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Knock Knock:
This is not such a bad movie that it warrants no stars. It is a bad movie. At best I could rate it 3 out of 10. But my rule has always been that the 1 is my lowest rating for bad films. The 0 is reserved for offensive films. This film allowed Eli Roth to offend my senses in the worst way possible. I'm quite used to being "offended" by Eli Roth, horror director notable for his torture porn movies such as Hostel. I like Hostel. His goal is to make you uncomfortable with his repulsing visuals and B-movie production values, and he accomplishes that very well. Knock Knock offends logic and good filmmaking. Warning, spoilers are present. Just read the review. There is no reason why you should ever watch this film. Secondary warning, this film is rated 18 for explicit sexual actions and is very political in nature. In order to fairly discuss it, I need to mildly describe some of these explicit actions and dissect political views. If you are uncomfortable with either of these things, you do not have to read them.
The story sounds like a porno, but trust me, if it was sexy in any way I would give it a better score, because at least that would give it a reason to exist. An architect and DJ played by Keanu Reeves of all people is a husband of 14 years and a father of two children. Two girls, played by the atrocious Ana De Armas and Lorenza Izzo, a woman who was totally cast because of her acting skills and totally not because she is Roth's fiance, go to his house because insert contrived excuse here, which Keanu believes because insert poorly written dialogue that fails to establish a reason for any of the action that happens in this film here. The first thirty minutes of this film are adequate. Then, as expected, there is something not quite right about the girls and things go horribly wrong. The pair have sex with Keanu, tie him up, and hold him prisoner in his own house, all while playing sadistic games and torturing him in ridiculous ways. It's kind of like the movie Funny Games in that respect. Personally, I hate Funny Games. It was cruel and shocking not because it served the story but because being shocking gets a response out of people, and it gets too meta for its own good near the end with a dumb deus ex machina that was lazily tossed in because the writers had no idea how to end the movie. Funny Games is about a pair of men that invade the lake house of a 1% family and torture and eventually kill all of them. Now, if there is one thing I can credit to Funny Games, it knew not to attempt to justify the actions of the murderers. It was a social satire about the rich and the powerful and how they don't necessarily correlate, but there was an awareness that duh, you do not want to say that the killers are doing the right thing by murdering a little kid. That seemed so obvious that I never consciously thought of it as a positive, but apparently the idea that you should not make the home invaders the good guys with no hint of parody or comedy is lost on Roth.
I have little idea what message Roth was trying to convey with this picture, because he botched the execution of his concepts so poorly, but my best guess would be something like "all men are sex-hungry animals that will screw anything for pleasure, are incapable of forming deep relationships, and women are always the victims in this." If you say that I'm interpreting it wrong, the only other viable message is that all women are skanks that exist only to ruin men, and that is even worse, so I'll stick with this one. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that Roth believes in both of these things simultaneously and gets to save face because he is treating both genders equally poorly. The women go through this game because Keanu had sex with them, being unfaithful to his wife and proving that he doesn't really care about his kids. We as an audience are expected to take this at face value. This is probably the biggest thing that offends me. There are two sex scenes in the movie, and in neither one of them is Keanu a willing participant. The first time, he tries to reject them for about an hour until they forcibly shove him against a wall and start blowing him. I guess you could say that he could have physically beaten them to get them off of him, but one girl would always be pinning him while the other was getting down and dirty. The second time, he is tied down to a bed and one girl bangs him while the other takes a video. Eli Roth wants us to believe that Keanu is the bad guy for having these sexual actions. It's like watching an 80s slasher movie, where all of the victims deserve to die because they're all nasty sluts and the virgin is the last survivor to take down the killer. In 2015, that just is not how the world works. Sexuality is something that can be experienced and discussed in ways that don't reflect so poorly on the perpetrators that they deserve death and humiliation. There's a scene at the beginning that exists in part to establish that Keanu's relationship with the rest of his family. Eli Roth wants me to be disgusted in a good way that Keanu would rather have sex than enjoy time with his kids, but I'm disgusted in a bad way that Roth thinks the state of having those thoughts, even if not acted upon, are worthy of a great punishment. When his wife says no, he accepts that and has a fun time playing with his kids. That is not a horrible person. That is a good father who sometimes wants things for himself. I don't care how rape is used within gender roles going by the dictionary definition of the word, Keanu was raped twice and had consenting sex never. We are expected to blame him for getting raped and act like it makes him a bad person. If the genders were reversed, there would be people asking for public executions of Roth. Because a man is taking the abuse, this is apparently supposed to be clever and subversive. It's not. It is insulting to real life rape victims, and it perpetuates the stereotype that men cannot ever be abused.
