A Disappointing Continuation

A Brilliant Conflict

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Blistering performances.

I'll admit this right off the bat: The only real reason I rented this film was because I had recently seen "Silver Linings Playbook" and fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence (!). Granted, I am a suspense/thriller movie genre fan, but I figured that this movie would be decidedly average. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when it hooked me right from the start and carried my interest all the way through!For a basic plot summary, "House At The End Of The Street" sees Elissa (Lawrence) and her mother Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) move from Chicago to a more rural locale. They quickly discover that they have a reclusive young neighbor named Ryan (Max Thieriot), who is orphaned after the grisly death of his parents. Elissa quickly forms a relationship with Ryan and begins to unravel the secrets surrounding his life.Like I said, I was expecting to see Lawrence looking beautiful for 100 minutes and little else. But, the film ends up working very well because it is not quite as predictable as you would think. It will never be Shakespeare, as the saying goes, but it distinguishes itself from current similar genre fare for two significant reasons:1. The plot always keeps you guessing. This is one of those scenarios where the less I say here the better it will be for your viewing pleasure, but suffice it to say that you won't "figure out" this one in the opening minutes.2. The acting is tremendous. Lawrence shines again (when has she ever not?!), Thieriot nearly steals the show on occasion with his nuanced performance, and for older film buffs, it is fun to see Shue back on the big screen.Overall, I think that most viewers will be surprised by "House At The End Of The Street" for its ability to differentiate itself from the more mundane suspense/thriller fare that has cropped up recently.

Moving into a new house, a teen and her mom meet the lone survivor of a massacre still living in his old house and after ignoring her early warnings to stay away she decides to help him only to stumble across a deadly secret he's harboring in the house.Overall this one here is quite a bland and unworthwhile horror/thriller. For the most part this one is really undone by the fact that hardly anything at all even occurs in this one for the majority of its running time. As the majority of this one centers heavily on the family drama between the two, from the mother's worry about her daughter's troubling-to-her behavior and the daughter's worry about trying to uncover the secret of his lonely and horrific past, this bland narrative stalls the film almost immediately by not only running such a clichéd and unappealing piece but doing it so that there's an incentive here to wind through these pieces solely for the benefit of the target audience only. It's simply augmented only to make her the center of attention the whole time and make you side with her despite her mom being the clear-cut voice of reason and sanity, yet this one makes her out otherwise merely to feature her as often as possible. This results in plenty of lame non-horror thriller moments merely to try to make her seem as good-natured as possible rather than try to do anything with that storyline and it just feels too safe and clichéd enforcing these stereotypes. As well, that cuts into the action so drastically with these absolutely banal and lame set-ups that there's very little action that would be considered enjoyable, featuring such wasted moments as the girl home alone in her house after the first escape and the attempted attack on the couple in the car which are both interrupted before either actually gets into big stalking territory which is a big missed opportunity to actually feature something of interest during the overlong and excruciating setup. That also manages to hold itself back from the actual blood-and-gore set-up here with an absolutely minimal amount of bloody kills or gore, and it just all adds together into the film's overall watered-down feeling. While these here hold it down, it does have enough good stuff here to make it somewhat watchable which is almost solely based on the final half- house here which is quite fun. Once it's full twist is finally unleashed and given out, there's a lot of fun here with him holding her captive and tied up in the house as it then turns into a somewhat enjoyable series of escape and recaptures that do get a little old but still have some solid action throughout. The big battles down in the basement hiding room and then later on in the garage where there's plenty of good fun to be had with these few scenes offering up some rather enjoyable stalking. As well, the opening rampage does have some solid work for it with the basic elements of a stalking slasher working in quite fun ways Although these here are where it works, there's still some problems here.Rated PG-13: Violence and Language.

(12%) If you think really hard, and do a bit of mental arithmetic, you'll probably come to the conclusion that of all the bad horror movies of the past so many years this could almost be considered a mild highlight of sorts. But then again does this even qualify as an actual horror movie in the first place? As a very good portion of the runtime is much more of a drama than anything else with only a small section at the beginning and at the end even resembling a horror picture. So it doesn't really qualify as a horror, and the vast bulk of teen based drama that makes up everything else is just bland, forgettable, and flat. The only thing this has going for it is Jennifer Lawrence who is clearly too good for the lame material she's given to work with, and the twist isn't exactly terrible in a kind of camp fire style way, but it clearly lacks enough substance for it to be made into a full length movie. My advice: skip this and watch a real horror movie instead.

Was this supposed to be a thriller? A horror movie? Every character is incredibly dumb and everyone totally fails to communicate. Everyone is psychopath, drunk, idiot or whore. There is not a single sympathetic character in the movie, period. Everyone and I really mean everyone made me just sick.The female character played by Jennifer Lawrence is incredibly, insanely stupid. I mean a lot of beyond "Darwinian candidate level stupid". I think this is really a very bad spot on her career that will be hopefully forgotten.The moment that made me laugh in the very bizarre moment was she tries to remove the straps by burning them on the light bulb. She tries to burn them for a pretty long period of time. Hello? Have you ever suffered a burn by a light bulb? You would have to be a Hero of Soviet Union class macho to sustain this! Yet she manages to free herself only to make several incredibly bad decisions after that.Please, stop to make such idiotic TV shows. Please, do not make such crap anymore or at least mark them as "ultra dumb waste of time for a brainless audience". I feel very sorry for everyone who wasted his money on this.