Praise4Media #58 - The House with a Clock in its Walls (A Strange Halloween 2)

A clock on the wall is always heard

But a clock in the wall seems rather absurd

The noise it makes will drive you mad

And could be a countdown to something bad

An orphaned child, innocent and bright

Comes into a house on a dark, long night

If the mystery is solved is still to be seen,

But we visit this house on A Strange Halloween

The House with a Clock in its Walls is based on the 1973 novel written by John Bellairs of the same name. I haven’t read the book, but give me a break, I’m going to be doing a bucketload of adaptations very shortly and I’ve got a lot of reading to do as it is. Adapting the film to screenplay is Erik Kripke who’s only film writing credit was Boogeyman, which was lambasted by critics. He’s gone on to help run acclaimed shows like Supernatural, Revolution and Timeless and also the comic series Jacked… I have never read Jacked and the general premise does not appeal to me.

Directing the project is Eli Roth, who has experience as a screenwriter, producer and director of various things, sometimes all at once. The film was financially successful, making $131m on its $42m budget, but was less of a hit with audiences and critics with 66 and 45% ratings and average scores of 5.98/10 and 3.12/5 respectively. So, where do I stand on this? Let’s take a look.

We open with the writing of a letter, narrated to us by Jack Black, who’s playing the character of Jonathan Barnavelt. He’s giving our POV character, Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) a bus ticket and 2 silver dollars for his journey to Michigan. Not sure what the 2 dollars are for, but I imagine they’re not worth very much. Lewis lost his parents in a car crash and now he’s coming to live with his uncle Jonathan.

Lewis is on the bus, being cramped by an overweight man sitting next to him, and is trying to speak with his parents via magic 8-ball. I really struggle with this, Shazam! Ghost Rider and this all feature a magic 8-ball. At least here at has some plot relevance, but to that: later. He’s also wearing pilot goggles inspired by a TV show and we find out it’s 1955. Probably could’ve guessed that from the currency.

Lewis meets with Jonathan and we find he’s been hauling dictionaries around because he likes new words. ‘Pulchritudinous?’ expect to find that word crop up in Ducktales at some point. Jonathan doesn’t have a TV, so Lewis can’t watch Captain Midnight, the show that inspires his attire. Instead, they have a poker game but Lewis is 10. Naturally Jonathan’s car’s a pile of junk and makes all the usual noises that kind of car makes but is at least initially reliable enough to get them home.

The house is big and spooky in and of itself, not helped by the pumpkins which he keeps around all year long, but they’re quickly visited by Mrs Hanchett and her dog, Marmalade, she’s concerned about saxophone playing at 3am, which Jonathan quickly dismisses, she’s also not best pleased to hear he’s responsible for keeping a child alive. They enter the house, which is filled with clocks.

And we’re introduced to Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett), Jonathan’s neighbour and colleague, I guess. Either way, the time they’re on screen together are the best parts of the movie as they trade insults in way only great friends can do. Jonathan explains his philosophies, Lewis is free to do whatever he wants, more or less. He’s not a very good parent, is what I’m saying. Lewis’s 8-ball was the last thing his parents gave him before he died, which is why he’s still holding onto it.

So, Poker, Lewis’ cards change to give him the winning hand every time. Although a poker game with 3 players is a bit naff really. With Jonathan out to make Poker, Florence explains that she ran to here from Paris after the war, and his been friends with Jonathan ever since. She believes that all you need in life is one good friend, which we will be getting back to. Lewis may have had loads of friends, but they’re in another state and it’s not like you had instant contact in the 50's.

Lewis heads to bed, kissing his one photo but is woken up by loud clanking. He hears someone walking around outside and heads out to investigate, it’s Jonathan, listening to the walls with his torch, he’s scared back to bed by a demonic looking (and sounding) clock cuckoo. The next morning, Jonathan wishes Lewis good luck at school, sticking his head between shutters ala Johnny in the Shining. Horror director, you say? No kidding. 

Another horror shot soon follows as we get a wide angle shot, featuring Jonathan and Florence standing and waving in a slightly creepy manor. It’s a basketball game and it’s between Lewis and a guy on crutches, who probably shouldn’t be doing PE in his condition. The guy on crutches is picked and it’s only thanks to the intervention of another kid, who’s name I’ll reveal when its important, that Lewis is picked for a team at all. Incidentally the coach was OK with Lewis not taking part because they were even teams, asshole!

