User Reviews

It's THEIR house. They live there. Why not search for whatever hidden treasure that may or may not be there (in THEIR OWN house) AFTER dealing with the cops and the self-defense killing of an armed intruder?!

Again, they live there. They could search for this mystery loot hours later, or the next day, or next week, or in a few months if they chose. It is THEIR house.

The cops would've only processed the crime scene within the confines of the bedroom where the body is (or was before they moved it) - not go scouring around their house looking for whatever the intruder may have been looking for - so why was it so pertinent for them to go searching before the police arrived?*

So, so stupid.

*note: I've written this review only 20 minutes in so far so maybe the movie tries to justify this gaping logic hole later, but it still wouldn't excuse the wife so casually going along with her husband's idiotic plan.

A couple wakes up in the middle of the night to discover a strange man searching for something in their house. After they are forced to kill him in self-defense, they decide to spend an hour before calling the police. That's because they decide to hunt for whatever that man was looking for, which very well may have been a hidden fortune.

The first full-length feature by Walker Whited, who co-wrote this along with Sean McCane, this boasts a good performance by Michelle Rose (who has a pretty impressive stunt resume and puts that to use in this film as well). As her character struggles with job loss, PTSD and the loss of a child, you get the idea of how the idea of finding money inside her new home may just be the silver lining that she and her husband Mark (Kurt Yu) need to escape their downward path. Of course, things are never quite that simple.

The main character stares at a fridge of her dead daughter with sad music, right below that a drawing of a dog titled "Puppy!" This was after the couple manufactured their own drama by claiming they just couldn't call the cops and then search for the money after. The couple acted like they had just met a day ago, with half a brain cell to share between them. The bad guys were no better. The people who wrote this should be blacklisted from ever writing again, the fact that this wasn't written by six year olds is utterly incomprehensible to me. I feel bad for everyone who worked on this. I also couldn't help but empathize when the woman had a sniper crosshair on her chest and she said "shoot me," I felt much the same while watching what I can't even call a movie.

Firstly, I'll start off by saying what a honour it is to be asked to review this new movie. The movie I talk about is a new home-invasion movie called "by Night's End". And I have to admit that I had not heard too much about the movie beforehand, and sometimes these are when you really find those hidden gems. It takes me back to when I used to rent movies from Blockbuster many years ago, I would hire a movie on a whim and sometimes all I had to go on was a title. I like that kind of adventure, going forward not knowing what you are getting yourself into but with zero expectations and you can enjoy the film in all it's entirety. Spoilers: So the film starts off with an escaped convict breaking into a house very late at night, and so straight away you are drawn into this storyline and you can't help wondering what this guy is up to. A few weeks or months later you see this couple move into the house. At first you see this couple as a very solid marriage, but in no time at all you start to see little cracks in their relationship that eventually open up wider and wider as the story unfolds. Shortly after moving in they become victim to a home invasion, where the perpetrator is definitely looking for something that has been left in the house, that is obviously worth a lot of money. The invader is shot and killed, but instead of calling the police they decide to spend some time trying to find out what they have got themselves into. More importantly they want to know what the guy was looking for...

What happens next is entirely up to the couple to try and make the right decisions to get out of some very difficult situations they now find themselves in. There are some moral and ethical dilemnas they are now faced with, and they must work together as a couple if they are going to get out of this alive.

There are many twists and turns, and it is a fast-paced movie where you are never unsatisfied. From the first 10 minutes right to the end, there is plenty of edge-of-the-seat drama to keep the most die-hard movie fan happy. The end scenes were astonishing, and very different to what I had seen in other home-invasion movies. This movie turns the genre on it's head and re-defines it as a genre of it's own. Very edgy, very satisfying, and very entertaining, with plenty of surprises.

Two law-abiding citizens, Mark and Heather Barnes, are the victims of multiple home intruders. In a far-fetched premise, something valuable has been hidden in their home, and a group of thugs will stop at nothing to retrieve it.

The best part of the film was the development of the characters of Mark and Heather. They lost a child, young Lilly, who was killed by a drunken driver. Mark shoulders the blame because he was late in picking up his daughter. For her part, Heather is a veteran of Iraq, a sergeant who witnessed atrocities in combat.

An intriguing premise of the film was the apparent greed felt by Mark and Heather in the attempt to discover the "treasure" that might get them out their precarious financial situation. But there was no follow through on that premise. Will they ever be able to "sell" the hard drive?

The action sequences were awkward due to the dark lighting. It was also unclear why so much effort would be expended to retrieve a hard drive that had salacious material about the town mayor. That was a lot to turn the home of Mark and Heather Barnes into a last stand at the Alamo.