Review of Someone's Knocking at the Door (2009) by Lee M — 02 Jun 2010

The opening moments of director Chad Ferrin's Someone's Knocking at the Door features a male college student, Ray (Jordan Lawson), doing drugs in his dorm. There is a knock at the door, and upon answering Ray discovers that there is an attractive and very naked woman outside ready and willing. Now, if you know anything about horror movies then you probably should know that this situation isn't going to end well for Ray. And not end well it does, since this attractive female turns out to be a hideous man with an enormous penis who proceeds to anally rape Ray to death. I've seen some strange ways to start off a movie, but none quite like that.

The rest of the film focuses on Ray's mourning friends, who get together one night in their school's medical records room to read through files and do drugs. They stumble upon a file about a deranged married couple, John (Ezra Buzzington) and Wilma Hopper (Elina Madison), who violently raped people to death (see where this is going already?). What started out as a night of fun turns into something worse, as these two maniacs show up and extract all sorts of violent sexual acts on each of the students who has the unfortunate luck of crossing paths with them.

Someone's Knocking at the Door is another film to pop up in recent years that tries to be a throwback to the more deviant days of horror, where gratuitous sex and violence played hand in hand. The material in the film is pretty messed up, but it was a lot tamer than I was expecting it to be. In fact, Someone's Knocking at the Door seemed more concerned with messing with the viewers mind than it was in trying to scare them. I'm sure that the bizarre nature of the film was meant with the best of intentions, but I found Ferrin's film a bit hard to stick with. It spent so much time trying to be weird that the rest of the film didn't come together or develop properly.

I did like that the film acts as a cautionary tale of sexual activity and of the use of drugs, since most of the slasher films of the 80's contained a similar theme. I'm sure that a good movie is buried somewhere in this film. But every time Someone's Knocking at the Door seemed like it was heading towards a better direction, it would revert back to its bizarre nature again. The movie would be building up a nice mystery, and then decide it was time to throw in another scene involving sexual reproductive organs that were either grotesquely large or being used in ways that they shouldn't be used.

The ending to Someone's Knocking at the Door comes as no surprise to me. There are strange things that happen throughout the film and I was suspecting the movie was going to end as it did. I won't spoil it, but I'm sure if you know a thing or two about movies, then you probably can figure out this film. Chad Ferrin's film is an interesting one to say the least. But his attention was all over the place on this one, and not focused in the places that it really needed to be. Even if Someone's Knocking at the Door is a failure in my eyes, it still is one of the most memorable horror films of the decade.