ryan emerges from the basement. The wallet is still on the counter. Elissa gives some bogus excuse about needing to be home for her mom and tries to walk out, but Ryan isn't buying it. He grabs the back of her head while she's trying to walk out and slams it on the door, knocking her out.
Now, when Elissa first made it to Ryan's house, her mom called to make sure she was at home because her mom is a doctor and Tyler had just come to the ER with his broken leg. Remember that Elissa forwarded all the house calls to her cell phone. When Ryan hit Elissa's head on the door, she dropped her cell and it went under a little part of the counter, hidden. Elissa's mom called the house phone again while Ryan was downstairs with Elissa and when it went to voicemail, it played Elissa's cell phone voicemail. Elissa's mom asked her cop friend to go check on Elissa right after the phone call she had with Elissa earlier. She calls the cop and asks him to go by Ryan's house first because Elissa had forwarded all the house calls to her cell.
The cop makes it to Ryan's and knocks on the door just after Elissa wakes up and Ryan explains everything to her. Carry-Ann didn't get brain damage when she fell off the swing. She died. Ryan's parents blamed him and beat him all the time. They sent him away to his aunt's for a while. He snuck out one night and went to his parent's house dressed as Carrie-Ann and killed them. He got back to his aunt's before the bodies were discovered so no one knew it was him. He inherited the house and little bit of money from his parents, so he and his aunt moved into the house. His aunt had a stroke and died, and since then he has been kidnapping girls and keeping them in his basement, dressing them up like Carrie-Ann because he can't live without her. He tells Elissa that he is going to make her his new Carrie-Ann, that way he can have both Elissa and Carrie-Ann.
Elissa is tied up in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and the waitress - still dressed like Carrie-Ann - is tied up on the bed. Ryan goes upstairs to talk to the cop. The cop asks him if Elissa is there and he says no, then they talk about the incident with Tyler. As the cop is walking out, he sees the waitresses wallet - which is obviously a girl's wallet - on the counter, but he doesn't say anything about it. Once he steps out the door, Elissa's phone - which is still under the counter - starts ringing. Her mother tried calling her phone again. The cop hears it and stops. Ryan knows he's heard the phone, so he turns off the light. The cop knows something is up now that the lights are off and comes back into the house with his gun drawn.
As this is happening, Elissa is trying to get out of her ties. There's a big battle between the cop and Ryan, but Ryan ends up stabbing and killing the cop. Ryan then goes downstairs to check on Elissa. At this point, Elissa has kicked over the lamp in the room so that it is laying across her lap. The light bulb is directly on the tie on her left arm. It is burning the tie and her skin. She gets out of that tie and is trying to undo the right tie as Ryan starts coming downstairs. She gets out of the tie just as he opens the door and uses the door to knock him to the side. She runs out the door, grabs the key, and locks it from the outside.
She, of course, trips while running down the empty hallway before going up the stairs and into the basement. She closes the door to the cellar and moves the dryer on top of it. She runs to the basement door, but it is locked from the other side. Ryan has made it out of Carrie-Ann's room and is trying to break open the cellar doors. Elissa finds the garage and gets into a car parked in it. As she's looking around for the keys, she finds a bottle of chloroform and a rag. Suddenly, Ryan is at the side of the car and reaches in, grabbing the rag out of her hand and holding it to her face. She passes out.
When Elissa wakes up, she is in the trunk of the car. The body of the waitress is right beside her. While this is happening, Elissa's mother has shown up at Ryan's house, looking for Elissa. She knows that Elissa is there, but Ryan keeps telling her that she isn't. Just as she is about to leave, she hears Elissa screaming for her help. Elissa had broken out of the trunk and broke the glass out of the window in the door to the garage with a hammer. She heard her mom talking to Ryan and screamed for her. Her mom pushes her way past Ryan and into the house. She is making her way to the garage when Ryan stabs her. Ryan puts her in the basement and goes after Elissa. Elissa runs into the basement and sees her mom. She grabs the gun and flashlight that the cop dropped when he was stabbed.
She hides behind some shelves as Ryan comes into the room. He is talking to her while he's looking. He decides to turn off the lights. Elissa tries to use the flashlight to see, but the batteries are dying so it only works half the time. You can't see anything except for when the flashlight decides to work and you can only heaar Elissa's breathing. This goes on for about two minutes. Finally, the flashlight turns on just as Ryan attacks Elissa. She fires the gun multiple times and shoots Ryan. Elissa then turns on the light and Ryan tries to attack her again, but her mom has woken up and knocks him out.
We cut to a later date, where Elissa and her mom are moving out of their house. Earlier in the film, when Elissa and Ryan were getting to know each other, he took her to a tree near his house. He told her what his mom once said to him: that everything has secrets that are obvious, you just have to know how to look at things to find them. He asks her what she sees when she looks at the tree and she tells him she just sees a tree. He then tilts her head a little bit and asks her, "Now what do you see?" She sees a face. Elissa returns to this tree just before they leave.
Her mom joins her and asks what she's looking at. Elissa then shows her mom what Ryan showed her before, tears running down her cheeks as she does.