Lewis is naturally not very adapt at basketball, what were they teaching him at the school he was at before? I swear he should be more competent than this, although it might help if he took off his goddamn goggles! And the kid on crutches manages to score.

We’re introduced to Tarby, the guy who helped Lewis get on a team and is running for ‘class president’ with a broken arm, he can’t play football, because injuries now mean you don’t play, and he befriends Lewis. They call the house the ‘Slaughterhouse’ because some guy died there and it’s apparently haunted. Localisation issue, they spell axe in the subtitles as ax, as it’s spelled in America.

A voice speaks out to Lewis, it’s his mother, apparently. She warns him that he’s in danger and needs to be brave, get the book, get the key. Lewis wakes up, this apparently a weird dream, he can hear a ticking, but it’s not coming from his alarm clock. Once again, he heads out to investigate. He enters a room filled with creepy puppetry because naturally this house would have that, he finds Jonathan pounding the wall with an axe.

Jonathan runs but the house begins to act up to prevent him from leaving. A stained glass window tells him not to go and a suit of armour and later a chair try and prevent him from leaving before Jonathan arrives to explain. Jonathan is a warlock, not an especially competent one but at one time, Florence was. The house used to belong to Isaac Izard and his wife, Selena, he died and left a magical clock in the walls, he claims as a prank. Lewis asks to be taught and although Jonathan is initially reluctant, he’s quickly turned. He gives a Lewis a pile of old books to read.

Iron and Pumpkins help keep away evil, hence the jack-o-lanterns, and Lewis is quickly up to speed on magic, just ignore the pooping Lion hedge in the garden and tentacle hentai in the house. To become a full-fledged warlock, you need to defeat an evil spirit using your own magic. He’s showed a cabinet, with dozens of magical protections. His one rule is you don’t go into that cabinet under any circumstances. He even threatens to kick him out if he does so.

Jonathan flashes back to finding Isaac in the middle of a spell, a spell that ended in his death. Jonathan and Florence later reveal that Issac was a bad man, and his clock means something bad. Lewis reveals to Tarby about the goggles being something Captain Midnight always war. I suspect he was a war-time pilot, there’s the difference. He tells Lewis that he might be better off being a bit more normal in what’s supposed to be the first sign that Tarby isn’t all he appears to but to be honest, in this particular case, seems more like a hard truth, at least with regards to the goggles.

That night, Jonathan lets Lewis try his first real spell, turning lead into gold. His delivery is… so bad it doesn’t work. Part of the magic is imbuing oneself into it. Jonathan starts playing the saxophone, annoying the neighbour again, but it somehow unlocks some stars, giving them a map of the universe, or at least I believe that’s what they’re intending. It is nice to remember the wonder of magic and not just the danger and whilst the effects aren’t stellar, they hold up well enough.

Asked about why he was never around, Jonathan explains that he and his father argued over his use of magic until he left. He didn’t think the rest of the family thought much of him either, and yet you were the one given guardianship over their son.

  

Again. Lewis begins to increase his proficiency in magic to a funky pop song. It doesn’t all work as planned but he’s clearly learning. The clock is now counting down, and they know something bad is going to happen when it gets down to one. The next morning, a mirror plays an episode of Captain Midnight, which Jonathan happens to see, as someone’s cracking a safe using a stethoscope. This gives him an idea.

Tarby wins his class presidency and his arm appears to have healed also, which means he’s hanging around with his football friends. Friends who are so great, they couldn’t be bothered to include him whilst he was injured. Not that Tarby himself is off the hook for that, but Lewis offers to show him his magic. Of course, Tarby is sceptical but agrees to hear him prove it.

The stethoscope doesn’t seem to do anything, but he does stumble upon a photo and notices one of the manakins in the room has his arm in a different position, he corrects it and unlocks the secret room inside the demon fireplace. Tarby and Lewis arrive with Tarby immediately eyeing the forbidden cabinet. Tarby immediately finds the key because Jonathan was really stupid. Throw the key in the river, hide it somewhere, do something! Anyway, Tarby opens the cabinet and they find a book inside, opening the book and finding the first chapter to be on necromancy, raising the dead, Tarby thinks it’d be a cool trick but upon hearing Jonathan, Lewis snatches the book back and returns it to the cupboard.

