

#Knock knock movie movie
The two friends insist innocently that the cab dropped them off in the wrong spot on the way to a party, and now they’re lost, so could they please come in and use the phone? And maybe take off their clothes and throw them in the dryer? As Julianne Moore says so drolly in “ The Big Lebowski” while showing Jeff Bridges the porno movie “Logjammin’”: “Lord, you can imagine where it goes from here.”Īnd it does go there-sort of-in time. Standing on his front porch, giggling and dripping in itty-bitty clothing, are the brunette Genesis ( Lorenza Izzo, Roth’s real-life wife) and blonde Bel ( Ana de Armas), who must be half his age. But then, there’s a knock at the door on the one night there happens to be a torrential downpour in drought-stricken Southern California. With the wife and kids away on a beach trip, Evan uses the weekend to catch up on a project, enjoy some red wine, maybe smoke a little pot and listen to his treasured vinyl on the turntable. The execution never feels quite so focused, however. At first, it's as if Roth and co-writers Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amadeo are toying with the notion of domestic bliss, only to hold it up to the light, examine it and crush it to pieces later on. There almost seems to be an intentional awkwardness to these early interactions between Evan and his family they’re too happy and perfect, like folks you’d see forced together in a catalog. Clearly, this is an idyllic place-which the presence of Evan’s flirty, artist wife ( Ignacia Allamand) and adorable son and daughter confirms. Roth sets the mood rather elegantly off the top, with long, gliding camerawork over the Hollywood sign, through Malibu canyons and down serene, suburban streets until he winds up at Evan’s front door. He stars as Evan, an architect living in a coolly sprawling minimalist home filled with colorful, modern art in the hills outside Los Angeles. As a piece of social satire, “Knock Knock” winds up being not just toothless but anticlimactic.īut it does feature Keanu Reeves, who’s game for all the craziness that comes his way in the leading role.
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Roth skillfully builds tension until the moment when everything snaps and goes insane, followed by a series of shrill and repetitive scenes of increasing torture and destruction, all of which leads to The Big Reveal of what inspired these vicious games.

His intention, he says in the film’s press notes, was to demonstrate how much more quickly we experience everything in the social media age-both the delights and the torments-and how the rules of civilized society no longer seem to apply.īut he makes his point far clearer in the notes than he does in the movie itself. (The two actresses who were its stars, Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, get producing credit here while Camp appears in a brief supporting role as a nosy friend).
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Not to mention a few surprises, the most pleasant of which is the ultimate fate of Evan’s dog.Roth’s film, which he directed and co-wrote, is an update of a trashy little exploitation flick called “Death Game” from 1977. “Knock Knock” ends on a not entirely satisfactory note, but delivers a pretty mean genre wallop getting there (with almost zero gore). In his weak defense, Evan can only semi-hysterically invoke the metaphor of “free pizza” to excuse his moral trespasses, in one of the movie’s more eye-opening scenes. Roth, also one of the film’s writers, has big fun balancing the teeth-grinding vengefulness of the young women with the inescapable fact of Evan’s ethical breach. Matters escalate to the point where Evan is tied to a chair, awaiting ultimate “punishment” for his adulterous transgression. Evan’s sexy dream turns into a waking nightmare the next morning, when he discovers that his new friends have trashed his kitchen.

(Their mobile phones are drenched, too.) The next half-hour of double entendres ends with Evan’s virtue compromised, not so unpredictably. The rain has given them the appearance of wet-T-shirt-contest winners, but Evan keeps his head as he kindly offers them towels and the use of his computer. Left at his upscale house in the San Fernando Valley of California while his wife and kids visit the beach, he’s interrupted one stormy night by two young women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) who claim to be looking for a party in the neighborhood. Keanu Reeves, himself putting a funny spin on his not uncommon performance mode of melding virtue with cluelessness, plays Evan, a happy and ultra-devoted dad and husband. Here the torture is meted out by two women who initially embody a pornographic male fantasy. The mildly notorious horror director Eli Roth’s work helped bring the term “torture porn” into the cultural lingua franca his new film, the giddily sadistic black comedy “ Knock Knock,” puts a new spin on the concept.
