Knock Knock starts out as a satire of vapid male fantasies before then becoming a vapid male fantasy. It then transforms itself into a satire of vapid torture porn before then becoming vapid torture porn. And, in the end, your main response will probably be, “Eh, who cares?”
Keanu Reeves plays Evan, an architect who has a nice house, a nice family, and a nice dog. He also has an injured shoulder, which leads to him staying home while his wife and children spend the weekend at the beach. Evan is looking forward to having the house to himself, especially when it starts to rain. I mean, who wants to be at the beach in the middle of storm, right? That night, Evan is relaxing in his home when he hears someone at the door.
Knock knock.
Two young women, Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Anna de Armas), are standing on his front porch, soaked. They tell him that they’re looking for the address of a party and that their phone has gotten wet and could they please come inside for just a few minutes and get online and find the correct address? Evan agrees. Genesis and Bel enter the house. They tell him that they’re models. They tell him about their girlfriends. They talk about their sex lives and Evan responds with a goofy smile. They ask if they can take off all their clothes and toss them in a dryer. Evan agrees. “Uh, I’ve got some robes,” Evan says and it’s a funny line because Keanu Reeves sounds sincerely bewildered when he says it.
Anyway, you can tell where this leading. It starts with a threesome and then it ends with the house getting destroyed and people getting buried alive and, to be honest, it gets a little bit boring after a while. Perhaps if Evan was truly a loathsome character, as opposed to just an awkward Keanu Reeves, there would be some sort of joy in watching Genesis and Bel taunt him while destroying his home and destroying his wife’s artwork but instead it just amount to a bunch of repetitive taunting. Despite all of their talk about how Evan represents the 1% and how quickly Evan was willing to cheat on his wife and potentially destroy his family, Genesis and Bel don’t come across as being revolutionaries or avenging angels. Instead, they just seem to be overcaffeinated with no real reason for doing what they’re doing beyond the fact that there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise.
Keanu Reeves gives a strange performance in this film. At the start of the film, he actually seems like he’s perfectly cast. When Genesis and Bel first show up at his door, there’s some genuine wit to found in his confused reaction to the two girls. But then, as the film progresses, Reeves has to start pretending to be desperate and that’s never really been his strong suit. Perhaps because he’s trying to keep up with the hyper performances of Lorenza Izzo and Anna de Armas, Reeves starts to shout every single line and it just becomes rather humorous before then becoming rather dull. “STOP IT! I COULD GO DEAF!” he shouts when the girls force him to listen to loud music. Later, when he curses the girls, he sounds like a cartoon character talking about how much he hates Bugs Bunny. I like Keanu Reeves but he’s just not a very good shouter.
I’ve defended Eli Roth in the past and I imagine that I’ll do so again in the future but it’s best to keep the door closed on Knock Knock.
Watching Life Itself is like getting a Hallmark card from a serial killer. Even if you appreciate the sentiment, you still don’t feel good about it.
Written and directed by This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, Life Itself attempts to juggle several different themes, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult to understand just what exactly the film is attempting to say. That said, I think the main lesson of the film is that you should always look both ways before stepping out into the middle of the street. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a horrific backstory, involving a decapitated father, a pervy uncle, and a gun. It doesn’t matter if you love Pulp Fiction or if you think Bob Dylan’s more recent work is underrated. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a dog and husband who is so in love with you that he’s practically a stalker. It doesn’t even matter that your pregnant and looking forward to naming your firstborn after your favorite musician. If you don’t look both ways before stepping out into the middle of the street, you’re going to get hit by a big damn bus.
That’s the lesson that Abby (Olivia Wilde) does not learn and, as a result, she not only gets run over by a bus but we, the viewers, are subjected to seeing her repeatedly getting run over by that bus. As temtping as it is to feel bad for Abby, my sympathy was limited by the fact that she and her husband (Oscar Isaac) named their dog Fuckface. I mean, seriously, who does that? Not only is it cruel to the dog but it’s also inconsiderate to the people who have to listen to you shouting, “Fuckface!” whenever the dog gets loose. For whatever reason, the movie doesn’t seem to get how annoying this is. That’s because Life Itself is another one of those movies that mistakes quirkiness for humanity.
