SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

KNOCK KNOCK! WHO'S THERE? SPOILERS!

It's always difficult to get that excited about horror movies where the whole of the action is taking place inside the head of one of the characters. To me it's as much of a copout as "he woke up and it was all a dream". It means that action on screen doesn't necessarily need to make any logical sense (because our dreams and imaginations rarely if ever do), which is a gift for writers who can't write logical stories: if they make everything a dream or a hallucination then they can pretty much do what they like. But then no-one's in danger, no-one gets hurt and nothing is lost - so where's the thrill? It's a fantasy within a fantasy. Where's the excitement and horror in watching people think about getting brutally murdered?

In Someone's Knocking At The Door, a stoned college kid is raped to death after he and his imbecilic friends ingested some drugs they found in the hospital archive: drugs that fuelled the rampages of a couple of serial killers back in the 1970s. (Er, surely they should be in a police evidence vault rather than a hospital.) Anyway, could these drugs somehow be bringing back the spirits of the 70s killers into this reality? And if it is a hallucination, then whose? Certainly the cops seem to think they're real - but are they part of it? Is there really a violent and unstoppable sex maniac running around with a 15-inch phallus or might the hallucinogenic side effects of this unknown chemical be responsible?

Presumably this is a legal prescription drug they've taken, since the bottle comes with a handy list of potential side effects including hallucinations and a coma (which the idiots cheerfully ignore as they calculate the chances are only 0.0001%, only to find the odds are closer to one in one). Or possibly zero, since it's increasingly unlikely that any of this is actually happening. It ultimately gets too confused and gives up towards the end, so what looked like a bunch of horrible things happening to a bunch of tiresome idiots turned out to be a tiresome idiot imagining a bunch of horrible things happening to him and his tiresome idiot friends. And I didn't care. In honesty, I'd have been happier if the horrible things had actually been happening to them because then there would have been some justice.

Frankly, as college sex and weirdness movies go, I infinitely preferred Gregg Araki's Kaboom although I didn't think that was more than okay at best; and while I really didn't like Donnie Darko it's still a better made and more interesting movie than Someone's Knocking At The Door. It's got a grubby indie vibe about it but it's genuinely hard to give a damn, yet again, about a group of uninteresting people to whom these things might not even be happening. Really not worth the time and rental fee, and not a fraction of a very small fraction as interesting as the box blurb makes out. Mysteriously, the opening credits are repeated at the end in a different font, twice.

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May cause drowsiness: