So much average

Great Film overall

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I read Anne Rivers Siddons's excellent book some years ago. Stephen King, in his essay DANSE MACABRE, refers to the novel as one of the best haunted house stories ever written, and he is correct. Unfortunately, in translation from the printed page to the small screen, quite a bit is lost.The basic plot remains intact, happily: a young, hot-shot architect (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) builds a new, contemporary house on a vacant lot next door to the Kennedys, Col and her husband Walker, who frame the story and serve as the narrators (Here is where the inexplicable differences begin: in the novel, Col was Colquitt and Walker was Walter, and the book is told in first-person by Colquitt). During the course of the next year and a half or so, three couples occupy the house, and each of them suffers terrible tragedy, leading Col to the conclusion that there is something malevolent about the house.She's right, but some of the terror has been diluted by two things: the choice to make this a television movie, and the choice to update it by nearly thirty years (the novel was published in 1978). Had it been made as a feature film set in the Atlanta suburb of the original late-Seventies novel, perhaps they could have captured the indescribable creepiness of the book.The cast isn't much help, either. Lara Flynn Boyle leads the proceedings as Col, but she seems miscast (To be fair to Boyle, Siddons never actually gives a physical description of Colquitt in the novel, but Boyle is not what I myself pictured), and worse, she underplays the role so severely that she often appears comatose. And the massive amounts of collagen plumping up her lips on one side don't help matters any either; in some scenes her mouth is such a distraction it is easy to miss what is going on. Still, there are moments when her dreamy, almost-hypnotized stare does send a chill through you as you realize what the house next door might be doing to her, never mind the neighbors. And Colin Ferguson is just about right as her husband; he wisely plays his role at the same emotional level so as not to upstage her or make Walker seem foolish.Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not worth talking about. In the novel, the effect of the malevolent house was felt by eight of the neighbors on the street, and each, especially the women, reacted in his/her own way. The supporting cast in this telefilm is so homogeneous that unless Boyle says their names it is hard to tell them apart. A pity, because Siddons described them quite vividly.Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the architect was probably cast to pull in the young girls, but he is probably the worst choice of all. For starters, he still can't act. He couldn't as a kid on "Saved by the Bell;" he couldn't on "NYPD Blue;" and he still can't. All he can do is pose and look pretty. Which he does very well, except that the role does not call for it. The architect wasn't unattractive in the novel, but he certainly wasn't a pretty boy like Gosselaar.I can't say I hated it. I loved the novel, and there's still enough of the novel left to make this worth sitting through on a rainy afternoon if you've nothing better to do. But I'd sooner recommend reading the novel; you'll get all the shivers that way, and you won't think Stephen King has terrible taste in horror stories.

Basically there was a creepy house. It was creepy on account of its hauntings. Anyways, some woman who lived on the street found out a friend who designed the house lost the ability to design, so she assumed the house was evil, like any sane person would.Basically the movie tells the story of several people who occupy the building, but these people had little personality outside of attributes the house turned against them. The characters not living in the house really only existed to demonstrate that the protagonist's life was being affected by her paranoia about the house.There isn't much reason to be concerned with any of these people since... well honestly early on the effect of the house on its first occupants was kinda unexpected.I've mostly been rambling but this movie while watchable is one of those without any lasting impact on the viewer.

... is twofold. Firstly, it totally destroys, with a plodding, boring and mucousy script, a fine novel that Stephen King had singled out as one of the best horror stories of the last century in his essay "Danse Macabre" (1981). The second jolt comes from seeing Lara Flynn Boyle's lips slowly disintegrate all through the movie from the sheer weight of the collagen they are stuffed with. Her mouth gradually descends in her face in a very ominous and asymmetrical fashion, unsupported by facial muscles that are already rendered weak and useless from too many Botox injections. The end result is an inverted wedge of a mouth incapable of smiling or any other recognizable human expression. Those are the only things that qualify this mess as truly scary, if you don't count the sheer ugliness, vulgarity and faux-modern ordinariness of the house itself.

When I heard that this movie was coming out the night before Halloween, I was very excited. When I found out that it was a book, written in 1978, I had to read it before seeing the movie. I'm sure the movie would have been much different to me if I had not read the book. The writers actually did a good job of staying true to the main plot of the book, with minor differences, naturally. I think the thing that disappointed me the most about the movie was Boyle playing the role of Col. I'm not a big fan of Boyle, and it seems that no matter what the mood during the movie, she's always trying to use her over-plumped lips, and darkly makeup-ed eyes to make herself seem super sexy. Indeed, I think that the movie held true to the genuine creepiness of the house. My favorite subplot was the Sheehan family (which is so weird b/c the son was killed in Iraq and in current events there is Casey Sheehan whose mother went on a huge anti-Iraq tirade). In the book, obviously the war was not Iraq, but rather, Vietnam, and when the house turns on that video of the son in the helicopter, I was truly creeped out. Overall, I was impressed with the movie, in that it followed the book very well.