Dream House

The plot: Will Atenton (Daniel Craig) moves into a new house with his wife; Libby (Rachel Weisz) and their two children; Dee Dee and Trish. Soon after moving in, their daughters begin to see a strange man lurking around, and after some research, Will finds out that the previous owners will all murdered by someone in their family; Peter Ward. Will begins to think that Peter Ward is back to get his family and the rest of the movie is about his discovery about Peter Ward and who the man lurking around is once and for all.

The good: There's very little redeeming here, so I'm going to have to start grasping at straws.....oh, Naomi Watts (who plays the Atenton's neighbor) and Rachel Weisz perform well here with the bare, minimal material they are given. Seriously...about 20 minutes total of speaking time for the both of them. Way to take the good things and squish them like a family of bugs.

The bad: Oh boy, where the hell do I start? Listing the number of things wrong with this movie is like listing how many rocks are currently residing in the United States. Well, for one...the preview is totally misleading. It makes Dream House look like a scary, entertaining horror movie. The joke is now on you if you believed that shit. Dream House is easily one of the dullest and least chilling horror movies of 2011. Not one scary thing happens and you're more likely to give yourself goosebumps by cleaning underneath your fridge.

Daniel Craig is also a big reason why I feel this movie drowns. He delivers such a bland and monotone performance. His voice never changes and there's never any sense of danger or peril in the way he behaves. Even in later (supposed to have been) emotional scenes where he finds out the true discovery of Peter Ward (which isn't surprising in the least if you have watched the trailers) lack any sort of emotion or passion at all. It's as if we're watching a movie about someone two days after they received a lobotomy.

And the twist? Well, I'll ruin it for the two people on Earth who haven't seen the trailer. HE IS PETER WARD and his family is all dead. Yeah, big surprise. Even if you haven't seen the trailers, the clues to this discovery are about as difficult to find as the clues in an episode of Scooby Doo. Plus, this twist has been done several other times in better movies with better finishes (The Uninvited, Shutter Island, The Others). At one point, someone even looks at "Will" and says, "He's back!". How is that not obvious? After he discovers this, there's another lame twist about who else has insidious intentions, but by that point you don't really give a shit considering the 90 minutes of soap opera disguised as a horror movie that you've been forced into watching.

Logic is another aspect of good filmmaking that takes a flying leap out the window here. If Peter Ward was innocent and they had no proof to lock him up, why was he there in the first place? What made them think he did it if there was no proof? Why didn't anyone else investigate the crime to see if he wasn't guilty? Why would people who were trained to work with crazy people allow someone to make up an entire other life with completely different names? Why did it take him 5 years to get out? Why didn't someone else tell him that he was Peter Ward? Seriously, the people in this movie act like such idiots just to get the plot to barely move from beginning to end.

The lowdown: Dream House is an absolutely terrible movie from start to finish. It's dull and thrilless, the main star is someone with the urgency of a potato, the twist is easy to figure out, and it's been done so many times that the neat twist started many years ago by The Sixth Sense has now been flattened to a pancake thanks to movies that take the formula of a ghost horror movie and flush it down the cinematic toilet. Next time anyone involved in this movie decides to make another horror movie of equal quality...just say the butler did it.

0/4