Chix Chat on Film Review: A creepy thrill.

Rating: 7/10 (16 October 2012)

This film is definitely a new look for Ethan Hawke (Ellison Oswalt), and it was a whole lot of him. Most of the scenes consisted of Ellison drinking and freaking out. I don't recall ever having seen Mr. Hawke in a horror flick before. Actually, I would say that this tale about the mass murder of entire families was more of a creepy thriller than a horror flick. There were indeed some horrific occurrences, but I have to say that I appreciated the fact that it wasn't simply a gorefest, and that there was an actual story to be told. Ellison is a writer and in an attempt to reclaim the glory from once having had a top selling crime story, he moves his family into the home of a family that has recently been murdered. I found the fact that his wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) preferred to know as little as possible about the what, when and how of Ellison's preparation for acquiring the reference material for his new book. Not so surprising in this case ignorance is not bliss. The trailer did a good job of conveying just how creepy this film is, with the scene of Ellison's son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) bending over backwards out of a moving box. That little exercise in flexibility turned out to be a red herring, but it was still pretty creepy. Fortunately, there was some comic relief that came in the form of Deputy So and So (James Ransome), who was so much more helpful than one would think upon the initial meeting. It was too funny when he rattles off to Ellison exactly how he felt about moving his family into that house. The explanation of who the culprit is in this case was delivered in a plausible manner, so I had no real issues with the story telling. I knew fairly early in the story how the murders were being executed, pun intended, so there was that level of predictability. I'm so not a horror genre fan, my idea of an acceptable horror flick is Happily N'Ever After, but this film wasn't too bad to experience. A lesson learned is if you knowingly move your family into a house where the entire family was murdered and there are no leads for an arrest, then don't expect that you will have a different outcome. But hey if people could take a hint, there would be no horror stories. I give it an amber light.