The other annoying thing about Abby is that she’s an English major who somehow thinks that the use of the unreliable narrator is an understudied literary phenonema. In fact, she’s writing her thesis on unreliable narrators. Her argument is that life itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator because life is tricky and surprising, which doesn’t make one bit of sense.
Speaking of narrators, Life Itself has three, which is three too many. Two of the narrators are unreliable but I get the feeling that the third one is meant to be taken literally, which is a shame because the film would have made a lot more sense if it had ended with a Life of Pi-style revelation that none of what we just watched actually happened.
Anyway, Abby getting hit by a bus has repercussions that reverberate across the globe and across time. Not only does it lead to her husband writing a bad screenplay but it also leads to him committing suicide in a psychiatrist’s office. Abby’s daughter, Dylan (Olivia Cooke), grows up to be what this film believes to be a punk rocker, which means that she angrily covers Bob Dylan songs and stuffs a peanut butter and jelly sandwich down another girl’s throat. Meanwhile, in Spain….
What? Oh yeah, this film jumps from New York to Spain. In fact, it’s almost like another film suddenly starts after an hour of the first one. You go from Olivia Cooke sobbing on a park bench to Antonio Banderas talking about his childhood. Banderas is playing a landowner named Vincent Saccione. Saccione wants to be best friends with his foreman, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) but Javier suspects that Saccione just wants to steal away his saintly wife, Isabel (Laia Costa) and maybe Javier’s right!
Javier has a son named Rodrigo (who is played by five different actors over the course of the film before eventually growing up to be Alex Monner). When Saccione gives Rodrigo a globe, Javier decides to one-up him by taking his wife and child on a vacation to New York City. Rodrigo has a great time in New York, or at least he does until he distracts a bus driver, which leads to a bus running down a pregnant woman…
…and the movie’s not over yet! It just keeps on going and believe it or not, there’s stuff that I haven’t even mentioned. Life Itself has a running time of only two hours. (For comparison, it’s shorter than almost every comic book film that’s come out over the past few years.) This is one of the rare cases where the film might have been improved with a longer running time because Fogelman crams so much tragedy and melodrama into that running time that it literally leaves you feeling as if you’re being bludgeoned. This is one of those films that gets in your face and screams, “You will cry! You will cry!” Even if you are inclined to cry at movies (and I certainly am), it’s impossible not to resent just how manipulative the film gets. You get the feeling that if you spend too much time wondering about the plot holes or the on-the-nose dialogue, the third narrator might start yelling at you for not getting with the program.
Life Itself is full of twists that are designed to leave you considering how everything in life is connected but, for something like this to work, the twists have to be surprising. They have to catch you off-guard. They have to make you want to see the movie again so that you can look for clues. The twists in Life Itself are not surprising. Anyone who has ever seen a movie before will be able to guess what’s going to happen. For that matter, anyone who has ever sat through an episode of This is Us should be able to figure it all out. Life Itself is not as a clever as it thinks it is.
Also, for a film like this work, you have to actually care about the characters. You have to be invested in who they are. But nobody in the film ever seems to be real and neither do any of their stories. (To the film’s credit, it actually does point out that one narrator is idealizing the past but that’s an intriguing idea that’s abandoned.) Everyone is just a collection of quirks. We know what type of music they like but we never understand why. Background info, like Abby being molested by her uncle or Isabel being the fourth prettiest of six sisters, is randomly dropped and then quickly forgotten about. Almost ever woman has a tragic backstory and, for the most part, a tragic destiny. (Except, of course, for Rodrigo’s first American girlfriend, who is dismissed as being “loud.”) Every man is soulful and passionate. But who are they? The film’s narrators say a lot but they never get around to answering that question. This is a film that insists it has something to say about life itself but it never quite comes alive.
