a review of 夜半鬼敲门

ℍ𝕆𝕆ℙ𝕋𝕆𝔹𝔼ℝ 𝔼𝕃𝔼𝕍𝔼ℕ ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋 𝕋ℍℝ𝔼𝔼: Kind of a weird tonal hodgepodge mixing elements of other better-known horror films/franchises -- a little bit of Amityville, a pinch of The Shining, and just the slightest hint of Evil Dead* -- in a horror comedy that doesn't always seem to recognize that it's a comedy. There's lots of sillier moments and sight gags that feel almost like they've been randomly spliced into the film, with no real acknowledgement from William Katt or the rest of the cast (including '80s sitcom stars Richard Moll and George Wendt) that something absolutely over the top looney tunes just happened. Part of it is that they've saddled Katt's character with a bunch of tragic backstory in the form of his aunt's suicide, a missing child, divorce, and (extremely cartoonish) Vietnam trauma; As the film goes on and Katt becomes more randomly unhinged, I think we're supposed to understand that the haunting is a manifestation of all of this, but we don't really *feel* any of it until the last 20 minutes or so. For most of the running time, we don't really get any interaction between Katt and the other characters other than nosey-neighbor hijinks, and nobody really presses him to spill his guts about what's bothering him, so we can't tell if he's going nuts or experiencing an actual haunting, or what. The final act does a LOT of heavy lifting to bring the disparate plot threads together, but it feels like maybe too little too late to really feel any catharsis from the apparent happy ending. I'm curious to see how they carry this concept forward into three sequels, but after seeing the first one it feels like it's neither fish nor fowl. (*In some ways William Katt's performance and the wacky haunted-house shenanigans feel like a highly sanitized PG-13 version of what Campbell/Raimi/KNB accomplished in Evil Dead 2 a couple of years later. It almost makes you wonder if they saw this movie and thought "we can do way better than this.")