The twist ending is almost as bad, because we find out that these girls have done this to dozens of other men. Every one had sex with them, and every one died. Roth is trying so hard to make a grand statement about society, that all men cannot control sexual feelings, but with how this film is executed we're left to believe that, like Funny Games, the game was rigged the whole time, making any tension pointless. I've spent virtually none of this space talking about Knock Knock as a film, but it is truly awful. A thriller relies on having suspense in order to work, and there is not one moment where I slightly believed that any scenario other than the girls finding a contrived and unrealistic way to beat up Keanu would be the outcome. It slowly builds to an obvious conclusion, and there is virtually nothing stimulating to fill in the gaps. The entire last 45 minutes are so repetitive it numbed my brain. The girls will make fun of Keanu for being a horrible cheating bastard who is not worthy of having a family or life as nice as his, Keanu says "Please! No!' or "I'm a good person!" or the pizza monologue, but I will get to that later. Keanu gets basically two lines of dialogue to repeat until he pukes them up. The girls torture him by hitting him with sharp objects, shocking him, drawing dicks on artwork and pictures in the house, and using loud noises to make him go deaf. Roth doesn't even give us the decency of letting these scenes happen and move on to the next one. The girls will start one form of torture, remember that they have the attention span of a goldfish, and pick up another, only to go back to the first one at a later time. I cannot remember the order in which these torture scenes happen. There is one change of pace, in which the sassy black friend enters the movie for reasons. I know what these reasons are: Provide unfunny comic relief, abuse stereotypical black language like calling out the girls for being "ghetto hoes" and saying he's from "Oakland streets, bitch!", and die so that Roth can say the black guy died first. I just don't think that any of those reasons justifiy him being in the movie at all. If Roth really wanted to spice the plot up in the second half, he would have done it more.
The ending also hits us with the twist that Knock Knock was actually a comedy the whole time. I guess. In some ways this movie was so bad that it was almost funny. I can already see people saying that those parts were intentional comedy which makes the movie good. I have to take a stance against that. I can clearly tell what parts of this film were supposed to be funny. Keanu Reeves is overacting like crazy. He delivers a ridiculous speech about how the girls showing up was "FREE PIZZA! FREE ******* PIZZA THAT JUST SHOWED UP AT MY ******* DOOR!" This speech further tries to convince us that Keanu is an adulterer and a terrible man, because instead of calling it like it is and saying that he was banged against his will, he just says that the opportunity to have sex with the pair was too good to pass up, undermining his previous actions, derailing his character, and telling the audience something contradictory to what we were shown, but I digress. The point is that these things are intentionally funny. We are supposed to laugh at them. The problem is that these were not the funny parts. The pizza speech is stupid and never entertained me. What I did find entertaining was the basic continuity errors that litter the movie, repetitive cinematography which deals exclusively in tracking shots of hallways and closeups of faces, and how lazily Lorenza Izzo applied her makeup even though a full scene in the film is dedicated to her putting on makeup. Roth's other 2015 release The Green Inferno had this same problem. He understands that jokes can be funny, and that in the 2010s it has become accepted and even preferable in some cases to include jokes along with creepier elements, but he does not understand how to balance them in a way that makes the comedy feel natural and doesn't undermine the creepier elements. That is what happened in both of those movies. The jokes feel out of place next to the torture we see, and the hokey jokey atmosphere makes the torture significantly less terrifying, because it feels so fake. Hostel is not a realistic film, and Knock Knock was never going to be plausible in the world, but neither is a man with knives for hands killing kids in their dreams. Horror movies are scary because the viewer is afraid that what will happen to the characters will hurt them, because Freddy Kruger at least makes sense in the context of that fictional universe. Rules about how he works and what he is capable of are firmly established in the first act and remain constant throughout the film. Roth keeps finding ways to push the absurdity of the situation further and further to the point where the audience starts to understand that no matter what bad things happen, Keanu will somehow survive until the very end of the movie, because he has to, because if Roth wanted to kill him off he would have done it last time. The game of hide and seek, in which the girls look for Keanu with the threat to shoot him if found, is completely meaningless because Keanu pulls off a ridiculous escape, an even more pathetic re-capturing, and still has no damage done to him worse than how he was already bruised. Within the context of the first act, it makes no sense how the girls could get to his house again. Within the context of that, it makes no sense that the black friend dies from slipping and falling on grass, or for that matter why he confronted them at all instead of freeing Keanu from being tied to a chair. Even within the context of a universe in which nobody thinks logically about why Keanu has the girls in his house and any character can travel across the state of California by foot in less than a day, there is no logical explanation for how the girls could have been spying on Keanu for weeks, or why they would even follow a list of targets. In theory, wouldn't it be unnecessary to stalk potential victims if everybody you have ever gone after had sex with you and was killed? At that point it's just extra work. No matter who you pick, you know you will win. There is no logic to any action or motive anywhere in this film.
