Knock, Knock -- 2007 -- NR

Ah, after a good weekend of watching such movie masterpieces as Patton and Thelma and Louise, why in the name of all that is good would I put down a review for a movie like Knock, Knock? It's a straight to video horror flick, with almost no redeemable value. Wouldn't a review of Mystic River be more enlightening? Probably not. You already know it's good. And besides whining about the "what are we going to do?" scene in Thelma and Louise, it was all good, too.

So let's talk about Knock, Knock. To start with, let's insert standard horror synopsis here: homicidal maniac goes around killing teenagers for undisclosed reason. Good. For the high points of the blood-lusting, there was lots of gory killings, and one scene of completely gratuitous, above-the-waist nudity. But from there, let's go into the more nitty-gritty aspects.

The plot follows an investigation of the killings of teenagers as they are left alone in various places. The killings are occasionally creative, but the scenes all happens a little too quick to be scary or suspecseful, so while we know what's going to happen every time one of them is left alone, there is not fear factor in any of them. While it's not a slice and dice on every occasion, most of the dirty work happens between scenes after we're graced with the point of death. While this serves to add some mystery, it grows tiresome after awhile, and we're wondering why after 30 years, they can't at least use some of the effects from Friday the 13th so we can get a view of the hack-n-slash.

But more along my forte, let's talk plot. Here's where the movie fails even more miserably. It's the believability factor. The killings are happening to the children of a group of miscreants who killed or almost killed some kid in a fire while they were in high school. This means that this group all had children at exactly the same time. They also all stayed in town (well, all except one), their kids are all "pretty", and they all followed in their parents' popularity. The chances of all of that happening in the real world is infinitessimal. Can it happen? Sure. But all of them deciding to have children at exactly the same time, or in a couple year span? No, don't think so.

Then there's the obligatory "let the star have a trap that gives them a chance of escape." After all, the killer wiped everyone else out almost immediately upon confrontation. For the last one, though, he knocked her out, carried her outside her own house, dumped her in a coffin (still alive), and then set the coffin on fire. While this does fit the plot, it doesn't fit the rest of the killer's characteristics. Just too much of a stretch.

When it comes to characters, there was nothing to write home about. We get a backstory about the main washed up detective and the incident that started it all, but that's about it. We meet the victims long enough for them to die, and to top it, the story doesn't even really focus on them. And pretty much every scene with the slow janitor runs boring. A guy playing with dolls doesn't warrant a 3 minute scene. Sorry.

This one was a goner from the script, and would have been a far more interesting film if it had taken an approach more similar to It, and focused solely on the miscreants committing the crime in the past and present. They still could have wiped out the children and preserved the whodunit aspect, if they wanted to, but to focus on the cops in a horror movie is a poor choice and took us out of the story entirely.