I'm a fan of the gut-wrenching. I like horror & suspense. I like to be shocked. Some of my all-time favorite films I wouldn't dare show my closest of friends out of fear that they would think I was mentally unstable. This film, 'The Girl Next Door', I would choose to not show them simply because it's a bad film. I'm not sure what Greg Wilson tried to accomplish here, and the screenplay was poorly adapted from Ketchum's novel. This is torture-porn, lightly cloaked by a terrible excuse for a love story.<br /><br />You've got two sisters, Meg & Susan Loughlin who are based on Sylvia & Jenny Likens, who were both horribly abused by one Gertrude Baniszewski - who is portrayed in the film as Ruth Chandler. In the true story of these crimes, the girls are abandoned by their circus traveling parents and left to live with Gertrude. In the film, the girls parents were killed and they end up with the same fate - to live with Ruth. Ruth is abusive and out of her mind and so are her accomplices who happen to also be her own children and some neighborhood kids. So as days pass, both girls are abused and tortured in terrible ways, with the older of the two getting the brunt of it. Ruth uses her basement as her chamber of horrors and calls what she does "games", for instance one "game" involves hanging & blindfolding Meg by her arms and stripping her nude. The boys take care of this for her, and Meg is left there over night. This type of thing makes up the majority if the second half of the film. Enter the ridiculous premise of one of the boys and Meg having feelings for each other. This is ridiculous because the boy continues to go over to the house time after time watching (and sometimes partaking) in said torturous activities. The police show up a few times. He tells his parents (in a round about way). Point is, the way the movie unfolds, these girls wouldve been saved, numerous times. It's almost laughable how we are supposed to believe none of these morons wouldve done something. What happened in real life is nowhere near what went down on film. The story has so many holes that you could throw it in a cave in France, take it out in a year, then slap a sticker on it "100% Grade A Swiss Cheese". It's terribly lame & incredibly unbelievable. I assume this side story of love was added to try and get some emotion from the audience so that the ending of the film could pull some tears out. The acting is plastic & any emotional investment, other than imaging that some form of this film actually happened, is completely impossible to reach. If you want to shock us, take what REALLY happened for once and just show that. Don't waste our time with preposterous side & back stories.<br /><br />The only reason I didn't give this a 1 is because the last 12 minutes or so were actually intense. The rest of the film, however, is tripe. Skip it.<br /><br />-iii