I'm watching Pulse this morning, and it has all the elements I've described. Just not quite in the order he remembered them. And his idea of when he saw it first was off because Pulse is from 1988. Maybe it made him think of when he was the age of the boy in the movie, which would have been the 1970s.

The kids talking about the garbage disposal incident happens 27 minutes in, and it is a neighbor boy telling the kid that lives there now the story. It actually happened in the house next door, that is boarded up. And it is not a whole family moving in to a new house, there is just the boy David who was living in Colorado with his mom but has come to visit with his dad and girlfriend in suburban L.A. area. There is dead grass too.

The garage door incident happens about 15 minutes later. The boy is home alone and ends up trapped in the garage with all sorts of smoking electrical malfunctions going on and he starts up the car and bashes the door open enough to get.

His dad's girlfriend is trapped in the shower and almost scalded to death after that. She is recovering in the hospital for the rest of the movie , so it is just David and his dad Bill who end up in a fight to the finish with the house. At the end of the movie they are trapped in the burning house and Dad fights his way out with an axe, which he then takes to the power pole.

So mystery solved I think. Pulse is the main movie he was thinking of. Some other movies like the ones listed above and perhaps Poltergeist may have helped him get some of the details confused. Thanks again, everyone!

Who would have thought a freak typhoon would have come out of nowhere and wrecked all calculations?