Its title may be unruly, but “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” offers goofy and whimsical charm and the right amount of creepiness for little kids interested in trying out the horror genre – and for those gore-avoiding moms and dads who just can’t deal with “It” or “The Nun.” Director Eli Roth’s adaptation of the John Bellairs’ children’s novel is a throwback in setting, with 1950s retro cool coming together with magical fantasy in small-town Michigan, but also in tone. Children of the 1980s who grew up with “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Labyrinth” and “Gremlins” will notice “House’s” commitment to preying into human fears while also balancing it with enthusiasm and playfulness. What it’s all about Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is an odd, goggles-wearing little 10-year-old whose parents have died, and he goes to live with his Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black). Things are rough at first: Lewis finds his saxophone-enthusiast relative and the old house super creepy, and he’s not at all fitting in with his new school. But Lewis discovers that Jonathan’s a warlock, and his new home is a pretty wondrous place with art and furniture that come to life, including a topiary griffin that has the personality of a feisty house cat and farts leaves. Jonathan gives Lewis some magic lessons, but when he tries to raise the dead with a book of black magic to impress a classmate, things go awry. Lewis, his uncle and the witch next door, Florence (Cate Blanchett), have to stave off a doomsday scenario that also involves the mysterious tick-tock beating Lewis hears in the house’s walls. How scary is it? A good litmus test is R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” books: They’re aimed at ages 7-12 as an entryway to horror, and that’s the core crowd for “House” (and perhaps a little younger depending on individual maturity level). The first half of the movie is Lewis first being weirded out by his new surroundings and then seeing them as cool, but things grow much darker when previously deceased evil warlock Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan) shows up. He’s fresh out of the grave and looks decently startling. There’s a demon in one quick but pretty bone-chilling sequence, a shapeshifting character appears who’s a little freaky, and the kooky elements of the house turn against our heroes in a few action-packed scenes with automaton robots, moving dolls and sinister decorative pumpkins. Slapstick comedy and humor is used in conjunction with those to break the tension. The movie also tastefully handles a potentially unsettling situation with Lewis’ dead parents – he’s sad at the family wake, but the story moves ahead quickly, though his mom does play a part as the plot unfolds. And the verdict is … Kids and parents alike will find “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” an enjoyable treat without having ongoing nightmares about bad wizards and the end of the world. Black has turned himself into a family-friendly joy who's really fun to watch, and Blanchett complements him as both friend and paternal figure for Lewis. Plus, as much as it’s an introduction to fright fests, “House” has a lot of positive things to say about owning your own weirdness and individuality.<doc-sep>It’s hard to put a finger on what a movie like The House With the Clock in its Walls is exactly. It isn’t a fantasy movie. It is a little scarier than that. It isn’t a horror movie. Too much care is taken to make it easily accessible to a family audience. Whatever the movie is, it is good. Maybe it's Beetlejuice for kids or the Black Cauldron with a decidedly more pronounced funny bone. Whichever perfectly quotable description you want to throw on a poster doesn’t matter. The point is family fare like this doesn’t get made very often anymore. The House With the Clock in its Walls is directed by Eli Roth (yes, the same Eli Roth behind modern horror classics like Hostel and Cabin Fever). He doesn’t shy away from some really scary stuff in his first family outing. He just dials back the gore and the jump scares that would keep seven year olds from ever sleeping again. The movie, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Lewis, an orphan who goes to live with his mysterious Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) after the death of his parents. Jonathan is a warlock and lives in a creepy old mansion. His neighbor Florence (Cate Blanchett) can use magic but hasn’t practiced it in years after the death of her family. Both actors are terrific in their respective roles. Cate Blanchett is…well, Cate Blanchett. She is the most consistently excellent actor, regardless of gender, working in Hollywood right now. Jack Black has perfectly settled into dad mode while still being able to tap into the boundless energy that made him a movie star. There is a scene very early in the movie where Uncle Jonathan’s cranky neighbor, Mrs. Hanchett, asks him to stop playing his saxophone at 3 a.m. When Jonathan says he will do his best, but “them’s my best jammin’ hours,” you can see hints of Tenacious D’s Jables coming out to play. Lewis has trouble making friends at his new school. He reads dictionaries for fun. He dresses weird, even by 1950s standards, a decade when all kids dressed like the father in a Norman Rockwell painting. He spends most of his day talking to a Magic 8-ball. It isn’t until Jonathan and Florence share the story of Jonathan’s house and Isaac Izzard, the