We all know there are a lot of lame movies floating around out there, and the best ones are laughably bad. 2014’s Treehouse, not so much. This monstrosity, which is set in the Ozarks, only garnered two critics’ reviews and an abysmal thirteen percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, plus a whopping 3.8 rating on IMDb. What makes it so terrible? Let us count the reasons.
It all starts in the forest, because of course it does, and a teenager named Lizzie (Dana Melanie) is walking home from school. She goes into her house to find mud tracked all over the floor, an open half-gallon of milk on the table, and a note from her dad on the open fridge door. He’s had to go to Kansas City, Little Bob is asleep, and would Lizzie please feed him?
Before we have time to find out if Little Bob is Lizzie’s younger brother or the family pet, Lizzie decides to take her shoes off and wander through the house with a shotgun. No one turns up, but Lizzie does see a shadowy figure in the backyard, which she chases through the forest. Her feet are still bare, by the way, and she steps on a big piece of glass. She also hears her brother screaming.
Meanwhile, life goes on in the nearby town of Westlake, and during Lizzie’s scary episode the town is doing normal town things. Preparations are going on for the local fair and people were walking around with big smiles.
Cool guy Crawford (Daniel Fredrick) is in class making eyes at Betty (Mallory Malibu Waugh). His brother, Killian (J. Michael Trautman) is at a cross-country practice with the team, including the school bully, Germinski (Chance Nichols), who not only bears a remarkable resemblance to Goyle from Harry Potter, but is just as intelligent. Would this guy chow down on a floating cupcake? Absolutely. Germinski has a hate-on for Killian, of course, and likes to give him a right cross whenever he deems Killian worthy.
These prosaic activities are doomed, though, because kids are disappearing and “it’s happening again.” No word on what “it” is, but the schools are closed and there’s a curfew. Crawford and Killian, who live with their aunt Marsha (Shannon Knopke), wait to get picked up, but Crawford still has time to lay a retaliatory smackdown on Germinski before Marsha gets there.
Crawford is a special kind of genius, because despite there being a curfew, he gets a bunch of teenagers together to go miles outside of town and set off fireworks. No one will notice, of course, as if fireworks going off are easy to miss.
As it turns out, though, the group doesn’t come together as planned. Crawford and Killian hike through the forest instead, only to find a random treehouse out in the middle of it, and Lizzie crouching under some debris, with her foot wounded from those glass shards she stepped on before.
Crawford goes for help, leaving Killian with Lizzie. The menacing “it” is out there, but instead of staying in the relatively safe treehouse, Killian and Lizzie get the glass out of her foot and then go hiking back through the forest. They find a farmhouse with a dead body inside, but at least there’s an ample supply of chocolate. Why neither one of them pass out from the decaying corpse smell is anyone’s guess.
I’d say I don’t want to ruin the ending, but there really isn’t one. “It” turns out to be three literally unwashed guys who speak in grunts and go around murdering people. Who are they? We don’t know. What happened to Crawford? We don’t know. What happened to Lizzie’s brother? We don’t know. Do Lizzie and Killian make it out alive? Who knows, but Lizzie seems to be a quick healer and with it comes a vengeful gleam in her eye. She also calls Killian “Baby Bear” for some reason.
There are so many problems with this movie. First of all, Killian is almost too nerdy, although he kind of redeems himself in the end. Maybe it was all done so the character would have somewhere to go, but seeing as Killian doesn’t have a George McFly moment of seething anger or anything that would conceivably lead him to turn from his nerdiness, it doesn’t feel earned. Lizzie calling him “Baby Bear,” is not entirely unjustified although it still feels a little weird and random.
Speaking of weird and random, why does Crawford presume to think no one is going to notice he and Killian lighting off fireworks out in the wilderness? Does he not know those things can be seen from miles away? And that someone might think it’s a little strange to see fireworks going off when there’s supposed to be a curfew? Apparently not.
Lizzie’s not off the hook, either. Why, praytell, does she slip off her shoes when she’s looking for the mysterious intruder? It’s not as if she’s wearing anything noisy like leather soles or heels. Her Toms slipons are probably the quietest shoes she could possibly wear, but nope, off they come. I guess there had to be a reason for her to stay in the forest and end up in the treehouse, but these characters don’t have the greatest decision-making or logic skills.
Neither, for that matter, do the filmmakers, as missed opportunities abound. For a movie called Treehouse, the characters don’t spend nearly enough time in that titular locale or use it to their advantage in any way. It could have been a great story device, with Killian employing what he’s got in Crawford’s backpack to take down the bad guys MacGyver-style, including…oh, let’s see here…those fireworks he and Crawford were gonna light. They didn’t light all of them because they thought their friends were coming, so those things are still in Crawford’s backpack. Did it occur to anyone that they would have been great ammo? Or a way to signal for help? Fireworks aren’t flares, obviously, but they’re great for attracting attention.
Another bit of weirdness is that the filmmakers constantly shoot into the sun, which is not only hard on the eyes but keeps us from seeing anything important. Why would anyone do this? And what would shooting into the sun do to camera equipment? Probably not much, but it can’t be good.
Treehouse is such a no-win enterprise and not what it promises to be. About halfway through the movie I quit trying to make sense of it and scrolled through Instagram with one eye on the TV screen.
Another post is coming out on Thursday, and it’s not only so-bad-it’s-good, but undeniably unique. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
Treehouse is free to stream on Prime.
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