Ursa Guy's Film Reviews

To make a (really) long version short, it's a good movie with flashes of greatness on its own merits but kind of underwhelming as "Studio Ghibli's final film." Not their best work and doesn't have the same conclusion to a saga feel that Wind Rises did.

Studio Ghibli>>>>>>>>>>>Disney/Pixar>>>>everyone else

I utterly adore Studio Ghibli , and I'm heartbroken that, like you said, this will probably be the last film they'll submit. I haven't seen it myself yet, but your rating alone makes it look very promising!

Someone has finally decided to get off their lazy bum and read my reviews :P The stuff between the Ghibli banner and the film poster as well as the last paragraph is just contextualizing its place in the Ghibli canon, which I think is worth a read even if you haven't seen it yet. Why it's a bad final film, the pros and cons of Ghibli shutting down, and how their legacy has probably had a bigger effect on American cinema than Japan. It's a hard movie to talk about, because it's dependent on its twist, so I tried really hard to avoid any kind of spoilers, but those parts barely even reference Marnie.

It can't be worse than The Wind Rises as far as swan songs go, I actually thought was one of their weakest efforts to date. Even if this isn't as great as their consistently extremely high standard, we can just use Princess Kaguya as the final film that can be included in the Studio's "canon" as it were, because it seems to have done significantly better than the other two, it even pinched an Oscar nom out of nowhere!

I agree as well, I remember reading somewhere that the staff at Pixar watch a Ghibli film if they ever need inspiration, and for me, they'll always be significantly better than their peers at Laika, Disney, Dreamworks etc. By quite a vast length, and some of their strongest films are amongst the greatest films ever made, animated or not, I genuinely believe that no animation production will ever even compare remotely close to them! I'll miss them so much!

I was hoping you wouldn't notice as well! but something everyone here will probably learn pretty quickly is that I'm quite forgetful, it's honestly like I'm a male Dory

I liked the Wind Rises as a swan song, even if I didn't really like it as a movie. Kind of the opposite of this. Yes, the voice acting is bland (in both languages) and the script is all over the place, and the central story about making planes isn't very interesting, but Miyazaki writing the self-insert fanfic of a plane designer is. It shows us a lot about his psyche. It was really powerful how Hayao directly addressed his prominent themes and what his critics don't like about him. It helps his filmography come full circle. It's not just about creating something beautiful, it's how that thing has different effects on different people based on their perspective (which ended up being ironic because pro-war Japanese criticized it for being anti-war and anti-war Japanese criticized it for being pro-war). Everybody sees only what they want to in the planes: the designer sees unbreakable magic, the government sees someone who is wasting their time and money to serve himself, the optimists see a new beginning, the pessimists see the final ending, the smart ones hate it for not being practical, and his wife doesn't care one bit about the planes. That same logic is applied to perceptions of Miyazaki and anime itself. The ignorant Americans see it as simple kids stuff, the mass of Americans see it as a dumb thing that nerds fawn over, those nerds see it as a deeper form of art, but their ignorance towards the still great American animation just loops in on itself. My point is that even when Ghibli misses, and they do miss sometimes, there is almost always more depth to it than 90% of American animation and at least 50% of live-action.

Battle Royale and this aren't much alike. One is not a "rip off" of the other. What are the similarities here? In the future, a post-apocalyptic government establishes a game show in which teenagers fight and the losers are killed, all based on a book for "young adults". Deadly game shows are neither a rarely used concept, nor were they first published in 1999, with the release of the book of Battle Royale. In fact, I would argue that The Hunger Games is more a "rip off" of Walter F Moudy's 1965 book "Survivor" than Battle Royale. The motive of the government in that is to show the viewing audience the horrors of war, and it embraces the winners with a lifetime prize, which are both themes that The Hunger Games uses prominently that are never even touched in Battle Royale, where the motives are to keep people separated so they can't fight back. Even Stephen King's The Walk has a much greater influence on The Hunger Games than Battle Royale, at least conceptually. Kids volunteer to go into the walk for various reasons, like helping their families not get chosen or giving them extra food rations in a starving area (both of which are, you guessed it, character beats that are directly lifted into The Hunger Games and never mentioned in Battle Royale). The main theme of that one is that in a game where the losers die, even the winners don't really get to live, which is one of the big themes in the sequels books and movies to this. Another Stephen King book, The Running Man, agrees with The Hunger Games that "game show" is the most important part of the phrase "the ultimate game show would be one in which the losing contestants are killed", both serving as a satire of reality television, while Battle Royale is caught up in the "kill" part. My point is that there are a dozen books and movies that The Hunger Games actually does take a suspicious amount of influence from, and Battle Royale would be near the middle of that list, not the number one thing that people complain about. It's a surface level comparison, because the themes differ greatly but the two sentence plot summaries sound the same.

