Whereas those titles have a pointed central message (usually about cultural tourism & American entitlement) & a dedication to gut-wrenching gore, however, Knock Knock is much more deliberately ditzy. I’m not sure that I have enough context to settle that question of Roth’s tonal intent on my own, but I can say that if Knock Knock was indeed meant to be a setup for a joke, the punchline was constantly amusing, making for a decent entry point into a career I’ve been too grossed out to approach for more than a decade now.Ī nasty exploitation thriller that resembles a direct-to-DVD knockoff of Funny Games, it’s tempting to view Knock Knock in the same light as more typifying Eli Roth ventures like Hostel or Green Inferno. Everything from Keanu Reeves’s strange line deliveries to the film’s cheap digital look to its winking title suggests that it’s supposed to play like a joke. If you need a brief glimpse of what I’m getting at, look to the trailer for Roth’s recent home invasion piece Knock Knock.
As sick as his sense of humor seems to be, I’ve come to think of Roth as something of a prankster. If you judge Roth solely by his fake Thanksgivingtrailer for the Grindhouse project, his performance as “The Bear Jew” in Inglourious Basterds, and his production work on the campy body horror Clown, he comes off as much less misanthropic than his usual reputation would suggest. Roth has a way of sneaking into other projects I’m interested in, though, and I’ve started to notice over the years that he seems to have a sense of humor to his work that I had missed out on from the outside looking in.
#Knockknock making movie#
The alternate ending to Knock Knock would have been more sensible, and offered the story several additional layers that it desperately needed.I’ve never bothered watching an Eli Roth movie before, mostly because I associate him with the mid 00s torture porn aesthetic that I generally try to avoid in my horror binges. In Knock Knock's theatrical ending, the audience can assume Evan's wife leaves him, and the suffering he faced continues to impact his life. It could've added nuance to a movie that, as it stands now, has a simplistic ending. Had it concluded with Eli Roth's alternate ending, it could've expanded the story beyond the assumption that Genesis and Bel are just senseless brutalizers. However, this ending likely wouldn't have sent the right message, given Bel and Genesis' potential backstory.Īt its core, Knock Knock is a story about victims, survivors, and predators. When he knocks on the door of their next victim's home, it could've given him the ability to find answers or enact revenge on them for ruining his life. Evan represents something evil from their past that Bel and Genesis cannot escape it's clear that the two women went through something awful in their lives, which in turn caused them to turn their tormentors into their victims. Their reasoning for targeting men like Evan is never fully revealed, but it could've been, had the alternate ending offered the opportunity for a Knock Knock sequel. While Genesis and Bel are tormenting Evan, it's alluded that they've experienced severe trauma and assault, which led them to attack men and - more specifically - fathers.
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