It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
Keanu Reeves plays a forty-something architect whose family has gone on vacation without him. Later that night, a couple of young women show up on his doorstep, seduce him, then refuse to leave his home. When he threatens to call the cops, they giggle and say they’ve got a good story to tell: “You want to check her ID?” asks one of the women. “She’s too young to have one.”
From that point forward, Keanu’s character is forced to take part in their nightmarish games. After tying him to a bed, one of the women wears his daughter’s clothes and rapes him while the other woman videotapes. At various points throughout the movie, Keanu gets the opportunity to make a run for it, but he chooses not to, hoping until the bitter end that he’ll find some way to fix this problem and cover up his infidelities.
Not many movie stars would do a picture like this. Hell, most would have run the other way when offered The Matrix after getting burned by Johnny Mnemonic. It’s clear Keanu is a genuine fan of genre films. Knock Knock is obviously not a movie he did for the paycheck—the entire budget was less than most movie star salaries. It’s a brave move to take a role like this for such little pay.
Knock Knock is probably Eli Roth’s best-looking film, but it’s perhaps his least entertaining. I liked it, but maybe I would have liked it more if I had seen Death Game, which Roth apparently wanted to remake. I missed the old Roth—the juvenile and fun Roth—but he doesn’t get up to his old tricks until the credits are about to roll. There’s actually a very funny bit near the end involving Facebook. Had the rest of the movie been so unhinged, I probably would have been able to recommend it more.
2023 Update: I’ve seen Death Game now and, as I suspected, my opinion of Knock Knock slightly improved.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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