Of course, this is being reviewed in 2015, after 2 more Hunger Games movies have been released, and that doesn't do it any favors. This would have been a 3.5 star rating out of the theater, but it drops on every watch for me. The Hunger Games' biggest problem will always be that it's the same movie as its sequel. This was directed by Gary Ross, while the sequels were directed by Francis Lawrence, and F-Law was clearly more interested in telling The Hunger Games in a better way than making a sequel. The books are problematic in how similar they are too, but when they're made by the same person it's easy to criticize the second one. If they're the exact same, the first part is original and the second part is a cheap cash in. Catching Fire does literally everything that The Hunger Games does, only it does it all 20% better. They make the same exact chariot scene with the fire effects a little bit better, they have the same cardboard cutout villain tributes but make them a little bit more menacing, they have similar arena traps but the second one is way more creative in that, and the camerawork is way better. It's impossible to judge The Hunger Games strictly on its own merits because there is no reason why I would ever watch it over the alternative.

There is quite a bit of good stuff in here. The banter between Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks is usually funny. The acting is really good all around. I always felt that the acting is what set this YA series apart. They were the legitimate one, getting the best actor under 25 working today in Jennifer Lawrence and 3 adult actors better than any single one from failed series attempts like The Host or The Mortal Instruments. Donald Sutherland has been really great at embracing the evil of his role, but still being an actual person. He's never too evil to take seriously, a common pitfall that even Harry Potter fell into sometimes. The hair, costumes, and makeup are all amazing, to the extent that I'm willing to call it a snub that the entire series has been shut out of awards. Was Les Miserables really that great in makeup? There was a minute of flash at the end by aging Hugh Jackman and some standard period fare. The ridiculous hair that everybody in the Capitol is sporting looks outstanding, and it has a purpose that directly relates to the story instead of just looking pretty.

This film doesn't really follow a three act structure. It's a movie of two halves. They're in the arena for 70 minutes and out of it for 70 minutes. That run time is too long for its own good. Most of that 70 minute pregame time slot is exposition about the world, which I understand has a purpose, but to be selfish for a minute as somebody who has read every book and seen every movie, I was really bored watching it. It spends a lot of time setting up, which hurts its replay value tremendously. Even then, they didn't set up the right things. A really common complaint from people who never read the books is that they had no idea who any of the tributes were. That's a problem. The two main kids have a developed personality and grow in a relationship with each other, and that's fine, but none of the 22 other kids are the slightest bit memorable. In the book, there were 6 other kids that actually mattered, and the rest get reduced to death fodder. In the movie that number gets reduced to 2. The blonde girl that dies from the nest, the girl that wrestles Katniss near the end, the red head girl, and the big black guy are all wastes of space. They are shown doing things, because the book says they do things, but those actions are usually meaningless, none of them have even one dimension of character, the last of those four dies off screen. The two that get things to do are still one dimensional. Cato is a villain who spends the entire time killing people and laughing about how much fun it is to kill people until he gets a monologue at the end about how killing isn't what he thought it would be. Rue exists only so she can look cute, be helpful and generally likable, and then die. She's death fodder that book writer Suzanne Collins tricks you into thinking isn't so you feel an emotion when she is. Again, for a quick comparison the sequel has 3 brand new characters with more character than anybody in this.

The Hunger Games also holds a special place in my heart for being the first time shaky cam actively annoyed me. It makes the fight scenes worthless. They're not bloody, they're not emotional, and they're not fun. In quite a few you can't even tell what's happening. When Katniss and the girl working with Cato wrestle each other for the bags of supplies, I found it hard to tell which was which. The actresses don't look all that similar, but when they're tumbling over each other and the cameraman is having a seizure I couldn't figure it out. The final fight with Peeta and Cato has the same problem. Two actors that look vaguely alike become twins when you shroud them in darkness and shake your camera too much. It's just awful, and thankfully the next director knew what he was doing.

