Cant Come Out to Play

A young boy is isolated in a room, attached to a drip and a heart monitor. His parents are nurses and they are keeping him here as he appears to be very sick. When a young girl from next door is bored and ventures into their yard, she sees the boy and tries to befriend him. When his parents find out, his mother reacts. As the girl tries to keep in contact with her friend, she begins to understand that all is not what it appears. It would seem that everything has an ulterior motive.....with a very deadly consequence.

A film like this has many significant motifs it has to work with. Genre, performance, mise en scene and of course editing. A thriller / horror merges many pieces of these motifs together. Now the media student out there knows this and will say at this point, get on with it. Well you see my point here is that you have to work on balance. Do you want a sexy thriller, with the mere scent of horror? When this is done well then you get a Fatal Attraction and that film is the true standard to which many are judged in this sub genre. If you go the other way then you have horror film with the smattering of thriller and you get any film from the teen horror you may have seen. This film sadly can find its balance within this field and instead creates a third type of genre....Melohorror Thriller. That is too say, Melodrama that masqurades as a thriller and has the over bearing blast of horror. Like when you spray fabric freshener on sweaty shirts!

The melodrama comes from the bit players that include Peter Fonda, who actually acts a lot like his father Henry. He has the same tone and flow and in this it seems he has replicated his fathers Oscar winning performance in On Golden Pond. The child actors are treated without much care and they act very wooden. The adult actors (bar the main leads) simply speak their lines and jester toward things. This leaves a taste of daytime television about the whole piece. The leads are good enough to be in something better. Michael Shannon is very good as the father with no control over things. He has range and personality but his performance is pulled down by the love interest who is dull. Morton has the crazy lady stuff down here but I have seen her perform so much better and it is not her or Shannon at fault here. I would blame soft casting and a mediocre script.

I love John McNaughtons this films director and his previous work is a must for film fans, especially genre buffs. Henry: Portrait of a serial killer had a harsh tone and excellent economy of performance. Wild Things smouldered and left you sexy and satisfied. Mad Dog and Glory was silly and very funny in places. But like many directors he has had his duds and sadly this is another one to add to that list. He deserves better and should give better. He was given a film that was confused and a mess of genre convention and tired speeches. What he did was not to craft a great film as that would have been impossible. It seems what he did was cut and run....

DVD comes with

Trailer and subtitles