House At The End Of The Street

There's nothing to beat a nice psychological thriller cum horror film when you are in the mood for it, and on the day following my return from Gran Canaria and prior to the even bigger horror of returning to work, I was fairly in the mood for a bit of frightening.

To be fair, there wasn't much else on, but this was a most worthwhile project as I used to be a big fan of this genre. It's basically a modern day update of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", with modern American youth culture and college kids thrown in. Everything is bigger and better these days - or so they think - so there were more twists and turns than would have been allowed previously, which really left it a bit unsatisfying as at the end of the film you couldn't really get to grips with the killer's motives. There were plenty of dark and broody scenes and tense atmospheres, but in the final analysis, there was nothing really to compare with the shower scene from Psycho - and the hero of the piece didn't come across as strongly - or as weirdly - as Norman Bates. Perhaps most disappointingly for me was that an awful lot of sympathy was built up for the main character and it was such a shame that he turned out bad in the end. What with him being a loner and an outsider, being picked on by all and sundry and after such a traumatic childhood, you just ached for him to turn out good and misunderstood. What a shame that the bullies, bigots and vigilantes turned out to be right after all.

I suppose it's very hard to put new twists on a theme that's been done thousands of times before, but this was one of the better efforts and it was quite tense and psychological. Just a shame that the loner and the outsider had to be the "baddie" as ever.