WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Knock Knock

Cinema, at its best, has thrown itself unstoppably against the immovability of the biggest questions. Some directors spend their entire career focused on one question or thematic concern. For Sam Peckinpah, it was what happens when men of a certain mindset outlive their times while stubbornly refusing to change. For Michael Mann, the terrible cost to be paid when one ceases to be true to oneself.

Other directors step outside their usual aesthetic playbook to create a one-off distillation of something so utterly profound that the effect is unforgettable: take Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru’ – not a samurai in sight, but a cumulatively beautiful and emotionally shattering meditation on how, in the face of death, one can undertake a single act that proves one’s life had purpose.

In ‘Knock Knock’, Eli Roth squares up – utilising every creative and cerebral nuance in his directorial paintbox – to that thorniest of existential dilemmas, to whit: Is the destruction of one’s home, the ruination of one’s marriage, the tarring of one’s reputation, the abject humiliation of the self, and the possible loss of one’s life worth it for a threesome with Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas?

By the final frame, I’m not sure that Roth wouldn’t come down on the side of shag-a-thon and the hell with the torture porn that follows. Hell, what’s torture porn but normal porn wth a little more in the way of pain? Roth would probably take a night of debauchery and marching songs with Prussian Blue and happily let them tie him up and carve a swastika into his willy the next morning and pour Wild Turkey over the wound. I can imagine him chugging a celebratory beer and asking them to do it again.

All of which is a 300-word way of saying that Roth’s enthusiasm in directing ‘Knock Knock’ is roughly akin to Oliver Reed being offered the job of Chief Quality Control Officer at Talisker distillery or Keith Richard winning a lifetime’s supply of cocaine and doing every fucking molecule of it in first 48 hours.

Here’s another thing about ‘Knock Knock’: after four films that are basically unofficial remakes (or rather greatest hits packages) of the films Roth grew up loving, this is his first official remake: of Peter S. Traynor’s 1977 sexploitation classic starring Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp. Camp cameos in a splendid comedy-of-embarrassments scene, while she and Locke act as producers. I’ve taken the piss out of Roth routinely in these pages but, with all sincerity, props to the guy for seeking Locke’s and Camp’s blessing in taking on the material.

And while I’m holding my hands up here, I’ll come right out with it: ‘Knock Knock’ is the first film in the Roth canon that I’ve straight up enjoyed. Granted, it’s no classic – one can easily imagine Jag Mahendra turning in a slightly less polished version of it in the mid-1980s with Shannon Whirry and Delia Sheppard – but it sees Roth freeing himself from those late-1990s “future of horror” expectations, working with a genuine A-list star (Keanu Reeves), and gifted with the most dementedly sexy double act imaginable courtesy of Izzo and de Armas. It’s no coincidence that the best scenes are where Roth simply points the camera at his leading ladies and lets them play off each other in the most deliciously nasty way.

A robot could probably have directed this film and got away with it, that’s how memorable Izzo and de Armas are. I can only describe what they achieve onscreen as being as if Rodney Bewes and James Bolam in ‘The Likely Lads’ or Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale in ‘Porridge’ were Lolita-esque jailbait.

Here’s the basic premise, if you haven’t second-guessed it already: Evan (Reeves) is a successful architect, happily married to an artist, Karen (Ignacio Allamand), who is about to get her first big exhibition. Karen takes their kids for a weekend away while Evan finishes work on a major commission. In the time honoured tradition of architects everywhere, he rolls a skinny, works late into the night and blasts out 70s rock. (In fairness, I only know one architect, but let’s just say that his working practices are significantly different to Evan’s.) Halfway through looking at an onscreen graphic – Roth seems unaware of how CAD actually operates – he’s disturbed by a knock at the door and – … wait a fucking minute, he’s a successful architect living in a detached piece of architecture in a suburb that has “white entitlement” written all over it and the cunt doesn’t have a fucking doorbell?

Okay. So. No-doorbell-cunt answers the knock – it’s pissing it down with rain – and finds Genesis (Izzo) and Bel (de Armas) on his doorstep, soaked through and asking for shelter from the rain. Which, being a decent guy, he gives them. And being a decent guy, he books an Uber for them. And being a decent guy he dries off their sodden clothes in his tumble-dryer. And being a decent guy he gives them dressing gowns to wear. And being a decent guy he acts all flustered when their behaviour demonstrates that they are confident in their sexuality.

And, finally, being basically a bloke and incapable of thinking through anything but his dick when half-his-age poontang is on offer, he conveniently compartmentalises his wife and kids and his sense of morality and, for want of a subtler phrase, goes at it like a butcher’s dog.

