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| The House Next Door (2021) Movie Review: Horror Thriller or Lame Thriller? |
The House Next Door is a new horror thriller that is currently in theaters. It's rated R. The story is about a couple expecting their first child. They discover that their neighbors have gone missing.
The couple suspects the house next door is haunted. This is a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat, but will it be scary enough to scare you? Here are my thoughts on the movie.
The House Next Door is a Netflix original movie, which is a bit of a warning sign, to be honest. It's a horror/thriller/mystery that's supposed to be super scary, but I feel it falls short of its potential. I'll be honest with you. This is a hard one to review.
I feel like I have to mention the plot in some detail to give you some idea of the movie and my opinion of it, but I don't want to give anything away. Here's the basic idea behind the movie. There's this house. It's in a nice neighborhood and it looks normal, but the family who lives there, the Lesters, are not.
The House Next Door is a horror thriller that had me on the edge of my seat. The story follows a family who moves into a house next door to a serial killer’s old home.
They think they’ve found the perfect family home. It’s peaceful, the neighbors are friendly, and the house is quaint. But the house next door is actually hiding a dark past.
Could this house be the serial killer’s old home? I loved this movie. It was a horror thriller that had me on the edge of my seat.
Here’s everything we know so far about The House Next Door (2021) Movie:
Cast and characters:
Mike Epps - Carl Black
Katt Williams - Dr. Mamuwalde
Bresha Webb - Allie
Zulay Henao - Lorena
Lil Duval - Cronut
Michael Blackson - Mr. Wooky
Danny Trejo - Hugo
Directed By - Deon Taylor
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Genre - Action, Comedy And Horror
Language - English And Hindi
Release Date - 11 June 2021
Is the House Next Door a horror thriller or a lame thriller?
I'm not sure. The movie is very much a sequel, set years later. (Could be more, could be less, depending on how you look at it.) The house isn't the only thing that's changed. Carl has two adult sons, who can't seem to accept their mom's new life.
Drew (Christopher Denham) is a successful writer with an unrequited crush on his sister Katie (Lindsey Gort). Cody (Paul Welsh) is a half - starved writer who can't write worth a damn and has a giant scar running up his leg.
I guess this was supposed to make things more dramatic, but the writing just seems silly. The plot is pretty standard, too. Carl sells his house to a developer, and he moves back in with his parents. Now that his house is vacant, everything is starting to disappear.
The plot
A good part of The House Next Door follows the same pattern that horror movies normally follow – an innocent family moving into an old mansion, only to have a serial killer plot to exterminate them.
Like the majority of horror movies, it is not a case of straight horror, with gruesome scenes without a chaser of either thrills or scares. In other words, The House Next Door is about a series of fake murders, one after another.
Why this might be good:
There are elements that can be seen in a small number of horror movies, and it works on these bases – random murders that make no sense, but which fit into a larger puzzle and allow the villain and hero to move ahead in their journey.
The actors
Keanu Reeves as Carl Black and Willem Dafoe as Anders Treiber are much-needed in this movie. It is good to see Reeves trying his hand at comedy in a genre that he isn’t normally associated with.
I’m sure he will come up with something original with the ‘Goosebumps’ based project he is attached to direct for Sony. Dafoe is back as Dr. Treiber, and he is his usual excitable self, whereas Katie Holmes does little to make this whole story come together.
The cast was enhanced by a few comic turns from Kristen Schaal, Eugene Cordero and Nicholas Braun. The rest of the cast features Dane DeHaan (Hotel Transylvania), Fiona Dourif (The Guest) and Peter Stormare (Fargo) in smaller roles, playing the evil humans in a town filled with the beautiful good people.
The Good
The Good Screenplay. DeNiro and Keitel give excellent performances, along with the rest of the cast. DeNiro pulls off a real sarcastic tone with Keitel, and their relationship goes all the way back to the 1980 movie “Panic Room”. Director James Wan does a wonderful job creating a creepy mood with the first half.
The characters in the story are relatable, even if you are not from Pittsburgh or Chicago. There are some great moments in this story where the script leads you to believe something strange is going on, but you get your answers after the fact.
You will wonder if you missed something or not if you have not read the book. For me the scary parts were not the best part of the movie.
The Bad
So there we have the intriguing plot to a good horror movie: The new family moves back into a house that happened to be the scene of a gruesome murder committed by a madman who lived there.
I know what you are thinking. And I can almost see you already sliding your smartphone out of your pocket or purse to begin gathering your thoughts. But you must be wrong.
This is a comedy. Well, sort of. If you get the humor of the writers and directors (Adam McKay and Will Ferrell) here right, there is an inherent wit that may prove to be unexpectedly funny. And the slick effects work is more than adequate.
But for me, it just doesn’t work. It’s a bad movie with bad comedy and a low gross if one can imagine. It will be fine on cable television if you aren’t expecting a great movie.
What I Liked
Haunting Body Language The movement of body language in the movie was excellent. Sometimes in horror movies, I don’t see any real body movements and the actor keeps the face straight ahead, looking at the character in the close-up or the one out in the front.
But that wasn’t the case here and the dynamic between the three main characters was excellent. The body language in the movie is what you see on the faces. The horror in the movie comes from the lack of body language, not the body.
You also get very good looking people in this movie. In some ways, I’d classify this movie as a rip off of the Deliverance movie with the same evil pimp figure and an old hillbilly slacker turning out to be a nasty psycho killer.
What I Didn’t Like
A sequel? A sequel to a franchise that needs a reboot? The premise is a classic horror movie trope: A family moves into a big old house, and soon things start to go wrong. The most memorable example of this is the 1973 film, The Amityville Horror.
The famous premise of that film was that a family moves into an old house, and all of the classic movie tropes start happening: They’re tormented by strange happenings, they open all of the doors and windows, they start to feel like they’re being watched, they start to hear loud knocking sounds, etc.
It’s a classic horror film premise, but it’s one that many new horror films exploit. Why make a sequel to a film where nothing bad happens?
Conclusion
If you are not a fan of super violent horror movies, do not buy this movie! They expect the audience to sit through this boring mess of a movie. I did try to watch this movie, and for about 20 minutes, I enjoyed it.
But the movie descended into a ridiculous and boring mess after that. It is almost like the movie makers were trying to hide a bad script. Every time the movie has to change locations or scenes in the movie, they stop the action and just run through the script and cut out all the good stuff.
Then they start over again. Overall, the movie is a disappointment. Although the movie has its moments, it seems as if the movie makers were hoping the movie will be watched in half hour chunks or even more like the original screenplay.