I still do admire the subject matter tackled here, because it's way more mature than the YA crap genre deserves. I touched on most of it for comparisons sake in the intro, but it is more about the game show aspect than the fact that the government is evil or teenagers are killing each other. The scene where people from District 11 attack the soldiers before being bombarded by reinforcements is great. It showed the humanity and anger of the common people towards the games while also showing us in visual form instead of telling us that realistically there's nothing they can possibly do to actually beat the government. The ideas of PTSD and having to live with the fact that you killed others for that right are set up in the last 10 minutes so the actually good movie can get into it. It's the only one in which the relationship between Katniss and Peeta isn't a typical teen romance plot. People fabricate things all the time on reality television, and that especially includes romance. It's a conscious decision that they can make themselves likable without actually feeling anything. That's some smart stuff. I also like how there isn't much of a love triangle. It does kind of exist, with Gale (played by Thor's little brother) brooding and smouldering to the camera when Katniss kisses Peeta, but in the entire book series there would be these insufferable soliloquies where she would spend a chapter deliberating over which boy she loves. In the whole series of films, she picks Peeta as her lover relatively early into the first movie, never feels regret for not picking Gale, and Gale is satisfied to never look at her romantically after the first movie.

The biggest flaw is redundancy. If you're just getting into the series soon to prep for the finale in November, I would skip the first. It's an adequate experience, but there isn't anything in the sequels that demands your awareness of the first and it's not as good as its counterparts. Watch Catching Fire, tell yourself that you guess it would still be okay without Phillip Seymour Hoffman and competent cinematography but you wouldn't like it as much, and forget it ever happened.

Oh, M Night Shyamalan. You're like a psychotic ex-girlfriend, or that 4th bottle of Heineken. I know that it's bad for me, and I know that it will always end in disappointment, but I can't stay away. I was ready to officially give up, but The Visit got great reviews and I forced myself into a theater. Part of me wanted to love this movie. Part of me wanted to hate it. The actual experience was a weird one. I tried to trick myself into being cynical about everything, but about two thirds of the way through I gave in. This movie is good. If I'm feeling generous, I might even call it great. This is the first mainstream horror movie this year to understand my first rule of horror. Scary things are only scary if they happen to characters that I care about.

Who are these characters? A couple of teenagers and their grandparents. The kids are fascinating characters, because they are unique in today's cinematic landscape. The top billing goes to Olivia DeJonge, a 17 year old girl named Becca who plays an amateur documentary filmmaker. She has a surprising amount of layers. In plenty of ways, she's an easy device for M Night to talk directly to his audience. She's also disturbingly pretentious and still has a character of her own, her driving motivation being to help her mother feel better about herself after her husband left her. Her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), is pretty much the opposite form of entertainer. He's an amateur low brow rapper. He has essentially no rap or lyrical skills, but he still tries really hard to talk about bitches and hoes with little success. Like his sister, he goes beyond this to establish a character of his own, one who is trying to help his sister recover from the family split in the same way she tries to help their mother. The greatest strength of this film are that these characters are kids, because I think they would both be insufferable as adults. They're not realistic, but as kids their extremes are funny, and the fact that they have these ambitions at all is really nice. Their two grandparents are normal for a few hours, and they they're weird, and they they're really really weird. The moment when I knew I liked this film came during the closing credits, which are rapped over by Tyler while Becca looks at herself as she is brushing her hair. Both of these things are payoffs that were set up earlier, and they both just made me happy to be alive and watching it. I legitimately cared for these kids, enough to be happy when they got happy endings. These characters are directed, written, and acted well enough to feel real, to come out of the screen and make me feel emotions, which few movies can do.