Waking the next morning to the post-coital equivalent of buyer’s remorse, and none too impressed that Genesis and Bel are making themselves a little too intimately at home, he finds himself having to jump through a number of hoops just to get them out of his house. He then gets busy eradicating every shred of evidence that they were ever there, little knowing that the games have only just begun.

Roth keeps the 100 minutes of ‘Knock Knock’ moving at an admirable clip. He turns up the heat on the erotic elements, only to go all abstract in the way he films the big shagging scene. He monkeys with the home invasion scenario in seeming to have Evan rid himself of the threat. And, when he sets the scene for the final half hour or so, the expected torture porn tropes are abandoned in favour of pure black comedy in which the surreal restaging of a popular gameshow stands in for the blood-letting of the ‘Hostel’ films and a wrongly “liked” Facebook post is the worst possible thing that can happen to you.

Four years ago, on these very pages, I concluded a review of ‘Cabin Fever’ with the assertion that “this and ‘Thanksgiving’, the fake trailer Roth created for ‘Grindhouse’, [are] evidence of something that’s probably not at the top of anyone’s list at industry meetings but which I think would merit exploration: Eli Roth could direct the hell out of a comedy.”

‘Knock Knock’ is his first significant step in that direction, and I’m now prepared to double down on that assertion. Give Roth a scenario that demands straight-faced social horror and he’ll blow it by acting stupid; give him a set-up steeped in gallows humour and mordant satire and the guy delivers. In a decade’s time, when the originality-challenged bigwigs in Hollywood decide that what the world needs is a ‘Scream’ reboot, Roth will ace it. Although whether anything in any future film he directs, comedy or not, will ever top the demented brilliance of Keanu Reeves’s final reel “free pizza” speech is not something I’d put money on.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Green Inferno

This is what it must be like to be Eli Roth:

Hillbilly horror! My favourite genre ever! I’m gonna make a hillbilly horror movie, bitches, and it’s gonna rock!
Makes ‘Cabin Fever’.
Realises he’s trying too hard.
Is sad.

Torture porn! I fucking love torture porn! I’m gonna make the torture porn movie to end all torture porn movies – AND do a sequel!
Makes ‘Hostel’ and ‘Hostel 2’.
Realises he’s trying too hard.
Is sad.

Cannibal movies! OMG, why didn’t I think of that before? Imma be the next Ruggero Deodato!
Makes ‘The Green Inferno’.
Realises he’s trying too hard.
Is sad.

Whether the pattern holds for the erotic thriller and ‘Knock Knock’ is something we’ll find out in the next review. And in the interests of fairness, being Eli Roth probably encompasses a lot of other things, including money, lifestyle, having QT as your best bud, and being married to the not-unglamorous Lorenza Izzo.

Speaking of whom, Izzo is the audience’s surrogate through our 1hour 40 minute ordeal and proves an empathetic heroine even though the script has about as much emotional investment in her character, Justine, as a Tory politician has in the lower and unprivileged classes. We meet Justine at the kind of too-neat-and-clean American university that exists only in the movies. The daughter of a UN official, she’s moved by the activism and general do-goodery of some of the student body, much to the contempt of her room mate Kaycee (Sky Ferreira). In particular, she’s drawn to the swarthy Alejandro (Ariel Levy), a fact noted and frowned upon by his brittle girlfriend Kara (Ignacia Allamand).

The script needs to paint Alejandro as charismatic and impassioned in order to entice Justine into joining his expedition to an under-threat village in the Amazon, only for him to be revealed later as a man of hidden motives and self-interest. This cloak-then-reveal tactic would have required a better script and performance; as it is, we have Alejandro as a moody, self-righteous prick from the outset. Given that Izzo goes all out to sell Justine’s attraction to him, Levy’s non-performance is a drain on hers.

Fortunately, Roth doesn’t waste too much time in getting everyone on a plane and into the jungle. If there’s anything positive to be said about ‘The Green Inferno’, it’s the economy of the storytelling in the first half. Another smart move is to have Justine get the measure of Alejandro pretty quickly, so that she stops being all soppy and doe-eyed and gets her mettle tested in a gruelling tale of survival against the odds. Wait, let me rephrase that: in what Roth achingly believes is a gruelling tale of survival against the odds.

You see, there’s a common faultline in the filmography of Mr Eli Raphael Roth. Like his compatriot Quentin Tarantino, Roth’s films derive from a life-long immersion in genre cinema. Like Tarantino post-‘Jackie Brown’, his films are movie-movies rather than works that make any claim to being grounded in even the remotest facsimile of reality. But while Tarantino conjures non-naturalism into an aesthetic – an auteurist signature – the stories Roth wants to tell would work so much better if the veneer of artifice were stripped away.

