Far-Fetched Movie The Girl Next Door 

Bears no Relation To Sylvia Likens Case

By Lynn A. Granata

Aunt Ruth is the film's arch villain

I thought that after a fair amount of thinking that it would be a good idea to write about this fictionalized version about the Sylvia Likens Case.

The movie in comparison to An American Crime tears at your heart. It was credited to a famed horror novel author, Jack Ketchum. Released in 2007, it was a box office bomb.

The time setting takes place in the late 1950's, the Dwight Eisenhower years.

 Two adolescent girls, Meghan and Susan are sent to live with their Aunt Ruth in the suburbs. Because they lost both of their parents to a car accident.

Meghan is an attractive 15 year old girl and her sister Susan is 12 years old, and Susan has to wear leg irons on both legs because she broke both of her legs in this accident. Meghan, however escaped with only a couple of minor lacerations. She was very lucky.

The movie opens with the narration of David Moran, who reminisces about that time in his life when he met both helpless sisters. He tells his side of the story about how his life was changed forever after the events which took place in Aunt Ruth's home unraveled.

Young Meg meets David, then 12, on a sandy river bed and strikes up a friendly, if not flirtatious conversation. David is showing Meg the crayfish he caught Meg tries it and she catches the two larger crayfish that Dave tried to catch but couldn't.

Meg tells David that she had just moved in next door with the Chandler's. David exclaims "hey we're neighbors!"

The next day David finds out about Meg and her sister Susan through his best friend and next door neighbor Donny Chandler. He is Meg and Susan's second cousin.

Enter Aunt Ruth

She is supposed to set the example of the super strict authoritarian disciplinarian who doesn't tolerate any adolescent high jinks' and she most certainly lays down the law to Meg and Susan very early on in their boarding arrangement with herself and her young sons.

The trouble doesn't start until Aunt Ruth discovers that Meg has painted a water color portrait for David. David inappropriately shows up at Ruth's house that evening and tells Ruth that the painting was from Meg and meant for her.

Ruth immediately scoffs at the painting, proudly announcing that she knows that it wasn't meant for her, telling David that she painted it for him.

Ruth stands up and walks over to Meg and tells her to take it back. Ruth then lectures her troupe, and especially Meg about the evils of being a slut and warns Meg that she will not stand for any slutting going on in her house.

Ruth thinks that Meg isn't well you guessed it, unchaste.

About a day later, David goes over to their house and finds his 3 pals upstairs tickling Meg. Meg slaps Ralphie, the youngest boy of the depraved lot across the face because he pinched her in the wrong place. Ralphie runs out of the bedroom to let his mother know. Willie, the eldest and meanest of the trio hollers you b@@*h! at Meg. Willie then pulls Susan out of the closest and throws her seated on the bed. Willie shouts "look what your sister did to Ralphie!"

Ruth comes storming into the bedroom once she hears all the commotion going on and asks, "what in God's name is going on in here.?"

Now to make the rest of this long story short, Susan is punished for being in connivance with Meg. She is paddled with a toilet bowl cleaning brush about 18-20 times. Meg, who is fiercely protective of her sister, tries to stop the corporal punishment but can't because her 3 male cousins hold her back.

 Ruth demands that Meg give her the diamond ring necklace she wears around her neck that was her mother's. When Meg protests, Ruth violently yanks it off her neck.

Later on and from here on out, the abuse of Meg gets worse and worse. She is bound and gagged in the basement. She is refused food and water. She makes a feeble effort to escape, is caught, and then beaten again more severally than ever.

Ruth and company eventually and slowly murder Meg, they rape and brand her, and then finally burn her in her most sensitive part of her body. It is too gruesome for me to tell you what it is, but all I could do is give you a hint, it is a practice that some third world countries do to young women so that they lose their desire for human coitus. The End.

 Meg dies and David tried to save her and Susan's lives, but he ends up only saving his own. Susan is rescued, when the cops come after a fire was set by David earlier to grab the attention of the neighborhood for an SOS.

Conclusion

It is now the present. David is a Wall Street Bigwig. He looks back and remembers that summer in his life and how it changed him forever. He admits that what Meghan taught him was "it's what you do last that matters."