Movie Review: The House with a Clock In Its Walls

The House with a Clock in Its Walls *** / *****

Directed by: Eli Roth.

Written by: Eric Kripke based on the novel by John Bellairs.

Starring: Owen Vaccaro (Lewis Barnavelt), Cate Blanchett (Mrs. Zimmerman), Jack Black (Jonathan Barnavelt), Kyle MacLachlan (Isaac Izard), Colleen Camp (Mrs. Hanchett), Lorenza Izzo (Lewis' Mother), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Selena Izard), Sunny Suljic (Tarby Corrigan), Braxton Bjerken (Woody Mingo), Christian Calloway (Azazel).

 

I would not have guesses that the recipe for Eli Roth to finally make a good movie was to make a horror movie for kids. Roth has been consistently making movies since his debut Cabin Fever (2002) – and to be honest, I don’t think I’ve liked any of them (to be fair, I didn’t see The Green Inferno, so perhaps there is one I’d like). More often than not, when I read an interview with Roth after seeing one of his films, I want to see the film Roth thinks he made, rather than the film he actually did. This was certainly true of both Hostel films, that he said was about American torture of prisoners in the war on terror, but was really just a series of torture scenes, or his recent Death Wish remake that he said was aiming to start a conversation on guns, when it played like a NRA recruitment video. Roth has always had style, but his ideas have more often than not been confused. Perhaps The House with a Clock in Its Walls is his best film because essentially, the film has no ideas at all – it aims to be a fun little scary movie for families to enjoy – and its basically that. It was the first scary movie I’ve ever taken my seven-year-old to see – and it worked like a charm on her, sometimes making her laugh, sometimes making her watch the film through fingers covering her eyes, but never outright terrifying her. That’s the perfect amount of scares for a seven-year-old.

 

The film, like many a film aimed at children, starts with a child losing both of his parents. This is Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who parents die in an accident, and so he is sent to live with his eccentric Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), who he has never met before, in a new city, in a strange old house that everyone all the kids think is haunted – and while they’re not quite right, they aren’t quite wrong either. Jonatan is a warlock – a boy witch, the movie helpfully explains – and so strange things happen in the house. His neighbor and best friend is Mrs. Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett), a powerful witch, whose spells have started not working quite right. Owen senses, not incorrectly, that they aren’t being wholly truthful with him about what they are doing at night. Meanwhile, at school, he’s trying to make friends – and choses the wrong kid to try with, which of course leads him to break the one rule Uncle Jonathan has in his house – about a lock cabinet.

 

For a seven-year-old who hasn’t seen a scary movie like this before, The House with a Clock in Its Walls works like gangbusters. It helps, a lot, that Jack Black goes full doofus in this role, in a way that I found distracting, but that kids will find adorably funny. He helps take the edge off of the scary stuff – which is mainly just creepy and spooky, then downright terrifying. Blanchett finds the right notes to be comforting, and funny – without going goofy like Black. The special effects and the art direction for everything at the house are quite good – Roth knows what movies he’s aping here, and he does a decent job.

 

Now, I’ve said the movie worked well for my seven-year-old, but how about for me – a horror fan who has seen countless horror movies. Well, it’s entertaining enough – it’s solid and fun, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. But I admit I had more fun watching my kid watch the film, then I did watching it myself. It’s still Eli Roth’s best film – that’s not saying much is it. If you have kids, and want to introduce them to scary movies, you can do worse. If you want a real scary movie, look elsewhere.  

Movie Review: Death Wish

Death Wish ** / *****

Directed by: Eli Roth.

Written by: Joe Carnahan based on the novel by Brian Garfield and the screenplay by Wendell Mayes.

Starring: Bruce Willis (Paul Kersey), Vincent D'Onofrio (Frank Kersey), Elisabeth Shue (Lucy Kersey), Camila Morrone (Jordan Kersey), Dean Norris (Detective Kevin Raines), Beau Knapp (Knox), Kimberly Elise (Detective Leonore Jackson), Len Cariou (Ben), Jack Kesy (The Fish), Ronnie Gene Blevins (Joe), Kirby Bliss Blanton (Bethany).

