Review: Knock Knock

Keanu Reeves plays a happily married architect and father, whose wife and kids are away for the weekend, whilst Reeves stays behind to finish some work. On the first night, he gets a knock at the door from two young ladies (Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo), soaking wet from the rain. Apparently they got lost on the way to a party, and being a good Samaritan, Reeves lets them in to dry off while he calls them an Uber to come pick them up. However, the girls start getting all flirty, and eventually wrangle Reeves into having a threesome with him. Being that he loves his wife, he’s extremely resistant (well, a bit more resistant than Michael Douglas in “Disclosure” at least), but being a dopey thriller, it’s not long before he’s powerless to stop these ladies from servicing his nether regions. They never do catch that Uber, either. The next morning, things take a nasty turn when after being asked to vacate the premises, the girls respond by knocking Reeves out, and he awakes to find he is now captive by the two clearly unhinged girls. The fun has only just started, it seems. Colleen Camp turns up briefly as a concerned neighbour.

 

Eli Roth (“Hostel”, “Hostel Part II”, “Cabin Fever”- none among my favourite films to say the least) directs and co-writes this 2015 remake of the 1977 exploitation flick “Death Game”. That’s a pretty obscure title to consider for a remake, I must say. Having not seen it, I have no idea how faithful it is to the original, but it’s interesting to note that the first film’s stars Colleen Camp and Sondra Locke helped produce Roth’s version, and Camp even has a cameo as a nosy neighbour. That’s about it for interesting things with this pretty useless, poorly acted film that isn’t really worth your time unless you want to be shocked by how Colleen Camp looks these days.

 

I’ll admit that there’s one or two moments of interestingly sick psychological interplay going on here, but with the central trio of performances being woefully unconvincing, it doesn’t really add up to much. I won’t dock points for the film’s slow pace, as the simplistic plot pretty much dictates a slow pace, but I was hoping for far more interesting twists and turns within that simplistic plot than what we get.

 

Keanu Reeves was one of the producers here, but he doesn’t look too happy about appearing in the film. He’s somewhat convincing as a dope who gets duped, but the rest of his performance isn’t convincing at all. For a guy who has been acting in films since about 1986, his amateurish turn is really inexcusable. He’s even worse once he starts getting victimised, with one profane rant in particular being the single worst bit of acting he’s done since “Johnny Mnemonic”. As for the girls, they get the flirty stuff down pat, but like Reeves that’s only one part of what they’re required to act out here. They offer up no convincing menace, and seem to be play acting as psychos rather than genuinely playing psycho characters, a subtle but important distinction.

 

This film is undeniable proof that Eli Roth and I aren’t on the same wavelength. Whilst he doesn’t offer up his usual ‘torture porn’, he also doesn’t go nearly far enough with the sex, either. The ménage-a-trois is shot in obscured fashion with MTV editing and in incoherent close-ups for the most part. For an exploitation film featuring a ménage-a-trois, it’s dishearteningly tame I must say. How the hell do you fuck something like this up? Roth manages to find several ways, or perhaps he encountered studio interference. Either way, he whiffs on the exploitation front.

 

Distressingly uneventful, unsurprising, uncreative, unsexy, and uninteresting. The only way this might’ve worked is if Roth made it as an anthology segment, and cut out most of the boring filler. Even then it would still only ‘work’ from a story perspective, in order to make it ‘good’ you’d also need better dialogue and decent actors. The dialogue in this is utterly worthless. Whatever value all involved saw in the idea of remaking “Death Game” clearly hasn’t made it to the screen. One scene of bizarro psychological thriller interplay does not a recommended film make. Poorly acted to boot, and the pathetic ending is the death knell for the film (With one rather large misdeed seemingly forgotten about entirely. Talk about a hole in the plot, you could drive a truck through it). The screenplay is by Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolas Lopez, and Roth himself, who should all be put in irons for whoever the hell came up with the single worst dog name of all-time: Monkey. Yep, the dog is called Monkey. 

 

Rating: C-