The House with a Clock in Its Walls ** (2018, Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan) – Movie Review

With its thin, rather lame story, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is not great for adults but it is well produced in retro style, quite funny, quite scary, and ideal for its young people audience.

With its thin, rather lame story, The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) is not great for adults but it is an attractive, handsome movie, well produced in retro style, quite funny, and quite scary, telling a sweet story, and probably ideal for its young people audience.

A pleasantly laid-back Jack Black and an amusingly camp Cate Blanchett are both fairly good fun, though they are earning their money easily. Black has two Golden Globe nominations – for The School of Rock (2003) and Bernie (2011) – and Blanchett is a double Oscar-winner for The Aviator (2004) and Blue Jasmine (2013). Both of them have been in way, way better movies than The House with a Clock in Its Walls, though, to be fair, it would be much the poorer without them.

Owen Vaccaro is reasonably winsome as the young hero Lewis Barnavelt, a 10-year-old orphan who moves in with his warlock Uncle Jonathan (Black) and helps him to find a clock with the doomsday power to bring about the end of the world. It was created with black magic by evil wizard Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan), and is hidden somewhere in Jonathan’s Gothic house, and they have to find it before Isaac’s wife Selena (Renée Elise Goldsberry) does. Veteran character actress Colleen Camp lives up to her surname in her performance as the neighbour Mrs Hanchett. Ms Camp made her film debut way back in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) and is still going strong.

Jack Black and Cate Blanchett in The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018).

The film is set in 1955 but it runs like a Seventies Disney movie – you know that time when Disney movies were sweet and lame – so it is no surprise that the source story of John Bellairs’s novel was first published in 1973. The mild but humorous screenplay is by Eric Kripke, but to be fair that is what is required here. The story was previously made as a TV episode and that is about the extent of it. Turning from a TV segment into a 104-minute feature movie must have been quite a schlep.

What is really peculiar is that the director is Eli Roth, maker of Cabin Fever (2003) and Hostel (2005). After also making Death Wish this year, he seems to have lost his way somewhere. However, surprisingly, he does bring attractive visual flair and an appealing sense of humour to his project, going for a mix of Goosebumps and Tim Burton, and largely bringing it off.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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