An adolescent boy’s fantasy, The Girl Next Door is never as bad as you fear it could be, some mild twists and appealing turns from its two young leads rendering it better than watchable. Emile Hirsch, with something of the young Leonardo Di Caprio about him, is Matthew, a play-it-safe nerd who dreams of being the next president, his role model (appropriately, as it turns out), JFK. A high achiever, Matthew loses the plot when Danielle (24’s Elisha Cuthbert) moves in next door, immediately smitten by the seductive blonde bombshell.


As the two become closer, he in infatuation, her, initially at least, in charmed amusement, Matthew becomes more spontaneous and the envy of both the high school jocks and his two horny friends, Eli (Chris Marquette) and Klitz (Paul Dano). But when smut connoisseur Eli finds a tape of Danielle revealing her career as a porn star, Matthew is caught between lust and affection, creating a rift in their relationship that allows her pimpish ex Kelly (Timothy Olyphant) to come between them. Cold shouldered, Matthew tries in vain to win back the girl who loved him for (sometimes) not seeing her (solely) as a sex object. Naturally, this leads to the three boys attending a Las Vegas adult movies convention, Kelly stealing $30,000 Matthew had saved for a Cambodian genius and a prom finale directed by Eli starring adult movie stars.

Think you know pain? You don’t know shit. Sylvia Likens knew pain. In 1958 she was locked in the basement of her foster home, and tortured for weeks and weeks, until she was dead. She was starved, denied the use of a bathroom, forced to eat her own excrements, raped, and beaten by the kids of the neighborhood. Her foster family would invite kids over from the neighborhood to drink beers, smoke cigarettes, burn and penetrate a tied up 13 year old girl in the cellar, as long as they didn’t tell anyone. It went on for around three months, until poor Sylvia Likens died. It was, as someone at the actual trial had stated, "the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana".

Release Date: December 04, 2007
Director: Gregory Wilson
Writer: Jack Ketchum, Dan Farrands
Starring: Blythe Auffarth Blanche Baker Blythe Auffarth Daniel Manche
Studio: Anchor Bay