Some critics are saying that Life Itself is the worst film of 2018. Maybe. I don’t know for sure. The Happytime Murders left me feeling so icky that I haven’t even been able to bring myself to review it yet. Life Itself, on the other hand, is such a huge misfire that I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about it. There’s something to be said for that.
Seriously, it’s hard for me to think of any recent film that has made me cringe as much as Eli Roth’s cannibal epic, The Green Inferno. A film about a bunch of Occupy activists who end up getting eaten by a native tribe in the jungles of Peru, The Green Inferno does not shy away from showing us all the icky cannibal action. Eyes are scooped out of heads. Heads are removed from bodies. Flesh is ripped off of a bones. Blood flows everywhere and …. well, let’s just say that I didn’t have much of an appetite after watching The Green Inferno.
And, to be honest, I have no idea whether or not the gore effects were realistic or not. It always amuses me when some of my fellow film bloggers say, “That’s not what the inside of a human body really looks like.” Like we would know! Listen, I have no idea what it’s like to cook a human body and I never will. It may have been realistic or it may not have been. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that, in a very visceral and frightening way, the effects worked. They made me look away from the screen. They inspired me to say, “Agck!” and I imagine that’s the exact response that Roth was going for.
If The Green Inferno was a box office success, I imagine that thousands of people would leave the movie and promptly google, “Can you get cannibals high by stuffing a baggie of marijuana in a dead body?” (The Green Inferno certainly argues that you can but it also suggests that, once a cannibal tribe gets the munchies, bad things will happen as a result.)
However, I doubt that The Green Inferno is going to be a box office success, at least not during its theatrical run. The film was originally made in 2013 and it’s taken two years for it to finally get a theatrical release and it’s pretty much being dumped into theaters with little fanfare. Not surprisingly, it’s currently getting slammed by most mainstream critics and it’s hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t review films online waking up and spontaneously saying, “I want to see that movie about people being eaten alive!” (Myself, I had no great desire to see it but I felt somewhat obligated, considering that I’m a self-described grindhouse fan and horror lover.) Jeff and I saw The Green Inferno on Tuesday, at the Cinemark 14 in Denton, Texas. The theater was nearly deserted.
And, in many ways, it is a difficult film to recommend, though that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s not an easy film to watch but it does what it does well. Back in the day, many grindhouse films were advertised as being “a film that goes all the way” and, for better or worse, The Green Inferno goes all the way. At a time when so many horror films are either watered down or just the usual found footage rehash, The Green Inferno is a film that actually made me squirm in my seat. It’s a film that delivered exactly what it promised and that does count for something. The Green Inferno is being advertised as being nightmare fuel and that’s exactly what it is.
(SPOILER ALERT! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU’RE GOING TO WHINE ABOUT SPOILERS AS A RESULT!)
There’s an interesting and unexpected political subtext to The Green Inferno and, I would argue, that political subtext is exactly why so many online critics are having such a violently negative reaction to the film. The Americans who end up getting eaten by the cannibals are all Occupy-style political activists. The reason that they are in Peru is to protest a company that is chopping down the rain forests. When they do their protest, they all wear masks (which makes the Occupy comparison obvious) and they use social media to make sure that the whole world is watching. It’s only later, once the surviving activists are all locked away in a cage and waiting to be eaten, that they learn that their leader, the arrogant Alejandro, was actually working for a rival logging company. And now, they’re desperately waiting for that rival company to show up, tear down the rain forest, and save their lives.
