THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (2018) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

the house with a clock in its walls (2018) movie

Genre              |   Fantasy Horror

Classification   |   PG

Running time   |   99 minutes

Released         |   20 September 2018

cast

Cate Blanchett ... Mrs. Zimmerman
​Jack Black ... Jonathan Barnavelt
Owen Vaccaro ... Lewis Barnavelt
Renée Goldsberry ... Selena Izard
Sunny Suljic ... Tarby Corrigan
Kyle MacLachlan ... Isaac Izard
Colleen Camp ... Mrs. Hanchett

director

Eli Roth

writer

​John Bellairs ... (based on the novel by)
Eric Kripke ... (written by)

cinematographer

​Rogier Stoffers

music

​​Nathan Barr ... (music by)

film editor

​Andrew S. Eisen ... film editor
Fred Raskin

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box office result

Worldwide               $? million

Australia                 $? million

North America        $? million

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the best dialogue

Jonathan Barnavelt: There's a clock in the walls. We don't know what it does, except... something horrible.

Mrs. Zimmerman: So, you told Lewis everything?
Jonathan Barnavelt: Well, not everything.

Jonathan Barnavelt: Have a look around, it's perfectly safe...
[a tentacled monster opens a door, Jonathan shoves it back]
Lewis Barnavelt: THAT's safe?
Jonathan Barnavelt: As long as it's fed.

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THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (2018) STORY SYNOPSIS

​In the tradition of Amblin classics where fantastical events occur in the most unexpected places, Jack Black and two-time Academy Award® winner Cate Blanchett star in The House with a Clock in Its Walls, from Amblin Entertainment.  The magical adventure tells the spine-tingling tale of 10-year-old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who goes to live with his uncle in a creaky old house with a mysterious tick-tocking heart.  But his new town’s sleepy façade jolts to life with a secret world of warlocks and witches when Lewis accidentally awakens the dead.

THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (2018) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 22 September 2018
Pop ​Movee Rating ⭐⭐

It’s hard what to make of THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS. It could be argued, at its core, it’s a children’s Fantasy with a dash of the Supernatural Horror sub-genre thrown in to make it just scary enough to keep the story interesting. Those familiar with the resume of Eli Roth, the film’s Director, might argue that this is a genuine effort by him to move away from the torture porn Horror movies he’s best known for. Jack Black fans might form the opinion that their man has finally run out of “performance gas” and is in need of a serious schtick overhaul.

THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS is all of these and more, but it is also less...

Based on the John Bellairs book of the same name, the film is centred around the character of young Lewis Barnavelt, played by Owen Vaccaro. Like many protagonists in this type of film, based upon Young Adult fiction, Lewis is an orphan, having been sent to his Uncle after the death of his parents. It sounds very HARRY POTTER and, in a way, J.K. Rowling’s first couple of books in the POTTER series are similar to the 1973 novel upon which this film is based. To be fair, Rowling created a much more complete universe and, as her series progressed, the tales became darker and much more personal than anything on display in THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS.

In the film, the young boy’s Uncle - Jonathan Barnavelt - is played by Jack Black.

The two start off in an uneasy fashion. Jonathan is reluctant to share with his young Nephew everything going on in the strange house to which he’s been sent to live in. Things don’t seem right. There’s noises… Furniture seems to move of its own accord… Uncle Jonathan prowls the corridors of the house in the small hours of the morning armed with an axe!

Most performers couldn’t do what’s needed to convince the audience that anything happening in THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS is remotely credible, but, Jack Black has a knack for taking the utterly ridiculous and turning it into something believable. He almost pulls off the film’s best magic trick by delivering a performance that papers over all the other flaws within the film, having the audience believe the film is better than what it really is.

Unfortunately for Black and the audience, he’s not quite on top of his game in this film.

All the things the audience has come to expect from him all seem muted in THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS.

The big, booming reactions are largely missing.

The wink and nod with the audience is nowhere to be found.

The general exuberance associated with a Jack Black character just isn’t there…

It’s hard to know why this is, but, watching the film,  there appear to be two reasons. The first is the presence of Cate Blanchett. It’s not often Black has to share the screen with a performer of her calibre and everything about Blanchett’s Florence Zimmerman is designed to draw attention to her. By comparison, Black looks positively dull against her array of eye-catching purple outfits.