The horror in this film is surprisingly good. Shyamalan goes back to his Sixth Sense roots by being more creepy than scary. There are no deaths or graphic blood in the first two acts, and there is only one jump scare in the whole run time. He limits his sound design to be appropriately subtle and realistic for the found footage setup. No single scene pops out as being freaky, but over time he adds up moderately unsettling scenes. There are about 10 by the end, where my reaction was that the thing I just saw kind of bothered me and I can't wait to see what it builds up to. I would describe it as a slow burn in that way, but the pacing is excellent because not a single scene is wasted. The found footage angle actually contributes to the quality of the film, words that I might never say again. The basic concept is that these kids are alone and too young to effectively handle the situation they are pushed into. Having a homey vibe and a decent but not great cinematography eye fits in with the characters and setting. Yes, it is dumb at times, like when they prop a night vision camera on top of a shelf and keep it static, but on the whole it progresses a character and arguably the story.

The comedic elements of this film were not quite as strong. Shyamalan said that three versions of this exist. There's supposedly a horror cut, a comedy cut, and the one we got in theaters is somewhere in between. I would rather have seen the first, but there were funny moments that worked. There weren't even many jokes, but the problem was that a lot of the jokes had more setup time than the punchline deserved. No single line stands out to me as especially good or bad, but I wish he could have cut that element altogether.

Another genius thing this film does is trick you with the trailer. I was there with everybody else, laughing at the commercial where the grandmother asks the girl to get into the oven and shuts it. Guess what? That happens twice in the film, and nothing comes from it in either instance. They are both mildly creepy scenes, but neither one of them ends in a typical horror movie fashion. She cleans the oven, the grandmother opens the door, and the scene ends. That is one of the most brilliant things I have seen on film this year. Take a perceived weakness and turn it into a strength, all while building tension without blowing your load on something that would be considered dumb. There are more scenes like that too, where you think you have already scene what is coming and the movie subverts your expectations in a clever and atmospheric way.

I'm not going to tell you that The Visit is a fantastic movie. Unfortunately, I don't think it could be. It's too short, low-budget, and most of all unambitious to reach the heights of a 5 star film. It is not as good as The Sixth Sense, and it is not as entertaining as The Happening. But I think that M Night could not have possibly executed it better. This is the definition of a film that is good for what it is. There's a lot of stuff that I wish was here, and it never gets into the territory of perfection, but there are very few flaws with what he gave us. For the first time in a decade, I am looking forward to the next M Night Shyamalan movie. What a twist!

Dope is a weird film. I have no idea what it was trying to be, because I think it had no idea what it was trying to be. What we have here is another dramedy that just wants to push dramatic layers into a comedy. There is no sense of balance between those two elements, and it doesn't feel like they belong together, but they are here either way. It's as if two different movies got spliced together. There is a comedy about three dorky black kids who do white things like care about grades and college that are forced to sell drugs in unique ways because of the typical black society around them. There is also a drama about a good kid being corrupted by society around him. The comedy is funny, original, and great. The drama is melodramatic, cliched, and mediocre.

No matter how much I enjoyed or did not enjoy parts of Dope, I cannot deny how well made of a film it is. The acting is fantastic all across the board. Shameik Moore gets the big role as a kid named Malcolm trying to get into Harvard, however unrealistic it seems from his Inglewood dump. The script couldn't balance a full range of emotions, but Moore definitely can. I think this man is going to be a star someday soon. As the center of a coming of age story, he has to grow a lot in 100 minutes. Every single stage in his development was convincing. Kiersy Cemens and Tony Revolori play his two best friends. Both actors are very good, even though they are playing the same part. A lot of rappers get cameos, which had me concerned going in, but none of them are notably poor. A$AP Rocky was surprisingly decent as the drug dealer that forces Malcolm into his problems. This is also a pretty movie to look at. The lively colors bring out the Southern California flare that director/writer Rick Famuyiwa is known for, and I really liked the editing style on display. It has a quick cutting montage look similar to the one that Requiem For A Dream used. It doesn't use that look to as severe of a degree, but that's probably for the best, as the drugs on display here are more annoying than crippling.

