Lado oscuro del deseo

I pretty much never leave a review for a movie.

I also pretty much never stop a movie or book before I finish it.

This movie was so bad that both happened. It's complete trash. The characters are unbelievable, the situation is absurd, and the acting leaves a lot to be desired. It's incredibly slow and there's basically no story or reason to be invested.

Avoid.

After the less than stellar box office return of Hostel Part II, Eli Roth blamed the internet and swore off making films for a long time. In fact, he hasn't directed another movie since then. He's produced, starred in and wrote a few, but never touched the camera again, except for the sniper film that plays in Inglorious Basterds and the Thanksgiving segment from Grindhouse. Almost ten years later and we have not one, but two feature films from Roth. The Green Inferno, which was actually completed in 2013, but held up until now, and the erotic horror thriller Knock Knock, which is a remake of 1977 film Death Game.

Did Roth coming back from "retirement" encourage me to see the film? Was it the deranged sexual element that would draw me in? No, it was Keanu Reeves my friend. Everything else didn't matter to me, I wanted to see Keanu Reeves in movies again. He did a kick ass job in John Wick, now I was going to see if he would be able to play a helpless cheat who is terrified for his life. A role that is really against type for him. Can Reeves pull it off? The man has been labeled emotionless in a lot of his film roles, so this would seem like it would require him to dig down and actually act. Now, he does manage to scream, freak out and indeed, act terrified at times, but there is always and I mean always, something off about his performances. Maybe it's his monotone voice or the deadness behind his eyes, but it doesn't always come off well. Don't get me wrong, I highly enjoy a lot of his work, but a great thespian the man is not. It looks like the man is trying here, I'm not too sure if he pulls it off too well.

Reeves plays Evan, an architect who has to stay at home for the long weekend and work, while his wife and two kids go to the beach house. One stormy night, he hears a knock at his door, two young beautiful women are stranded and need his help. While inside, they manage to seduce him, despite his constant resistance. The next morning he finds out that they won't leave, not without playing a game with him being an unwilling participant.

So the premise alone seems like a typical invasion torture horror flick, with the added element of sex and the intruders being young hot women. Once that is out of the way, the film offers nothing new or insightful. Roth, a man who knows a thing or two about the genre, tries to amp of the suspense a bit, but falls into the same generic traps all these films do. Knock Knock isn't sexy enough, nor terrifying enough. I guess it must just feel weird to direct your wife in a naked threesome with Keanu Reeves.

The question people will be asking themselves is, will Reeves live or die by the end of the film. I won't spoil how it ends, but the build up to that final situation is decent enough to make the film almost watchable. The denouement is completely wrong though and adds an unneeded comedic joke that is literally the very end of the film. You go through this long torturous journey with Reeves, only to have it end with a one liner? Really odd choice that left me scratching my head with disappointment. I wanted some kind of answer to what would happen next, but never got it. Roth leaves a little hint here or there, but I guess I wanted something a little more concrete.

What the film does accomplish is me, never opening my door to anyone. Not even two young, beautiful, wet women who beg me to let them inside so they can have sex with me. That's just for my dreams.

Why on God's green earth what an actor, A class actor, like Keanu Reeves take this role?

Does he have financial difficulty we don't know about?

I could understand if this was one of his first roles and he was desperate. This was just so bad. The only thing worse than the movie was the ending.

The only decent thing about the movie was Keanu Reeves. Just terrible.

I wanted the two girls in the movie to die a slow and horrible death.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Architect Evan (Keanu Reeves) lives in a nice, swanky house with his wife Karen (Ignacia Allamand) and their two young boys. One weekend, Karen takes the boys away with her, leaving Evan on his own. He gets a surprise one night when two young women, Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bell (Ana de Armas) knock on his door, claiming to have broken down and in need of a shower and a taxi. Initially pleasant, after luring Evan into a night of soaring passion, they then refuse to leave and subject him to a relentless, psychopathic barrage of violence and humiliation.

Playing like a variation on The Human Centipede set-up (and, by the end, astonishingly much more horrible than that film), despite not having much opening development between the main character and his loved ones, Knock Knock does manage to generate an interesting premise for the beginning. As soon as the girls arrive, knowing that things are going to take a sinister turn, it's intriguing to see just how this will play out and why. But after that, it just goes to pot and ends up leaving a really nasty taste in the mouth.

With elements of Phone Booth and Hard Candy chucked in to the plot, this skirts around the issue of young girls looking older than they are, and suckering older guys into going with them, an issue that's been playing in the media lately. But rather than using this as a plot device for some deep thought, it just degenerates into a relentlessly gratuitous and nasty piece of work, like a long winded, less grounded version of the superior British flick Cherry Tree Lane. Izzo and de Amis are a pair of seriously deranged, psychotic devil women, who just serve to distract from Reeves, who is as wooden as ever.

By the end, it's just started to become annoying and stupid, with only the theme from the end of Fight Club playing over the end credits to remind you of something better. You think of those two girls up the north of England who battered that woman to death in her house, and when you're expected to be entertained by something as dispiriting as this, it puts things in perspective. **

Despite the warnings from negative reviews and low IMDb rating i watched it anyway... I've always liked Eli Roth mainly for his near show stealing appearance as 'The Bear Jew' in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and his movies, though never groundbreaking for me, offered playful b-movie fun. His efforts here seemed to diminish after the initial creation of suspense. Once we move to the second act the script loses any credibility and little is left for creation of further suspense. It's almost as if the idea was to get Keanu to behave somewhat like Nicholas Cage in OMG mode. That idea i couldn't shake and ironically it became what kept me entertained, imagining cage instead of reeves, which wasn't too hard as Keanu seemed to channel the spirit of the rage cage as if he were possessed by him. Don't let my mention of cage fool you, the acting in this movie is sub par, if Keanu isn't The Wicker Man he's the wooden man and the girls act like female villains in a made for TV batman movie. In summary; I found a few things Keanu said in a serious monologue quite laugh out loud funny and the use of a popular pixies track at the end credits reminded me of a student movie using cool music to be cool. All it did was remind me of it's already iconic use in one of my favorite movies. The movie was just bad enough to enjoy it's shitness or i'd have not sat through it. Avoid this if you get offended by crap movies but I'm almost recommending you to watch this for the points I mentioned for your own curiosity. The movie stuck in my mind enough for m to waste time writing this review, i wonder if that was Roth's intention for the audience or he actually took this movie seriously.