To get back on topic, the ending reveals that the whole movie was a joke. It also reveals the movie's true intent, I guess you could call it, even though as a self respecting and thinking human being you really shouldn't, as supported by Eli in interviews and press events about the flick. It is also a painfully unfunny pair of gags. In the second to last shot of the film, we see that Keanu Reeves is left for dead, nearly buried alive with only his head above the ground. Lorenzo Izzo comes back and drops his phone in front of him. We see that the phone is currently on Facebook, and that Keanu's account has posted the video taken by one of the girls in which he is tied down to a bed and has the other girl ride him in a schoolgirl uniform. You see? The movie was actually about how the internet is a horrible invention, because it allows word to travel faster than ever before. The world of online dating has created more abusive relationships, and more frequently causes married people to cheat, both because they met online and because the internet has a great supply of women willing to cheat. The internet causes men everywhere to have their reputations ruined at unbelievable speeds, destroying their social lives, connections to friends and family, and respect in the eyes of their employers and government. And when Ana De Armas sticks her finger into her own butt, the finger is actually a metaphor for Eli Roth flipping the bird to a metaphor for the audience stupid enough to sit through the entire film. Excluding that last scene, there is just as much evidence to support the Roth approved thematic statements as there is to support my interpretation of figuratively fisting his audience. And if you can even believe it, it gets even worse! Keanu tries to hit the delete button with his face and accidentally likes the post! Not only is this a cheap and annoyingly unfunny joke, but it punctuates quite possibly the stupidest scene in the history of film, and was the moment that I decided this review needed 4000 words instead of my usual 1000. Technology grabbing humanity by the balls was the entire message of the film. First of all, that means the offensive gender biases and portrayals are coincidental, extraneous to the plot and characters, and mot importantly, completely natural to Roth. It is worth noting again that Lorenza Izzo is the fiance of Eli Roth. A big deal is made out of Keanu being twice the age of the two girls. Eli Roth is not far off in years from Keanu, and also twice the age of Lorenza Izzo. This movie feels like a cry for help on his part, as if the entire film were really just a reflection of his lifestyle, such as his belief that cheating is an irredeemable sin, his belief that women are all evil and everybody other than his girlfriend is trying to seduce him away from that girlfriend and lead him astray, and his likely BDSM fetish. If this movie has absolutely nothing to do with society's gender roles, then he actually buys into disgusting philosophies about how men and women should be treated in sexual situations. It is possible that Roth thinks it is crazy that his future wife is half his age, and that he feels bad from time to time because in some ways he is exploiting her, but this is Eli Roth we are talking about, the primary example of a modern director who thrives on exploiting things for attention and money. The technology angle is also ridiculous because it only becomes a theme in the last 45 seconds of a 90 minute movie. Technology gets referenced a few times. He calls a cab from his phone and that cab fails to get the girls out. Was that supposed to represent humanity resisting against technology to do justice to the world? He attempts to call his wife from his iPad but cannot get a stable connection. Was that meant to tell us that technology will fail us in times when we need it most? Roth spends a long time lecturing the audience on gender roles, only to pull the rug out from under us and say that there are no themes to look deeper into relating to sex. Being the skeptical cynic that I am, I would guess that the technology angle was a cover for the real insulting and degrading messages of the film. He created a piece about how teenage girls and grown men are horrible, the studio hated it, and he haphazardly changed a few moments so that he could say his vision had nothing to do with those mean-spirited preachings, and that any political views on sex are not endorsed by him and you are the crazy one for even thinking that he was going in that direction. The second joke is that Keanu's wife and children come home to find the destruction left by the girls, and the youngest kid fires off a stupid one liner about Keanu having some kind of party. This can be chalked up under lines desperately trying to be funny but falling flat.
