The Worst DVD Releases of January 2013

 Rating: 15/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:A forgettable wasteRemember when movies revolved around children were just that, children movies? Nowadays, you’re lucky not to find adult themes in movies where the majority of the cast is kids. Now, depending on the setting, it is becoming increasingly acceptable, and honestly quite hilarious. However, no matter whether it is children or adult themed, “Nature Calls” cannot be saved.Patton Oswalt plays Randy, your typical Boy Scout enthusiast that wants nothing more than to get out one last time with his dying father to camp out with the boy scouts. There is one problem, no longer are the scouts a thing. Instead, the boys would rather stay in and watch television all night. After the boys have a sleepover, Randy kidnaps the boys and tells them they are going on an adventure. Randy’s brother, Kirk (Johnny Knoxville), learns about this, and ventures off to find and destroy his brother, as being a Boy Scout and camping is obviously the worse thing in the world.In the scheme of things, that is all the movie has to offer. There is no real heart underneath the rest of the garbage that this film holds, and the comedy is extremely dull. It will be a surprise if anyone finds this film funny. In fact, the movie is not even deserving of a failed TV sitcom. It was that bad. What was the goal of the movie? Surely it wasn’t to teach boys the importance of being a Scout, because that was ignored. Surely it wasn’t about making an audience laugh, because practically the entire film lacked humor. It may have tried to get these messages across, but nothing was effective.Imagine a screenwriter sitting at a desk about to lose his job if he doesn’t write another movie, and this is what he wrote. That’s right, it may not be true, but this film may as well have been a filler project in order to keep one screenwriter from losing a job, nothing more. What is hard to pinpoint is the reason why some of the actors in the film chose their roles, because it wasn’t filled with unknowns, there was a few very recognizable names in the film. Other than Oswalt and Knoxville, there was also Rob Riggle, Darrell Hammond, and even Maura Tierney.Some of these actors have gone beyond proving their abilities in the past with unforgettable roles. Where were their heads when they chose roles for this film? Is their career really that lacking to be at the point where any movie was a good choice? The only thing you might think is that the movie was trying to be “Moonrise Kingdom”, another Boy Scout centered film that received an abundance of positive reception. However much it may have attempted to be like “Moonrise Kingdom”, it failed at every turn.If you took the time to write down a list of both positives and negatives in the film, your list would be overflowing with negatives while the positives may have you getting stuck past the actors involved. This is only a prime example of when picking known actors doesn’t subsequently make a movie good. You will only end up feeling bad for some of them, mostly speaking Patton Oswalt. His role was a stinker, as was the movie as a whole.“Nature Calls” came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 22, so you know which movie to avoid when you see it at your local Wal-Mart.Rating: 09/100Dave's 3-Word Review:Robotic and EmotionlessAs they hype for the "Twilight" films dies down, Pattison fans everywhere will begin looking for his other works apart from the vampire series, one such film, "Cosmopolis" will be hitting the DVD and Blu-Ray shelves early 2013. The real question is if Pattison can stay on par in his ability to charm teen girls? In "Cosmopolis", probably not teen girls, nor anyone else at that matter.Billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattison) wants a haircut, so on a day of heavy traffic, he hops into his limousine and inches along in the slowest of traffic jams. Along the way, Eric runs into a number of strange characters to which he asks them the secrets of the universe, and takes a look at everything in this world as something incredibly deep with its own separate and meaningful story. Meanwhile, the President of the United States is in town, and for some reason or another, Eric and the President may both be in danger.The writing does respectively seem like it has an element of positive attributes to it, but without a proper platform that will keep people interested, the writing will fail to impress. In this scenario, the only thing that will keep an audience member intrigued is the strange tones. There are plenty of films out there with a strange tone that are ultimately great, but there is just too many negatives to take into account.The premise is only about a guy wanting a haircut, and the rest is filled with impossibly ridiculous conversations. While its strange tone may intrigue a viewer as to how this dream-like state will play out, it just ends up feeling