Knock Knock (2015) Review!!

Synopsis – When a devoted husband and father is left home alone for the weekend, two stranded young women unexpectedly knock on his door for help. What starts out as a kind gesture results in a dangerous seduction and a deadly game of cat and mouse.

My Take – Those who have been watching movies for a while now should know who writer/ producer/ director/ actor Eli Roth is! He is the guy behind some awful films like Cabin Fever, Hostel (& its sequels), The Man with the Iron Fists, Aftershock & the recently released cannibalism film The Green Inferno (which I have already watched & will be a posting a review soon) is most recognizable as Sgt. Donny Donowitz aka “The Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino‘s masterpiece Inglourious Basterds (2009). He’s notably a member of the “Splat Pack” – a group of filmmakers notorious for the overly violent and explicit style of their films. A remake of the 1977 horror film Death Game, this is quite unlike anything Roth has done up to this point though and frankly it caught me quite off guard. This time around he’s gone for a more thought-provoking style, don’t get me wrong the film is quite awful (as I expected it to be), yet it contains a uniqueness that all his films have and which brings an added layer of quality to the story, in simple words a kind of a film which people refer to as ‘its so bad its good’! Roth has an ability, possibly unseen in any other current director in the horror genre, to build ridiculous characters to no end. One of his earlier films ‘Hostel‘ is known as one of the most brutal, hard to watch films ever created. However what people rarely mention about that film is that nearly the entire first half is taken up purely with character development. He tries really hard to make us care for the characters so that later on when they meet their fates it has that much more effect on the audience, well its another thing that the ploy doesn’t work most of the time. This film has that same endless patience for the first half, and whilst it is undoubtedly a very different film to ‘Hostel’, the same affect is utilized. And above all that he got Keanu Reeves, who has suddenly been shot back into limelight again after the surprise success of actioner John Wick (2014), to star in it! If people thought that the current status and talent of Keanu Reeves was going to save a script that can have only been written by a ten-year-old, well, maybe people should stop thinking altogether above Eli Roth film.

I’m still waiting for Eli Roth to make a good movie. But for the first thirty or forty minutes into the film, I thought maybe this was the one. Honestly this maybe he is least unlikable film yet! Along with that this home-invasion thriller avoids even a single act of bloody violence (unlike his previous films). A minor character does die, but it’s the result of a childish prank. The story follows successful architect Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves), who is left alone (well he has good looking dog as well) in his enviable Hollywood Hills home, as his wife Karen (Ignacia Allamand) has gone to the beach with their children for the weekend. At the middle of the rainy night, while Evan is sipping his red wine & smoking weed, two young woman Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) & Belle (Ana de Armas) knock at his door, soaked-through in the downpour, they ask him for help. Ever the nice guy, Evan obliges. The women eventually seduce him, then refuse to leave the house in the morning. Claiming they are underage, they threaten to call the police unless Evan plays along. Alternately savage, manic, depressed, suicidal, and homicidal, the girls trash the house, force Evan to baby them as if they were his kids, then seduce him again and finally force him to submit to a mock trial for statutory rape. For a while, the film is content to watch the playfully tense give-and-take between Evan and the girls as they try to sidle up to him. Curious inquiries turn into flattery, flattery turns into light physical contact, light physical contact turns into rubbing up and erstwhile embraces. Throughout, Evan tries to politely navigate the situation, jumping from chair to chair, trying to avoid these girls’ clear advances. But he doesn’t exactly kick them out, either. Here’s a narcissistic guy approaching middle age, with a family, his days as a hard-partying DJ long behind him; surely he can’t resist all this willing female flesh, can he? Roth, who actually has a talent for comedy, expertly choreographs this game of sexually loaded musical chairs, all the while keeping us guessing as to Evan’s true desires — even as the man seems to be playing everything by the rules. Viewers decrying a lack of “plot development” are as usually barking up the wrong tree, saying words out of habit. We do not need “plot developed” in this or other films, it is enough to undergo an experience. The drawback here is that we do not experience either with vigor that will shatter our reality or in a particularly interesting way. It’s okay. Anyway, that’s the good part of the movie. Then, Evan finally gives in with the two flirty sirens, and things go downhill from there, as the film degenerates into a kind of torture-revenge comedy designed to punish Evan for his philandering ways. That’s not exactly unexpected, of course. The film has more than a passing resemblance to Haneke‘s “Funny Games” — about two young male intruders who hold an entire family hostage. It mounts an intelligent, if not altogether successful, attack on consumer culture, the mass media, and middle-class moral values. The film uses Evan’s attackers, who are obsessed by childhood sexual abuse, to attack the constant barrage of media images that sexualize girls at a young age. The girls are schizoid creatures, taught to present themselves as objects of desire, yet at the same time worthy of parental love and protection. While its message is a little simplistic, the film is shot through with a brilliant, gleefully anarchic dark humor that’s equally fun, bad and disturbing. The second act of the film features all the familiar beats of movie psychos on parade. There’s a mock-game show with our protagonist tied up, complete with music and game show lingo (variations of “Let’s take a commercial break” are uttered more than once).

The crazy duo put on crazy make-up! The ladies become clingy and unhinged a la Fatal Attraction. All of this plays out with repeated accusations of “You’re a pedo for sleeping with ‘underage teens!’” as a backdrop. All Reeves is left with is dialogue that consists of “Fucking cunts!”, “Fucking bitches!”, and “You’re crazy!” It’s a waste of what was looking to be an interesting character. Herein lays the lazy attempts at making the film into a morality play, if that is indeed what Roth is trying to do here (I gave up after a while). The action is too loud and the performances are too broad to accomplish that goal, so the movie falls well short of becoming the cult classic it’s desperately trying to be. For a thriller, the film doesn’t provide sufficient tension or horror to keep anyone at the edge of their seat even for its limited run time of 99 mins. Plus the film ends up on a very cringe worthy note -a joke of something mentioned earlier in the film that comes off very embarrassing than anything else. The film collapses, because it doesn’t convince us on a basic level: the characters are driven by convenience, not behavior, and their actions seem like they’ve been manhandled into place to make the plot work. Roth also never captures the dangerous tone required to make us feel in any way invested in what’s happening onscreen. Even at their worst, those Grindhouse movies he loves and references had an unhinged quality that made it seem like anything was possible, like in watching them we’d entered a world without any rules. This film, by contrast, is inert. The torture gets worse and worse, and we care less and less. Speaking of Keanu Reeves, he really gave it his best! He plays “likable” just so well that he’s ideally suited to a role like this. He should not be blamed for his character, which felt pretty unnatural and very predictable consuming the fact that he always failed at every scenario in the film, I wanted to root for him but it became pretty tiresome after a while since everything he thought of got butchered down by the girls. In any other film it would be hard to imagine Lorenza Izzo (Eli Roth‘s wife) & Ana de Armas as femme fatales, but here they are life of this film. The two shriek, scream, and alternate between being completely unhinged to totally in control in the blink of an eye. If their performances were voluntarily loud, it was pretty awesome (well I am not sure really if it was meant to be that way) for a film like this one. On the whole, ‘Knock Knock‘ is silly & campy yet a badly made home invasion thriller which never meets its proposed end. If you enjoy unintentionally funny films, something on par with a Lifetime movie. This one is for you, or best skip it!