I haven't done much explaining of the actual filmmaking elements. They are bad, but as stated in the very beginning of this essay, not so awful that they would warrant such a bad rating. The acting is ridiculous, but they are all being directed like that. This is a remake of a 1970's exploitation film, and to match that atmosphere and let the campy tone set it, he wants his actors Nicolas Cage out in their performances. In that sense I like Keanu Reeves' performance in the film. A stuntman by nature, Reeves is clearly game for just about anything that Roth wants to throw at him. He embodies and embraces spending about half of the movie with his wrists tied to heavy objects. The two girls are less impressive. De Armas at least looks like she is having fun with her role. She goes for maximum ham, which doesn't always come through, but her thick Spanish accent holds her back in some respects and that isn't quite fair to judge her on. Izzo phones this in. At no point does she look like she had fun going crazy. Her acting isn't just bad or insane, both of which would be acceptable in this environment, it's stilted and lifeless. I get the impression that Reeves and De Armas were probably laughing hard between shooting scenes, reveling in how absurd they get to act, while Izzo stands alone in a corner, taking herself way too seriously for the type of movie that this is. The production design is nice. The art sculptures owned by Keanu's wife are often impressive, and the family photos do a nice job of nailing the fake and picturesque vibe that Roth was so obviously trying to capture. The camera spins so much that it breaks the 180 degree rule constantly, to the extent where I was never able to figure out where certain rooms of the house were in relation to others. The script fluctuates from being okay (most of the first act) and garbage (any line after the first act which required an original thought by the writers). I think one of the biggest cinematic flaws was the insistence on making the girls as obnoxious as possible. They are kind of heroes in this story, whether or not they should be. Roth has them positioned as executioners of sinners to preserve marriages everywhere. They are so irritating and insufferable that there was no way I could tolerate them, let alone think about rooting for them, asides from the obvious problem of being morally flimsy characters against a person with a legitimate case written as an ignorant strawman. Their dialogue is filled with loud teenage girl shrieks and laughter. I'm not sure what their characters' ages are, as De Armas never gives a number and Izzo gives about eight, but they act like 15 year olds. They both get lines that would normally indicate unlikable brats that go crazy over a Harry Styles poster. They are just so annoying that I cannot listen to them.
Of course, this movie also contains plenty of the 'offensive' Roth tropes, like an asthmatic, an animal constantly put in peril, constant gay slurs, and an abuse of the word 'retard'. None of these advance plots or develop characters, they are just casually tossed into dialogue to stir a reaction out of people. I think this is the third or fourth time I have written that sentence. Therein lies the problem, that no matter what you think of the words themselves Roth is way too willing to rest on his laurels and has not tried to advance his basic formula in years. It gets even worse though, because in 2015 there is no reaction to get. Those words aren't actually shocking or offensive anymore. American society just shrugs it off and says he's being uncool about his treatment of others. He should not be writing those lines in, but nobody really cares about a crappy B-movie that uses them. There is nobody left to shock. Either people who were offended by old Roth refuse to watch his newer films, or people who loved old Roth watch this disappointed at the lack of genuinely disturbing things that happen. In the gore department, this is probably the most tame Roth has ever been. To his mild credit he does embrace the erotic thriller genre, and his goal is more to get under your skin psychologically than to cut your skin and laugh as a swimming pool of blood explodes on your screen. The death is almost shot in a PG-13 way. The black friend dies in a quick cutting mess with very little blood shown, and Keanu's death is just implied at the end of the film. We never get to see Keanu killed. The biggest physical sign of pain he shows is a bloody chest from being stabbed with a work, but the blood is always hidden under the shirt and could have gotten a 12A rating if the movie around it was Spiderman. There is nobody left to feel an emotion of any kind from an Eli Roth film. Everybody has already picked a side, and Knock Knock does nothing to up the ante for those who decided they wanted to see more. A waste of time, space, and valuable filmography in the Keanussance, Knock Knock is just an all around unpleasant experience, not in the way that Eli Roth wants to be disturbing but in the way that it is an annoying trek to sit through. Filled to the brim with questionable gender politics, a lack of understanding of sexual abuse, and repetitive and generic second half of relatively tame torture, this film is both boring and offensive, and should be doomed to the depths of hell for eternity.