And, oh my God — some reviewers (mostly the ones that write at sites like the A.V. Club) are so upset about this! But, honestly, those reviewers are missing the point. The Green Inferno is not attacking the politics of the activists. Instead, the film is attacking the shallowness of the activists themselves. Almost all of them are caucasian, all of them come from privileged backgrounds, and all of them are so high on their own self-righteousness that they don’t even realize that they’re being manipulated by the same system they claim to be destroying. And, just like the college students who spent a few months doing the Occupy thing and then went on to get a job on Wall Street, they ultimately expect the system to protect them even as they play revolutionary. At the end of the film, hundreds of new white, privileged protestors are wearing t-shirts decorated (Che-style) with Alejandro’s face. It’s a deeply cynical vision of political activism but, in many ways, it’s far more realistic than a lot of people want to admit and it makes The Green Inferno a bit more interesting than your typical gore film.
(Add to that, there are thousands of movies about heroic political activists so what’s wrong with having one film where they all get eaten in the Amazon rain forest? Seriously, it’s not the end of the world…)
Admittedly, the film does make a huge mistake. It features a mid-credits scene which sets up a sequel. (And a sequel was announced way back in 2013 but has apparently been abandoned.) That mid-credits scene — which feels more appropriate for a Marvel film — is totally unnecessary. There’s no need for a sequel. The Green Inferno accomplishes exactly what it set out to do.
It would be difficult to call Through the Shattered Lens a film blog that appreciates grindhouse filmmaking if we didn’t mention something about the cannibal subgenre of horror once in awhile.
Once a huge thing during the 70’s and right up to it’s demise during the early 1980’s, the cannibal films from Europe (especially by exploitation filmmakers from Italy) would compete with Italian giallo film and Euro-zombie knock-offs for on which one could be the most gory and grotesque. It was like a grand guignol royal rumble.
As founders of the site there’s one particular cannibal film that both Lisa and I have some sort of admiration for. This film is Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. It would go down as one of the video nasties that kept the film as one that new fans of horror were told they must see if they were to complete their journey into the dark side.
After two years of distribution limbo, Eli Roth’s homage to the cannibal films of the 70’s and 80’s finally gets to show it’s wares up on the bigscreen and this red band clip will give audiences a brief taste of what to expect.
The Green Inferno is set for a September 25, 2015 release date.
That was my main reaction to watching The Stranger, a film from Chile that, for some reason, is set in Canada. (There’s absolutely nothing about the film that brings to mind Canada. The film was obviously shot in South America and almost all of the actors are Chilean. And, just in case you forget, they’ve all been badly dubbed.) The Stranger is full of atmosphere and it does attempt to do something new with the vampire genre so I guess we should give it some credit for that…
No, sorry.
Can’t do it.
Listen, I love horror movies. I think that some of the most interesting films being made today are coming out of the South American film scene. And, in the past, I’ve even defended Eli Roth, who is credited as being one of the producers on this film. But I’m sorry — The Stranger is an incredibly boring and unpleasant film.
And yes, I fully realize that the best horror films are meant to be nightmarish and, as a result, somewhat unpleasant to watch. However, there’s a difference between the stylized violence of a good giallo and the relentless sadism of The Stranger. There’s no real point or style to the overbearing violence and gore in The Stranger and, as a result, it gets pretty boring after just a few minutes.
Of course, another huge difference between good horror and The Stranger is that The Stranger takes itself way too seriously. Again to return to the Italian horror comparison, the best giallo films always featured quirky characters, clever dialogue, and plot twists that took us by surprise. They were exercises in pure style that celebrated cinematic excess. The Stranger is so somber and grim and serious that it all becomes a bit tedious to deal with.
Also, an innocent black cat is brutally murdered about 30 minutes into a film. Then, towards the end of the film a dog is similarly attacked and left to die in the desert. And you really don’t get the feeling that there was any reason for these scenes, beyond the fact that the director needed to keep up with his onscreen death quota.. If you’re going to portray an innocent animal being killed by your hero, at least make sure it’s absolutely necessary to the plot. Otherwise, it just comes across as pointless sadism.
Anyway, the movie itself is about a stranger (Christobal Tapia Montt), who shows up in what we’re told in a small Canadian town. He’s looking for his runaway wife, who he discovers has subsequently died. The man has secrets of his own, of course. He hates the sunlight. He apparently cannot be killed by ordinary methods. His blood can heal others but it also tends to transform them into being blood-thirsty monsters. Yes, the man is obviously a vampire but the film never comes out and admits that.
