VERDICT: While it is more of a thriller than a horror movie and provides some heart-pounding here and there, the only thing really going for this movie is its lead, who seems to float over the awful script, poor editing, and mediocre acting from the supporting cast. Jennifer Lawrence, and Elizabeth Shue, to her credit, deserve better than this.
Whew! It's been a busy few weeks. And my brain's tired. So I figure the time is ripe for me to review a movie that was a complete stinker. I haven't done that yet, have I?
My birthday was on the twelfth of February, which my college friends honored with a surprise party they'd been planning since January. I did not clue in at all until they surprised me, so kudos to them. It was a truly wonderful day; one I will remember for a long time. I also was hired by a contractor at oDesk to begin writing articles for whatever they want me to write about, so it's iffy how often I'll be on here.
Directed by Mark Tonderai and written by David Loucka and Jonathan Mostow, House At the End of the Street surrounds teenager Elissa Cassidy (Jennifer Lawrence) and her single mother Sarah (Elizabeth Shue) as they are moving into their new house, hoping to start fresh. Turns out they've moved in to the house next door to another in which a young girl murdered her parents. When Elissa befriends Ryan (Max Thieriot), the son of the deceased parents, she wanders into the folds of a confusing mystery and a horrible, hidden truth that, as Elissa learns, is far from being resolved.
OTHER CAST MEMBERS: Gil Bellows, Nolan Gerard Funk, Allie McDonald, Joy Tanner
I saw this movie purely because Jennifer Lawrence is in it. I will admit I do have a raging girl crush on the woman (I am straight, I promise), but it's mostly due to her acting. Because she's phenomenal. You can't take your eyes off her. So any movie with Jennifer Lawrence in it must be a good movie, right?
Let House At the End of the Street stamp out that myth right now.
I think the thing that got me first was the script, because it was terrible. It sounded like a high-schooler had written it as a last-minute short story project for English class. It was shallow and uncreative. I recall one particular scene where Ryan is going to see Elissa and the neighborhood jerks are like "You tappin' that?" and when he doesn't answer they say "I guess it's official. She will sleep with anyone." I cringed at how poorly placed that was, because it was painfully simplistic and it made absolutely no sense considering what minimal character exposition we had been given of Elissa already. Plus, Elissa is still new in town at this point. Does she already have some kind of reputation? As well as already joining a band within days of moving there? It's like the filmmakers were as bored with these characters as we were. Also, no teenager of this generation starts a conversation with "You tappin' that?" If it was meant to be set in the 2010's, that sure didn't prove it.
As a (screen)writer myself and an avid movie viewer, a bad script is like an insult to my intelligence. If a movie has a good script, it has the ability to make up for a lot of other things that might have fallen short. So setting the basis of the film with a horrible script is strike one with critics and it affects the rest of the film. It won't necessarily bother the audience, unless they're smart. In which case, they'll feel like they're being addressed with condescension because the script is on such an elementary level. There are many people, I'm sad to say, who probably found the shallowness and stupidity of the script to be just at their literacy level. Perhaps even above it. That might be why I continued to see people on my Tumblr who were like "HATES was so amazing omg!" But then, people still say the same of Twilight.
Even Jennifer Lawrence seems to know that she's in a complete garbage dump of a movie.
What's frustrating is that the story had potential. It's an interesting take on the normal horror story formula; it begins with your usual psycho kid kind of story before the weird psychological twist that you weren't really expecting. In fact, I managed to get my hands on an early draft of the script some time ago, and the original story was actually better than the one they decided to transfer to the screen. The original story had Elissa discovering the truth and leading the victim involved to safety. Which, honestly, would have been a much better idea than what the final story ended up presenting us with. I won't spoil it for you, but I suppose it isn't even entirely worth it either way. You don't really care about any of the characters at all, so that by the time the "big reveal" comes around, it's not that big a deal. It's actually pretty lame.
"How did my agent ever let me sign on to this movie?"
One of the only good things about this movie was Jennifer Lawrence, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a huge fan of hers. She's perfectly in character; so perfectly, in fact, that she seems separate from the entire movie. It's that bad. And what's worse is that they got Elizabeth Shue in on this too, the other great actress who doesn't deserve a movie this awful. They try to work on the mother-daughter problems they have, or at least Sarah does while Elissa consistently acts the daughter-turned-mother role. That subplot is perhaps the best acted, just because it only consists of Lawrence and Shue. The rest of the subplots, ranging from Ryan being bullied by the other teenage boys to Officer Weaver (Bellows) hitting on Sarah from time to time, just fall flat. They aren't well-acted and they have nothing to do with the general plot. Basically, it's enough to bore the pants off of you. It's like the plot kind of meanders around before we start to figure out what part Ryan plays in this supposedly urgent situation that still managed to go unsolved for years and years. And then Elissa does what every smart movie character does with the bad boy and proceeds to hang out with him against her mother's will, beginning a pretty boring romantic subplot. Their chemistry's believable, but it, like everything else, feels lifeless.
So then Elissa gets knocked unconscious and taken down to the basement. Guess her mom was right about her psycho boyfriend, huh? You would think that anyone who lived in that day and age had seen or at least heard about a dozen horror movies similar to that one and would know better than to do the exact same thing that all of the other stupid horror movie characters do that end up getting into sticky situations. At this point, when Elissa is screaming and running around, you're like "Dude, you brought this on yourself," because the scantily clad girl running away from monsters is so overworn it's beginning to look dog-eared.
Now Jennifer Lawrence was a good sport about being in a crappy movie. She saw it all the way through, even praising the director and the script in interviews. She was approached about her second Oscar nomination (for Silver Linings Playbook) on the CCA (Critic's Choice Awards) red carpet, and interviewer Josh Horowitz asked "What was this for, House at the End of the Street?" Jennifer burst out laughing.
