Clock Tower is a 2018 horror film directed by Christopher Smith and written by Asia Argento, Smith and Takashige Ichise. The film is an adaption of Human Entertainment's 1995 video game. It stars Holly Hunter, Hailee Steinfeld, Lewis McGowan, Liv Hewson, Natalia Dyer, August Maturo, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Capaldi and Kelli Berglund.
Plot[]
A doctor is summoned to a clock towered mansion estate in 2010, on the outskirts of Woodburn, Oregon to deliver the twin sons of a concealed woman. The infants upon birth bear morphing demonic features and devour his right arm.
In present day 2018 at Granite Orphanage in Portland, Oregon wealthy heiress Mary Barrows arrives to open up her home to four teenage girls. A group of four 17 year old girls (Jennifer, Lotte, Anne and Laura) who are close friends are interviewed and ultimately adopted by Ms. Barrows.
They travel out to her large mansion estate that has a large clock tower at its' center. By night the girls settle in and wait in the lobby after setting up their rooms after a cautious Jennifer experiences strange occurrences such as a faucet leaking maggots and blood, an onlooker from an upstairs hallway window and decapitated crows in the garden. Ms. Barrows leaves the girls to start on dinner and produce the wireless internet password. The power goes out and the girls are separated from one another in the dark.
Jennifer is rendered unconscious in the foyer with a smash to the back of the head, when she comes to she progresses through the oddly color lit house coming across first Anne who comes smashing through a large stained glass ceiling with giant shears stabbed into her chest by a demonic, bandaged boy.
Jennifer is pursued across the mansion hiding and trying to utilize emergency call on her phone to contact 911. She eventually reaches an area where Laura is fleeing from the Scissorman boy who is able to propel from an upstairs window before drowning her in a courtyard fountain which then fills with her blood. Jennifer reaches the fountain now armed with her own pair of modified shear scissors but emerging from the fountain is instead an attacking scissorman.
Jennifer is badly wounded by various cuts and instead escapes to an upper floor where she follows what appears to be Ms. Barrows. She is found and tended to by closest and now only remaining friend Lotte who escapes with her down a series of trapdoors into what becomes a hidden labyrinth of dungeons. Inside the two come across Ms. Barrows' believed dead husband Simon, starving away in a horrific malnourished state in a cell who tells of his children and wife. Eventually Mary enters and aims a shotgun at Jennifer while holding a ceremonial dagger to Lotte's throat, Jennifer is shot in the shoulder during a struggle and pushed into the cage by Mary, where she is then descended upon by a starving, animalistic Simon.
Lotte is dragged away as a barely lucid Jennifer is able to use empty ceramic bowls to stab at Simon and critically injure him.
Jennifer escapes and in Laura's ensuite to her beset bedroom discovers her strung up corpse in the running shower, which from the flooded tub the scissorman emerges from.
Jennifer discovers a concealed altar room in Mary's tower chambers and a hidden trapdoor in the middle of a sigil which leads to a caver with a monstrous humanoid colored worm feasting on male corpses on a master bed, feet from it laid in a circle of candles is Lotte dying of a broken neck. Jennifer comforts her as she dies. The creature then engages Jennifer in conversation revealing it's name as Dan Barrows, one of two twin sons of Mary Barrows and that the girls were brought to sacrificed to them, as with everything their mother has set up ritualistically tonight their deaths at their hands can result in the sons finally reverting to their human forms.
Jennifer using the candles and collected kerosene from earlier immolates and kills the Dan Barrows monster. She then escapes upward back into the mansion and finds what is the remains of Walter Simpson: the obstetrician who delivered the twins of Mary years ago, he is revealed as Jennifer's father who went missing the night he delivered them. Bobby Barrows the remaining shear wielding brother busts through a bedroom mirror in Jennifer's room which she flees to as the cave fire spreads to the house. Various explosions result in Bobby becoming distracted long enough for Jennifer to seemingly kill Bobby by stabbing him through the head with his own shears.
Jennifer is then apprehended by Mary who is in bereaved rage at the death of her sons, stabbing Jennifer numerous times before throwing her down into the lobby.
She cradles Bobby's body before preparing her handgun to shoot Jennifer who has in frantic adrenaline made a run for an outside window ladder up to the clock tower.
There her and Mary face off as she reveals the complete history of the ritual, it's requirements and the death of her father. Mary still has a chance at her resurrecting and reverting the entrapped forms of her boys if by the time the tower strikes midnight Jennifer dies within the property. Demonic apparitions of the mansion begin to attack the two and Jennifer uses the opportunity to kill Mary by electrocution which expels from the tower in a fatal fall.
The apparitions cease as the tower strikes midnight and Jennifer collapses. Paramedics and authorities arrive at a now mostly burning Barrows mansion and Jennifer is air lifted away still alive, as the bodies of Lotte, Anne, Laura, Mary Barrows, Simon Barrows, many feasted upon parts in the cavern chambers and skeletal remains of Walter Simpson are recovered. Police discover Dan Barrows' charred remains in the cave horrified and confused, as for Bobby Barrows he is taken away in an ambulance still somehow alive. He arises and slashes at the male paramedics and driver, killing them and causing a crash as he watches Jennifer be airlifted in the distance.
The film ends as a shear wielding Bobby staggers off into the woods in the direction of the helicopter carrying Jennifer.
Cast[]
- Holly Hunter as Mary Barrows
- Hailee Steinfeld as Jennifer Simpson
- August Maturo and Martin Klebba as Bobby Barrows/Scissorman
- Liv Hewson as Lotte
- Natalia Dyer as Anne
- Kelli Berglund as Laura Harrington
- Lewis McGowan as Dan Barrows
- Bobby Cannavale as Walter Simpson
- Peter Capaldi as Simon Barrows