Review of Knock Knock (2015) by Jamess — 05 Jan 2016

I was a fan of Eli Roth's Cabin Fever all those years ago, before Hostel and everything else, but haven't been impressed by his work since. My one complaint about Cabin is the cheap joke at the end, calling back an earlier scene (the "my **** line).

And he does the same here, with a cheap callback joke as the final line. Why Roth decided to reboot an old 30 plus year old C-movie that starred Colleen Camp, Sandra Locke (both producers here) and Seymour Cassell is anyone's guess.

Unless he was intrigued by the standard universal theme of temptation and it's results. Knock Knock starts well, setting up the family dynamic, although Reeves just can't pull off warm and cuddly Daddy.

Spending Father's Day alone working, while wife and kids are away, a couple of young, nubile, and wet (of course it's a dark and stormy night) ladies come knocking at his door. Reeves tries to be gentlemanly, moving to a single chair, everytime the ladies get too close.

But little Keanu gets the best of him, and he beds both of them. This is where the movie becomes the "from hell" sub genre thriller. You know the "from hell" genre...the husband from hell, the roommate from hell, the TEMP from hell, etc.

Etc. The ladies, Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas, work on destroying Reeves from that point. And the movie goes completely off the rails. Game show parody, paper mached corpse, torture by volume...and a scene where Reeves loses it that has to be seen to be believed.

I think Roth told him just to go bat shirt crazy...And the ladies, tho attractive as can be, are more annoying than menacing. I never thought or felt they were truly dangerous. And the acting. There are times that I thought I was watching a bad SNL skit.

If this is the indication of Roth's career, no Taratino connection is going to keep him from a career of direct-to-DVD releases.