Someone’s Knocking at the Door
Review By Sharon Foss
There are varying categories within the horror genre. You have thrillers, psychological mindfucks, stomach churners, slapstick, and more. I’m not sure where 2009’s Someone Knocking at the Door fits in. It’s at times repulsive, oddly humorous at other moments, and rated X throughout. Writers Roham Ghodsi and Rosie Roberts and writer/director Chad Ferrin must have had a few days on their hands and decided to turn sexual perversion into a bloody horror film. Sometimes this works (I Spit on Your Grave), and sometimes it just doesn’t. This would fall somewhere in-between.
There is this group of medical students, unlike any I have ever witnessed, who are stoners. They’re drugged up, stoned, and out of their minds. One student gets a knock on his door. When he opens it, a stunningly attractive naked woman walks in and tells him that she is going to have sex with him until he dies. She succeeds.
The rest of the gang uncovers a case where a couple of serial killers (played in flashbacks to morbid perfection by Ezra Buzzington and Elina Madison) went around raping people to death in 1973. The students get high and begin reading the case files while listening to audio tapes of the killers. Their background fact checking gets nowhere, because the medical morons continue to die one by one, in gruesome (and often funny) sexual deaths as these blasts from the past sex fiends visit.
I must add that anyone who believes these people are actually supposed to be doctors in training must be on the same drugs the students are taking. Maybe this movie created a whole new horror category: Just Say No. Is that what was intended by the writers, that Someone Knocking at the Door would be in the players of college kids everywhere as they get stoned and drunk, because only then will it make a viewer take it seriously? Who knows. It’s borderline campy, full-on sexually disturbing, but not at all scary.
Someone Knocking at the Door is 80 minutes of full-frontal bloodiness that occurs when people dabble in prescription narcotics. Noah Segen is a standout as a lead stoner and Buzzington is creepy as the wandering rapist. Lew Temple has a cameo as a coroner. My copy didn’t have any special features, which totally killed my narcotic buzz, but there are deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes look at the trippy movie on the full-length DVD.
