With some changes. The original was meant to look like it was from the mid 1980s which sealed it into a cube of pastiche. The feature is set in the twenty-first ce3ntury. This allows Roth to dispense with a truckload of period cuteness so he can concentrate on making a slasher for today. Some of the more elaborate kills are ported to the movie and in one case the version in the trailer is far more extreme. But that's the strange thing about this outing, it works very hard to create a standard genre piece, solid enough but not what you might expect of its writer/director.
Eli Roth made his name with horror movies that were highly derivative but more extreme than their influences. Cabin Fever gets a lot yuckier than Evil Dead or The Curse. Hostel goes so far further than the serial killer movies of its previous decade that it infamously drew the term torture porn into use in a review. Roth's all but self-avowed reputation for nastiness precedes him and leads us to expect a level of violent misanthropy. The more recent Knock Knock promised to turn the tables on the frat-boy sensibilities he'd been accused of but it was so self-consciously responsive to the criticism it came across as absurdly contrived. So, here we are at a point where he can bounce back with a realisation of the idea in the faux trailer that would not only fulfil its brutality but extend it. And we get an assembly line slasher.
What should we expect, though? For all the boundary pushing of Roth's earlier career there has been very little follow through. His more recent involvement in more scholarly pursuits like the History of Horror have served to soften his image but none of this should be enough to compel him to change his approach, especially in a sub-genre he clearly delights in (go and take a look at that Grindhouse trailer again). Even if he were to do that he supplies us with the basics: group of teen friends with some internal tensions, a series of thanksgiving and retail related kills, a good handful of suspects with strong motives and a pace that, if it lags here and there, always gets back into gear. All those elements fall into place with some fun punning dialogue and a snappy third act twist. And when it's over we feel we've seen something that has done its job. Curiously for a film maker who has been good at turning derivative material into something that feels fresh, a late scene completely lifts a brooding twist from a recent thriller. It feels as though he had to include the final sub-generic note somehow.
I suppose I just wanted a little more tension and strain in a newly made slasher. If Eli Roth can't bring something new to the table that is not already being done by the restlessly resurrecting Scream franchise than why bother? It gets those Grindhouse trailer kills into serviced housing but now they have narrative context and aren't that scary anymore, we can't just imagine them finished the way we wanted now. But finish might be what this is all about, polish and form for the old standards.
I wonder if a studiously recreated '80s video version brazenly projected in a modern cinema might not have appeared more daring with more obsolete ethics on savage display. What an opportunity for cultural commentary that would be, and how far beyond Knock Knock it might go. Eli Roth has to pay his bills like anyone else and the era of daring auteurs dazzling at ground level in the old arthouses is a memory that has long faded. It's set up for a sequel and so it should be and now there's a new Halloween costume for trick or treaters. Let's not judge this harshly, cinema has always had a commercial core, but by the same token let's remember that we don't have to reward what we reserve judgement on. If something reaches the OK barrier, let it, sometimes OK will have to do.
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