Netflixable? It’s “The Last House” and Nobody Should Buy It

“The Last House” is “A Quiet Place” with rain — “A Rainy Place.” With survivalism. And monsters.

It’s a dull and exceptionally stupid environmental thriller, sort of “The Revenge of the Sea” for dummies.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson wrote “Love and Monsters” a few years back, and the unfunny parts of Ricky Gervais’s rom-com “The Invention of Lying.” Here, he feels obligated to have our patriarch-hero utter the lines that every overmatched horror movie dad has said before him when the rains come, their house traps them inside and “something” is “out there” controlling all this.

“I’m not going to let anything BAD happen to us!”

Like that’s within dad Jason’s (Wagner Maura) control.

The set-up is stupid — the rains come, everybody’s house locks them inside to eventually starve or other die. But wait, there are monsters doing this? What’s their angle? People as food? Why let them rot, then?

Dad Jason and plucky mother Ann (Greta Lee) devote themselves to protecting their kids in their tumbledown Seattle home that’s about two mortgage payments shy of reposession. This mysterious “We’re locked in!” has an upside.

“At least we don’t have to worry about the mortgage this month.”

The script dives deep into the DIY nature of being trapped, on your own, in a world that has shut down. Communication with neighbors comes through chalk boards, passing gossip on about how far this calamity extends. Food must be rationed, but if you get sick, you’re all but doomed.

Nobody can “help” anybody else.

The loopsholes our family (Riley Chong and Noah Alexander Sosnowski play the kids, with Gabriel Barbosa and Emma Ho taking over “five years later”) benefits from come from the crumbling nature of the house. They create gaps in the “total lockdown.”

Mom DIYs vegetable garden is manageable with only the seeds of what they’ve been eating (and no, um, polinators). Unemployed engineer Dad makes DIY traps for “chimney fishing” for critters out in the wild, which reclaims their subdivision when the humans are stuck inside.

Yeah, a lot of animals meet their untimely end in this, before you run off to visit DoesTheDogDie.com.

Meaningful subtexts about what constitutes “living” — hiding in a house, or figuring out a way to face the perils of the world outside — are stumbled over. A whole lot of the logistics (walk-around sewers in a subdivision) make little sense and the science makes none at all.

Director Louis Letterrier once gave us an “Incredible Hulk,” but he’s hard pressed to serve up any suspense here, even in the action-packed third act.

The players do what they can, which isn’t much, considering the screenplay’s limitations.

But hey, Robinson got to write a version “Edge of Tomorrow 2.” So at least we’ll know what happened if that never goes before the cameras.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Greta Lee, Wagner Maura, Riley Chong, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, Garbiel Barbosa and Emma Ho.

Credits: Directed by Louis Letterrier, scripted by Matthew Robinson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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