Actually, make that two common faultlines. The other one is frat-boy humour. There comes a moment in every Eli Roth film where he makes a directorial decision that functions on roughly the same artistic, intellectual and emotional level of someone photobombing an Allied Press picture of a corpse-littered war zone while chugging a beer and pretending to butt-fuck a giant blow-up sheep.

[SPOILER ALERT: next two paragraphs.]

There are two such moments in ‘The Green Inferno’. One comes almost immediately after Justine and Alejandro, along with Lars (Daryl Sabara) and same-sex couple Amy (Kirby Bliss Blanton) and Samantha (Magda Apinowicz), have been captured by a cannibal tribe and imprisoned in a bamboo cage. No sooner have they witnessed their comrade Jonah (Aaron Burns) dismembered and feasted upon, than Amy suffers a gastrointestinal upheaval. Roth captures this – the first moment in the character’s degradation that leads to her self-immolation – with an over-the-top and extended sound effect, then immediately cuts to a reaction shot of the village children grinning and waving their hands under their noses. If his intent were comedy to leaven the horror, it’s misjudged – not only because it cheapens the ordeal but relies on a gesture I doubt cannibal children would know or have any use for even if they did.

The second is the film’s derailment moment. Recognising that the now deceased Amy is next for the cannibal stew pot, Lars forces down her throat a small baggie of pot which he has concealed upon his person. His reasoning? The tribe entire will feast on her and get high, rendering them incapable of preventing an escape attempt. Quite which branch of forensics or human biology convinced Roth and co-scripter Guillermo Amoedo that a small quantity of mary-jane can suffuse every ounce of a dead body’s flesh – dead body, folks: i.e. no functioning pulmonary system – to the extent that every man-jack of an entire tribe are turned into giggling dopers after two fucking bites, I can’t honestly say, but the resulting sequence is so powerfully stupid that it feels, as a viewer, as if you’ve swerved from a Ruggero Deodato fan-wank tribute to ‘Cheech and Chong Meet the Cannibals’, a comparison strengthened when Lars, his getaway foiled, exclaims “They’ve got the munchies” as he finds himself availed of in the light snack department.

[SPOILERS END, though why the fuck I’m not actively discouraging you from this pile of bum-dung I don’t know!]

‘Cannibal Holocaust’ is nasty as all hell, and that’s its power: it gives the audience no leeway, no comfortable only-a-movie rationale. ‘Massacre in Dinosaur Valley’ is total bollocks that exists as a delivery system for macho posturing, gore and Suzane Carvalho in the buff – and is honest about its intents from the outset. ‘The Green Inferno’ is a misjudged mash-up of the two – and it’s telling that the “history of the cannibal genre” overview Roth slips into the closing credits fawns over ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ but fails to mention ‘Massacre in Dinosaur Valley’ even though he makes more visual steals from that film than any of the other entries in the cannibal cycle. It’s a sad and self-effacing via negativa, akin to declaring your intent to homage ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ but knowing in your bile-embittered heart of hearts that you’re incapable of producing anything better than a hamfisted retread of ‘Ishtar’.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #12: Cabin Fever

Amazing to think that it’s over a decade since ‘Cabin Fever’ came roaring onto cinema screens on a tsunami of hype that made ‘The Blair Witch Project’ seem under-represented. Amazing to think that Eli Roth was being talked up as the future of horror. And amazing to think, given the not inconsiderable amount of box office success and industry buzz that came his way in a very short space of time – not to mention becoming big buddies with Quentin Tarantino – that Roth has only made two films since: the hugely xenophobic and moderately misogynistic ‘Hostel’, and the hugely misogynistic and moderately xenophobic ‘Hostel 2’.

Look at ‘Cabin Fever’ now and it’s impossible to see the film for what it is: a shaggy dog story. But here’s the rub – Roth is not without talent. For all that the ‘Hostel’ films promulgate a grubby and unlikeable world view that comes on as two parts drunken frat boy to one part casual racism, they evoke a very specific and stomach-churningly effective sense of foreignness; before any Achille’s tendons are severed or surgical tools misused, Roth incrementally strips his characters of every vestige of entitled white middle class Americana, miring them in an ancient, superstitious and coldly intolerant culture.