like a dream. Imagine sleeping and accepting the world around you, despite its ridiculousness in retrospect. It is harder to accept ridiculousness when you are awake and realize how unbelievable this film is. There is no connection with audience members who enjoy believability. Imagine a slew of robots having conversations that they think are intelligent but come off as failed attempts that are simply put, laughable and fake. Now imagine a stereotypical wannabe poet that practices his poems in front of a near empty crowd with the remaining audience snoring. No, the characters in this film are not robots, nor boring poets, but they might as well be with their robotic conversations and emotionless reactions.The characters that Eric speaks to throughout the film show up out of no where and have absolutely no introduction. There are so many characters, and every time the viewer is going to have a very difficult time not asking "where the heck are these people even coming from?" To be perfectly honest, it makes absolutely no sense, and it won't take the average viewer very long to press stop.This film is very soft-spoken. Every character speaks slowly and softly as if they are high on marijuana and the music is a constant ambient hum. Everything about the movie has the elements to help someone fall asleep. To be perfectly honest, the movie is boring, very boring. It feels pointless, the acting is robotic and detached, it has an incredibly weak foundation and underdeveloped plot. The only good acting in the entire film was done by the short appearance of Paul Giamatti, and that is stretching it. For some of you, you may feel the desire to pull your hair out.This film has a very small window for an audience that may actually enjoy it, as the film has typically mixed reviews around the world of reviews. Sometimes you might say love or hate, in this case it may be hate or tolerate. If you believe this is a gamble worth pursuing, be my guest."Cosmopolis" came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 1! Rating: 22/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:Saw for SuperheroesWho out there remembers the popular horror film series that got a ridiculous amount of sequels? I’m not talking about the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, but rather the “Saw” films. That’s right, the franchise that released a new film every year for seven years. Like countless horror films, other movies like it began popping up trying to whisk some of that popularity up for themselves, but for the most part, these wannabes disappeared as of lately. That is until the film “All Superheroes Must Die” showed up bringing back clear memories of the “Saw” films.We have four superheroes that wake up with injection marks in their wrist. Their names are Charge (Jason Trost), Cutthroat (Lucas Till), Sledgesaw (Nick Principe), and Shadow (Sophie Merkley). Each one of these heroes are greeted by their arch nemesis, Rickshaw (James Remar). Rickshaw is tired of losing to these heroes, and wants to win, so he has removed them of their powers and tells them that he wants to play a game. The game entails going around town trying to save civilians before they get blown up from explosives that are wired to them. So these heroes must work together to figure out how to be heroes without their powers.If you are wondering what powers these heroes have, you can stop wondering now, because wondering will lead you nowhere. The film never goes into detail about who these heroes are, or what their abilities are except for Shadow having the power of invisibility. It slightly explains how they got powers to begin with through a flashback, but it never shows us anything. We also don’t know anything about these heroes’ background other than these two use to have feelings for each other. The development is just so ridiculously bad. There is no foundation, there is no chemistry, and there is no reason why we should even care who lives or dies.The oddest part about the entire movie is why James Remar accepted his role. The man is very good at acting as his role in “Dexter” has proven. In the midst of everything else, he is the only known actor in the entire film, and he just doesn’t seem to fit his role of Rickshaw. By the way, the villain in “Saw” was Jigsaw, who also used a small television set to talk to the main players, are we noticing any resemblances here? Okay fine, there was very little gore in the film, but to be perfectly honest, it is probably because they didn’t have the budget to supply gore; which is probably the same reason why we never see any powers.The budget is so bad that it looks like a student project for school. The same can be said for the stale acting and ridiculous premise that holds no footing to even be remotely good. To be fair, a lot of the same can be said for the first “Saw” film, which did an excellent job. However, this film does have that overwhelming sense of being a wannabe, but not much of anything else. You