 

I can easily see a way that a version of Death Wish could be updated, and relevant, for 2018 – but the version directed by Eli Roth is not that film. The 1974 original starred Charles Bronson, as a man pushed too far, after his wife and daughter victims of a home invasion – the wife raped and murdered, the daughter raped and traumatized – Bronson decides to strike back at the “animals” who did this too his family – even if he doesn’t really know who those people are. That spoke to audiences in 1974 – when violent crime in America really was on the rise, and people in major cities were afraid to go out at night. In 2018, violent crime is actually down – the lowest it’s been in decades – but there are places (Fox News, the NRA among them) who still want to make people afraid – it’s good for business. I think a new version of Death Wish should at least address that. But this movie doesn’t really do that – it is basically a feature length version of the NRA tagline “Nothing will stop a bad guy with a gun, except a good guy with a gun”.

 

This time the movie takes place in Chicago, not New York (it’s no coincidence, they’ve picked the most violent city in America), and Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is now a surgeon, not an architect (or an accountant, as he was in the original novel). He has a beautiful wife (Elisabeth Shue) and teenage daughter (Camila Morrone) about to go off to college. The same basic thing happens as in the original – a trio of thugs break into the house when Paul isn’t there – his wife ends up dead, his daughter in a coma (thankfully, the movie spares us of either of them getting raped, although the threat is certainly there with the daughter). Paul ends up getting himself a gun, and going out onto the streets to get revenge on all the bad people out there. Two detectives, Raines and Jackson (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) try to find out who attacked his family. When Kersey visits Raines at work one day, and sees a bulletin board full of open homicides, he is assured that most of those crimes are gang related – “asshole on asshole” crimes that won’t be solved. But Kersey’s case is different. He doesn’t say why, but then again, he doesn’t need to.

 

The movie gets bloody – as you expect from a movie from Roth. He lingers over one scene of torture in particular, but all of the violence in the film is over-the-top in how bloody and ridiculous it can be. Roth cannot seem to decide if he wants to go full on exploitation and fun with the violence (hell, there’s a scene in which one of the bad guy literally gets hit in the head with a bowling ball) or he wants to make something where the violence hurts – where you feel it in the audience.

 

The original novel that Death Wish is based on is actually very anti-vigilante justice – the novel’s Paul Kersey essentially goes insane, and by the end of the novel is killing unarmed kids because he doesn’t like the way they look. He even wrote a sequel after the original movie came out to make his stance even more explicit (that book was turned into a much better, underseen movie by James Wan in 2007 – although it doesn’t have all that much to do with the novel either). The original movie at least pays lip service to being anti-vigilante as well – the cop investigating the crimes figures out who is behind them, and wants to arrest him – but his hands are tied by the higher ups. No matter what Roth says in interviews about the film (and by the way, whenever I read interviews with Roth, I am always struck by the feeling that I would really like the movie he thought he made – it just rarely matches the movie he actually made), that’s basically gone here. There is one good sequence in the film – a montage of Kersey the surgeon removing bullets from shooting victims, and Kersey the vigilante dad loading his gun that points out the absurdity of the two sides of him), but the film never really delves into that. There are talk radio montages that debate the killings Kersey does – when he becomes a social media celebrity the “Grim Reaper” because of YouTube videos of him in action.

 

I think much of this undercut though by the fact that unlike the original novel or film, this Kersey actually does track down those responsible for hurting his family. It’s harder to question that sort of justice being meted out against people we know are guilty, and have seen do horrible things. This Kersey is far easier to understand and root for.

