“The House with a Clock in Its Walls” Ticks Some Right Boxes
Release Date：Sep/29/2018Genre：Comedy/Family/Fantasy
Director：Eli Roth
Cast：Jack Black、Cate Blanchett、Owen Vaccaro、Kyle MacLachlan、Colleen Camp
Viola's Rating：6.4
Before “Fantastic Beasts: The
Crimes of Grindelwald” brings all the witches and wizards back to the magic
world, “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” can’t wait to take everyone onto
another adventure on September 29.
Based on a 1973 juvenile mystery fiction novel of the same name, written
by John Bellairs, this fantasy family comedy is depicted as an old version of “Harry
Potter” meets “The Mummy” story. The plot is mainly about a young orphan named
Lewis Barnavelt assists his magical uncle in locating a clock with the power to
bring about the end of the world.
Besides the main goal which is to stop the clock from ending the world, “The
House with a Clock in Its Walls” also discusses the issue “family”. Similar to
Harry Potter’s background, the protagonist Lewis is an orphan as well, and
doesn’t get along with his schoolmates until he discovers magic from his uncle
Jonathan. Not only has to deal with losing parents, Lewis, uncle Jonathan and
their neighbor Florence Zimmerman develop a strong bonding during their
endeavor to locate and destroy the clock.
As an “apprentice”, Lewis learns to do small tricks instead of “real
magic”. While trying to perform the latter, he accidentally wakes a dead which
is probably not a good idea. This sounds familiar with the story of “The Mummy”,
and all these similarities paint the picture of human’s imagination to different
façade of magic world.
From
the trailer, “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” seems pretty funny with the
comedy ambience, but just as “The Addams Family” has its bizarre atmosphere and
still remains the laughter, this feature film also delivers an eerie vibe
through the ginormous mansion and all the clocks and Halloween related
decoration in it.
Directed by Eli Roth, who’s most closely associated with the horror
genre, even if “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” is rated as PG, there are
a lot of jump scare techniques in the film, which might give children a fright
while adult audience might not find it creepy at all.
Even though “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” tries to create a
rather friendly environment with pumpkin monsters and sphinx tree sculpture,
kids that are easily frightened still probably won’t like the flick. If it’s
made into animation like “Hotel Transylvania”, the scale of scariness might
decrease for children much more.
All in all, “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” is suitable for people
who love fantasy motion pictures, but it only ticks “some” right boxes instead
of all of them.
Picture Credit: IMDb
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