won’t be able to contain yourself before pressing the red stop button on your remote control.So many people enjoy superheroes just because they are superheroes. It makes sense, as those grew up around the idea of these great and iconic people who are nothing but selfless. These heroes wore tacky outfits, cursed, and didn’t seem to care all that much about civilians as they did about not failing. That’s selfish, rude, and unbecoming of a superhero. It’s actually more fitting for a villain.Basically, the problem here is that these so-called “heroes” were more of a villain than the actual villain of the film, and for that reason the movie is dumb, unprofessional, dimwitted, and just not worth your time. When “All Superheroes Must Die” comes to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 29, I suggest you stay away from it.View the list »
 Rating: 0/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:I feel InsultedParody films used to be appreciated more back in the day. Back when Leslie Nielson lit up the screen with amazing comedy that was both rude, random, and hysterical. Why were they so great back then? Simple, because they had original stories and characters. They didn’t originally spoof off of specific characters and movies, they spoofed off of the idea and off of stereotypes. Remember in “Airplane!” the pilot that had a “drinking problem”? That was hilarious, and all original. They have changed a lot since then, and only a few remain great in the ways they began. The rest seem to hold a similar pattern of going way too far, and not making any sense. You can already tell from the title that “30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” will be one of those failing films. Their first mistake was one of the easiest to avoid, the title, which they didn’t even try on. After watching this film, you will begin to notice the title is not the only thing lacking attempt.As mentioned above, poorly done parody films are often confusing regarding plot of the film. There is an easy explanation to that, but we’ll get to that in a second. To give you an idea of what the film is about, just look at the title, it is obviously based off of “30 Days of Night“, “Paranormal Activity“, “The Devil Inside” and randomly “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“. The arc of the film followed closest to “Paranormal Activity” with the found footage and overall story. However, there was way more films, television shows, and even commercials spoofed throughout the movie. Way too much, out of context and out of place.It would be impossible to mention how many things are spoofed in the film unless you were taking note of every time something popped up. Did it make any sense? Not at all. Sure, they may have been aiming for random humor, but it just shows up as random without the humor, and just plain annoying. It was incredibly jumbled up, and no one will be able to follow the story at all. Not that the story was any good, because it wasn’t. That is why parodies are often confusing, because they have no idea about how to organize their material appropriately.The reason why the story was ridiculous is because a lot of people, probably the filmmakers included, find many horror films to be alike. So, whoever it was that wrote this, thought these films could interact with each other well because they were so similar. The problem with that is the fact that they aren’t similar. At all. The stories don’t mingle well, and yes, it adds to the cluster and adds to the growing population of parody-haters.So, the comedy is terrible, the story is lazy and put together by someone who doesn’t understand film, and the acting was horrid. Not only this, but the editing was bad too. In “Paranormal Activity” and films like it, there is often a timer on the bottom right hand side of the screen that tells the time. Because it is found footage, it is often cut at weird places. Usually, the editor is smart enough to not only cut the video of the person popping around the screen, but to also cut the timer so the time at least looks appropriate. In this movie, we have the cut video frames with a person popping around the room signifying time past, with a timer that continues on the bottom as if it is a continuous shot. That is just lazy and unprofessional, and again….doesn’t make a lick of sense.Towards the beginning of the film, we have two women that find a tape that says “found footage” and when they play it, it would appear to have the elements of found footage while being made fun of at the same time. One issue, there is narration. You will never find a found-footage film with narration. That part wasn’t making fun of found-footage or anything, it was just poorly written like everything else. This movie is bad folks, don’t mess around with it. If the devil were a filmmaker that made movies just to get people angry, this movie would be worse.“30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 15! So don’t get it!