The script has major issues. The most consistent one was that these supposedly intelligent kids are making decisions on the level of an 80's slasher victim. The movie keeps on telling us that these three kids are the smartest people in their town, but I don't believe it, because if that were even slightly true this movie would be over in 20 minutes. We never see any of them do anything intelligent or make a good choice about what they should do next. Malcolm gets a near perfect SAT score, but is completely inept at making an obvious decision to get rid of the drugs at the first opportunity. He's about to do something smart, but then he sees a hot girl and gets stuck in a worse position than he started in. Twice, with different girls both times. I sort of get what they were going for, that the book smart kid still has a lot to learn about street smarts, but the execution got botched somewhere along the way. There are also quite a few very serious subplots that never get a conclusion. The biggest example is the two men who first call Malcolm about the drugs. They chase him down, get into a shootout with his friends, and neither of the men nor the friend that shoots at them is ever referenced in the half of film that follows. A$AP Rocky's character has a significant role in the first act, but he is not once shown on camera after that. Rick might as well have wrote in that Malcolm got the results of the test back and definitely has breast cancer. It's almost funny how bad it is that the secondary conflict is left unresolved, especially when you consider that to the very end this movie is just adding more and more characters that have a huge effect on the plot for a few minutes. Proper film structure would tell you that you should have side characters have small effects on plot for the duration of the movie, because it feels cheap when the main problem is fixed up by some guy who the audience doesn't even know exists until he saves the day. I'm not sure whether this is an appropriate situation to use the term 'deus-ex-machina', but it is just as unsatisfying as one. The story is a contrived mess that only moves along because of people doing things out of character. There is also a speech at the end. Malcolm writes an application essay for Harvard which is basically the plot of the movie. That's fine. He uses what he learned about the rest of the world from his recent adventures and applies them to other areas of his life. He then looks directly into the camera and reads this speech. Directly to the camera. Rick, you have to trust your audience more than that. We understand what you tried to say with this film, you do not and should not have to summarize the themes of what we just watched in a monologue with no other characters even on screen. His clinching line is "Why do I want to go to Harvard? If I was white, would you even have to ask me that?" Beyond being patronizing, pandering, corny, and having an obvious rebuttal of "Yes, everybody gets the same application question," it makes the film less poignant. Up to that point, my understanding of the message was that black people should embrace their background along with their individuality to suceed, which gets contradicted to an extent by pulling the race card and trying to blend in with the accepted standards of black culture.

I will give the movie a ton of credit for its inventive use of its classic hip-hop score. The songs will usually correspond to the events that are happening or the feelings that the characters are going through, almost like a Disney musical where a pop singer and visual storytelling come together to show events instead of just telling them. The standout moment was when Malcolm sees one of his friends fleeing cops without any context while A Tribe Called Quest's Scenario is playing. Busta Rhymes says "bring it back, rewind" in the song, and the film plays in reverse from that friend's point of view to give the audience an idea of what events caused this. I thought that was a masterful device to lead into exposition. I won't claim that this is the first time a movie has ever been played in reverse on the cue of the music, but this is the first time I have ever seen it. The main trio also play in a garage rock band (titled something that has a different spelling on every website I try to check. It sounds like Oh-we-oh), and while those songs don't do as much for the story, they are all nice to listen to.

I really, really wanted to love Dope, but I can't. I refuse to call it overrated, because this rating reflects how much I enjoyed the film and I acknowledge that its cinematic quality is better, to the tune of at minimum 4 stars and maybe more. Its screenplay is its only serious flaw, but that screenplay is so bad that it takes me out of the movie completely. It feels like a cross between a generic Judd Apatow movie and a cheaply made Christian flick, and I mean both of those things in the worst way possible. The direction is great, the acting is often very good, but I think that for a comedy or even a lighthearted drama those things can only boost up the writing, which is the main attraction and the most important one to get right. It might also be a victim of circumstances, as this June movie may have been great then but at this point in time I can't imagine a situation in which I would ever choose to watch it instead of that other California rap coming-of-age story that I gave 5 stars to. Dope is worth watching once, but I cannot think of anything worth coming back for.