It’s an ability that should serve him well in the forthcoming ‘Green Inferno’, Roth’s first directorial outing in six years (although early reviews are already talking up one-dimensional characters and a redundant first half), and it’s tempting to see the seeds of his cannibal opus – as well as the ‘Hostel’ films – as being in present in ‘Cabin Fever’. First point of comparison: a group of college kids journey somewhere (here, to the backwoods; the geographical peregrinations are pushed further with each film). Second: their initial interactions with the local populace betray their naivety/ignorance. Third: nasty shit happens.

The college kids in ‘Cabin Fever’ are smarmy law student Jeff (Joey Kern) and his voluptuous girlfriend Marcy (Cerina Vincent), douche-bro asshole Burt (James DeBello), ostensibly sensitive type Paul (Rider Strong) and girl-next-door Karen (Jordan Ladd), whom Paul is eyeing as girlfriend material. Karen, however, very much regards him as just a friend. Meanwhile, Jeff and Marcy are at it like rabbits while Burt just wants to go shooting squirrels in the woods. With Jeff and Burt as different varieties of macho asshole and Marcy as the all-purpose siren (Roth’s camera spends so much time lingering on Cerina Vincent’s midriff, the film begins to feel stalkerish), Paul and Karen are the only remotely sympathetic characters, a set-up that Roth subverts utterly by the halfway point.

In one sense, ‘Cabin Fever’ adheres to the tropes: a cabin in the woods, threatening hillbilly characters, a killer dog, cellphones betrayed by lack of signal, various contrivances that prevent the protagonists from leaving. In another, it doesn’t. The script flirts with the convention of final girl, vacillating between Karen and Marcy, before abandoning the idea altogether. The hillbillies are portrayed, at least until the gun-happy denouement, as considerably more calm and rational than the college kids. The comedy law enforcement – personified by Deputy Winston (Giuseppe Andrews) – becomes more protracted in the increasingly surreal coda.

And on the subject of said finale, ‘Cabin Fever’ has the gumption to play its last few minutes as if the preceding hour and a half were nothing more than the set-up for a punchline. This ought to feel like a cheat, or at best a hasty wrap-up before the whole infected water supply subplot threatens to necessitate another half hour’s running time and considerably more greenbacks in the budget, but somehow the sheer insouciant absurdity of it works.

In ‘Hostel’ and ‘Hostel 2’, stereotypes and sadism replaced the gallows humour of ‘Cabin Fever’. Based on the trailer and advance reviews, the probability is that humour will be notable only by its absence in ‘The Green Inferno’. Which leaves only this and ‘Thanksgiving’, the fake trailer Roth created for ‘Grindhouse’, as evidence of something that’s probably not at the top of anyone’s list at industry meetings but which I think would merit exploration: Eli Roth could direct the hell out of a comedy.

THE FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: Grindhouse

Do you know how excited I was about ‘Grindhouse’? Imagine the adrenalin levels of a kid on Christmas Day, a fat kid in a sweetshop lockdown and no adults around to tell him not to, a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory, a dipsomaniac left in charge of a distillery, a voyeur given carte blanche to roam around the Playboy Mansion, and a member of the NRA at an arms bazaar. Now combine all those adrenalin levels, throw a few tequila slammers into the mix and shoot the whole thing full of heroin.

That’s how excited I was.

Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy reviewed it under the pullquote ‘The Movie I Was Put on This Earth to See’, and I was almost wetting myself.

And. Then. Something. Happened.

‘Grindhouse’ underperformed at the American box office. I started hearing dispiriting rumours: the film was being split in two for its European release; ‘Death Proof’ would come out first; there was no confirmed UK release date for ‘Planet Terror’. There was a big question mark over whether the spoof trailers would be released theatrically.

I. Was. Not. Happy.


I’ll admit it here and now: I was looking forward more to ‘Planet Terror’ than ‘Death Proof’, having been monstrously underwhelmed by ‘Kill Bill Vol. II’ (another Tarantino opus that got released in two parts, with a six month wait after the blistering first instalment with its iconic “House of Blue Leaves” set-piece).

Sure enough, the handful of lobby posters I’d seen for ‘Grindhouse’ quietly disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Death Proof’ posters. Frequent IMDb visits seemed to confirm that there was still no release date for ‘Planet Terror’. In the meantime, I’d tracked down the spoof trailers online and bookmarked them.

A week before ‘Death Proof’ opened, I got hold of ‘Planet Terror’ on Region 1 DVD, featuring the ‘Machete’ trailer (my personal favourite of the four spoofs). Me and Paula decided to have our own, cobbled together ‘Grindhouse’ experience: we watched ‘Planet Terror’ on DVD in the morning (including ‘Machete’), fired up the computer and watched the ‘Don’t’, ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ trailers, then went to the cinema and watched ‘Death Proof’ on the big screen in the afternoon.

