"THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS"........THE JAPES OF ROTH

The House With A Clock In Its Walls (2018)     It's tempting, we know.....

               To immerse yourself in that long ago, wondrous mythical kingdom of Spielbergia.......that golden cinematic age of the 1980's........

                .........where nerdy kids triumphed and found their inner courage.......where bullies got their comeuppance........where family and friends lovingly bonded as they found themselves sucked into fantastical adventures.....brimming with aliens, monsters, and ghosts....oh my.....

                      Duplicating Spielbergiana in the 2000's is not as easy as it looks.........Spielberg himself has struck out repeatedly at it........even with the visual splendors afforded him by CGI, all the usual tropes come off as tired and worn out.....

                       On the plus side, the Duffer brothers struck Spielbergiana gold with "Stranger Things" juggling all the requisite elements perfectly........and we all happily jumped for joy and jumped right in.....

                       Which brings us to the next unlikely batter to take a swing at it.......Eli Roth, the
shlock-o-holic who made his directorial rep with torture porn.......

                    For some unknown reason, Roth's been afflicted with delusions of adequacy......leading him to attempt genres way beyond his meager talents ("Death Wish").......

                     His flailing stab here at Spielbergiana is a sight to behold allright.......but not in any good way.

                    Roth knows all the dots to duly connect in this kind of retro 80's fantasy, but he has no real affinity to this material or the characters...... he thought anyone with a film buff's working knowledge of Spielbergiana could easily pull this off.

                     Wrong. Everything's off here. The films drags on with no pacing. Jack Black does his usual shtick as if he's performing in an Off-Broadway one man show. un-tethered  from the movie around him.  Cate Blanchett?  What the hell is she even doing, wasting her time and talent in this mess?

                 And while we hate to gang up on a kid, the lead child actor is painfully awful......we blame Roth for this, forcing a child with barely any geniune acting ability into scenes requiring high emotion and tears. Under Roth's non-direction, the kid makes "Phantom Menace"s Jake Lloyd look like Al Pacino.

               The poisonous icing on this shitstorm of a movie comes in its typically special-effects heavy climax, where Roth parades out a load of scary little creatures designed to creep out and terrify the film's prime demographic of small children.......which makes you wonder who Universal studios thought this film would appeal to......it's a chore for anyone over 12 to sit through and guaranteed to give younger kids nightmares.

                  Even for fans of Spielbergiana nostalgia, it's a lifeless, joyless, ugly enterprise........with completely the wrong director at its helm. Zero stars (0).  BQ says pass it by.