This is not such a bad movie that it warrants no stars. It is a bad movie. At best I could rate it 3 out of 10. But my rule has always been that the 1 is my lowest rating for bad films. The 0 is reserved for offensive films. This film allowed Eli Roth to offend my senses in the worst way possible. I'm quite used to being "offended" by Eli Roth, horror director notable for his torture porn movies such as Hostel. I like Hostel. His goal is to make you uncomfortable with his repulsing visuals and B-movie production values, and he accomplishes that very well. Knock Knock offends logic and good filmmaking. Warning, spoilers are present. Just read the review. There is no reason why you should ever watch this film. Secondary warning, this film is rated 18 for explicit sexual actions and is very political in nature. In order to fairly discuss it, I need to mildly describe some of these explicit actions and dissect political views. If you are uncomfortable with either of these things, you do not have to read them.

The story sounds like a porno, but trust me, if it was sexy in any way I would give it a better score, because at least that would give it a reason to exist. An architect and DJ played by Keanu Reeves of all people is a husband of 14 years and a father of two children. Two girls, played by the atrocious Ana De Armas and Lorenza Izzo, a woman who was totally cast because of her acting skills and totally not because she is Roth's fiance, go to his house because insert contrived excuse here, which Keanu believes because insert poorly written dialogue that fails to establish a reason for any of the action that happens in this film here. The first thirty minutes of this film are adequate. Then, as expected, there is something not quite right about the girls and things go horribly wrong. The pair have sex with Keanu, tie him up, and hold him prisoner in his own house, all while playing sadistic games and torturing him in ridiculous ways. It's kind of like the movie Funny Games in that respect. Personally, I hate Funny Games. It was cruel and shocking not because it served the story but because being shocking gets a response out of people, and it gets too meta for its own good near the end with a dumb deus ex machina that was lazily tossed in because the writers had no idea how to end the movie. Funny Games is about a pair of men that invade the lake house of a 1% family and torture and eventually kill all of them. Now, if there is one thing I can credit to Funny Games, it knew not to attempt to justify the actions of the murderers. It was a social satire about the rich and the powerful and how they don't necessarily correlate, but there was an awareness that duh, you do not want to say that the killers are doing the right thing by murdering a little kid. That seemed so obvious that I never consciously thought of it as a positive, but apparently the idea that you should not make the home invaders the good guys with no hint of parody or comedy is lost on Roth.

I have little idea what message Roth was trying to convey with this picture, because he botched the execution of his concepts so poorly, but my best guess would be something like "all men are sex-hungry animals that will screw anything for pleasure, are incapable of forming deep relationships, and women are always the victims in this." If you say that I'm interpreting it wrong, the only other viable message is that all women are skanks that exist only to ruin men, and that is even worse, so I'll stick with this one. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that Roth believes in both of these things simultaneously and gets to save face because he is treating both genders equally poorly. The women go through this game because Keanu had sex with them, being unfaithful to his wife and proving that he doesn't really care about his kids. We as an audience are expected to take this at face value. This is probably the biggest thing that offends me. There are two sex scenes in the movie, and in neither one of them is Keanu a willing participant. The first time, he tries to reject them for about an hour until they forcibly shove him against a wall and start blowing him. I guess you could say that he could have physically beaten them to get them off of him, but one girl would always be pinning him while the other was getting down and dirty. The second time, he is tied down to a bed and one girl bangs him while the other takes a video. Eli Roth wants us to believe that Keanu is the bad guy for having these sexual actions. It's like watching an 80s slasher movie, where all of the victims deserve to die because they're all nasty sluts and the virgin is the last survivor to take down the killer. In 2015, that just is not how the world works. Sexuality is something that can be experienced and discussed in ways that don't reflect so poorly on the perpetrators that they deserve death and humiliation. There's a scene at the beginning that exists in part to establish that Keanu's relationship with the rest of his family. Eli Roth wants me to be disgusted in a good way that Keanu would rather have sex than enjoy time with his kids, but I'm disgusted in a bad way that Roth thinks the state of having those thoughts, even if not acted upon, are worthy of a great punishment. When his wife says no, he accepts that and has a fun time playing with his kids. That is not a horrible person. That is a good father who sometimes wants things for himself. I don't care how rape is used within gender roles going by the dictionary definition of the word, Keanu was raped twice and had consenting sex never. We are expected to blame him for getting raped and act like it makes him a bad person. If the genders were reversed, there would be people asking for public executions of Roth. Because a man is taking the abuse, this is apparently supposed to be clever and subversive. It's not. It is insulting to real life rape victims, and it perpetuates the stereotype that men cannot ever be abused.