 

Willis is probably the wrong actor to play this role – but then again, so was Bronson (originally, the 1974 film was supposed to be directed by Sidney Lumet, and Jack Lemmon was to star – Bronson always said that he thought the role should have gone to Dustin Hoffman – although, Hoffman did a version of it in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971). Willis is an action hero, so we immediately accept him as a killing machine and a hero. The film is essentially a fantasy version for every civilian with a gun, who knows – just KNOWS – that if he was at that school, that concert, that mall when that asshole started shooting everyone with an AR-15, that he would run in, and put an end to it. There was a possibility that a new Death Wish could reflect on, or at least mirror, the America that exists today. This isn’t that film.

Movie Review: Knock Knock

Knock Knock
Directed by: Eli Roth.   
Written by: Eli Roth & Nicolás López & Guillermo Amoedo and Anthony Overman and Michael Ronald Ross.  
Starring: Keanu Reeves (Evan Webber), Lorenza Izzo (Genesis), Ana de Armas (Bel), Aaron Burns (Louis), Ignacia Allamand (Karen Alvarado), Dan Baily (Jake), Megan Baily (Lisa), Colleen Camp (Vivian).

The problem with the films of Eli Roth is that there is always a decent idea at the core of the movie, that Roth than precedes to ruin by taking the dumbest, most obvious take on that idea. Could you make a good horror movie about young Americans acting like morons in foreign countries and getting tortured to death? Yes, you could – but Roth failed not only once, but twice with the Hostel movies – as he provided no context, no insight into his films – instead replacing it with a lot of gore (it’s three times if you include Aftershock, a film he co-wrote and co-starred in0 . His latest film, Knock Knock at least has some humor to – which is more than you can say for the rest of his films. But again, there is a way you could make a decent film out of this idea – a filmmaker like Michael Haneke has done it numerous times. But Roth has no real idea what the hell he’s doing here – and has made a ham-fisted, idiotic and misogynistic film.

The film stars Keanu Reeves as Evan Webber – a normal family man with a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids, who is left alone one weekend because he has some work to do, and the family is headed to the beach. Late on the first night, there is a knock on the door – and on the other side are two soaking wet, young beauties – Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Ana de Armas) who say they are lost. He invites them in, calls them an Uber (which won’t be there for 45 minutes). They are very forward with their sexuality, trying desperately to seduce him – and while he resists, at first, he eventually gives into temptation (although they practically force themselves on him) and they have a threesome. The next morning, they’re still in his house – and make it clear they are not leaving. They have gone from sexy to insane – and are now claiming to be only 15. They will spend the rest of the movie tormenting Webber – often while he is tied up.

You could make an interesting movie out of this premise – a film about Webber’s moral failing, and the price he pays for it. This is exactly the type of thing that Michael Haneke does exceptionally well – where even the most minor of transgressions are punished. But Roth isn’t Haneke – and he doesn’t even try to be. That isn’t the problem – the problem is that Roth has no idea what he’s doing. The portrait of the two women is in particular hateful – in the first act, they are mere sex objects – which would be fine if he were going somewhere else with the movie in the second or third act. Instead, he turns them into insane harpies for the next two acts, pushing them further and further into the realm of insanity. By the time they finally reveal why they hell they are doing this to Webber, its incredibly disappointing because its treated as an afterthought.

The best thing in the movie is the performance by Reeves – who really does make you feel sympathy for Webber. He tries to be a nice guy at first – and even does try and resist the two young women who are throwing themselves at him. He makes one, understandable (not forgivable) transgression – and has his life completely destroyed for it. Reeves goes full on Nicolas Cage in his performance – and it’s a wonder to behold really – especially when he starts screaming about free pizza. Reeves does what he can to save an awful movie – but he cannot do it.

In short, once again when I was done watching an Eli Roth movie I felt dirty. I felt that way after both Hostel movies and Aftershock – I wanted to wash the movie off of me. I felt the same way at the end of this film – but for different reasons. Roth has some provocative ideas in the films – about male sexual fantasies and young women – but he has no idea what to do with those ideas (having the two girls infantilize themselves and call Webber “daddy” isn’t the same thing as having an idea). Knock Knock is one of the worst films of the year – and once again, I am kicking myself for believing that Eli Roth may have actually made a good movie when I sat done to watch one.