It doesn’t quite equate to taking your seat in the cinema, watching two 90-minuters (each complete with ‘missing reel’) back to back, interspersed with the spoof trailers – ie. three and a half hours of moviegoing designed as an affectionate, often ironic but ultimately down and dirty throwback to the grubby joys of the exploitation B-movie double bill.

The point of those 70s double-bills was that you saw them in a cinema. Usually a dingy fleapit where the seats were dimpled with cigarette burns, smoke was still hanging in the air courtesy of the audience at the earlier screening, your shoes adhered to the floor thanks to a combination of melted ice cream, popcorn and spilled Ki-ora, and the films were interrupted at least a couple of times during the screening due to technical problems with the projector.

In order to recreate the experience, ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ – the former more authentically – are scratched and distressed and jump about a lot, simulating hamfisted splicing, and in the case of ‘Planet Terror’ the film seems to bubble up and burn into white nothingness.

Seen on DVD, you think “hmmm, that’s quite a convincing effect”. Seen on a computer, the spoof trailers are quite obviously that: spoofs. You find yourself picking hairs. Both ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’, as sleazily inspired as they are, are billed as “a film by Eli Roth” and “a film by Rob Zombie” respectively, the latter trumpeting a big star name (Nicolas Cage) – but no zero-budgeted exploitation flick would be thus advertised. Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ hits the mark as acutely as ‘Machete’, though, delivering a minute’s worth of stalk ‘n’ slash highlights while the voiceover drones monotonously “Don’t … don’t … don’t … don’t.”

Still, all of these component parts were meant to be taken together, as a three and a half hour whole … and were meant to be seen at the cinema. Instead, we got expanded cuts of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’, the former now clocking in 1 hour 45 minutes, and Tarantino’s opus pushing the two hour mark, again pushing the films another step away from their original aesthetic.

The damage done to both films is that you view them as separate entities, which leads to pointless exercises in critical approach whereby you try to reconcile the more authentic ‘look’ of ‘Planet Terror’ with the post-modern ironic playfulness of ‘Death Proof’ instead of thinking “zombie movie – cool; car chase movie – cool”. Or ruminating on the promise of the erotic given the plethora of eye candy (two quartets of heroines in ‘Death Proof’; cleavages a-go-go courtesy of Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton and Stacy Ferguson in ‘Planet Terror') and the non-inclusion of actual nudity (want topless women? the ‘Machete’ trailer’s the only place you’ll find ’em) and coming to the conclusion that an implied salaciousness : disappointment ratio is par for the course in exploitation movies and Rodriguez and Tarantino have played on this most effectively … when you should, of course, be thinking “wow, hot chicks”.

Tim comments, in his brilliantly written review, “the structural vulernability of Grindhouse makes it the same as those things it mimics, even while the very soul of Grindhouse is that, as a mimic, it is not the same thing. Therefore, the film becomes both thesis and antithesis”, and he’s absolutely right. To discuss structure is perhaps the most intelligent way to approach ‘Grindhouse’ critically. Otherwise, as just as valid, you can simply kick back with a big tub of popcorn, turn off your critical faculties and let your mind go “zombies, cool … wow, Rose McGowan’s a fox … machine gun leg … shoot-outs, cool … stuff blowing up … fast cars, cool … wow, Vanessa Ferlito’s a fox … Kurt Russell being a badass, cool … wow, how long’s this car chase gone on for? …” and so on and so forth.

They’ve been constructed deliberately – and a lot more cleverly than a first viewing might lead you to believe – but the component parts of ‘Grindhouse’ are quite simply a hymn to the gleeful pleasures of moviegoing in an age where hot chicks, fast cars, cheesy special effects and 90-minutes of low-budget mayhem were their own raison d’etre.

Comparing and contrasting the films is a redundant exercise. The distributors, by splitting ‘Grindhouse’ in two, have left the likes of your humble blogger here with no choice other than to do just that. I was even tempted to use this post as a prologue to articles on ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ over the next two evenings.

But I won’t because I’m convinced that if I ever get to see ‘Grindhouse’ in the format Messrs Rodriguez and Tarantino intended me to, then I’ll have seen a masterpiece of post-modern throwback indulgent irony. Yup, I know those last four words seem like a quadrille of contradiction but I reckon the movie that underperformed in America and never made it to the UK has what it takes to synthesise them; and until ‘Grindhouse’ gets released in this country in its original format (preferably in a theatrical run), or until I can get my hands on a Region 1 DVD, it will have to remain the best movie I’ve almost seen.