1 out of 5

Directed by: Eli Roth

Roth gave us the dark-humored Cabin Fever, delivering some delightfully ookily uncomfortable gore amidst a vibe that seemed to embrace and appreciate the roots of its genre, thereby causing fans of said genre to champion their new favorite director and get all hyped up when he promised us horrible horrors in Hostel.  We ate it up at the time, and tortune porn was unfortunately born… though we can’t blame Roth for that.  We also can’t blame him for slipping through the hype machine with Hostel, which, upon retrospective views, is a pretty damn average flick with a dumb script and mostly poor acting and occasionally surprisingly poor effects.  Maybe we could take it as a joke had Roth delivered another Cabin Fever, but that hasn’t really happened.  And with Knock Knock. I’m ready to confirm that he’s just not that inventive or great of a director.

Knock suffers from a lot of the same tediousness that Hostel executed, in terms of scene framing, and pacing.  It’s actually worse in that the overly cheesy opening that hopes to establish Keanu Reeve’s Evan as a family man and its accompanying overly dramatic score looks like a made-for-TV affair, something that, in the 90s, went straight to HBO.  Sure, Knock is a remake of a 70s film, but I just can’t credit Roth with enough awareness to be so dedicated as to make the film come across as simplistic as it does for the sake of maintaining some type of meta-winky tone.  And while there are moments that seem like they might redeem the movie, such as the tension surrounding the uncomfortable flirtation between Evan and his two “our cab dropped us in the middle of nowhere” visitors, Genesis (Lorenzo Izzi) and Bel (Ana de Armas), or a review of the eventual destruction these visitors cause – both of these moments accomplished through some nice drifting shots that effectively establish the posh house in which Evan lives – it’s the movies complete lack of desire to go anywhere unexpected that ultimately sinks it.

Left alone by his wife and kids for a weekend of working, it’s appreciated that Roth and his scriptwriters have Evan hold out against the girls’ aggressive approaches for a while, but once he inevitably gives in, Knock Knock has absolutely nothing else to offer, and the small cast that the home-invasion story allows isn’t buoyed well by Reeves, who can’t quite muster the believability needed to sell the freaked-out frenzy of his character.  It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s just rather boring, and Roth hardly adds anything to the direction to make it more than a paint-by-numbers thriller.