There’s all sorts of small town intrigue going on but I’m not going to talk about it because it was tedious enough just trying to watch it. Ultimately, the whole film is basically just a collection of scenes of people threatening the stranger, the stranger looking somber, and then people threatening each other. None of the actors are particularly memorable and very few of them speak in their own voices. One gets the feeling that the Chilean cast could not sound properly Canadian and so a bunch of American actors were hired to overdub everyone’s dialogue. (I say American because I heard many regional American accents but not a single Canadian one. All of this again makes you wonder why this film was set in Canada as opposed to some place like maybe Chile.) The dubbing is atrocious, with the voices rarely matching either the facial expressions or the body language of the original actors.
This movie is a total mess. Sorry, Eli. I still think that the Hostel films have a lot more to say about America’s place in the world than most people are willing to admit but ultimately, The Stranger is a disappointment.
Ah, the Italian cannibal subgenre of grindhouse and exploitation films. It’s been awhile since we’ve had something like this. Sure, we’ve had cannibal-based films throughout the years with some even becoming cult hits (I look at Ravenous as an example), but not one that takes it’s setting and basic plot straight out of the cannibal films of the late 70’s and early 80’s from the Italian horror filmmakers of that era.
Eli Roth returns to directing after a seven years in hiatus to give horror fans a taste of the old-school cannibal flicks with his homage to Ruggero Deodato’s classic grindhouse film Cannibal Holocaust. The interesting bit about Roth’s film is how it’s title actually is part of the homage to Deodato’s film which was originally suppose to be called….The Green Inferno.
This is the second official trailer for The Green Inferno and it even uses a quaint, serene song to open it up the way Deodato’s film and trailer for said film does over thirty years ago. We don’t see much cannibal feasting going on, but it’s hinted at that it’s what’s for dinner.
Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno is set for an September 5, 2014 release date in the US.
Here’s the first official trailer for Eli Roth’s first film in 6 years. It’s been awhile since we;ve had a proper cannibal film in the theaters and from the buzz coming out of the festival circuit this one could be something to keep a look out for.
With all the hoopla over this weekend’s release of Iron Man 3 one shouldn’t overlook the release the following weekend of a little horror film coming in under the radar called Aftershock.
The film has Eli Roth producing and starring in it with Nicolás López directing it. The film is a fictional account of a group of Americans with their Chilean friend trying to survive the aftermath of the real-life massive 2010 earthquake in Chile.
From the look of this official red band trailer the film looks like it’s going to be quite bloody and gory. If there’s anything that Roth seems to know it’s blood and gore. Whether this film and its director will bring something else to the table will be determined upon the film’s release.
Aftershock is set for a North American release date of May 10, 2013.
Horror is still my first true genre love when things get boiled down to their most basic. 2013 looks to be full of horror films to more than satisfy my appetite for them. One such film that I’d be itching to check out is the Chilean horror-thriller titled Aftershock.
The film was co-produced by horror filmmaker Eli Roth who also had a hand in co-writing the script with Guillermo Amoedo and the film’s director, Nicolás López. The film is a fictional account of the aftermath of the 2010 8.8 earthquake in Chile and how a group of young partygoers try to escape the chaos of the city after the quake. Part of the film’s story uses the real-life prison breakout of prisoners after the quake and the resulting chaos in the damaged areas of the city.
Aftershock looks to be in the same extreme horror that the French have been helpful in making one of the newest trends in horror cinema. The trailer is not the glorious red band variety everyone has been waiting for but there seems to be enough hints throughout to show that Aftershock will not be a bloodless affair.
The film premiered during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and the buzz surrounding the film has been quite positive. Unfortunately, there’s still no word on a release date in the US or anywhere for that matter, but it definitely joins Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac as one of my must-see horror films for 2013.
Through the Shattered Lens 