Recent Reviews
Film Review: Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door
By John Marrone
Apr 14, 2007, 15:53

You ever see that Stephen King flick - Stand By Me?  I just spent two hours with some kids just like the ones in that film.  The only thing is, instead of taking a walk down the tracks and checkin out a dead body, I watched them rape and beat the shit out of a young teenage girl!   They made up their own reasons, and beat and bruised and broke and burned and defiled and cut her until she was dead.  She was only 15 or 16.  She never did anything wrong to deserve it.  But they stripped her naked, burned words into her - she was tied up in a basement and all the kids in the neighborhood came over and did whatever they wanted! 

Does the idea of that make you feel a little nauseus?  Well when venturing into a Jack Ketchum story in search of a horror fix, this is nearly always the end result. Anyone unfamiliar with his material, prepare for a deep, dark ride into a part of life that is all around us - child abuse - and a no-holds-barred gaze into the reality of what is for the most part, a true story.

So, please, allow me to begin again.

Think you know pain? 

You dont know shit.  Sylvia Likens knew pain.  In Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, young innocent and abused Meg and Susan are based on the true unfortunate lives of Sylvia and Jenny Likens.  Its been called, in a courtroom, "the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana".  Sylvia's foster caretaker kicked her in the crotch, tied her up by her thumbs in the basement for three months, starved her, and invited kids from the neighborhood to the house to do things to her - like strip her, use coke bottles on her, and put cigarettes out on her.  After being denied the use of a toilet, she was eventually even forced to consume her own excrements.

This is the real life story that inspired "The Girl Next Door", a novel by Jack Ketchum that we reviewed a while back HERE.  It was a very offensive story to read - to be put through an innocent, sweet young girl's torture and death.  It went to levels of offensiveness that rivaled films like Imprint, or Hostel.  While those movies can be considered by some to be exploitative, the same can not be said about this stomach knotter.  This was based on a true story.  In the late 1950's and into the 1960's, how families disciplined their child was up to the discretion of the household.  The safety and rights of children and spouses wasn't focused on, and abuse ran rampant in neighborhoods behind closed doors.  I myself used to visit a cousin in Massachusettes - his father was a 275 pound Airborne Ranger - and he used to beat him to the forest floor with lumber sized fists across the jaw for walking on his mother's newly waxed floor.  Cousins in prison now.  Child abuse destroys lives, and instead of hiding it from the filmgoers eye, behind ratings and censorship, perhaps its time to stare this ugly monster in the face.

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is a bold move by Moderncine - the film company behind its production - whose 2005 release Headspace went beyond general expectations.  GND is brave, unique, and even has the professional crisp look of an art film.  It, along the way, uncovers a naked truth that makes your stomach twist and blood boil with anger.  This tragic tale, fictionally enhanced for an easier dramatic digestion, when played out on screen, gets under your skin as only a handful have in film history.  At the theater premeire,  a full grown woman sat beside me - choking back tears and mumbling, "Oh Lord, kill that poor child." 

Its effectiveness and treasures are spawn from Jack Ketchum's riviting novel, which, but for one or two scenes, was a dead on adaptation.  Cindi Rush, in charge of casting, deserves a pat on the back.  Her choices to play the parts of Meg (Blythe Auffarth), caretaker Ruth (Blanche Baker), and Davey (Daniel Manche), and everyone else for that matter - their performances were awesome.  Solid direction by Gregory Wilson who managed to bring beauty and tremendous force through the film medium and ratings system, and a passionate vision by producer Andrew van den Houten, who throughout its production had been deeply in touch with its horror elements and the need to somehow get the whole picture to the screen and blow us away.

While The Girl Next Door shoves all other films like it aside and stands tall, and will be a film remembered for years to come, its hard to predict what genre it will specifically fall into or apply to.  Its a domestic drama, that gets so dark that it contains inarguable horror - Imprint/Hostel-like torture - but its not a monster or some serial killer theyre trying to run from.  Its the sickness within Ruth's brain that is dominating and rotting their worlds like a cancer.  This story makes you so angry, that you are dying to see Ruth get hers.  "Somebody burn her alive - and put her out before she's dead!"  many horror fans will think to themselves.  And while there is some retribution in the end, it sort of occurs with a faint, childlike slap, when it was cocked and ready and could have been a cannon explosive, fully deserved form of vengeance.  In real life, this bitch went to a trial and eventually prison.  That's not justice, considering what she did that those poor girls - to the minds of those young boys.  Maybe that's the underlying jist of what this film's ending amounts to.

Final Analysis:  If you have a heart, it will bleed.  This film is going to go far.  It will touch the hearts of anyone who values the life of a good, innocent young girl, or life for that matter, and it will shock and horrifically amaze with grace and style, like not many films do.  Over the top performances by all the acting in this movie - including young Susan (Madeline Taylor) - who about had your heart cracking at its seams.  Forget for a moment the likes of Leslie Vernon, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees...  In Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, evil comes in the form of Ruth Chandler, one of the most anger inducing, accurately acted, loathesome scum bag bitches ever played, and I dont say that lightly.  You'll wanna peel off her skin and punch her to death.  That Blanche Baker takes a sunny 1958ish, lollypop looking environment and manages to create one of the darkest domestic depictions of a family dysfunction possibly ever witnessed within this so-called "decade of innocence".  Horror fans, check this one out.  It will appear somewhere soon.  Its a surprise to see a film like this make an R rating with such offensive material.  More than a handful of people got up and walked out on this baby.  A shocking, taboo driven drama, darkened to horror blackness with child torture, abuse, and a deeply injected heartache.  Its exposes an underbelly of American society with such style and filmmaking grace that you'll see it through, regardless of the brutality and jaw dropping, raping of innocence.  Revolting, moving and discussion inducing.  Moderncine has created a laser copy of what makes Jack Ketchum so successful in the horror genre - unrelenting exposure to true life evil. Think you know pain?  You'll feel it soon, when you see Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door - a story that needs to be told, and can NOT be ignored.