In a career full of necrotic deceases, profitable torture cults and cannibals, surely the most shocking twist of all is when Eli Roth suddenly veered into other genres to ply his trade. However, while his segue into the likes of Bruce Willis’ Death Wish remake or provocative Keanu Reeves thriller, Knock Knock technically still fit within Roth’s usual themes with savage violence and twisted sexual aspects at play, no one could have possibly foreseen that the director who once staged a scene where a woman saved the skin off of her own legs would go on to helm a kid’s film.
Based on the first of a series of books published back in 1973 by John Bellairs, the admittedly clunkily titled The House With A Clock In Its Walls saw the “Hostel guy” move into the realms with a horror tinged, dark fantasy that saw Jack Black in charge of a secretive magical world that was equal parts kooky and dangerous. However, other than the issue of whether Roth was the right guy to direct a kid’s film, surely the main sticking point was “didn’t Jack Black make this exact movie three years ago with Goosebumps?”.
After his parents are killed in a car accident (immediately orphaning your young leads in this kind of movie is imperative, it seems), Lewis Barnavelt is sent to go and live with his eccentric uncle, Jonathan, in his large house in Zebedee, Michigan. While all this is enough to overwhelmed any child, the fact thst Lewis is also somewhat introverted and “weird” means that starting an entire new life from scratch is an enormously daunting task. However, what helps the troubled child during this sad time is that his uncle is actually a warlock and the house that he’s staying in not only boasts items of furniture and hedges that boast intelligence, but Jonathan’s purple clad neighbour, Florence Zimmerman, is a witch of some talent.
Convincing his uncle to teach him some magic helps Lewis starts to feel joy again and even makes a friend at school in the form of injured popular kid, Tarby Corrigan, but unbeknownst to the kid, Jonathan has some issues about his house that needs ironing out. You see, the magical abode once belonged to Jonathan’s long time friend Issac Izard, but after he went away to fight in World War II, he returned a different, darker man and after he seemingly sacrificed his own wife Selena to cook up a plot to end humanity, he was fatally expelled. However, before he was, Izard managed to hide a special kind of clock within the walls of the house and Jonathan has been searching for it ever since to try and discover its obviously sinister purpose.
Meanwhile, Lewis is plagued by dreams of his dead mother, who urges him to break into Jonathan’s forbidden cabinet and start doing spells from the book of necromancy that’s locked within. In order to impress Tarby, Lewis caves with predictably dangerous consequences – but with Jonathan only a novice warlock and Florence only half the witch she once was, can this group manage to halt the potential disaster that’s been set in motion?
OK, so Eli Roth made a kid’s film. Great. Now that we’ve established that it’s probably good manners to actually delve in to the movie in question and see if he did a good job and if any of his more adult orientated habits have managed to worm their way into a whimsical tale of warlocks and witches. The short answer (to both) is yes. Yes, the film is actually pretty good, if a little slow – and yes, a surprising amount of horror visuals manage to make their way into the film which manages to make it just as dark, if not darker, than one of the later stage Harry Potter movies where they started getting an actual body count. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I’ve always been a little iffy with filmmakers who suddenly abandon a chosen genre in favour of adding more quills to their directorial bow, but Roth seems way more at home installing legit, horror images into a Jack Black fantasy/comedy than he was rebooting Death Wish. He also retains a surprising amount of maturity from the book by tying things up with the impact that WWII had on most of the characters lives, what with Kyle MacLachlan’s character turning evil after the horrors of war (and a shifty demon) shift his perception of humanity into something more hateful and the revelation that it was the holocaust that broke Ms. Zimmerman into being a shadow of her former self. However, at no point does the movie forget that it also has to function as a Jack Black movie too, so the star lightens the load at regular intervals by being typically being loud and pronouncing various words erratically.
However, despite Roth’s admirable efforts, there are a few issues that even witchcraft isn’t able to overcome. In a time when such recognisable properties such as Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket and Goosebumps have already thrown together a mixture of growing pains, dark fantasy and robust comedic performances, The House With A Clock In Its Walls doesn’t really have enough extra oomph to seperate itself from the pack and while it’s certainly better than average, that frankly hideous title certainly doesn’t help matters much. It’s a shame because aside from the usual CGI creatures and moving paintings, the director stages some of the most memorable set pieces of his career that will probably require some quick fire eye-shielding by parents for their younger children. A sequence that sees our heroes fend off a room full of broken down robots and mannequins looks like it would be more at home in a Silent Hill movie than an escapist flick for the little ‘uns and while the sight of killer pumpkins and a sentient chair much like the one from Pee Wee’s Playhouse may lull the more sensitive nippers back from the brink of regular night terrors, the sight of MacLachlan’s zombified face will most likely freak them out all over again – but then, you suspect that it was Roth’s plan all along.
Jack Black is pretty much Jack Black at this point mo matter what, although a moment where he’s zapped into the truly horrific sight of having his full grown head attached to a baby body is something that’ll give the adults nightmares, much less the children. However, Owen Vaccaro does well to avoid turning his damaged, timid, oprphan into too much of an annoyance as he goes through the usual child champion tropes. However, proving to be an unsurprising high point is Cate Blanchett razor-tongued witch who trades vicious – but friendly – barbs with Black without missing a beat, fights ghouls with a magical umbrella and carries a lifetime of pain and tragedy on her face with only a single, revealing line of dialogue. OK, so it may have inadvertently led to the actress appearing in Roth’s abortive video game adaption, Borderlands, but surely we can’t put the blame of that on this movie, no matter how awkward that title is.
Roth’s horror past leads to him delivering a supremely dark and solid fantasy film in something of an overly critical landscape thanks to the domination of a particular, spectacled school child. But while the director turns some of the fear factor up maybe a smidge too high, his mature approach to having real life horrors give his characters weight means that The House With A Clock In Its Walls certainly knows what time it is.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 