In Eli Roth's kiddie horror flick, the real horror is the mind-numbing storytelling. Now, this is a movie that is all about discovering boring magic in 1950s from the perspective of a recently orphaned little boy named Lewis (Owen Vaccaro).
Ten-year-old Lewis, who wears airplane goggles like a security blanket, is your typical oddball, outcast underdog of a hero desperate for a school friend. After the death of his parents, Lewis is adopted by his Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) to live in his magical, haunted house with animated objects and moving stained-glass windows.
When we meet Uncle Jonathan for the first time, and he keeps emphasizing that he's wearing a kimono, I knew I was bound to suffer throughout this movie. What? Is a kimono supposed to be funny? Or cute and funny? Wardrobe 101?
In Uncle Jonathan's mansion, we meet the purple-clad Mrs. Zimmerman (Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchet), and her and Jonathan's favorite pastime is throwing insults at each other. They explain to Lewis that they share a platonic relationship. Nothing endearing about this verbally abusive relationship.
While the movie is visually lush, with a rich and heavy production design, it does not establish anticipation and thrill from what is about to happen. And you keep waiting for something interesting to happen. But they never come, even up to that necromancy thing going on.
Sequences are rendered as bullet points, with quick emotion-less transitions, preventing you from feeling anything or holding on to a moment. You can't even dread or feel an anticipatory thrill from the arrival of an evil warlock because you barely know the guy. He's just rumored to be evil. But where are the macabre, chilling details? None.
Details are dull and uninspired. Magical jokes include a topiary lion pooping leaves, cobs of corn turning into a bowl of popcorn, a wild purple pet, and an armchair that acts like a clingy puppy, and Black hanging mid-air or reduced to a baby.
And what is with the clock? Is this all bout finding a giant clock that never stops ticking and driving Jonathan mad? My unilateral tinnitus is way worse than that relentless tick-tocking. "Horrors" include angry pumpkins oozing with adhesive glue and a zombie named Izard with a bone key. Not much imagination for magical things.
The only reaction I made throughout the movie is laughing at a cute toddler audience mimicking the squawk from a sporadic appearance of a bird, the boy's voice hilariously resounding in the theater. His parents love it, too. Without that squawking kid inside the theater, which is excellent and perfectly timed, I don't think I would have survived the movie.
1 out of 5 stars
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