If you can’t wait to get your kids started on horror, then The House with a Clock in Its Walls is the movie for, well, I guess the whole family. It’s rated PG, apparently for mild language and the demon who cuts someone’s hand and then licks the bleeding wound with his forked tongue. It would be easy to blame director Eli Roth for the fact that the film plays like a kindergarten primer on the occult, except that he’s better known for the torture-heavy Hostel films (I’d wait until the kids are 12 for that). The House with a Clock in Its Walls is adapted from a 1973 kids’ novel, about a recent orphan (Owen Vaccaro) taken in by his magician uncle (Jack Black) and the uncle’s friend (Cate Blanchett). Turns out he’s a warlock and she’s a witch and they’re engaged in magical warfare with an evil spirit. Black is bland (I didn’t think I’d ever write that sentence), while Blanchett does what she can. Both are playing to a very young audience, which makes it strange when the movie lurches from juvenile potty humor to the demonic. I’m all for scaring kids at the movies, and even allowing dark magic to be a part of that. (I’m a fan of The Witches, after all.) But the indiscriminate application of intense horror tropes here feels both clumsy and inconsiderate. Kids deserve both more, and less.