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Every month, we are offered a wide variety of DVD and Blu-Ray releases that we are sure to either look out for or avoid. However, some of us don't really know what some of the movies are about or if we should even pay them any attention. In the month of January, we were offered twenty-six movies on DVD and Blu-Ray, and those movies were (in alphabetical order):

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  1. 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity
  2. All Superheroes Must Die
  3. Branded
  4. Cold Light of Day
  5. Compliance
  6. Cosmopolis
  7. Dredd
  8. End of Watch
  9. For a Good Time, Call
  10. Frankenweenie
  11. Game Change
  12. Guns, Girls & Gambling
  13. Hit & Run
  14. Hotel Transylvania
  15. House at the End of the Street
  16. Nature Calls
  17. Nobody Walks
  18. Paperboy, The
  19. Paranormal Activity 4
  20. Possession, The
  21. Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden
  22. Seven Psychopaths
  23. Stolen
  24. Taken 2
  25. The Awakening
  26. Won't Back Down

So in this wide range of movies, what were the top five movie releases that are the worst of the bunch, and that we should definitely avoid? This list offers a good idea of movies to look out for the next time you are at a DVD rack.

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  •  Rating: 0/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:I feel InsultedParody films used to be appreciated more back in the day. Back when Leslie Nielson lit up the screen with amazing comedy that was both rude, random, and hysterical. Why were they so great back then? Simple, because they had original stories and characters. They didn’t originally spoof off of specific characters and movies, they spoofed off of the idea and off of stereotypes. Remember in “Airplane!” the pilot that had a “drinking problem”? That was hilarious, and all original. They have changed a lot since then, and only a few remain great in the ways they began. The rest seem to hold a similar pattern of going way too far, and not making any sense. You can already tell from the title that “30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” will be one of those failing films. Their first mistake was one of the easiest to avoid, the title, which they didn’t even try on. After watching this film, you will begin to notice the title is not the only thing lacking attempt.As mentioned above, poorly done parody films are often confusing regarding plot of the film. There is an easy explanation to that, but we’ll get to that in a second. To give you an idea of what the film is about, just look at the title, it is obviously based off of “30 Days of Night“, “Paranormal Activity“, “The Devil Inside” and randomly “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“. The arc of the film followed closest to “Paranormal Activity” with the found footage and overall story. However, there was way more films, television shows, and even commercials spoofed throughout the movie. Way too much, out of context and out of place.It would be impossible to mention how many things are spoofed in the film unless you were taking note of every time something popped up. Did it make any sense? Not at all. Sure, they may have been aiming for random humor, but it just shows up as random without the humor, and just plain annoying. It was incredibly jumbled up, and no one will be able to follow the story at all. Not that the story was any good, because it wasn’t. That is why parodies are often confusing, because they have no idea about how to organize their material appropriately.The reason why the story was ridiculous is because a lot of people, probably the filmmakers included, find many horror films to be alike. So, whoever it was that wrote this, thought these films could interact with each other well because they were so similar. The problem with that is the fact that they aren’t similar. At all. The stories don’t mingle well, and yes, it adds to the cluster and adds to the growing population of parody-haters.So, the comedy is terrible, the story is lazy and put together by someone who doesn’t understand film, and the acting was horrid. Not only this, but the editing was bad too. In “Paranormal Activity” and films like it, there is often a timer on the bottom right hand side of the screen that tells the time. Because it is found footage, it is often cut at weird places. Usually, the editor is smart enough to not only cut the video of the person popping around the screen, but to also cut the timer so the time at least looks appropriate. In this movie, we have the cut video frames with a person popping around the room signifying time past, with a timer that continues on the bottom as if it is a continuous shot. That is just lazy and unprofessional, and again….doesn’t make a lick of sense.Towards the beginning of the film, we have two women that find a tape that says “found footage” and when they play it, it would appear to have the elements of found footage while being made fun of at the same time. One issue, there is narration. You will never find a found-footage film with narration. That part wasn’t making fun of found-footage or anything, it was just poorly written like everything else. This movie is bad folks, don’t mess around with it. If the devil were a filmmaker that made movies just to get people angry, this movie would be worse.“30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 15! So don’t get it!
