the house with a clock in its walls author

Or maybe not: Roth’s most well-realized supernatural creature is a topiary chimera who has a nasty habit of unleashing a projectile torrent of shit whenever a scene runs too long (one does not get the sense that either Roth or screenwriter Eric Kripke have thought through whatever a flying lion made out of grass likes to eat). It doesn’t matter who makes the glass-stained windows move, or how the playing cards change denominations in your hand, or why the chewed-up loveseat whimpers like a puppy these things just happen, though all of them would be much easier to accept if any of them were endowed with any real creative purpose. It’s easier to believe in all of the magic stuff, even though the movie resists any sort of unifying internal logic for how its sorcery works. That thunderous drone would be a total nuisance even if it wasn’t the work of an evil, apocalyptic wizard who used to own the place before he died. Especially not with the infernal ticking noise that comes from somewhere in the walls each night. The whole place has the feel of a display that you’d get in trouble for touching - it’s evocative, but you don’t get the sense that anyone could actually live there. Played by a spirited and charismatic Jack Black (who mined similar terrain in the recent “Goosebumps” adaptation), Jonathan lives in a musty old Victorian house where all of the objects seem to be possessed, and every moribund detail has been art-directed within an inch of its life. It turns out that Jonathan Barnavelt, Lewis’ estranged uncle and new guardian, is a bit of a weirdo of course, in stories like this, that’s always the best thing you can be.

It’s all glittering marquees, Ovaltine shakes, and other Amblin-esque symbols of Americana as far as the eye can see, but the newly orphaned Lewis Barnavelt (pre-teen actor Owen Vaccaro, looking like an aged-up Jacob Tremblay and spotting a pair of aviator goggles that give off a worrying “The Book of Henry” vibe) is about to move into the dark side of town, which hides all manner of magical secrets.

The action is set in the fictional ‘burb of New Zebedee, Michigan, circa 1955. Harkening back to the relatively macabre kids movies we used to get in the days before “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” (Roth channels everything from “Casper” to “The Watcher in the Woods”), “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” lacks the visual imagination required to do the book justice, though it almost has enough heart to capture the spirit of the story behind it.

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The house with a clock in its walls author