Knock Knock was one of those. In defense of the purchase of this piece of waste, we were mislead. It was one of those movies that look really awesome on the cover. And the write up on the back didn’t sound half bad. The boy brought it home and while it didn’t look interesting enough for us to watch immediately, we did finally get around to it.
I’m not even sure where I should start with the bagging on this one. Stock plot, stock characters, stock boogeyman, and the most fantastically bad acting I’ve seen outside of porn. (Actually I’m wondering if a couple of the female characters haven’t wondered down that road.) The story is that someone is knocking on the doors of teenagers and killing them when they open up. At least that’s the story at first. The story then morphs into teenagers getting killed in places that have something to do with their father. Then a little later on, teenagers getting killed in ways that have something to do with their father. Confused yet? Bad thing is even though the movie went through all these different plots, they were all stock. Every last plot device was something (horror) fans have seen a million times.
Of course to round out the plot that’s been done a million times, we had to have the overdone characters as well. The slut, the jock, the alterna-skateboard kid, the creepy/mentally handicap janitor, the old cop who is trying to reconnect with his family, and the oh so sweet heroine with the traumatic family life. Yawn. Add to this zero character development. Really, it was more like here’s your characters; we realize that dialogue and definition are not our strong points so we’ll just kill them off immediately.
On to the bad guy (more like the ridiculous guy). Let’s take Freddy Kruger and Jason and smash them together. Then let’s rob them of any personality or real creativity they have. Those two quick steps will get you Rico (and really how are you going to strike fear in the heart of anyone with a name like that? I personally can’t hear the name Rico without tacking Suave on the end of it. Heh, not only is he a killer, he’s a Latin lover). Rico’s father ran a funeral parlor. Some mean boys played a prank that went wrong and Rico ended up being partially toasted; now he’s back, gasp, with a mask! Way to not be innovative!
The only way this assload of bad writing could have sparkled on the screen was through really good acting. I like to think that a really good actor could make most things shine. Instead Knock Knock chose to go the other way entirely and find some extraordinarily bad actors/actresses. For example the lead crying over her dead grandfather did not make me feel pity for her, it only made me wish that Rico would have gotten her instead. The only believable character was the slut. She looked slutty and she sounded slutty. Mission accomplished.
My recommendation on this one: if you have the choice of watching Knock Knock or poking yourself in the eye for an hour and a half, I’d go with the poking.
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