It’s not just the costumes...

Blanchett is a minimalist. Black is not. Black spends most of the film dialling his performance back to match Blanchett and this is not necessarily a good thing for the film.

This is a film about Warlocks and Witches. Blanchett’s Zimmerman is meant to be a Witch, but her performance is akin to Mary Poppins, making it hard for Black to go BIG in any of their scenes together AND they have a lot of scenes together.

There’s also a distance in the relationship between Black’s Barnavelt and his nephew. Black is normally pretty good with child actors, but he and Owen Vaccaro never develop an onscreen chemistry that makes the audience care enough about how things turn out for them. The superficiality of the relationship is not really Black’s fault. Young Owen Vaccaro fails to make an impression as young Lewis.

There’s no doubt that Owen Vaccaro is a cute little kid. Part of the appeal in casting him must have been that he “looked the part”. There’s a big difference between appearing to “look” right for the role and being good enough to bring it to life. On this count, Vaccaro fails. His performance comes under the spotlight because he’s one of the three leading characters and gets plenty of screen time.

To put the problem into perspective, imagine that Daniel Radcliffe’s version of Harry Potter from THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE was the only child actor to have a significant role in the production and was on screen ninety per cent of the time. Given how much the HARRY POTTER cast matured as performers the longer the series went on, it’s easy to forget how mediocre they were in the first movie. That’s how it feels with Owen Vaccaro in THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS. He doesn’t have the acting chops required to make Lewis come to life.

Poor performances also extend to the supporting cast…

It’s hard to imagine what Kyle MacLachlan was thinking while playing the role of the film’s main antagonist, Isaac Izard, but it doesn’t look like he was too fussed about what he was doing as the character. His acting is woeful. To make matters worse, he’s forced to don an inordinate layer of prosthetics to give Izard a look that’s a cross between a sultana and Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor in RETURN OF THE JEDI.

The biggest mystery of THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS is the participation of Director Eli Roth…

CABIN FEVER, HOSTEL, HOSTEL: PART II, THE GREEN INFERNO and a remake of DEATH WISH.

These, and others, are all MA 15+ or R rated movies that Roth has become “notorious” for over the last two decades. Up until THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS, Roth has been most interested in depicting violence (and its effect) in as gratuitous a manner he sees fit.

Is this PG rated, children’s story about Warlocks and Witches a page-turn opportunity for Roth to break free of his fan base and become a mainstream film maker?

Perhaps.

It is easy to pigeonhole Roth and forget that his style is linked to the 1970s and the movies he absorbed as a young boy. Perhaps the very reason he’s become identified with “torture porn” Horror is his relatively slow, dramatic approach to telling stories. He likes to take his time with things and, by the very nature of this process, his visuals are on show for longer and create a lasting, visceral impression among audiences.

There are some flashes of Roth’s filmmaking strengths on display in THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS. There’s a funny, well orchestrated scene early in the movie, where Lewis is the last to be selected to play basketball. The scene’s humour is sustained because Roth shows patience and deliver the audience maximum pay-off with a slow-moving sight gag that highlights how isolated Lewis is from the rest of the world, especially at school. Unfortunately, this gem of a scene is the exception rather than the rule. Had he mined the humour a little more consistently and allowed the performing ensemble to GO BIGGER, THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS could have been a very different kind of film.

Hopefully Roth will continue down this path and, in the future, deliver something that plays to his strengths but also allows a much broader audience to appreciate his capabilities.

The Verdict...

THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS is entertaining in places, but runs out of steam much sooner than a 105 minute feature film should. Jack Black, who should be the force around which the film derives its narrative energy, is missing in action. Catch Blanchett is a fine
actress, but she plays the drama, not the adventure. A film of this sort needs actors who understand they’re not aspiring to high art. Owen Vaccaro lacks presence and struggles to convey the range of emotions needed to make Lewis convincing.

This is a kids movie about Warlocks and Witches. If nothing else, it should be fun to watch. THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS isn’t. It’s a ticking time-bomb of tedium with an anti-climatic finale and a contrived “Hollywood” ending designed to create a franchise at the expense of good storytelling.

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THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (2018) USEFUL LINKS

​The House with a Clock in Its Walls (film) - Wikipedia
​The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) - IMDb
​The House With A Clock In Its Walls (2018) - Rotten Tomatoes

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