I think J-Law can breathe a sigh of relief. Since it was sandwiched between The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, no one's going to remember that she was even in this movie.
VERDICT: Despite the sometimes middling road it takes to invoke emotion, Trade of Innocents is made to inform, not to entertain, and should thus be critiqued with this in mind. It has many flaws, but many more subtle truths, poignant symbols, and heartbreaking realities. It's one of those that takes a little while to sink in before you may find yourself shedding tears over the world's injustice.
I'm back! Sorry for the wait. My computer is up and running now.
This week I am reviewing a film that has remained virtually unknown this year due to low budget. But it is very much worth the discussion. I think if I hadn't seen this movie I would have just gone back to my normal review of something mainstream. But I'm changing it up this time. It'll just be quite a bit shorter, because it's a shorter movie and I don't have a whole lot to say about it.
Written and directed by Christopher Bessette, Trade of Innocents tells a story of a married couple, Alex (Dermot Mulroney) and Claire (Mira Sorvino). Broken by the loss of their young daughter and wanting to fix the strain on their marriage, they go to Cambodia to try and rescue girls from the sex slave trade, becoming fixated on one particularly widespread offender (Trieu Tran).
My college was actually screening this movie when I saw it, and Christopher Bessette himself came to our screening (how cool is that, right?). We have to get a certain number of chapel credits throughout each semester and this screening was worth two credits. So of course a few of us went. I plopped down next to one of my girlfriends and the premiere got started.
It's a shocking movie from the start. It's not comfortable to sit through, at all. But it isn't supposed to be. The idea is to disturb you enough about a very real situation to make you feel prompted to do something about it. The first scene where Alex plays rock-paper-scissors with a young girl who automatically reaches to take off her clothes before he stops her plays pretty well on the theme of stolen innocence, and this thread continues throughout the rest of the film.
It is a little strickening to see this young girl start to unbutton her shirt almost immediately.
The emotional subplot fell a little flat in my opinion, though it had its moments. It was certainly easy to see why both Alex and Claire quest to save these children; they themselves had their daughter kidnapped and killed when she was eight. It was saddening, certainly, and the writing isn't totally mediocre. Bits of light shine through the cracks in its dullness. But you don't have enough characterization to really care about these characters. Then again, they never ask you to. Because again, this movie was made to inform, not entertain.
They tried. Mulroney and Sorvino are decent actors. It's just that you aren't given enough time to care about them.
On the informative side, you may be surprised how well this problem has managed to stay hidden in our exposed modern times. The figures presented are startling, and even more disturbing is the fact that they are presented to be entirely truthful. I would list the figures, but it's much more jolting to hear them yourself.
One thing that this movie was good at doing, especially for me and my friend (nameless for privacy's sake), who was sitting next to me, was making us feel revolted at the flagrant pedophilia the movie brings to light. The brutal and vile language used to describe the young virgin girls that the main customer, Adderly, wants for himself is enough to make your skin crawl (describing them as "fresh flowers"). I appreciated how unflinching the movie was in terms of its honesty, because that kept me from completely writing it off for its low-budget look and mediocre emotional subplot.
This scene, as mentioned by the director, actually happened. It's easy to believe that it did, due to the way it makes your skin crawl and blood boil through every sickening minute.
I waited for about twenty minutes after the Q&A with the director had ended to speak to him. I had to tell him that I appreciated what he had done; the symbolism he used was striking and beautiful and I believe that was part of what disturbed me so much about the movie. My favorite motif was at the very end, when Adderly has not been given the girls he asked for. He packs his things and prepares to leave his hotel room, when he spies the white ribbon on the table that he periodically smells throughout the movie. He hesitates, then goes to the table, grabs it, and then leaves, becoming a lurking shadow.
A young man in the audience at the showing stood up at the Q&A and openly expressed his disappointment that Mr. Bessette had not resolved anything by the end of the movie. As a writer, screenwriter, and film enthusiast, I was a little angered by that comment. So, when I talked to Christopher Bessette, I told him that I flatly disagreed with that comment, that I liked that the issue was unresolved. Because it is unresolved. That kind of open ending leaves the audience wanting to do something about it.
I gushed compliments in his face, utterly impressed and amazed with what God had done through him in this movie and how beautiful and brave the message was to me.
He chuckled. "Well, bless your heart!"
Needless to say, my friend and I were both shaken emotionally by this movie for personal reasons. In the movie, Adderly asserts many times that he wants seven-year-old girls. After the movie was over and I went down to my friend's dorm (because if I didn't talk/cry about what we had just seen then I wouldn't sleep), she looked at me, her eyes rimmed with tears, and said "I was seven." My friend had been sexually assaulted at that age, and although she was never in any sort of sex slave trade, she looked haunted by the reminder of her own traumatic experience. Part of me was thinking about her and the other part of me was thinking about these poor girls in the movie and all over the world. Either way, the movie brought me to tears. And I'm a stone in movies. I rarely cry. It was a weird sort of relief, though, to know that I still could cry at movies. I figured then it must have had some kind of impact that touched me very deeply. Another reason why I can't write off this movie completely.
If nothing else, see this movie for its symbolism and its brutal honesty. Because this movie does something special despite its mediocrity; it values its message more than its image.
Sorry, everybody, I have reviews ready for when my computer is back up and running. My charger's busted so I have to wait until this weekend before I can publish anything. Thank you for your patience.
My name is Fallon Bechtel. I follow the Lord, I write, I read, I sing, I dance, and I explore and learn about God's creation. Reviewing movies is just another thing I love to do.
