House at the End of the Street (2012)

I'm kind of in love with Jennifer Lawrence lately.  The Hunger Games was awesome, and she's just so pretty and not skeleton thin and just all around fabulous.  And does Elisabeth Shue ever age?  Seriously, she looks like she just stepped off the set of Adventures in Babysitting.

I originally thought this was a remake, but maybe I'm just confusing it with movies of similar titles.  Scream King says that you should just skip to the last 30 minutes of this movie, since that was the only cool part.  Well, it was definitely the best part, but I don't know if I'd advise skipping the majority of the movie.   It's gotten pretty mediocre reviews across the board, but I thought it was decent, especially compared to a lot of current crap being put out.

The premise is nothing incredibly new.  A teenager, Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) and her newly-divorced mom, Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) are renting a house very cheaply in a new town.  The reason they are able to get it for such a great price?  Oh, no big deal, just that a young girl killed her parents in the place next door.  Elissa discovers that the girl's brother, Ryan (Max Thieriot) is still living in the home, fixing it up and preparing to sell.

Elissa is attracted to Ryan's sensitivity and broodiness, like many teenage girls are.  But the townspeople are less than welcoming to Ryan, believing that the house is dragging down their property values.  The more Sarah tries to keep Elissa away from Ryan, the more attracted she becomes.  Meanwhile, it seems like Ryan is keeping a little secret in the basement...

This movie had a couple of fun little twists, nothing that we haven't seen before, but they work here.  There were a couple of odd plot holes, like the presence of a key when a door was set to lock from the outside.  And some little side-stories that I didn't care about, like Elissa's band or whatever.  So nothing groundbreaking here, but all in all, I'll say I liked it.