The Woman in the Yard

I feel like the Blumhouse pitch meetings need to feature less weed.

After managing to create a feature film out of the "hey, what if there was a haunted pool!?" concept with 2024's "Night Swim", someone green lit an even lighter concept, simply titled, THE WOMAN IN THE YARD.

Come on Blumhouse, are you even trying??

Saddled with this weak title, screenwriter Sam Stefanak head scratchingly centers the film on one of the most unlikable female lead characters in recent memory.

As we meet Ramona, she's barely getting out of bed to check on her children. Depressed, on pain killers & crutches, pissed off at the world and all but ignoring her kids, she's not a pleasant focus.

It's not that Danielle Deadwyler (Till) isn't a great actress, she's strong here with what she's given, which isn't much.

The actors that play her children fair much better. Peyton Jackson ( The Harder They Fall) is very good as Ramona's teenage son, Taylor, who's become a father figure to his young sister, Annie (big screen newcomer Estella Kahiha) since the recent loss of their father.

With a running time of less than 90 minutes, you can feel the padding start early and you can almost smell the flashbacks coming when the kids start talking about what happened to Dad.

Living in the middle of the country, there aren't a lot of places to run after a mysterious woman shows up in a large chair on the edge of their property.

If you're going to create a scary foe in a Blumhouse film, I'm not sure an old woman in an antique chair would ever register as foreboding.

Mildly intriguing, maybe. Puzzling, perhaps. Scary? No.

Hey, is that Woman in the Yard actually getting closer or is that my imagination?

This is the type of movie where Mom keeps saying, "the Andersons live at the next farm, go over there for help!" but no one ever does.

It also has pretty silly rules for shadows, lightness and darkness that seem to bend to fit the story line. If shadow puppets gave you nightmares as a kid, this movie is going to terrify the bejeezus out of you. If they didn't, get ready to laugh, or snooze.

The emotion I felt the most during these 88 minutes was boredom.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra showed he can helm a hell of an action flick with last year's wild, airport set "Carry On". Here, the script gives him so little action to film that he seems as bored as I am for most of the running time.

And the ending.

Dark, self important and dumb is not a winning trio.

Never has the title to a great Barbra Streisand movie been used to so little effect.

I actually thought of "Jaws: The Revenge" as the final five minutes unfolded into a mess that thinks it's clever but plays for eye rolls.

What a mess.

I can't wait for the next film in the series, "The Dude in the Driveway".

Wait, no one mention that at Blumhouse, it will be in pre-production next week.

THE WOMAN IN THE YARD gets a D.