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Dream House (2011)

Spoilers, typos, and bad grammar ahead. You've been warned.

I like a good haunted house movie. The problem is that there are significantly more shitty haunted house movies out there than good ones. I also think tonight's offering was sold as a haunted house movie in order to preserve the "twist ending." (I'm going to reveal that twist herein. Don't want me to ruin it for you? You should stop reading now.)

The story of Dream House (perhaps better called "Daniel Craig has a mental breakdown") runs something like this:
A successful man (Will) retires from his job and heads off to celebrate with his family in their new country home. This idyllic life soon becomes plagued by a mysterious stalker. As the mystery begins to unfold, we realize this standard little home invasion thriller may be something supernatural which gives way to a plot twist anyone can see coming a mile away. Our hero isn't the quiet family man we believed him to be, nor is he just some Amityville style killer - he's a mental patient who was convicted for murdering his family. The trouble here is, he says the one armed man did it someone else did it. Eventually, it turns out he's right on the money; his next-door neighbor hired a man to kill his wife but the killer went to the wrong house and murdered Will's family instead. Whoops. Will solves the crime, gets revenge, is saved by his wife's ghost, writes a novel about his experience, and lives happily ever after.

Dream House suffers from predictability, bad writing, and unfortunately slow pacing. I'm not sure how things went so off the rails because there is plenty of talent behind the scenes. I'm guessing tit's another case of "the studio meddled with things" and turned a completely acceptable movie into a waste of time.

With all that said though, the aggressive panning Dream House has taken at the hands of critics seems sort of unwarranted. Honestly, how can The Ruins have a 48% rating on Rotten Tomatoes while Dream House only has 6%. It wasn't THAT bad. In fact, I think Daniel Craig was great and (yet again) shows an incredible chemistry working with children. His co-star (and now wife) Rachel Weisz also share a terrific onscreen chemistry, despite the idiocy of the script.

You can catch the Dream House trailer here:


You can pick up a copy of Dream House (and pay for renovations on my own dream house) here:
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