evil wizard that owned it before him, that we see Lewis start to find his place in the world. He goes to school during the day and trains with his new guardians at night. The problem is Lewis becomes so enthusiastic that he starts playing with the kind of dark magic that made Izzard so dangerous. It’s hard to find a glaring problem with The House With the Clock in its Walls. There are times where the comedy just kind of peters out, but the way Roth sets the movie up and the way the story unfolds, it makes sense. The ending is admittedly unsatisfying, but it’s 2018. Everything is either a sequel or being set up for a sequel. With this movie it’s the latter. I walked out of the theater at Mission Valley after my screening with two thoughts. First, those are the worst movie theater seats in the Triangle, and it isn’t close. Second, while this is a family friendly movie, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do a little research and evaluation on your kid before you go to the movie. Maybe the lack of “jump out and scare you” kind of frights make this a-okay in your eyes, but there are scenes that involve dolls that come to life and some pretty creepy demons and monsters. Overall, I thought this movie was fun. My son turns seven on Friday. He has been begging to see The House With the Clock in its Walls for his birthday, and I’m going to take him. But I am prepared to have him in the bed with my wife and me for the next week after.<doc-sep>The director Eli Roth has previously indulged his cinephilia with gory exploitation throwbacks (“Hostel”), but in “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” he makes a nostalgic fun house movie geared toward a younger crowd, and it pays off. This screen version of a celebrated 1973 book by John Bellairs doesn’t have the sophistication of an adaptation like “Hugo,” but no film in which Cate Blanchett head-butts a vivified jack-o’-lantern could be entirely without merit. The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view. After the deaths of his parents, Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) goes to live with his uncle, Jonathan (Jack Black), secretly a benevolent warlock. Jonathan is obsessed with finding a clock hidden in the house by its previous magic-dabbling occupant (Kyle MacLachlan). Lewis asks to apprentice.<doc-sep>'House with a Clock in its Walls' Review, or When the Passion in a Passion Project Never Materializes Onscreen By Steven Lloyd Wilson | Film | September 21, 2018 | Let’s clear up a few immediate misconceptions that you might have about The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which has gone essentially completely unadvertised and you may only have stumbled upon a few snippets of info about it. First, if all you’ve heard of is its name, you might be thinking, oh, that sounds like a subtle atmospheric horror movie. Or an unsubtle one. Maybe some VC Andrews type of tale where there are hidden hallways in this guilt-ridden Victorian mansion where your evil uncle used to hold seances with his secret family that he started by banging his sister’s hideously deformed twin. Or, you know, maybe you thought something less specific. But no, this film is directed by Eli Roth, so you’re way off base. Alright, now we’re in a different mind space. The house in question is obviously going to have a torture basement. It’s going to be unsubtle, nauseating, and completely unnecessary on every level. You are anticipating being bored out of your mind, wading through a gratuitous exposition of boobs and arterial spray in hopes that the eventual reveal of the clock in question will somehow be interesting. It won’t be. It’ll just be a more elaborate way of torturing unnamed nude WB castoffs in Roth’s continued desperation to shock that any number of therapists would be more than willing to discuss with him. But no, Bear Jew’s latest effort is rated PG. Yes, you read that correctly. And it’s written by Eric Kripke, the guy who created Supernatural. Seriously what is going on here? Once upon a time in the seventies, there was a series of books featuring magic and the adventures of children. Originally it was just a trilogy, and the author John Bellairs died all too young, of cardiofuckery in his early fifties. Another author (Brad Strickland) picked up his outlines in the nineties and wrote another nine of them over the last twenty years. The stories were based in a small Michigan town, the eponymous house inspired by one that stood ominously in the author’s hometown, where he lived until he died. You can almost smell the old paperbacks inevitably born out of that, can’t you? Can almost see the low slung small town houses crouched in the late autumn chill, hear the rasp of dead leaves blowing along the pavement in twilight wind? A flash of distant headlights blinding you, the smell of wood burning in fireplaces carried to you on a wavering breeze, the clattering echo of a family in one of those houses made tinny by the sheer size of the midwestern night and the dome of stars over your head. Even as a kid, you knew there were monsters out there in that darkness, that the comfort of home and family was under an invisible siege, the walls of that house thin as a stretching balloon against the cold and darkness of the night. And a bunch of people read those novels that have mostly disappeared from consciousness. Eli Roth must have, hate or love his work, he is well known and successful at precisely what he does, and making a kid’s movie based on a barely remembered novel from