  •  Rating: 22/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:Saw for SuperheroesWho out there remembers the popular horror film series that got a ridiculous amount of sequels? I’m not talking about the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, but rather the “Saw” films. That’s right, the franchise that released a new film every year for seven years. Like countless horror films, other movies like it began popping up trying to whisk some of that popularity up for themselves, but for the most part, these wannabes disappeared as of lately. That is until the film “All Superheroes Must Die” showed up bringing back clear memories of the “Saw” films.We have four superheroes that wake up with injection marks in their wrist. Their names are Charge (Jason Trost), Cutthroat (Lucas Till), Sledgesaw (Nick Principe), and Shadow (Sophie Merkley). Each one of these heroes are greeted by their arch nemesis, Rickshaw (James Remar). Rickshaw is tired of losing to these heroes, and wants to win, so he has removed them of their powers and tells them that he wants to play a game. The game entails going around town trying to save civilians before they get blown up from explosives that are wired to them. So these heroes must work together to figure out how to be heroes without their powers.If you are wondering what powers these heroes have, you can stop wondering now, because wondering will lead you nowhere. The film never goes into detail about who these heroes are, or what their abilities are except for Shadow having the power of invisibility. It slightly explains how they got powers to begin with through a flashback, but it never shows us anything. We also don’t know anything about these heroes’ background other than these two use to have feelings for each other. The development is just so ridiculously bad. There is no foundation, there is no chemistry, and there is no reason why we should even care who lives or dies.The oddest part about the entire movie is why James Remar accepted his role. The man is very good at acting as his role in “Dexter” has proven. In the midst of everything else, he is the only known actor in the entire film, and he just doesn’t seem to fit his role of Rickshaw. By the way, the villain in “Saw” was Jigsaw, who also used a small television set to talk to the main players, are we noticing any resemblances here? Okay fine, there was very little gore in the film, but to be perfectly honest, it is probably because they didn’t have the budget to supply gore; which is probably the same reason why we never see any powers.The budget is so bad that it looks like a student project for school. The same can be said for the stale acting and ridiculous premise that holds no footing to even be remotely good. To be fair, a lot of the same can be said for the first “Saw” film, which did an excellent job. However, this film does have that overwhelming sense of being a wannabe, but not much of anything else. You won’t be able to contain yourself before pressing the red stop button on your remote control.So many people enjoy superheroes just because they are superheroes. It makes sense, as those grew up around the idea of these great and iconic people who are nothing but selfless. These heroes wore tacky outfits, cursed, and didn’t seem to care all that much about civilians as they did about not failing. That’s selfish, rude, and unbecoming of a superhero. It’s actually more fitting for a villain.Basically, the problem here is that these so-called “heroes” were more of a villain than the actual villain of the film, and for that reason the movie is dumb, unprofessional, dimwitted, and just not worth your time. When “All Superheroes Must Die” comes to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 29, I suggest you stay away from it.
  • Rating: 09/100Dave's 3-Word Review:Robotic and EmotionlessAs they hype for the "Twilight" films dies down, Pattison fans everywhere will begin looking for his other works apart from the vampire series, one such film, "Cosmopolis" will be hitting the DVD and Blu-Ray shelves early 2013. The real question is if Pattison can stay on par in his ability to charm teen girls? In "Cosmopolis", probably not teen girls, nor anyone else at that matter.Billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattison) wants a haircut, so on a day of heavy traffic, he hops into his limousine and inches along in the slowest of traffic jams. Along the way, Eric runs into a number of strange characters to which he asks them the secrets of the universe, and takes a look at everything in this world as something incredibly deep with its own separate and meaningful story. Meanwhile, the President of the United States is in town, and for some reason or another, Eric and the President may both be in danger.The writing does respectively seem like it has an element of positive attributes to it, but without a proper platform that will keep people interested, the writing will fail to impress. In this scenario, the only thing that will keep an audience member intrigued is the strange tones. There are plenty of films out there with a strange tone that are ultimately great, but there is just too many negatives to take into account.The premise is only about a guy wanting a haircut, and the rest is filled with impossibly ridiculous conversations. While its strange tone may intrigue a viewer as to how