Knock Knock:
This is not such a bad movie that it warrants no stars. It is a bad movie. At best I could rate it 3 out of 10. But my rule has always been that the 1 is my lowest rating for bad films. The 0 is reserved for offensive films. This film allowed Eli Roth to offend my senses in the worst way possible. I'm quite used to being "offended" by Eli Roth, horror director notable for his torture porn movies such as Hostel. I like Hostel. His goal is to make you uncomfortable with his repulsing visuals and B-movie production values, and he accomplishes that very well. Knock Knock offends logic and good filmmaking. Warning, spoilers are present. Just read the review. There is no reason why you should ever watch this film. Secondary warning, this film is rated 18 for explicit sexual actions and is very political in nature. In order to fairly discuss it, I need to mildly describe some of these explicit actions and dissect political views. If you are uncomfortable with either of these things, you do not have to read them.
The story sounds like a porno, but trust me, if it was sexy in any way I would give it a better score, because at least that would give it a reason to exist. An architect and DJ played by Keanu Reeves of all people is a husband of 14 years and a father of two children. Two girls, played by the atrocious Ana De Armas and Lorenza Izzo, a woman who was totally cast because of her acting skills and totally not because she is Roth's fiance, go to his house because insert contrived excuse here, which Keanu believes because insert poorly written dialogue that fails to establish a reason for any of the action that happens in this film here. The first thirty minutes of this film are adequate. Then, as expected, there is something not quite right about the girls and things go horribly wrong. The pair have sex with Keanu, tie him up, and hold him prisoner in his own house, all while playing sadistic games and torturing him in ridiculous ways. It's kind of like the movie Funny Games in that respect. Personally, I hate Funny Games. It was cruel and shocking not because it served the story but because being shocking gets a response out of people, and it gets too meta for its own good near the end with a dumb deus ex machina that was lazily tossed in because the writers had no idea how to end the movie. Funny Games is about a pair of men that invade the lake house of a 1% family and torture and eventually kill all of them. Now, if there is one thing I can credit to Funny Games, it knew not to attempt to justify the actions of the murderers. It was a social satire about the rich and the powerful and how they don't necessarily correlate, but there was an awareness that duh, you do not want to say that the killers are doing the right thing by murdering a little kid. That seemed so obvious that I never consciously thought of it as a positive, but apparently the idea that you should not make the home invaders the good guys with no hint of parody or comedy is lost on Roth.
I have little idea what message Roth was trying to convey with this picture, because he botched the execution of his concepts so poorly, but my best guess would be something like "all men are sex-hungry animals that will screw anything for pleasure, are incapable of forming deep relationships, and women are always the victims in this." If you say that I'm interpreting it wrong, the only other viable message is that all women are skanks that exist only to ruin men, and that is even worse, so I'll stick with this one. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that Roth believes in both of these things simultaneously and gets to save face because he is treating both genders equally poorly. The women go through this game because Keanu had sex with them, being unfaithful to his wife and proving that he doesn't really care about his kids. We as an audience are expected to take this at face value. This is probably the biggest thing that offends me. There are two sex scenes in the movie, and in neither one of them is Keanu a willing participant. The first time, he tries to reject them for about an hour until they forcibly shove him against a wall and start blowing him. I guess you could say that he could have physically beaten them to get them off of him, but one girl would always be pinning him while the other was getting down and dirty. The second time, he is tied down to a bed and one girl bangs him while the other takes a video. Eli Roth wants us to believe that Keanu is the bad guy for having these sexual actions. It's like watching an 80s slasher movie, where all of the victims deserve to die because they're all nasty sluts and the virgin is the last survivor to take down the killer. In 2015, that just is not how the world works. Sexuality is something that can be experienced and discussed in ways that don't reflect so poorly on the perpetrators that they deserve death and humiliation. There's a scene at the beginning that exists in part to establish that Keanu's relationship with the rest of his family. Eli Roth wants me to be disgusted in a good way that Keanu would rather have sex than enjoy time with his kids, but I'm disgusted in a bad way that Roth thinks the state of having those thoughts, even if not acted upon, are worthy of a great punishment. When his wife says no, he accepts that and has a fun time playing with his kids. That is not a horrible person. That is a good father who sometimes wants things for himself. I don't care how rape is used within gender roles going by the dictionary definition of the word, Keanu was raped twice and had consenting sex never. We are expected to blame him for getting raped and act like it makes him a bad person. If the genders were reversed, there would be people asking for public executions of Roth. Because a man is taking the abuse, this is apparently supposed to be clever and subversive. It's not. It is insulting to real life rape victims, and it perpetuates the stereotype that men cannot ever be abused.