the seventies is not something he needs to do unless he wants to. Kripke is in a similar place, and he’s talked now at length about how the original book The House with a Clock in its Walls was his favorite novel growing up as a kid and that it inspired much of what Supernatural became. That’s not say that you as a viewer will notice anything more than the curious similarities: the small town Midwest, the dropping of a few familiar names like Azazel. But there’s something beautiful about people coming together and making art out of something they loved as children. Trying to use their own particular medium to show children something they once loved, to rekindle that spark for a new generation. They do it without cynicism, without a cash grab wink at the adults in the audience. Passion projects are fragile things though. Empathy makes you smile, from knowing you’re seeing what someone has lovingly sculpted. But you can never quite put yourself in exactly their position, can’t see it with their eyes. Because no matter how skilled they are, their view of the work will always be through the eyes of the child they were. And so there’s a sadness too in watching movies like The House with a Clock in Its Walls. You want it to be good, are rooting for the makers of the film to transcend the source material and show you what it is that so inspired them all those decades ago. And it fails on that front. Films like that almost always do. But it’s a perfectly charming movie, one that kids enjoy while their parents aren’t bored, even if they aren’t nearly as charmed by it. It’ll make its budget back and the hoped for series will never happen when the movie’s forgotten within a month even by those who enjoyed it just fine. And maybe a few kids will find themselves given the old novels and discover the power that Roth and Kripke did once upon a time. ← This Is Going To Get Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein Fired | Review: What You Should Know From Netflix's 'Iron Fist' Season 2 → Steven Lloyd Wilson is the sci-fi and history editor. You can email him here or follow him on Twitter. Header Image Source: Universal<doc-sep>
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, the adaptation of a beloved children's book, is directed by Eli Roth. The same Eli Roth who made the Hostel movies, which practically defined the term "torture porn," as well as Cabin Fever and the recent Death Wish reboot and the cannibalism-oriented eco-horror film The Green Inferno. The same Eli Roth who played the baseball-bat-wielding Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds and directed Knock Knock, a film in which Keanu Reeves is first seduced and then tortured by a pair of naughty school girls. In other words, Roth is, perhaps, not the first person you might think of to bring a PG-rated young adult fantasy movie to the big screen. But he was an inspired choice: The House with a Clock in Its Walls has a slick competence and cleverness that will appeal to adults looking for an afternoon activity with their kids and has just enough menace lurking under the surface to make the film tense but not terrifying for younger viewers. Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) is headed off to live with his crazy uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) following the untimely death of his parents in a car crash. He's an odd duck, having traveled by bus to his new home with little more than a Magic 8 Ball and a dictionary (he likes learning new words) and a pair of goggles that make him look like a refugee from a film about fighter aces set during World War One. As an odd duck, Lewis will fit right in with Jonathan and his (platonic) purple-preferring pal, Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett). Jonathan is a warlock, Florence is a witch, and the pair are happy to initiate Lewis into the world of magic and mystery. His new skills don't really help him win friends at school—though trying to impress buddy-turned-bully Tarby (Sunny Suljic) has dire consequences for Lewis and his new housemate later on in the film—but they might aid Jonathan in his efforts to figure out what, exactly the titular timepiece in the bones of the house is doing there. Jack Black and Cate Blanchett are perfect in their roles as the adult minders of the hopeful magician, Black bringing his patented manic energy and Blanchett bringing a dash of restrained class to the proceedings. They play off of each other well and ground the film in a darker reality than its magical setting might suggest: Zimmerman is hinted to be a Holocaust survivor and the group's foe, Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan, who feels modestly underutilized here), suffered horribly during combat. The House with a Clock in Its Walls hits all the marks of young adult literature, being about the abandoned weirdo who discovers that his oddities are actually strengths and magic will help confirm just how special he truly is. It's often hard for me to tell which of these children's books will actually translate as films that actually appeal to children—I quite liked Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, which was far better than the early Harry Potter flicks (the first two of which are legitimately bad) or the Percy Jackson movies, yet failed to find a place in the public consciousness. If this dies on the vine it's too bad: The House with a Clock in Its Walls is above-average children's fare that's just dark and clever enough to appeal to adults as well as kids.