30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 2: HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

To see a horror movie get a wide theatrical release is a rarity, and I have little doubt that House at the End of the Street would have been sent directly to DVD were it not for the fortunate presence of Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence is the rising star who got an Oscar nomination (and should have won) for her breakout role in Winter’s Bone, and made a splash earlier this year with The Hunger Games.

Since House at the End of the Street was filmed before the release of Winter’s Bone, Lawrence’s recent success must have been a boon for the film’s producers, who otherwise would have been stuck with an unreleasable film on their hands.

Unreleasable, you say? When a trash heap like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen makes hundreds of millions of dollars, certainly the standard bar is low enough for pretty much anything to find an audience. But no: even on the Michael Bay scale, House at the End of the Street is unacceptable. To call it hastily edited would be to assume that it was in fact edited. It is barely assembled. If it were a dinner entrée, I would send it back. It’s not finished yet.

The notion that anyone would find this film interesting to watch is insulting. It was supposedly directed by Mark Tonderai and written by David Loucka, from a story by Jonathan Mostow which, with some work put into it, could have been a worthwhile shocker. Mostow is the director of some very good action movies, like Breakdown and U-571, as well as the surprisingly good Terminator 3. According to the IMDb, Mostow was originally slated to direct the film when it went into development in 2003, from a script by Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly. Now there’s a movie I’d like to see. At least they would have put in some effort.

Elissa (Lawrence) moves to a far-off house in the woods with her mom (Elisabeth Shue) after a divorce. In pure horror movie fashion, they get a great deal on the house because it’s next door to the site of a grisly murder. Four years earlier, a 13-year-old brain-damaged girl killed both her parents in the middle of the night. They’ve been told their former neighbors’ house is empty, but soon lights begin to come on in the middle of the night, and the estranged son of the dead couple, Ryan (Max Thieriot), is occasionally seen skulking around.

Though trailers have portrayed the film as either a haunted house movie or a Last House on the Left-style fable of human depravity, the film spends so much time dwelling on Elissa’s high school life, formulaic family drama, and budding friendship with Ryan that we begin to wonder if it’s pulled a fast one and reeled us into a made-for-ABC Family movie. The first half is filled with incredibly little substance, mostly dedicated to some completely inconsequential sub-plots about Elissa’s dealings with some stereotype high school douchebags and involvement in a Battle of the Bands contest.

Elissa’s early interest in Ryan, meant to signify that she is a bastion of empathy and compassion (her mom constantly chides her for wanting to “save everyone”), is rendered just plain weird by Loucka’s clumsy screenplay. She insists on prodding him about his past and has one scene in which she wanders about his parents’ house inquiring about things like the invasive old woman from Deathtrap. If I were Ryan, I’d give her my best and politely ask that she go home.

As poorly written as the character is, Lawrence at least takes it seriously and is able to latch on to something authentic most of the time. Her budding courtship with Ryan is completely ridiculous—and even contains one of those scenes where he leads her into the woods, points to a tree, and says “See the face?”—but Lawrence is committed all the way. Thieriot, however, falters in a role that is unplayable. He’s good at playing misunderstood teenagers who are withholding something sinister, as in the underrated My Soul to Take. There’s simply nothing for him to work with here.

Elisabeth Shue does what she can with the role of Mom, a doctor who works at a singularly unconvincing hospital (a red brick building with “HOSPITAL” over the entrance). Mom is usually seen leaving a phone message telling Elissa she’s “working the late shift” and conveniently won’t be home for dinner, and pops up occasionally to offer seldom-obeyed warnings about Ryan. Gil Bellows, usually a reliable character-actor, struggles to find a single genuine note as a friendly local policeman who’s literally too dumb to live.

By the time the bloodshed starts—too late into the overlong 100-minute film—the movie has indulged so heavily in its teen-drama framing device that it rushes through the allegedly suspenseful scenes with no thrills. Though there are a few unpredictable twists in the plot, they’re sloppily presented and fail to build into any tension. As a result of the poor writing, Lawrence is stuck with a scene near the end in which she’s required to figure out every single one of the plot twists at once. Not the most enviable task for an actress.

House at the End of the Street is presented with a clear disregard for anyone who might watch it. It has a point A and a point Z, but the letters in between are garbled beyond comprehension. Characters appear and disappear at a whim; your guess is as good as mine as to what happens to Elissa’s new best friend. Whole sections of the film dedicated to Elissa’s musical talent go nowhere. The big climax is one of the sloppiest I’ve ever seen, right down to the trapped-in-the-dark-basement final moment, which is kind of like the climactic scene in The Silence of the Lambs after a lobotomy.

Yes, House at the End of the Street is dumb, but that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that nobody cared to assemble it into recognizable shape. This movie is incomplete, and should not have been released until it was finished.

1/2 out of ****