The twist ending is almost as bad, because we find out that these girls have done this to dozens of other men. Every one had sex with them, and every one died. Roth is trying so hard to make a grand statement about society, that all men cannot control sexual feelings, but with how this film is executed we're left to believe that, like Funny Games, the game was rigged the whole time, making any tension pointless. I've spent virtually none of this space talking about Knock Knock as a film, but it is truly awful. A thriller relies on having suspense in order to work, and there is not one moment where I slightly believed that any scenario other than the girls finding a contrived and unrealistic way to beat up Keanu would be the outcome. It slowly builds to an obvious conclusion, and there is virtually nothing stimulating to fill in the gaps. The entire last 45 minutes are so repetitive it numbed my brain. The girls will make fun of Keanu for being a horrible cheating bastard who is not worthy of having a family or life as nice as his, Keanu says "Please! No!' or "I'm a good person!" or the pizza monologue, but I will get to that later. Keanu gets basically two lines of dialogue to repeat until he pukes them up. The girls torture him by hitting him with sharp objects, shocking him, drawing dicks on artwork and pictures in the house, and using loud noises to make him go deaf. Roth doesn't even give us the decency of letting these scenes happen and move on to the next one. The girls will start one form of torture, remember that they have the attention span of a goldfish, and pick up another, only to go back to the first one at a later time. I cannot remember the order in which these torture scenes happen. There is one change of pace, in which the sassy black friend enters the movie for reasons. I know what these reasons are: Provide unfunny comic relief, abuse stereotypical black language like calling out the girls for being "ghetto hoes" and saying he's from "Oakland streets, bitch!", and die so that Roth can say the black guy died first. I just don't think that any of those reasons justifiy him being in the movie at all. If Roth really wanted to spice the plot up in the second half, he would have done it more.
The ending also hits us with the twist that Knock Knock was actually a comedy the whole time. I guess. In some ways this movie was so bad that it was almost funny. I can already see people saying that those parts were intentional comedy which makes the movie good. I have to take a stance against that. I can clearly tell what parts of this film were supposed to be funny. Keanu Reeves is overacting like crazy. He delivers a ridiculous speech about how the girls showing up was "FREE PIZZA! FREE ******* PIZZA THAT JUST SHOWED UP AT MY ******* DOOR!" This speech further tries to convince us that Keanu is an adulterer and a terrible man, because instead of calling it like it is and saying that he was banged against his will, he just says that the opportunity to have sex with the pair was too good to pass up, undermining his previous actions, derailing his character, and telling the audience something contradictory to what we were shown, but I digress. The point is that these things are intentionally funny. We are supposed to laugh at them. The problem is that these were not the funny parts. The pizza speech is stupid and never entertained me. What I did find entertaining was the basic continuity errors that litter the movie, repetitive cinematography which deals exclusively in tracking shots of hallways and closeups of faces, and how lazily Lorenza Izzo applied her makeup even though a full scene in the film is dedicated to her putting on makeup. Roth's other 2015 release The Green Inferno had this same problem. He understands that jokes can be funny, and that in the 2010s it has become accepted and even preferable in some cases to include jokes along with creepier elements, but he does not understand how to balance them in a way that makes the comedy feel natural and doesn't undermine the creepier elements. That is what happened in both of those movies. The jokes feel out of place next to the torture we see, and the hokey jokey atmosphere makes the torture significantly less terrifying, because it feels so fake. Hostel is not a realistic film, and Knock Knock was never going to be plausible in the world, but neither is a man with knives for hands killing kids in their dreams. Horror movies are scary because the viewer is afraid that what will happen to the characters will hurt them, because Freddy Kruger at least makes sense in the context of that fictional universe. Rules about how he works and what he is capable of are firmly established in the first act and remain constant throughout the film. Roth keeps finding ways to push the absurdity of the situation further and further to the point where the audience starts to understand that no matter what bad things happen, Keanu will somehow survive until the very end of the movie, because he has to, because if Roth wanted to kill him off he would have done it last time. The game of hide and seek, in which the girls look for Keanu with the threat to shoot him if found, is completely meaningless because Keanu pulls off a ridiculous escape, an even more pathetic re-capturing, and still has no damage done to him worse than how he was already bruised. Within the context of the first act, it makes no sense how the girls could get to his house again. Within the context of that, it makes no sense that the black friend dies from slipping and falling on grass, or for that matter why he confronted them at all instead of freeing Keanu from being tied to a chair. Even within the context of a universe in which nobody thinks logically about why Keanu has the girls in his house and any character can travel across the state of California by foot in less than a day, there is no logical explanation for how the girls could have been spying on Keanu for weeks, or why they would even follow a list of targets. In theory, wouldn't it be unnecessary to stalk potential victims if everybody you have ever gone after had sex with you and was killed? At that point it's just extra work. No matter who you pick, you know you will win. There is no logic to any action or motive anywhere in this film.
