"The Wrong House"'s central characters are Brian and Rebecca Lassiter (Tilky Jones and Clare Kramer). He's a successful architect in New York City who decides he can make even more money if he relocates to L.A. and works for the West Coast office of his firm. Professionally the move is an almost immediate success — his design for a major new skyscraper lands him the contract to build it (it looks from the model like a cross between a giant drill bit and one of Howard Roark's modern designs in "The Fountainhead") — but personally it's a problem. The Lassiters got a great deal on a fancy house in the Coral Gables section because it had been foreclosed on and the bank had been trying to unload it for years — though, unlike real-life banks in that situation, they'd spent money on upkeep to keep the house in good condition so it would fetch a good price when it was sold. The realtor who sold it to them, red-haired Angela Chasen (Carolyn Hennesy), told them there had been another offer for the place, but she was concerned that the other buyer didn't have enough liquidity so she sold the house to the Lassiters instead. Even though the Lassiters' move disrupted the schooling and friends network of their daughter Maddy (Ashlyn Jade Lopez), they seem happy enough in their new house.
Then various nasty things start happening: the Lassiters are about to go out to dinner when a delivery boy (Erik Estrada Loaiza) shows up with over $50 worth of pizzas with extra anchovies and says that Rebecca ordered them, which she did not. We've already seen Kathleen Strickland steal Rebecca's number and put it on her phone, so we know it was Kathleen who pulled this prank and later sent another delivery person with a bag full of Chinese food (which at least sounds tastier than those pizzas with double anchovies!). Things get nastier one night when someone throws a rock through the window of Maddy's bedroom — and Lauren's maternal instincts kick into high gear: being socked for $100 for delivered food they hadn't ordered was one thing, but something that endangered her daughter The next day, during the potluck, two exterminators (José Rosete and Mickael de Sinno) come over to spray the place for rats, and when David insists that there are no rats, one duly shows up and nearly bites one of the guests.
The "pranks" escalate as posters suddenly show up around the neighborhood that make a devastating criminal allegation against David, and then Kathleen Strickland, Lauren's physical therapist and the woman behind the attacks on the Lassiters, enters the house and fakes evidence of David having an affair: she takes off her underwear and hides it under the Lassiters' marital bed, she showers in the Lassiters' bathroom and carefully pulls off a lock of her hair to leave in the drain, and as if that weren't bad enough she leaves a note in the pocket of David's shirt, ostensibly from a woman named Caitlin claiming that David had promised to leave his wife for her and Caitlin was upset with him for reneging. Lauren throws David out of the house and he ends up in the Palm Court Motel. Maddy tries to keep in telephonic contact with her dad but every time Lauren catches her daughter and her husband talking on the phone, she grabs the phone away from Maddy and hangs up on him.
The only truly fun part of this film is, as usual, the performance of the actor playing the crazy villain: director Irvin and his writing committee were going after florid-psycho instead of self-contained psycho in their characterization of Kathleen Strickland, and Allison McAtee seized the opportunity for one of the most joyously overacted performances I've seen in a recent film. Self-contained one minute, doing rage the next and then suddenly breaking out in tears, McAtee is fun to watch for the sheer over-the-topness she brings to a character who's pretty relentlessly over-the-top even for a Lifetime villainess, and the writers give her plenty of opportunities by supplying a script of such demented sloppiness things just happen without much of a sense of direction — thereby throwing McAtee a bunch of barely motivated curveballs which she keeps hitting out of the park!
Then various nasty things start happening: the Lassiters are about to go out to dinner when a delivery boy (Erik Estrada Loaiza) shows up with over $50 worth of pizzas with extra anchovies and says that Rebecca ordered them, which she did not. We've already seen Kathleen Strickland steal Rebecca's number and put it on her phone, so we know it was Kathleen who pulled this prank and later sent another delivery person with a bag full of Chinese food (which at least sounds tastier than those pizzas with double anchovies!). Things get nastier one night when someone throws a rock through the window of Maddy's bedroom — and Lauren's maternal instincts kick into high gear: being socked for $100 for delivered food they hadn't ordered was one thing, but something that endangered her daughter The next day, during the potluck, two exterminators (José Rosete and Mickael de Sinno) come over to spray the place for rats, and when David insists that there are no rats, one duly shows up and nearly bites one of the guests.
The "pranks" escalate as posters suddenly show up around the neighborhood that make a devastating criminal allegation against David, and then Kathleen Strickland, Lauren's physical therapist and the woman behind the attacks on the Lassiters, enters the house and fakes evidence of David having an affair: she takes off her underwear and hides it under the Lassiters' marital bed, she showers in the Lassiters' bathroom and carefully pulls off a lock of her hair to leave in the drain, and as if that weren't bad enough she leaves a note in the pocket of David's shirt, ostensibly from a woman named Caitlin claiming that David had promised to leave his wife for her and Caitlin was upset with him for reneging. Lauren throws David out of the house and he ends up in the Palm Court Motel. Maddy tries to keep in telephonic contact with her dad but every time Lauren catches her daughter and her husband talking on the phone, she grabs the phone away from Maddy and hangs up on him.
The only truly fun part of this film is, as usual, the performance of the actor playing the crazy villain: director Irvin and his writing committee were going after florid-psycho instead of self-contained psycho in their characterization of Kathleen Strickland, and Allison McAtee seized the opportunity for one of the most joyously overacted performances I've seen in a recent film. Self-contained one minute, doing rage the next and then suddenly breaking out in tears, McAtee is fun to watch for the sheer over-the-topness she brings to a character who's pretty relentlessly over-the-top even for a Lifetime villainess, and the writers give her plenty of opportunities by supplying a script of such demented sloppiness things just happen without much of a sense of direction — thereby throwing McAtee a bunch of barely motivated curveballs which she keeps hitting out of the park!