House at the End of the Street Review: Calorie-free Psycho

rating: 3

If the 2012 suspense thriller House at the End of the Street has nothing else going for it, it's the fact that it contains a truly unique script by David Loucka (based on a story by Jonathan Mostow) with a plot twist at the end which nobody could have possibly seen coming. That said, chances are more than likely that this flick won't exactly be making cinematic history anytime soon. It's never an unpleasant nor painful viewing experience, but neither does it possess an "oooh-wow-I've-got-to-see-this-again!" moment in any of its over one hundred minutes of screen time. Sarah and Elissa are a newly-divorced mom and teen daughter who move to a new home in the suburbs, only to discover that the house next door was once the scene of a brutal double murder; daughter Carrie Anne murdered her parents in their beds and left her brother Ryan as the sole survivor and occupant. While Elissa begins making friends at her new school and quickly also emerges as popular for her musical talents, she somehow finds herself drawn to Ryan for his sensitivity and isolation. It's only a matter of time before we as an audience learn exactly how much more is lurking beneath Ryan's surface. Director Mark Tonderai has made the most of these elements, giving the film an occasional moment of Hitchcock-like purpose, but a more overall sense of juvenile pervades the on-screen atmosphere; for all intents and purposes, this is calorie-free Psycho. Fortunately, in terms of performances there's not a bad one in the bunch; all are completely rock-solid. Jennifer Lawrence proves her worth as Elissa and fully shows why Rolling Stone has called her "the most talented young actress in America." Elisabeth Shue is equally masterful as Sarah, and makes a definitive transition here into more mature roles; there's not a patch on her ingenue turns in such flicks as The Karate Kid and Adventures in Babysitting, and she's as fresh-faced and beautiful as ever. Gil Bellows remains as marvelous an on-screen presence as always in the role of Sarah's love interest Danny Peters, and exceptional supporting performances are here in abundance, most notably Allie MacDonald as Jillian and Nolan Gerard Funk as Tyler. But it is undeniably Max Thieriot who emerges as the bonafide star of the proceedings as Ryan; this pouty-lipped pool-eyed young hunk of manhood couldn't have been more perfectly cast, and will most certainly have a major career if he plays his cards right. Other problems abound. The uninteresting soundtrack only serves as a mediocre showcase for Theo Green's score, and while Miroslav Baszak's cinematography is extremely strong at the outset, it quickly dwindles down to amateurish attempts at auteurism at best. Producers Aaron Ryder, Peter Block and Ryan Kavanaugh wholeheartedly receive points for effort, but the whole is never greater than the sum of its parts here. Still, the film will most likely find a small but loyal audience of younger viewers. In short, House at the End of the Street never stands on its own as a glistening mansion, but rather a diminutive and not-always-satisfactory piece of ordinary cinematic real estate. House at the End of the Street is in cinemas now.
Contributor
Contributor

Upon choosing to study musical theatre intensively as a child and teenager, both in local classes and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts for three summers, Mr. Martin made his professional stage debut as a founding member of the internationally-acclaimed TADA! Youth Theater in 1984. Since that time, he has appeared on stages throughout the New York area and the Northeast as well as film and television. In the late 1980s, he shifted his career slightly to include cabaret performance, garnering in the process a 1994 MAC Award nomination for Outstanding Male Musical Comedy, but in 1990 also became an entertainment reviewer and contributor for Night & Day Magazine as well as a weekly broadcast on New York Entertainment Digest on WRTN-FM. He has since been a reviewer for the weekly New York Native newspaper and eventually contributed to Back Stage and New England Entertainment Digest among myriad other publications, and also briefly co-hosted the “Cabaret Corner” segment with Roy Sander for the PBS program “New York Theatre Review,” broadcast in 1995 on WNYE-TV Channel 25. He also, in 1991, launched the nationwide magazine CaB which, though most largely focusing on cabaret and standup comedy, also covered theatre, film, television, recordings, jazz, performance art, dining, wine, travel, and every other cultural medium before closing the magazine officially in 1996. By the mid-1990s, he shifted his performance career yet again to include work as a standup comedian and celebrity voice impersonator, and subsequently garnered acclaim for shows at the Comic Strip, the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, the Improvisation, Boston Comedy Club, the Duplex, Stand-Up NY and many other leading local laugheries. In 2001, he became a founding member of the sketch comedy group The Mistake, and along with founder Ken Scudder is currently the last remaining original member of the award-winning and critically-acclaimed company; Mr. Martin won a 2005 Spotlight-On Award for Outstanding Special Musical Material, and the group also won several awards in other categories over the following two seasons. In 2007, Mr. Martin collaborated with Corbin Ross on the screenplay “Exit Laughing,” a biographical script about the late comedy legend Allan Sherman. He is currently developing scripts for two other true-life entertainment biopics; one is “Static: The Lena Zavaroni Story” and the other is “Everything is Beautiful: The Life of Dorothy Squires.” A fourth, “A Girl Named Timi,” focuses on the life and career of singer Timi Yuro. In 2009, Mr. Martin completed a script for an hour-long comedy pilot geared for cable television, entitled “Breach of Conduct,” which now hopes for release as a Web series beginning in 2013. He also garnered a 2010 Planet Connections Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Harwitz E. Green in “Green! The Musical” at the Gene Frankel Theatre, and followed with a theatrical appearance as the Butcher in “Son of a Butcher” by Grant Harrison, directed by Julian Leong as part of the annual “FrightFest” at 13th Street Repertory. More recently, he created the role of The Writer in the worldwide premiere of the one-man short play “The Entry,” presented as part of the 9th Annual Fresh Fruit Festival in New York City and directed by Carol Polcovar, with a script by legendary playwright and off-Off-Broadway co-founder Robert Patrick (“Kennedy’s Children,” “T-Shirts,” “Blue is for Boys,” etc). He will soon embody a featured role in the independent short film “Lillian” by Amanda Pennington, a lesbian love story based on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,” starring acclaimed actress Kathleen Chalfant, and the featured role of pimp Johnny Long in the major motion picture "Dark Halls." And he continues a career in entertainment journalism, contributing reviews of theatre, cabaret and books as well as a column on cabaret history to http://www.NiteLifeExchange.com, and in two weekly broadcasts for the historic NYC station WPAT 930 AM; a live webstream is available at http://www.wpat930am.com/. Most recently, Mr. Martin has begun to find renown as a film historian. His first book, “All For The Best: Transferring Godspell From Stage To Screen,” about the 1972 filming of the musical mega-hit, was published by BearManor Media in November of 2011. A second book in two volumes, “Scene Stealers: The Supporting Actors and Actresses No One Could Ever Forget,” hopes to be published shortly, followed by “Sirens of Sepia: The Great Black Cinematic Actresses From the Silent Era Through the Present,” and then “For Want of a Nail,” which documents the life and career of cult film actress Shirley Stoler. In addition, he is currently trying to develop a documentary film about a specific area of the entertainment industry.