Thanksgiving (2023) - Movie Review

For as much shit as I’ve given Eli Roth over the years, I freely admit that I was actually looking forward to him releasing this film. The fake Grindhouse trailer that inspired this remains, for me at least, his greatest cinematic artwork. It’s a prime example of his bloodsplattered sense of humour, but without the annoying and/or smug underpinnings that keep getting in the way of the fun in his feature productions. I have a deep love for all things connected to Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, including the fake trailers and the films that eventually spawned from most of them. I may understand Edgar Wright’s stance on making his Don’t trailer into a full film, but a man can still dream.

Top 10 Most Surprising Films Of 2018

For a few years now, I’ve been making it a point to highlight the most surprising films of the year; the ones I went into not expecting anything worthwhile, yet walked away impressed in one way or another. I usually take the time to list the most disappointing films as well, but in a showing of just good 2018 was for films, the disappointments were honestly few and far between. As for the surprises, they’re not just surprisingly good; most of them came from filmmakers I never would have expected to be capable of anything as watchable as the films I’m about to get into. Here are my picks for the 10 most surprising films of 2018.

Death Wish (2018) - Movie Review

 

The plot: Surgeon Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) has his comfortable life turned upside-down after a home invasion leaves his wife (Elizabeth Shue) dead and his daughter (Camila Morrone) in a coma. With the police being ineffectual in finding the criminals responsible for the break-in, and Paul knowing that crime is a consistent problem in his neighbourhood, he decides to take the law into his hands and hunt them down himself.

Cabin Fever (2016) - Movie Review

Aside from making me feel really bloody old knowing that the film is over a decade old by now, Eli Roth’s directorial debut Cabin Fever was the world’s first exposure to Roth’s… interesting approach to filmmaking. Namely, hateful lead characters with sprinklings of batshit insane in the script. It has a handful of scenes that have gone into memetic legend because of their strangeness, none more so than this little beauty and it set a trend for horror writing that has plagued us ever since. It’s another example of the exception of the rule that became the rule, only here that prospect turned out to be far more disastrous than anyone could have foreseen. And then some idiot by the professional name of Travis Z decided he wanted to remake this "classic". I’d call this pointless, except it isn’t even the worst offender in that regard this year alone, so I’m willing to give this film its day in court. This is Cabin Fever.

Knock Knock (2015) - Movie Review

Every so often, the Hollywood scheduling system looks at the crap that gets screened and bestows a boon on the viewing public with a double feature from an acclaimed director. 2013 was an amazing year in this regard as we got not only two releases from David O. Russell with Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, but also the ‘supposedly’ final two theatrical releases from Steven Soderbergh with Side Effects and Behind The Candelabra. But then, there are times when the scheduling results in a dual release from a… less reputable director. This is unfortunately a latter case as we are discussing another film by Eli Roth. I once again don’t want to completely badmouth his abilities as a director, as the guy definitely has talent in certain areas. However, his insistence on filming his own scripts is his biggest flaw; the guy has character sensibilities that make Mark Renton look like Oskar Schindler. For as much credit as I was willing to give his last film, it still makes me feel slightly ill thinking back on it. So, is this film as bad as that… or is it, by some terrifying miracle, even worse?

The Green Inferno (2015) - Movie Review

I’ve talked before about the confounding writing trend in horror films that says that, because most of the characters are going to die anyway, we shouldn’t be made to have any emotional connection to them. As such, the majority of the main cast is written to be hateful by whatever way possible, usually through the exhibition of utterly misanthropic behaviour. Well, the director of today’s film is one of the forefathers of the style in today’s cinema: Eli Roth. He is also supposedly responsible for the almost-hilariously misnamed ‘torture porn’ sub-genre, alongside James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Now, even though his films may contain some of the most loathsome core characters in film, I do not think he is a bad filmmaker; after all, there were parts of Hostel that I could get into and his work with RZA made for a surprisingly entertaining flick with The Man With The Iron Fists. Well, since this is his first time in the director’s chair since he made the Thanksgiving fake trailer for the Grindhouse film project, easily the best work of his career, let’s see if he has grown at all in that time as he creates an homage to the 80’s Amazon Cannibal sub-genre.