Boy in the Walls

I'm a huge fan of horror movies, so I was excited when I saw this film pop up on Hulu. I thought it had the potential to be terrifying or at least suspenseful, but it just wasn't. None of the actors did a good job, and it felt like I was watching a bad SNL skit the whole time. The "twist" was painfully obvious from the beginning. I think they shot themselves in the foot with the title. If they had left the "in the walls" idea a surprise, it wouldn't have been so boring. It just feels like nobody involved with the creation of this movie has ever seen real people interact with each other. This movie is so bad that I don't think you'd even be able to enjoy it while drunk.

Alisa Jensen (Ryan Michelle Bathe) moves into a country house with new husband Chris (Luke Camilleri) and his two kids, Theo and unhappy teen Maya (Cassandra Sawtell). Chris is a widower and the couple is struggling to conceive. There are strange things happening in the house.

This is Lifetime. The most interesting name here is Constance Zimmer. I love her as an actress. She's trying to branch out into directing. Her work is functional TV and not exactly pushing the edge of the envelope. Maybe this shouldn't be a Lifetime movie. Maybe it should be an indie horror instead. This has no tension.

I had the opportunity to sit down and watch the 2023 Lifetime movie "Boy in the Walls" without ever having heard about it. But I will say that the movie's synopsis sounded interesting enough, and thus I opted to sit down and give director Constance Zimmer's 2023 movie a fair chance.

The storyline in "Boy in the Walls", as written by Katrina Onstad and David Weaver, was fair enough. It was a pretty straight forward narrative, however I found that the movie was lacking thrills and there never really was a sense of the family living in the house being in any real danger. And that sort of made sitting through 87 minutes of this somewhat of a bland ordeal.

The acting performances in the movie were fair enough. I wasn't familiar with the actors and actresses on the cast list, but they had some nice talents to portray the various roles.

For a thriller then "Boy in the Walls" was sort of a mundane viewing experience. The movie was devoid of any thrills really, and that was a shame, because the storyline certainly had potential.

Sure, "Boy in the Walls" from director Constance Zimmer, was a watchable movie, but hardly one that warrants more than just a single viewing.

My rating of "Boy in the Walls" lands on a five out of ten stars.

Ok, so my sister was watching this one day when i came over her house to watch her dogs for a few hours ( i don't mind i love the dogs). As i was watching and read the summary of the film provided by her cable company it reminded me of a story i read before that happened in the 1980's. Sure enough, after a little digging i read that this movie was based primarily on the story i was thinking of, giving it the "based on a true story" worthiness.

It's based on the actions of teenager Daniel Laplante, whom in 1987 had been stalking and tormenting 2 sisters who were often left home alone by their father. Their mother had recently lost a battle with cancer, and the now widowed father had taken on a 2nd job to provide for his daughters, often getting home late. The one daughter, 15 years old was now responsible to take care of her little sister (8 years). 16 year old Daniel Laplante was a disturbed teen who had been sexually abused by his father and stepfather, began breaking into people's homes and ended up not only breaking into the home of these 2 girls, but also would spend days living in the walls even when the girls and their father were inside. Laplante often "tapped" on the inside of the walls to scare the girls, and the girls began thinking it was their dead mother trying to contact them. Over the course of 2 months, the family would find food missing, appliances turning on or off while they were out, and furniture around the house being moved out of place. One night, the girls discovered a terrifying message written on the basement wall saying "I'm in your room, come find me". They stormed out of the house to a neighbor's where they called their father. The father believed all of this was either a joke being played on him by the daughters, or that is was his daughters way of dealing with the grief over their mother's passing. The father left work early and came home to find his daughters were not only telling him the truth, but out the corner of his eye he saw Laplante in full make-up and dressed in his dead wife's wedding dress wielding a hatchet. The story goes in different directions with rumors floating around that he held the family captive or that he escaped and then came back and haunted the family more....but shortly after a stay in Juvenile detention for this incident, Laplante would go on to murder a pregnant woman and her 2 children during a home invasion.

As for this movie, it was a basic lifetime thriller will bad production and sub-par acting. The Daniel Laplante story is really horrifying story which surprisingly hasn't been turned into a horror film, or at least a thriller by now.

In the opening credits, it's says "based on a true story"....well the story it's based on is the screenplay of the Toolbox Murders, The People Under the Stairs or more recently, Cobwebs. (IMO)

It's a home invasion movie with all the tropes that go with it: Nobody believes the heroine....medication is the issue....a bratty kid that's irritating af, ...the husband is out of town all the time.....let's not forget to wrap it all up with an emotional hokey ending.

The actors played their roles believably, but without anything original happening throughout the movie. I kept waiting for a plot twist, or a jump scare, but hey just didn't happen.

This movie is fine if you enjoy cookie-cutter plots, but there are so many home invasion movies that are worth the watch. If you skip this one, your 87 minutes won't be wasted.