DON’T KNOCK TWICE. (2016) DIRECTED BY CARADOG JAMES. STARRING KATEE SACKHOFF AND LUCY BOYNTON.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This isn’t the world’s greatest horror film, and it’s a bit confused and even confusing at times, but I liked it enough to watch it twice (the second time was to fill in the gaps left by the first viewing), so it must be review-worthy. In any case, you’re getting this review and liking it, lol.
It’s a mother-child horror film, except the child isn’t an adorable cute baby but a surly teenage girl called Chloe. Chloe was put in an orphanage when she was a nipper because her mother, Jess, was doing drugs and didn’t feel capable of giving Chloe the care she deserved.
Most people would consider that Jess did the right thing in giving the care of Chloe over to someone who could actually do the job properly, but Chloe’s feelings of abandonment, rejection and hurt understandably run really deep.
So, when Jess turns up several years later and asks to have Chloe back, Chloe’s reaction is initially one of hostility. Jess has her life together now. She’s a successful sculptor, married to a rich prick of a businessman (he’s not exactly Mr. Understanding) and living in a fabulous mansion with her hubby.
But Chloe is grateful for a safe place to stay (ie, Jess’s house) when it turns out that a silly game she played with her boyfriend from the children’s home, Danny, has resulted in a nasty female demon being woken from the dead. Dontcha just hate it when that happens, lol.
The demon has taken Danny with her to her underworld hell, but that’s not the end of the matter. Now she’s after Chloe, because Chloe was as responsible for waking her as Danny was. Fair enough, I say. Ya reaps what ya sows.
Chloe flees to Jess’s house, thinking it a safe space to hide from the demon, who takes the form of a horrible black-coloured, crawling, groaning female with elongated stick-arms and stick-legs that give her the appearance of a giant scuttling Shelob-type spider. Poor Chloe doesn’t reckon on the demon being able to travel a lousy couple-a miles. Clearly it has some class of travel card…!
Jess’s house, garden and studio where she sculpts her creepy statues form a good spooky base of operations for the demon. Throw into the mix the following: the ghost of an elderly woman who killed herself after being accused of the abduction of a small boy years ago; the detective who accused her of the child’s abduction; the small boy himself, and, finally, a friend of Jess’s, an artist’s model who pales with fright and heads for the hills when she meets Chloe, because Chloe has been ‘marked’ for possession by a terrible supernatural entity, and there you have yourself the recipe for a pretty good little horror flick.
The film peeps clearly had access to a nice little bit of forest also, which worked really well in the scenes in which Chloe and Jess were pulled through a portal into another dimension.
The so-called ‘witch’s house’ in the film, in which the demon was said to be ‘resting,’ is like the spooky old abandoned house in the two recent IT: CHAPTERS 1 & 2 films, where Pennywise’s domain can be accessed more or less by accident. I don’t know why the people in films get the urge to go into houses like these which are clearly evil and the devil’s own personal stamping-ground, but how-and-ever. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have some of our greatest horror films, I guess.
The film has been likened by Forbidden Planet to DON’T LOOK NOW and CANDYMAN, and the same Forbidden Planet also says that DON’T KNOCK TWICE is ‘one of the best mother-child horror movies since THE ORPHANAGE.’ I’m not saying it’s that good (I don’t think it is!), but it’s definitely worth one watch, anyway. Just don’t do what I did. DON’T WATCH TWICE…
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
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