Neighborly Concern: THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET

The House at the End of the Street starts out by introducing materials so standard that I found myself wondering if the movie could possibly be heading to such conventional territory. Oh, just you wait. The opening scenes introduce us to a single mother (Elisabeth Shue) and her teenage daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) as they move into a new house in a new town. They get the new place for cheap on account of the neighbors, who, four years ago, were murdered by their young daughter. The girl went missing that same night and now the only one living in the big empty house is their justifiably morose son (Max Thieriot). The poor kid’s avoided by the townspeople who monger rumors about his long gone sister and generally behave rather badly when the topic of the boy comes up at, say, a welcome-to-the-neighborhood picnic.

The eerie house with a mysterious history causing mild discomfort for new neighbors isn’t exactly new territory. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit, I suppose, that the whole thing ends up operating at a reasonably workable level. The script from David Loucka (based on a story concept by Jonathan Mostow) has some fun playing around with audience sympathies. Thieriot’s troubled guy is understandable for a while; it’s the townspeople who are generally awful. For once, all the foreboding and ominous red flags seems to point away from the guy who’d be the suspicious creep in many a horror flick.

The first half of the movie may be mostly unpolished exposition spoken half-naturally, but the actors are likable and talented enough to make it all seem more or less convincing and soon enough the situation grows enough mild interest that it doesn’t seem so bad. What’s too bad is that the movie doesn’t seem too good, either. There’s a lot of talent here, but the film never finds a good reason to make much use of it. Lawrence is called on mostly to wear a tight white T-shirt. (Hey, there are worse reasons to see a movie.) Shue gets to act intensely concerned about her daughter and the boy next door, but not concerned enough to stop the plot in its tracks. Everyone is suspicious, but there’s really not all that much to be leery about for a while.

Because of the movie’s sometimes agonizing scarcity of imagination, the whole thing starts to feel like a watchable bore. There’s not a whole lot of suspense happening for a very long time as the film sets off a long fuse of characterization and build up that’d work better if the flimsy material could rise higher than the actors can take it alone. The bulk of the film is only a notch or two scarier than what you’d find on the Disney Channel during October as we patiently wait for Big Secrets to be revealed. Director Mark Tonderai turns in the one of most stylistically generic horror movies in recent memory, bland PG-13 Hollywood slickness that leans on the crutch of sudden orchestration anytime something vaguely suspenseful is occurring. By the time it goes through a couple of genuinely surprising (well, it got me, at least) twists, it’s all too self-serious to go off the rails properly.

And these twists to which I refer are certainly a little nutty. I won’t spoil them here, because you just might have the TV on in the background one day a few years from now and this movie will come on and you won’t have enough willpower to change the channel so you’ll just let it play out while you, I don’t know, fold laundry or something. Anyways, the twists are silly and they undo a lot of what little I found of interest in the first half of the picture, but the actors are on board to sell them. Tonderai treats it all so reverently, so tactfully, and with such restraint that the effect is more or less negated. By the time the material grows dark and weird and a little predictable, but still functionally dangerous and tense simply through the sheer will of talented performers, it’s basically a moot point. The movie completely trades in what little I was enjoying for a badly executed climactic sequence derived from a jumble of influences from (mostly) better movies without even the slightest intention of enjoying itself.

A Fish Called PIRANHA

Piranha in 3D is a disappointment in all three dimensions, though not for lack of trying. Alexandre Aja’s movie is a winking horror-comedy with a tongue so firmly in the cheek that it draws blood. It’s gratuitous in every possible way, up to and including its very existence, with something sure to offend every large portion of the general public, and yet the film never manages to generate any real transgressive charge. By the end of the run time, when the credits started to roll, I found myself thinking, “is that all there is?”

Aja’s always been a fine stylist of horror imagery, but I’ve found his prior works to be shockingly lacking, with High Tension and Mirrors containing plot holes so large and shocks so predictable that any sense of fun or danger is entirely missing. His small stylistic touches weren’t enough to alleviate my pure boredom with those projects. With Piranha, a remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Roger-Corman-produced Jaws-inspired creature-feature, Aja has created his best film, but it’s still a disappointment. I liked just enough of it to wish it were better.

The movie starts promisingly enough with small-town sheriff Elisabeth Shue investigating a missing local (Richard Dreyfuss) and welcoming a team of geologists, led by Adam Scott, who are investigating recent seismic activity in the area. All of this is set against the backdrop of a busy Spring Break weekend that has brought hoards of idiotic amoral pleasure-seekers to writhe in the water. There’s a seedy carnival atmosphere taking over the town with slimy video producers (Jerry O’Connell and Paul Scheer) and a sleazy wet-T-shirt contest host (Eli Roth) playing ringmasters to the debauchery. It’s not a good sign that Shue’s teen son (Steven McQueen, Steve’s grandson) gets pulled into the craziness. And you know things are out of control when not even Ving Rhames with a bullhorn can command the crowd’s attention.

Of course, there are even bigger problems than crazy college kids. Those would be the thousands of starving prehistoric piranha that the aforementioned seismic activity has unleashed. Local scientist Doc Brown, I mean, Mr. Goodman (played by none other than – great Scott! – Christopher Lloyd) has grave pronouncements to make about the deadliness and danger brought by these aquatic killers. The opening scenes, and perhaps even half of the movie, alternate between scenes of ridiculously vulgar partying and swift, ominous shadows darting through the water. By the time the piranha attacks arrive, I was good and ready for some creepy-cool 3D comeuppances.

Rather than spacing them out through the length of the film, the majority of the deaths occur during one long bloody massacre of Spring-Breakers in what can only be described as the goofy gory centerpiece of the film. To be sure, some of the deaths are quite witty, like when a particularly buxom babe gets sucked underwater with, seconds later, two silicone spheres floating to the surface. It’s also a chilling rush to see hundreds of people thrashing through the water past their dying friends, capsizing boats and rafts while piranhas get blown away with shotguns and sliced to bits with boat motors. The water runs red with the blood of man and beast alike. But, after a while, what starts as horror-movie fun just grows sad. There’s a consistent, persistent intensity to this sequence that becomes literal overkill. The violence is so vivid and so sustained that it moves well past its purpose.

After the massacre we are given some perfunctory scenes of action and incident that are meant to resolve the immediate peril of the surviving characters. But then, it’s over. There’s a nice, shocking punchline that sends us into the credits (albeit one that’s front and center in the advertising), but the sense of disappointment is tough to shake. Sure, Shue’s family gives the movie a nice through line, but there’s little else of narrative interest. As the credits rolled, I found myself in a state of disbelief. The movie feels unfinished, like screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg wrote two-thirds of story and then never got around to writing a proper climax. The massacre makes for an overlong climax when it really feels like it should be the midpoint. I didn’t exactly enjoy the movie, but I wish it were longer.

Then again, this is a movie that really only promises to give you people being eaten by piranhas in 3D. It succeeds on that count. But the violence would have gone down better if it weren’t so confined in mostly that one sequence. And when the movie comes stocked with such charismatic performers like Lloyd and Rhames, Shue and Scott, is it wrong to expect that they be given something to do? They barely have a chance to stretch their genre muscles. Aja has made a movie that’s in the spirit of all kinds of fun, trashy low-budget horror flicks, but he is much more successful at bringing the trashy than making it fun.