To get back on topic, the ending reveals that the whole movie was a joke. It also reveals the movie's true intent, I guess you could call it, even though as a self respecting and thinking human being you really shouldn't, as supported by Eli in interviews and press events about the flick. It is also a painfully unfunny pair of gags. In the second to last shot of the film, we see that Keanu Reeves is left for dead, nearly buried alive with only his head above the ground. Lorenzo Izzo comes back and drops his phone in front of him. We see that the phone is currently on Facebook, and that Keanu's account has posted the video taken by one of the girls in which he is tied down to a bed and has the other girl ride him in a schoolgirl uniform. You see? The movie was actually about how the internet is a horrible invention, because it allows word to travel faster than ever before. The world of online dating has created more abusive relationships, and more frequently causes married people to cheat, both because they met online and because the internet has a great supply of women willing to cheat. The internet causes men everywhere to have their reputations ruined at unbelievable speeds, destroying their social lives, connections to friends and family, and respect in the eyes of their employers and government. And when Ana De Armas sticks her finger into her own butt, the finger is actually a metaphor for Eli Roth flipping the bird to a metaphor for the audience stupid enough to sit through the entire film. Excluding that last scene, there is just as much evidence to support the Roth approved thematic statements as there is to support my interpretation of figuratively fisting his audience. And if you can even believe it, it gets even worse! Keanu tries to hit the delete button with his face and accidentally likes the post! Not only is this a cheap and annoyingly unfunny joke, but it punctuates quite possibly the stupidest scene in the history of film, and was the moment that I decided this review needed 4000 words instead of my usual 1000. Technology grabbing humanity by the balls was the entire message of the film. First of all, that means the offensive gender biases and portrayals are coincidental, extraneous to the plot and characters, and mot importantly, completely natural to Roth. It is worth noting again that Lorenza Izzo is the fiance of Eli Roth. A big deal is made out of Keanu being twice the age of the two girls. Eli Roth is not far off in years from Keanu, and also twice the age of Lorenza Izzo. This movie feels like a cry for help on his part, as if the entire film were really just a reflection of his lifestyle, such as his belief that cheating is an irredeemable sin, his belief that women are all evil and everybody other than his girlfriend is trying to seduce him away from that girlfriend and lead him astray, and his likely BDSM fetish. If this movie has absolutely nothing to do with society's gender roles, then he actually buys into disgusting philosophies about how men and women should be treated in sexual situations. It is possible that Roth thinks it is crazy that his future wife is half his age, and that he feels bad from time to time because in some ways he is exploiting her, but this is Eli Roth we are talking about, the primary example of a modern director who thrives on exploiting things for attention and money. The technology angle is also ridiculous because it only becomes a theme in the last 45 seconds of a 90 minute movie. Technology gets referenced a few times. He calls a cab from his phone and that cab fails to get the girls out. Was that supposed to represent humanity resisting against technology to do justice to the world? He attempts to call his wife from his iPad but cannot get a stable connection. Was that meant to tell us that technology will fail us in times when we need it most? Roth spends a long time lecturing the audience on gender roles, only to pull the rug out from under us and say that there are no themes to look deeper into relating to sex. Being the skeptical cynic that I am, I would guess that the technology angle was a cover for the real insulting and degrading messages of the film. He created a piece about how teenage girls and grown men are horrible, the studio hated it, and he haphazardly changed a few moments so that he could say his vision had nothing to do with those mean-spirited preachings, and that any political views on sex are not endorsed by him and you are the crazy one for even thinking that he was going in that direction. The second joke is that Keanu's wife and children come home to find the destruction left by the girls, and the youngest kid fires off a stupid one liner about Keanu having some kind of party. This can be chalked up under lines desperately trying to be funny but falling flat.
