An average movie

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Eli Roth’s work but, since this movie was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. First of all, it’s interesting that, even though ‘Grindhouse’ was a flop when it was released, we are slowly getting full length features for most of the fictitious trailers (see also ‘Machete’,  ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ and this movie). Coming back on Eli Roth, from all his projects, this one was probably the most stupid one so far and, yet, exactly because of this fact, it had the potential to be really awesome. Eventually, it was not bad and I especially enjoyed the opening lambasting the Black Friday craziness showing how a traditional national holiday became an insane capitalist circus. The rest of the movie was basically a typical slasher flick but like so many other projects from this director, even though it had some potential, the end-result was just adequate but not really much more than that. I mean, from the trailer, you had this feeling that you were watching some nasty creepy even depraved flick from the 70’s but most of it was gone here though. Indeed, he shot this movie digitally which had automatically a clean but boring look. At least, the murder scenes were usually quite gnarly and some of the jokes were decent so he still managed to keep that. Concerning the cast, sure, it was fun to see Patrick Dempsey in a gory horror flick directed by Eli Roth but the rest of the cast was rather unremarkable and completely forgettable. I guess they were not helped by the fact that Roth didn’t give their respective characters any personality whatsoever. Anyway, to conclude, even though I wish it would have been much wilder, darker and nastier, I have to admit that it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

6/10