this dream-like state will play out, it just ends up feeling like a dream. Imagine sleeping and accepting the world around you, despite its ridiculousness in retrospect. It is harder to accept ridiculousness when you are awake and realize how unbelievable this film is. There is no connection with audience members who enjoy believability. Imagine a slew of robots having conversations that they think are intelligent but come off as failed attempts that are simply put, laughable and fake. Now imagine a stereotypical wannabe poet that practices his poems in front of a near empty crowd with the remaining audience snoring. No, the characters in this film are not robots, nor boring poets, but they might as well be with their robotic conversations and emotionless reactions.The characters that Eric speaks to throughout the film show up out of no where and have absolutely no introduction. There are so many characters, and every time the viewer is going to have a very difficult time not asking "where the heck are these people even coming from?" To be perfectly honest, it makes absolutely no sense, and it won't take the average viewer very long to press stop.This film is very soft-spoken. Every character speaks slowly and softly as if they are high on marijuana and the music is a constant ambient hum. Everything about the movie has the elements to help someone fall asleep. To be perfectly honest, the movie is boring, very boring. It feels pointless, the acting is robotic and detached, it has an incredibly weak foundation and underdeveloped plot. The only good acting in the entire film was done by the short appearance of Paul Giamatti, and that is stretching it. For some of you, you may feel the desire to pull your hair out.This film has a very small window for an audience that may actually enjoy it, as the film has typically mixed reviews around the world of reviews. Sometimes you might say love or hate, in this case it may be hate or tolerate. If you believe this is a gamble worth pursuing, be my guest."Cosmopolis" came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 1!
  •  Rating: 15/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:A forgettable wasteRemember when movies revolved around children were just that, children movies? Nowadays, you’re lucky not to find adult themes in movies where the majority of the cast is kids. Now, depending on the setting, it is becoming increasingly acceptable, and honestly quite hilarious. However, no matter whether it is children or adult themed, “Nature Calls” cannot be saved.Patton Oswalt plays Randy, your typical Boy Scout enthusiast that wants nothing more than to get out one last time with his dying father to camp out with the boy scouts. There is one problem, no longer are the scouts a thing. Instead, the boys would rather stay in and watch television all night. After the boys have a sleepover, Randy kidnaps the boys and tells them they are going on an adventure. Randy’s brother, Kirk (Johnny Knoxville), learns about this, and ventures off to find and destroy his brother, as being a Boy Scout and camping is obviously the worse thing in the world.In the scheme of things, that is all the movie has to offer. There is no real heart underneath the rest of the garbage that this film holds, and the comedy is extremely dull. It will be a surprise if anyone finds this film funny. In fact, the movie is not even deserving of a failed TV sitcom. It was that bad. What was the goal of the movie? Surely it wasn’t to teach boys the importance of being a Scout, because that was ignored. Surely it wasn’t about making an audience laugh, because practically the entire film lacked humor. It may have tried to get these messages across, but nothing was effective.Imagine a screenwriter sitting at a desk about to lose his job if he doesn’t write another movie, and this is what he wrote. That’s right, it may not be true, but this film may as well have been a filler project in order to keep one screenwriter from losing a job, nothing more. What is hard to pinpoint is the reason why some of the actors in the film chose their roles, because it wasn’t filled with unknowns, there was a few very recognizable names in the film. Other than Oswalt and Knoxville, there was also Rob Riggle, Darrell Hammond, and even Maura Tierney.Some of these actors have gone beyond proving their abilities in the past with unforgettable roles. Where were their heads when they chose roles for this film? Is their career really that lacking to be at the point where any movie was a good choice? The only thing you might think is that the movie was trying to be “Moonrise Kingdom”, another Boy Scout centered film that received an abundance of positive reception. However much it may have attempted to be like “Moonrise Kingdom”, it failed at every turn.If you took the time to write down a list of both positives and negatives in the film, your list would be overflowing with negatives while the positives may have you getting stuck past the actors involved. This is only a prime example of when picking known actors doesn’t subsequently make a movie good. You will only end up feeling bad for some of them, mostly speaking Patton Oswalt. His role was a stinker, as was the movie as a whole.“Nature Calls” came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 22, so you know which movie to avoid when you see it at your local Wal-Mart.
