The Girl Next Door 2007 Anchor Bay Entertainment Official Website Buy It Now

Movies based around true events usually mean that you’re in for some kind of uplifting, “feel good” movie that makes you feel better about the world you live in, but not always. Jack Ketchum is a name that most know quite well, and his book The Girl Next Door is loosely based on true events, some very terrible events that most people know very little about, and these crimes are horrendous enough that they do warrant a film.

The Girl Next Door is based on the series of brutal events that befell Sylvia Likens, a young teenager who was tortured to death by Gertrude Baniszewski, and to make the crime worse, she even allowed the neighborhood children to participate. While the names and events have been slightly modified and changed, The Girl Next Door still does provide you with a good template of what really happened. David Moran (Daniel Manche) has recently met Meg (Blythe Auffarth) one of the girls who has moved in with his next door neighbors, but little by little, David sees things changing. Ruth (Blanche Baker), a single mother, lets her sons do whatever they’d like, and when Ruth accidentally hits one of them while they are tickling her, she’s to be punished. Meg is locked in the basement and abused, first verbally, then physically, and the violence continues to escalate, and when David tries to intervene, he is trapped in the basement as well hoping for some way to escape.

Things start out innocently enough in The Girl Next Door, and everything begins simply enough with an adult David retelling his story. The movie is set in the 1950’s as opposed to the true events which occurred in 1965. At first, it seems to be something of a coming of age story, and David and Meg are starting to grow very close, but Meg as well as her sister Susan (Madeline Taylor) find themselves picked on by Ruth’s sons, Willie (Graham Patrick Martin), Ralphie (Austin Williams) and Donny (Benjamin Ross Kaplan), but at first it seems to simply be children playing games that are a little more than what is usually seen.

Ruth however has some rather twisted viewpoints on women, their behavior, and how they should act, not to mention that she’s not above handing out beer and cigarettes to the neighborhood children. Any idea that you might think with The Girl Next Door being comparable to a movie like Stand by Me will slowly begin to fade away, dissolved by the sheer weight that subject matter that is found in the movie. At first though, The Girl Next Door does seem to be just like any other movie with “boys being boys” but just wait.

Once Meg crosses Ruth, that’s where things go wrong for her. At first, it starts with just a few moments of physical abuse like her younger sister getting spanked, but that’s the beginning. Meg is soon tied up in the basement, suspended, and the boys are allowed to simply do as they please. They start by humiliating her, stripping her naked and wanted her to reveal the truth behind a juicy secret since they are under the impression that she’s masturbating, but Meg has no secret to revel, and what they believe to be true is simply a lie. No one believes her though, and she’s left tied in the basement. The abuse gets worse and Meg is soon beaten by the boys and other kids in the neighborhood, and Ruth instigates every moment of it, and it just continues to get worse from there.

The Girl Next Door is one of those movies that you really need to be quite strong to sit through. It’s not the type of movie that is gory or excessively bloody, but it is a grueling experience in physical torture and abuse. It’s something that a lot of people are not going to be able to suit through and if they do, they certainly won’t do so comfortably. When you think back to the 1950’s, it’s a time that most of us think as being very calm and peaceful, but there are things that always remained hidden, and the incidents that make headlines today were things that were simply tucked away; out of sight, out of mind. The Girl Next Door takes that sunny disposition of the 1950’s and utterly shatters it. The movie ultimately is about child abuse, and this is abuse that has been taken too far. While I’m not sure just how much of what is shown is true to the actual events, things that are here really aren’t too far removed from incidents that happen. From doing a bit of research, I know that what is left out, at least in the film, are things such as Sylvia being forced to eat her own feces and drink her own urine, and I’m sure that the atrocities that she went through during those painful, tortured days in the final moments of her life are far worse than anything we could ever read about.

This is a movie that is bound to get a lot of controversy around it. I’m sure some groups will simply try and state that The Girl Next Door is going to pave the way for further abuse and give people ideas, but there has always been abuse of all sorts. We live in a society now where it seems that parents are too afraid to punish their own children out of fear of what the neighbors might think or say and the same is true of those working in the educational profession, but there is also a world of difference between a child being punished and being abused. The Girl Next Door isn’t trying to glorify child abuse but instead show you the grim, cold, dark reality of it, what happens when it’s allowed to go farther than it should, and what the end result can be, and that’s where the true power of the movie lies.

The film also includes two separate commentary tracks, one featuring author Jack Ketchum along with screenwriters Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman, the other with Gregory Wilson, Andrew van den Houten and William M. Miller. There is a short selection of interviews with the cast and crew, a making of feature and the trailer as well as the inclusion of the screenplay with is accessible via a DVD-ROM. While it’s not a lot of bonus features, I think that the commentaries are definitely worth listening to.

This is one of those films that should include the warning that The Girl Next Door is not for the feint of heart. I’m fairly well desensitized to violence and gore, but this isn’t the usual, garden variety fantasy type but instead things that are plausible and have occurred to others. This really was a difficult movie to sit through, and it’s not something that is going to end on an uplifting note but instead is going to possibly cause depression in some and maybe even bring back some memories in others that they’d rather forget. Despite the content however, The Girl Next Door is a powerful, dark tale that deserves to be told and seen. And please remember that while this might be just a movie, child abuse does still occur each and every day, and ways that you can help can be found all across the Internet including childabuse.com as well as many other sites, so helping is one of the greatest gifts that you can possibly give in order to help children from becoming just another victim, just another statistic.

-mike-