The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)

Directed by Eli Roth. Starring Owen Vaccaro, Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Sunny Sujlic, Kyle MacLachlan, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lorenza Izzo, Vanessa Anne Williams. [PG]

A considerable change of pace for gorehound director Eli Roth, this family-friendly fantasy-horror tale, based on a juvenile book series dating back to the 1970s by John Bellairs, has only some of the right pieces, and the missing ones make all the difference. Formula setup finds an orphaned boy (Vaccaro) going to live with his eccentric uncle (Black) in a weird house, and proceeding to discover the uncle is a warlock (“nice”, but not “good”), the uncle’s affable neighbor and best pal (Blanchett) is a witch, and the two of them have long been trying to find a magical clock of mysterious purpose hidden away somewhere in the house. Black and Blanchett are game, although neither is used quite to their strengths, and the story stays fairly busy most of the time, but too much information is provided without interest and too much additional detail is left out. For instance, there needs to be a lot more given about a no-good husband/warlock-and-wife/witch pair—the story’s second-rate antagonists—to really get invested in the conflict and stakes, and just when the kid starts getting taught about magic, the movie just sort of abandons his training to keep hitting the standard story beats at regular intervals and get everyone home in about a hundred minutes. Could have been a fun romp in the youth-oriented magical-fantasy traditions of the big-screen Lemony Snicket adventure or the Harry Potter movies or their ilk, but winds up being a mixed bag…like that Lemony Snicket adventure or the best of the Harry Potter movies or their ilk. Adaptation by Eric Kripke, who also co-produced.

58/100