House at The End of The Street (2012)

Why do I torture myself like this? I'm coming down off one of the freakiest movies I've seen in a long time, "House of The Devil," and I immediately go to this garbage? What the hell is wrong with me? I knew it was going to suck. It's a PG-13 horror movie. There's only been one of those that was ever any good. And no, it doesn't matter one damn bit if it is the UNRATED VERSION YOU COULDN'T SEE IN THEATERS that I'm watching. If what I saw was the version too intense for theaters I can only assume that when it was released, it was rated G.

"House at The End of The Street," or #HATES as the trailer wanted us to refer to it as and tweet about, is a film that, to be quite blunt, should have been smothered in its sleep. This is a thing that should not exist. This thing is a travesty and complete failure on every conceivable level, and there is an hour and forty minute window of my life that I spent watching it, and I will never get it back. This is the kind of movie that makes me want to donate to a charity somewhere so that I can say I've done something of value with my day.

#HATES is about a girl named Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) who moves with her mother into a house in Rich Asshole County, USA. This house is right next door to the eponymous house where, four years prior, a husband and wife were murdered by their daughter, who subsequently ran away and presumably drowned. Now the son, Ryan (Max Thieriot) lives there by himself. And because it's populated by horrible people, the entire town hates him because he has the gall to have parents who have been murdered.

Seriously, what a dick.

Yeah, that's the first huge sticking point for #HATES. Every single person in this movie - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - is a raging douchebag of Brobdingnagian proportions. Not only are all of the neighbors the standard rich, white, stuck-up twats who would be the villain who got their rightly deserved comeuppance at the end of any random teen girl coming-of-age movie, but they go so far as to beat the ever-loving crap out him and try to burn his house down. And why do they do that? Well, because he showed up somewhere, of course. I mean, his parents got murdered. Clearly there is no place for him among polite society.

And what of Elissa? Well, she's a disrespectful, lying brat who calls her mom a whore right to her face and is too stupid to piece together that when a guy has a woman locked in a secret dungeon in his basement, maybe that would be a good indicator that you should leave and call the police. So that's nice. That's our protagonist.

If I may, can I say one thing about Jennifer Lawrence? Everyone needs to stop freaking out about her. She's not that good. Yeah, she's okay if blandness is your thing, but if there was one actress out there who gets FAR too much credit for what she does, it's her. She's like the female Sean Penn. Only instead of scowling and looking like she's eternally smelling something really bad like Sean Penn does, she's just eternally starring ahead and slightly off camera with jaw slightly slack. I never see any life in any of her performances. I don't get the hype.

She's just so bland...

The mom (Elisabeth Shue) is a nagging, drunk harpy who likes to politely invite guys that her daughter likes over for dinner, and then gets wasted and tells them to leave her daughter alone for no good reason other than he's "in college." Oh, and that the guy has murdered parents. If you have murdered parents you can't date her daughter.

So what this all boils down to is that even though we do find out that Ryan, the guy living in the #HATES, is indeed a psycho killer and has been abducting women and keeping them in his basement, he is still the most sympathetic, likable character in this movie. I am not even kidding right now.

Because here's the thing - all the hate that is channeled toward him by the town is unwarranted in every conceivable way. As they believe, it was his sister who killed his parents, and he wasn't there when it happened. There wasn't even a suspicion of "maybe he did it." No, it's case closed as far as everyone is concerned. The official, confirmed story is that the sister ran off and drowned in the dam, and her body was never found (although if the body was never found, how do they know she drowned in the dam?).

Now, as it turns out, he actually did kill his parents. In an exceedingly stupid and nonsensical "twist," Ryan's sister, Carrie Anne, died years prior when she accidentally fell off the swing set. For some reason that I can't fathom because it makes no sense, the parents decided to cover it up, buried her in the woods, and dressed Ryan up as Carrie Anne, beating him into pretending to be his sister. And then one night he snapped and killed his parents. Ever since then, he's been abducting young women, keeping them in his spooky basement dungeon and pretending that they're Carrie Anne until they die and he needs another one.

"Oh no. I am tied to a rickety old chair by very thin strips of cloth. I am trapped. There is no escape. I, a fully grown, adrenaline-soaked adult in a struggle for my life, couldn't possibly escape this death sentence. Woe is me."

So okay, he's a villain. But the problem is that nobody actually knows all that. For all everyone else knows he's actually a very polite, nice kid who hasn't harmed anyone. I'm not giving a pass on everyone else in this movie being a horrible person just because they happened to be right by shear luck. That's freaking stupid.

And despite all of that abduction and murder stuff, I still feel more sympathy towards Ryan than I do any of the rest of the townsfolk. Ryan may be a psycho killer but at least he's got an excuse. His parents used the guilt he feels over his sister's death and their fists to screw with his head until he could have been the lead in "Sleepaway Camp." I'm sorry, I'm going to feel more towards him than an entitled, rich, snot-nosed teenager whining about first-world problems like her mom giving her a curfew.

I have a suspicion this person has more problems than you.

But even if for some reason I were inclined to root for the villain, that doesn't work here because he's really bad at what he does. I just don't understand how he managed to keep what he's doing secret for so long when the girls he kidnaps keep escaping. Maybe if he kept the key on him instead of putting it right above the door where the girls can do the whole "slide paper under the door and knock the key down and pull it back under" thing. Although how in the hell they knew it was there when they never would have seen him put the key there since the door is closed at that point is a mystery to me. I guess they figured he was really stupid and lucked out.

"Aw, son of a - that's the third one this week! Man, I need to get better at locking doors."

The fact that everyone else here is also incredibly dumb doesn't help matters either. Like I mentioned earlier, Elissa's first reaction to seeing a woman gagged and tied up in a secret hidden dungeon this dude has down in his basement isn't to kick him in the nuts or beat him with a pipe or pepper spray him or call the police or anything that might help that poor girl, but to calmly go upstairs and get a drink of water. And as she justly deserves, he immediately knocks her dumb ass out and ties her up. You know what? At that point I'm willing to give it to him. Go for it, dude. Nobody here is bright enough to live.

I swear, if I have to suffer through one more of these crap horror films I might just snap. When I finally do, promise me you won't let me wear any dress that doesn't flatter my figure. And as far as wigs go, I've always liked how I look as a chestnut brown.

THE BOTTOM LINE - #HATES is a train wreck, and not the enjoyable kind. If there was a recent film to rival "The Apparition" in terms of how to screw up a horror film in every possible way, this is a strong contender. It's not scary at any conceivable point, the story is riddled with nonsensical ideas, the acting is one-note and boring, and there is not a single likable character at any point during it's entire run time. Well, except for the drunk chick at the party who hurled in the toilet. She contributed the most value thing in this film: vomit. And of course it being PG-13 means that we can't even have scawy bwood in our HORROR MOVIE. Because heaven forbid the kiddies get nightmares.