Lewis sees his mother again, projecting his wants and desires back onto him and convincing him to look for the book again to turn Tarby around. This doesn’t work, Tarby’s barely an entity in this story, we don’t see enough of their friendship to buy that it means this much to him. I’m willing to bet the book did more to flesh it out, but here is was cut for time. Of course, with this much obsession with the book and knowing details that post-date her death, Lewis should realise something about these visions are amiss, or does he chalk it down to dream logic?

Another girl warns him that Tarby is always nice until he wins the election, but is a jerk afterwards, he won’t hear it. He gets Tarby’s attention and arranges to meet him at the cemetery, and perform a necromancy spell. Lewis heads home and steals the book, breaking into the cemetery. The book begins to guide them towards a particular grave, which isn’t suspicious at all in the minds of these kids. He provides the blood required for the ritual and recites the spell.

The grave begins shaking and the spell evidently works. Lewis returns the book unnoticed and heads to bed. The next morning, he finds the house won’t listen to him anymore. The puppets are also active saying ‘he’s coming home.’ Jonathan drives to the graveyard and finds that the grave in question was Isaac Izard’s. He needs help from Florence to combat the threat but he spells are backfiring of late and she refuses. She tells him to enlist Lewis and tell him the truth but Jonathan refuses.

They begin nailing dozens of horse-shoes to the door and putting out more jack-o-lanterns to prevent Isaac from getting in. Of course, Lewis takes notice of this and eventually Florence reveals who Isaac is. He stops short of confessing his own involvement, afraid of their anger. For his own safety, Lewis is placed in Florence’s care for the time being.

Florence tries to channel her power into her umbrella but it doesn’t really work. Lewis notices a poster that shows that Jonathan and Isaac were once partners in magic. Isaac was drafted into the war and went MIA, he returned changed. Naturally all of this is visualised through a convenient looking device. He told them he got lost in the Black Forest, and they believe he found a dark Warlock there who gave him forbidden knowledge, including the book on necromancy.

He later married a witch named Selena, they locked themselves in the house, until the night we saw earlier in flashback. Isaac created a blood ritual to create a clock key of human bone, Selena’s, they suspect. We never ever actually hear what happened to Florence to make her lose her magic, but as the camera focuses on a picture of her with a husband and child, I think it’s easy enough to guess.

The next morning, Lewis tries to tell Tarby, but Tarby forces him into a classroom, tells him not to tell anyone he was ever there, punches him in the stomach and calls him a ‘weirdo.’ Kids can be cruel. During that, a dictionary in his school bag falls out, landing on the word indomitable, the same word that was used to describe Captain Midnight.  

Lewis heads back into the house, finding the blueprints Jonathan found in the secret room earlier. Books begin to attack him until Jonathan and Florence rescue him, he was being indomitable. No kid, you walking into danger without any means to protect yourself isn’t being indomitable, it’s being dumb. There’s code on the blue-prints and… this is a stretch guys so bear with me, it’s the same code the villain on Captain Midnight uses, and a decoder pin is found in a bottle of Ovaltine in a sweet shop. This is a mass of plot contrivance; no wonder Florence doesn’t believe it.

Jonathan orders 3 Ovaltine shakes because of the mess and that brings me to a question? How does Jonathan get money. I presume he’s not performing shows anymore, he can’t be winning much out of Poker, especially since the same question could apply to Florence also. And there’s no indication he does anything day-to-day. How can he afford upkeep on the house? There must be some bills to pay, even with magic.

Lewis makes a translation and there’s more stuff that’s gonna be tough to swallow. So, the plan is for a doomsday clock to rewind the entire world back to the beginning.

  

And it’s a total lunar eclipse tonight, because everything happens on an eclipse these days. They head back to the house and find the pumpkins destroyed and the horseshoes melted off the door. The house has been ransacked as Isaac was looking for the bone key but Jonathan had it on his person and only now thinks about destroying it. Jonathan, you are far too sentimental.

Lewis takes this moment to confess his involvement in Isaac’s resurrection. He confesses he was considering trying necromancy on his parents if the magic ended up working. Jonathan lives up to his promise and kicks him out, albeit with regret. Florence goes up to talk some sense into him, given her history with children it provides an interesting counterbalance to him and yeah, this is exceptionally personal to her.

Lewis hears Marmalade yapping, looks outside and sees Isaac in her bedroom window. He goes to visit Mrs Hanchett to warn her and by warn her I mean scream in ear-piercingly high voice and drag her over to his house. The house then locks Florence and Jonathan in the room they were in, suspecting Isaac was there, Mrs Hanchett opens the door to Isaac. We find out that Mrs Hanchett is infact Selena and it was the original Mrs Hanchett that was sacrificed to make the key.

And it was Selena who was Lewis’ mother in his dreams, is she a telepath now or…? We’re not getting any explanation for that, are we? Jonathan and Florence eventually escape and head after him, with Florence’s umbrella suddenly glowing. They’re quickly captured and chained together, Lewis is in a cage hovering above a bunch of blades. Isaac reveals in his egotism that the clock in question is hidden under a witch’s hex and demands the key to keep Lewis alive. Why no do that without them being chained up, you have leverage. Now they must know you don’t intend to keep your word.

OK, now the telescope thing projects Isaac’s history. I know, translate to visual and everything but this is hard to buy. His unit had been slaughtered in an ambush, and he wanted to end the war and erase the horrors he’d witnessed, it’s in the Black Forest he met a Demon, Azazel and through blood, he got the blueprints of the Clock imprinted in his mind. He reiterates his plan, which is still really dumb, by the way. He wants to erase humanity so the horrors humanity committed would be undone

Because the plot says so, Florence has regained her magic and rescues herself and Lewis, but thanks to a magic telescope, Isaac gets the key. They head out but the manikins stand between them and the exit. Jack Black and evil puppets, why does that sound so familiar?

Can’t think of it. Florence’s wand is destroyed and they’re thrown out the house. Worse still the remaining jack-o-lanterns have turned on them and trap their feet in pumpkin insides… I don’t know, it’s confusing. Lewis finds a knife in one of them that’s there because of reasons, and they manage to escape, with Jonathan knocked out because of his egotism.

When he comes too, they have 18 minutes until the eclipse, but with the hex meaning no witch or warlock could find it, things seem hopeless. Lewis suggests that since he is neither witch or warlock, maybe he could find something with his magic. OK… With the help of the 8-ball, Owen Vaccaro lets loose with his acting, and it’s hilarious. It works too, the clock is under the boiler.

With Florence’s magic back up and running, they get past the pumpkins and through the door, but now the hedge makes its approach. They barely get in in time, then Florence uses her magic against the manikins, shutting them down also. They head under the boiler but the tentacles attack again and Florence is now out of the climax.

Isaac activates the clock and the world begins to rewind. Jonathan attempts to unwind the clock and gets transformed into… WHAT THE F*CK IS THAT!? No CGI budget in the world could make Jack Black’s head CGI’d onto a baby body not look horrifying. Isaac tells Lewis that the turret will provide immunity to what comes next, Selena has taken a liking to him and my god is that creepy. Lewis of course, declines the offer but time is running out, quite literally in this case.

Lewis asks his 8-ball what to do and it answers ‘say goodbye.’ He throws the 8-ball into the gears below him, stalling the clock and making it cackle with energy, which he then manipulates to defeat Isaac and Selena. That was shockingly easy. Guess Lewis is an official Warlock now. Anyway, he hits Tarby in the face with a basketball, which then ricochets into the net, so he’s good at sports now.

He speaks to Rose Rita, who’s character was barely a presence in this film, so I don’t really care. She’s apparently a bit of a drawer, and says he looks like an insect. Antboy crossover anyone? No, just me? Yeah, it’s just me. He returns home and finds the house in a better shape and his family ever completed.

So, that was the House with a Clock in its walls and it’s not without its problems. It’s tonally a little all over the place, with scenes that are supposed to be comedic clashing with the some of the more horrific ideas. I do understand the need to have lighter moments to not make it traumatising for children but sometimes the juxtaposition is a bit off.

Lewis’ character arc is slightly old-fashioned. He’s an oddball who learns to deal with his grief, in bits and pieces and learns it’s good to be himself and embrace his odd quirks. This message can be poorly interpreted, but I think it strikes the right note by making Lewis relatively likeable, if still flawed. I feel more should’ve been done with his grieving, maybe his acknowledging he’s thinking about bringing back his parents with Necromancy before he confesses it to Jonathan and Florence but I digress.

Isaac and Selena’s plan is really f*cking dumb, it rather stifles the climax knowing how dumb this plan is.

Fortunately, the chemistry between Jonathan and Florence is enough to keep this movie afloat. They are a joy to watch every time they’re together. Jack Black and Cate Blanchett are talented actors and are clearly having fun here. There are some really good horror shots, which speaks to the director’s background in horror but if you haven’t guessed by now (welcome to Rage4Media) I’m more a story guy and that’s the angle I cover things from.

Rating -80%