rating: ***
starring: Noah Segan, Andrea Rueda, Ezra Buzzington
Slasher films are infamously known to be the key horror sub-genre to mark sex as a big no-no for its "survival rules"; screw someone and you'll be skewered with a big pointy spear or electrocuted alive while copulating, but it's sortah rare for one to use the subject of sex as a mean of murder. Last time we had a slasher film doing this was that of the underrated cheese classic Incubus (1981), so I guess someone decided to try this approach again as this appears to be the main theme of Someone's Knocking At The Door, a film featuring two oversexed supernatural maniacs raping their victims to death.
An original idea, but how well can they play along?
A med student shooting up some drugs finds his session cut short after a fully nude lady greets him at his front door. This gal made it clear that she wants him in her, but after a few humps, said lady reveals what she really is: a horribly diseased-looking, nude gentleman with a monstrous dick. Guy's colons are ripped, he bled to death and his five friends are placed under suspicion due to their history of drug use. After the group was interrogated, one of them reveals that sometime before their friend's murder, they were researching about two criminally deviant couple who use their groins to murder their victims. An experimental drug came with the reports, something that was used to treat the psycho pair, which the group (save one girl who's obviously gonna survive all this) proceeds to use. Could this have brought the two rapists back from the dead? And if so, who will survive their lustful rampage as they savagely abuse one teen's sexual organ to the next?
A bit of a look back to the trippy, sex-filled horror movies of the 70s, Someone's knocking at the Door, (which is a real mouthful of a title if I may get it out) is a real odd duck among slasher films: it's a good movie with a weird plot point that works as both a pro and a con.
Some of the scripting, editing and scoring made the movie unbalanced in terms of tone; we have scenes that were intense, but then we also have parts that were too obscure and laughable to be anything but intense, so unless it expects its viewers to find scenes like that of a fat undead man chasing, in a pace, a victim to rape with his huge (and I mean huge) latex dick under the score of country music (no less) entertaining, the movie will have a hard time approaching a large mass of following.Narrative-wise, it doesn't tell a straight story either, but rather it looked more like a series of scenes thinly connected to one another, with a spread of characters for us to follow that aren't likable and redeemable at all. This gave me a hard time trying to care for them once they're starting to drop down dead covered in blood and semen. (with an obvious exception for the surviving character played by Andrea Rueda)
Then there's the ending; not bad all in all, just been done dozens of times already so it really adds nothing for the story.
Still, if we're going to put the entertainment factor into this movie, it does win for the idea of having two demonic rapists as our main baddie; while rape is still a big taboo even for horror films (unless you're the kind who's all hardcore and shit), the strangeness of this film did help tone it down, more to add to the fact that these two appears to be more interested in raping a victim of their own gender. (Which is sorta okay? No, not really. It's still nasty, but at least it's something we don't usually see everyday in a horror movie!) Plus, they do have a creepy vibe to them, mostly from the male of the pair, John Hopper, whose creepy monologues brought the serial rapist to life. (the female rapist just...growls and screams a lot...yeah...) The film looks crisp and expertly shot with some good camerawork here and there, bloody good latex work for the gore effects, and it's budgeted enough to snag some cool cameos like that of Joe Pilato from Day of the Dead (1985)!Nothing outrageously big, Someone's Knocking at The Door's a fastfood version of a horror movie: big on visuals, but little on the nutrients. It's down and dirty, but that's it. So if you're that one kind of person who likes to try out a newly opened food establishment around the corner of your street without a damn clue what they'll be serving, pretty much just put that mentality in watching a horror movie and I'm sure you'll do just fine. Real. Fine.
Bodycount:
1 male raped to death
1 female bitten on the face, killed (flashback)
1 male bitten on the throat (flashback)
1 female suffocated inside the killer's groin
1 male had his jaw fisted open and choked on killer's groin
1 male shot on the neck
1 male raped until killer's groin broke out of his gut
1 male shot
1 male shot to death
1 male shot through the mouth
3 males and 1 female seen dead from drug overdose
Total: 14
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