  •  Rating: 23/100Dave’s 3-Word Review:Don’t. Just don’t.It’s nearing the end of the year, and the beginning of 2013 is bound to have a collection of incredible, fascinating, and even tear-jerking films. At the same time, you are bound to have films that in the end, just don’t accomplish what they set out for. One such film is “House at the End of the Street” a horror film fails to horrify.Our story begins four years ago, when a girl named Carrie Anne (Eva Link) murdered her parents and subsequently went missing. When Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) and her mother Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) move into the house next door, they immediately converse about the horror of what transpired in their neighbors home years ago. Almost instantly, they learn there was a sole survivor of the tragic events, the killer’s brother, Ryan (Max Thieriot).One night after a party, Ryan and Elissa meet and initially, all seems well, but there is more than meets the eye with Ryan. It would appear Ryan has found his sister and has since imprisoned her in the cellar.First things first, this is a horror film. This means that there has to be at least something that resembles horror. Give me gore, give me something that pops out, give me a slow suspenseful thriller with just the sliver of an idea that implants itself in your head, disturbing you in a frightening way. It has to feel like a horror, in which this film doesn’t. Instead, its slow-moving nature and questions have it feeling more of a drama/mystery than anything.Any movie, regardless of the genre, needs to have a point. If “House at the End of the Street” had a point, it is hard to distinguish. As it sets out to be a horror, its attempted point was to escape at any cost. The problem was that it didn’t feel like a horror, so the audience never feels any sense of danger for themselves or the characters, thus making it nearly impossible to sense a reason to escape. So is there a point? Absolutely, just accompanied with a poor excuse to an execution.So Ryan is trying his best to take care of his demented sister, or is he? Why he never calls the police or any psychologists in order to get his sister the help she needs was beyond me while watching a majority of this film. She clearly has a way of escaping, and seeing that she is supposedly an animal, and seeing how he cannot seem to stop her, then maybe sometime during the four years, he should have asked for some help? Taking care of a psychopath is also not scary, it’s just confusing. Again, there is a reason to everything, but dropping hints to a number of explanations would have been helpful, instead it gives you no explanation. The audience will find it very difficult to follow a story that doesn’t seem to have a plot, and is void of any scares, as the genre promises.Jennifer Lawrence does what she can with the role and lines that she was provided with, but not enough to the point of being unique. Anyone could have played her role, and the underdeveloped character of Elissa could probably never be unique as is. It’s a question as to why Lawrence accepted the role to begin with. To be honest, the same thing can be said for any one role in the film. At the least, there are characters in this film that would have been beneficial, and important to the future of one of the major characters. The one way they could have ended it slightly satisfactory was completely ruined.[Slight Spoiler Warning: There is actually a decent twist near the end of the film. The kind of twist that might actually make a viewer want to watch it a second time to catch hints. Keep in mind that this twist is the only thing that makes the film slightly enjoyable. It's psychological and it makes you think. It is the only hint that this film has elements of horror. The problem is that it is just not enough in the long run.]There aren’t a lot of great things to be said about this film, but in the end it really isn’t the worst movie in the world. It may be far from the best or even good, but there are far worse films than this that you may run into. The one thing it did have going for it was the mystery. Whether they set out to have that mystery or not is besides the point. It gives you questions that you want answers to, and yes, it eventually does answer those questions. Take that as you will.“House at the End of the Street” came to Blu-Ray and DVD on Jan. 8!
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, South Bend Movie Examiner

David Gilleand (24) is a film enthusiast and an established movie critic that has been featured on video sites such as Veoh.com and Nudia.tv. He has directly worked with names like Clifton Armstrong who worked as an Assistant Editor for "Jon & Kate Plus 8" as well as Jay Glatfelter from the...

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