I haven't done much explaining of the actual filmmaking elements. They are bad, but as stated in the very beginning of this essay, not so awful that they would warrant such a bad rating. The acting is ridiculous, but they are all being directed like that. This is a remake of a 1970's exploitation film, and to match that atmosphere and let the campy tone set it, he wants his actors Nicolas Cage out in their performances. In that sense I like Keanu Reeves' performance in the film. A stuntman by nature, Reeves is clearly game for just about anything that Roth wants to throw at him. He embodies and embraces spending about half of the movie with his wrists tied to heavy objects. The two girls are less impressive. De Armas at least looks like she is having fun with her role. She goes for maximum ham, which doesn't always come through, but her thick Spanish accent holds her back in some respects and that isn't quite fair to judge her on. Izzo phones this in. At no point does she look like she had fun going crazy. Her acting isn't just bad or insane, both of which would be acceptable in this environment, it's stilted and lifeless. I get the impression that Reeves and De Armas were probably laughing hard between shooting scenes, reveling in how absurd they get to act, while Izzo stands alone in a corner, taking herself way too seriously for the type of movie that this is. The production design is nice. The art sculptures owned by Keanu's wife are often impressive, and the family photos do a nice job of nailing the fake and picturesque vibe that Roth was so obviously trying to capture. The camera spins so much that it breaks the 180 degree rule constantly, to the extent where I was never able to figure out where certain rooms of the house were in relation to others. The script fluctuates from being okay (most of the first act) and garbage (any line after the first act which required an original thought by the writers). I think one of the biggest cinematic flaws was the insistence on making the girls as obnoxious as possible. They are kind of heroes in this story, whether or not they should be. Roth has them positioned as executioners of sinners to preserve marriages everywhere. They are so irritating and insufferable that there was no way I could tolerate them, let alone think about rooting for them, asides from the obvious problem of being morally flimsy characters against a person with a legitimate case written as an ignorant strawman. Their dialogue is filled with loud teenage girl shrieks and laughter. I'm not sure what their characters' ages are, as De Armas never gives a number and Izzo gives about eight, but they act like 15 year olds. They both get lines that would normally indicate unlikable brats that go crazy over a Harry Styles poster. They are just so annoying that I cannot listen to them.
Of course, this movie also contains plenty of the 'offensive' Roth tropes, like an asthmatic, an animal constantly put in peril, constant gay slurs, and an abuse of the word 'retard'. None of these advance plots or develop characters, they are just casually tossed into dialogue to stir a reaction out of people. I think this is the third or fourth time I have written that sentence. Therein lies the problem, that no matter what you think of the words themselves Roth is way too willing to rest on his laurels and has not tried to advance his basic formula in years. It gets even worse though, because in 2015 there is no reaction to get. Those words aren't actually shocking or offensive anymore. American society just shrugs it off and says he's being uncool about his treatment of others. He should not be writing those lines in, but nobody really cares about a crappy B-movie that uses them. There is nobody left to shock. Either people who were offended by old Roth refuse to watch his newer films, or people who loved old Roth watch this disappointed at the lack of genuinely disturbing things that happen. In the gore department, this is probably the most tame Roth has ever been. To his mild credit he does embrace the erotic thriller genre, and his goal is more to get under your skin psychologically than to cut your skin and laugh as a swimming pool of blood explodes on your screen. The death is almost shot in a PG-13 way. The black friend dies in a quick cutting mess with very little blood shown, and Keanu's death is just implied at the end of the film. We never get to see Keanu killed. The biggest physical sign of pain he shows is a bloody chest from being stabbed with a work, but the blood is always hidden under the shirt and could have gotten a 12A rating if the movie around it was Spiderman. There is nobody left to feel an emotion of any kind from an Eli Roth film. Everybody has already picked a side, and Knock Knock does nothing to up the ante for those who decided they wanted to see more. A waste of time, space, and valuable filmography in the Keanussance, Knock Knock is just an all around unpleasant experience, not in the way that Eli Roth wants to be disturbing but in the way that it is an annoying trek to sit through. Filled to the brim with questionable gender politics, a lack of understanding of sexual abuse, and repetitive and generic second half of relatively tame torture, this film is both boring and offensive, and should be doomed to the depths of hell for eternity.