Movie review: Kids' comic horror tale 'House' is derivative and suspenseless, but safe
“The House With a Clock in Its Walls” - ★ ★ ½
Eli Roth's “The House With a Clock in Its Walls” works well enough as a comic horror tale for youngsters.
Instead of red blood, we get orange jack-o'-lantern upchuck.
Instead of harsh violence, we get mild jump-scares.
Instead of shocking visuals, we get a baby Jack Black uncontrollably urinating and a griffin-shaped bush with flatulence problems.
Instead of R-rated swear words, we get two adult characters trading funny, grade-school-level insults.
As far as kid-centric comic horror goes, “House” has everything going for it, outside of originality and cleverness.
Like an uninspired, generic Harry Potter knock-off, “House” stars a thin Owen Vaccaro as Lewis Barnavelt, who in John Bellairs' 1973 kid-lit novel upon which this movie is based is an awkward and chunky 10-year-old orphan who misses his deceased parents.
In 1955, Lewis goes to live with his odd Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) in New Zebedee, Michigan.
Right away, Uncle Jonathan's house telegraphs things that might not be so normal. The knight's armor moves. The hanging pictures come to life. The furniture could be on loan from the castle in Walt Disney's “Beauty and the Beast.”
(Even the “living” upholstered chair in the house appears to be a riff on Chairy, a piece of talking furniture from “Pee-wee's Playhouse,” although Bellairs' book was published 13 years before the TV show.)
Uncle Jonathan confesses to being a warlock. Not a terribly good one, he adds.
He introduces the stylish sorceress Mrs. Zimmerman (a superb Cate Blanchett) as his neighbor, but she's more like his constant companion and bickering buddy.
It takes 15 seconds of begging for Uncle Jonathan to agree to teach Lewis magic.
Meanwhile, at school, nerdy Lewis (wearing goggles to look like his favorite superhero Captain Midnight) fails to fit in.
For unconvincing reasons, he befriends Tarby (Sunny Suljic), a white-T-shirt-wearing, greased-locks '50s kid who's apparently the school's most popular student.
The main plot ignites when Lewis discovers that a deceased evil warlock named Isaac Izard (“Twin Peaks” star Kyle MacLachlan) and his wife, Selena (Renée Elise Goldsberry), long ago planted a doomsday clock somewhere inside Uncle John's house.
If Uncle John can't find it in time (apparently he's been looking for it for years), time will reverse back to before when humans existed.
And poor Lewis inadvertently just cast a spell to resurrect evil Izard.
Kids, of course, will not know or care how derivative and suspenseless “House” can get, or how unscary it feels.
You'd think that director Eli Roth's background in hard-R-rated torture-porn horror tales (“Hostel,” “The Green Inferno” and the flesh-eating bacteria thriller “Cabin Fever”) would bump up the goose bumps here.
Nope.
Even 2015's “Goosebumps” (also starring Black as a conjurer of the macabre) raised more hackles than this PG-rated trip to the not-quite-dark side.
Which reminds me: I saw the critics' screening of “House” Tuesday night at the IMAX theater at Chicago's Navy Pier where a massive, constant light leak on the screen ruined all the dark scenes. And in a comic horror tale, a lot of dark scenes can be ruined.
Maybe that's one reason that this “House” never felt at all dark to begin with.
<b>Starring:</b> Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan
<b>Directed by:</b> Eli Roth
<b>Other:</b> A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG. 104 minutes