We cut to Ryan, who is now in a mental hospital. We enter his thoughts (at least, that's what I assume this is showing). He's remembers his mom and dad bringing a birthday cake out to him, singing happy birthday. When it shows Ryan, he is dressed up like a girl. His mom is singing, "Happy Birthday, Carrie-Ann..." Ryan then says that he isn't Carrie-Ann, that his name is Ryan. His mom hits him hard across the head.
And that is the end of the film.
My Review
Okay, first I'll tell you what I liked about the film, and then I'll tell you what I didn't like.
I liked the psychological twist. Finding out that Ryan's parents had dressed him up like Carrie-Ann and that's what drove him to kill his parents and then kidnap girls to be Carrie-Ann was very interesting to me. That might just be because I'm a psychology major, but that's my opinion.
I liked the fact that they made you feel sorry for Ryan and then he turned out to be the killer, but I didn't like it at the same time. I liked it because it made me think that this guy could never be the killer. They did a really good job of making him seem like the victim in this movie. But, like I said, I didn't like it because it made me sad because I really did like this character. When you find out your favorite character in a movie is also the villian, it bums you out.
The scene with the malfunctioning flashlight was super creepy and it pissed me off at the same time. Every time the light would come on, I would jump, thinking that Ryan would be there, but they made you wait for it. That two minutes felt way longer. It also pissed me off because the room is very quiet and this chick keeps breathing really loudly and making whimpering noises and cursing the flashlight. He's going to know where you are, dumbass, and not just because of the light! Shut. Up.
Now, there are probably some other things that I liked, but they are little things. I'm going to get into the things I didn't like now, and (trust me) there are a lot.
First of all, like I said before, I really hated the fact that most of the movie was build-up. When you go to watch a horror movie, you want it to be mostly horror. I was scared (maybe) five minutes when watching this film. So, if you're looking for a scare, don't watch this movie.
Another thing that really annoys me is how nosy Elissa is. Throughout the film, she is sticking her nose in places it doesn't belong. When she first visits Ryan's home, she wanders throughout his house without asking permission and stumbles on Carrie-Ann's room - her actual room that she'd had before she died. Elissa just grabs all sorts of things, asking Ryan about them. I was actually surprised that he answered her. Also, who goes snooping through someone's garbage? That has stalker written all over it. Then we come to the matter of the door under the rug. (I'm groaning while I think about it.) First of all, the only reason she knows there's a door under the rug in the first place is because she happens to notice the door hinge sticking out from under the rug. It's just a little sliver of it, but she notices it. Who would actually notice something like that in real life? This chick would be the best detective ever. Second, when you find a hidden door, do you go inside? No, you don't. Common sense tells you to leave whatever it is alone. There's a reason this door is hidden. On top of that, we have the fact that this door is also a cellar door. I don't know about you, but I'm freaked out by cellars. They're dark and creepy, and that's the number one place you'd expect something bad to happen in movies, other than woods. Even if I opened a cellar door and there was nothing but boxes in the room, I would still be freaked out and would not - under any circumstances - go in that room.
Now we come to the matter of the cop. This cop came to Ryan's house looking for Elissa for her mother. He knows that there is a possibility that she is there. He also knows that Ryan is the only person who lives in the house. Why would he just ignore the fact that there is a woman's wallet on the counter? No cop in real life would ever do that. I know plenty of cops because my mom works with them, and they wouldn't ignore that. Cops ask about things that seem strange because there might be a chance that it is connected to their case. So that part of the movie makes no sense.
There's some more things that bug me about this movie, but they are little things so I won't go into them. Overall, I wouldn't recomend this movie to anyone who isn't interested in psychology. Even then, I might not recommend it; instead, I might just tell them what happens to save them from losing an hour and a half of their life that they won't ever get back.
In conclusion
If I had to give House at the End of the Street (2012) a rating, it would probably be 1 out of 4 stars.
So, in conclusion, I don't recommend that you watch this movie. If you want to know what happens, well...I just told you. But if you didn't want to read the spoilers and just came to this part of this post, you could read the The Film section or go to wikipedia and read the synopsis on the site. It will tell you everything, it just won't give you as much detail as I did. And if you want to watch a horror movie, go rent a Halloween or Friday the 13th movie. Don't waste your time on this film.
~Oblivious
I think your rating is pretty harsh considering some of the things on your like list..: such as.. how you talked about jumping diluting the flashlight scene... I don’t know about you but not many movies actually make me jump or get my heart racing like that scene did (where did the flashlight come from?). For that comment alone it should get at least 2 stars... then the twist where Ryan turns out to be the bad guy, was pretty damn clever, I actually didn’t see that coming... and most of the time these type movies are very predictable so the fact that I didn’t see that huge twist coming is a reason for another star.. there were a few confusing parts to me but overall the movie pleasantly surprised me. Twists I didn’t see coming which rarely ever happens, good movie. Highly recommend.
ReplyDeleteYou actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I’m looking forward to your next post, I will try to get the hang of it!
ReplyDeleterent a skip bin