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Christina's House

Movie: C

Sound: C

Picture: B

Reviewed By: David

MGM and Director Gavin Wilding team up to bring you "Christina's House".

Christina (Allison Lange) is the new girl in a small Washington State town. She lives with her video game geek brother (Lorne Stewart) and her overbearing father (John Savage). The soon-to-be 17-year-old finds that her already tumultuous teenage life is further hindered by a boyfriend (Brenden Fehr) who tries to get Christina to have sex with him whenever they have a moment alone. These seemingly normal trials of life might be a pain, but it’s the noises in the attic that keep her up at night. When a couple of local teens go missing the noises amplify Christina’s fears to the point where people around her begin to wonder whether or not she’s just crazy.

There's also very little that goes on in this film, there’s really no suspense whatsoever, although we're led to believe that all kinds of mess is going down. I mean the killer doesn’t do much more than leave notes and cookies lying around. He does kill a few times but it’s in bland and off-screen ways. The subplot about the mother is also too vague and underused. Christina’s relationship with Eddie (Fehr) is just there and can be summed up with him entering through her bedroom window or him exiting through her bedroom window to hide from her dad. Her crush on Howie (Rowe) is also lightly touched upon. There’s also a whole other tedious subplot about Christina’s diary being stolen by a school rival. Of course, the killer winds up with it but don’t ask me why he/she wants to have it. Actually the diary thing gives way to a very funny scene. Check this out, Christina is sleeping and is awakened by a sound. She jumps up and the first thing she does is go look in her drawer to see if her diary is still there.

And to cap things, this one takes the killer’s revealing monologue to an all-time low. First off, the second that the killer’s identity is revealed, he/she is wearing pasty white makeup and black under their eyes. Why? Because he/she looks scarier that way. Funny he/she looked fine the whole movie though. Then, the monologue kicks in to explain the motive behind the killing. But the killer doesn’t really have a motive, so to compensate he/she resorts to puppet shows with his talking fingers and giving Christina dancing lessons. And of course, once he/she is known as the killer, he/she becomes invincible.

"Christina’s House" is a contrived psycho-thriller that builds itself on paranoia rather than a sensible story. Christina lives in a movie where heightened music at every gesture makes everyone a suspect. While the music may or may not keep you guessing the shifty eyes of a couple of characters make them lead suspects from the outset. But rather than giving these characters a real motive to make them credible suspects, instead the filmmakers have these folks come out of nowhere throwing punches at each other or getting in shouting matches for no reason. The result is false suspense.

I would recommend this movie, but, you really should rent it first. Click here to purchase the movie if you should want.

Edition Details:

• Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
• Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby
• Full-screen and widescreen anamorphic formats