The twist ending is almost as bad, because we find out that these girls have done this to dozens of other men. Every one had sex with them, and every one died. Roth is trying so hard to make a grand statement about society, that all men cannot control sexual feelings, but with how this film is executed we're left to believe that, like Funny Games, the game was rigged the whole time, making any tension pointless. I've spent virtually none of this space talking about Knock Knock as a film, but it is truly awful. A thriller relies on having suspense in order to work, and there is not one moment where I slightly believed that any scenario other than the girls finding a contrived and unrealistic way to beat up Keanu would be the outcome. It slowly builds to an obvious conclusion, and there is virtually nothing stimulating to fill in the gaps. The entire last 45 minutes are so repetitive it numbed my brain. The girls will make fun of Keanu for being a horrible cheating bastard who is not worthy of having a family or life as nice as his, Keanu says "Please! No!' or "I'm a good person!" or the pizza monologue, but I will get to that later. Keanu gets basically two lines of dialogue to repeat until he pukes them up. The girls torture him by hitting him with sharp objects, shocking him, drawing dicks on artwork and pictures in the house, and using loud noises to make him go deaf. Roth doesn't even give us the decency of letting these scenes happen and move on to the next one. The girls will start one form of torture, remember that they have the attention span of a goldfish, and pick up another, only to go back to the first one at a later time. I cannot remember the order in which these torture scenes happen. There is one change of pace, in which the sassy black friend enters the movie for reasons. I know what these reasons are: Provide unfunny comic relief, abuse stereotypical black language like calling out the girls for being "ghetto hoes" and saying he's from "Oakland streets, bitch!", and die so that Roth can say the black guy died first. I just don't think that any of those reasons justifiy him being in the movie at all. If Roth really wanted to spice the plot up in the second half, he would have done it more.

The ending also hits us with the twist that Knock Knock was actually a comedy the whole time. I guess. In some ways this movie was so bad that it was almost funny. I can already see people saying that those parts were intentional comedy which makes the movie good. I have to take a stance against that. I can clearly tell what parts of this film were supposed to be funny. Keanu Reeves is overacting like crazy. He delivers a ridiculous speech about how the girls showing up was "FREE PIZZA! FREE ******* PIZZA THAT JUST SHOWED UP AT MY ******* DOOR!" This speech further tries to convince us that Keanu is an adulterer and a terrible man, because instead of calling it like it is and saying that he was banged against his will, he just says that the opportunity to have sex with the pair was too good to pass up, undermining his previous actions, derailing his character, and telling the audience something contradictory to what we were shown, but I digress. The point is that these things are intentionally funny. We are supposed to laugh at them. The problem is that these were not the funny parts. The pizza speech is stupid and never entertained me. What I did find entertaining was the basic continuity errors that litter the movie, repetitive cinematography which deals exclusively in tracking shots of hallways and closeups of faces, and how lazily Lorenza Izzo applied her makeup even though a full scene in the film is dedicated to her putting on makeup. Roth's other 2015 release The Green Inferno had this same problem. He understands that jokes can be funny, and that in the 2010s it has become accepted and even preferable in some cases to include jokes along with creepier elements, but he does not understand how to balance them in a way that makes the comedy feel natural and doesn't undermine the creepier elements. That is what happened in both of those movies. The jokes feel out of place next to the torture we see, and the hokey jokey atmosphere makes the torture significantly less terrifying, because it feels so fake. Hostel is not a realistic film, and Knock Knock was never going to be plausible in the world, but neither is a man with knives for hands killing kids in their dreams. Horror movies are scary because the viewer is afraid that what will happen to the characters will hurt them, because Freddy Kruger at least makes sense in the context of that fictional universe. Rules about how he works and what he is capable of are firmly established in the first act and remain constant throughout the film. Roth keeps finding ways to push the absurdity of the situation further and further to the point where the audience starts to understand that no matter what bad things happen, Keanu will somehow survive until the very end of the movie, because he has to, because if Roth wanted to kill him off he would have done it last time. The game of hide and seek, in which the girls look for Keanu with the threat to shoot him if found, is completely meaningless because Keanu pulls off a ridiculous escape, an even more pathetic re-capturing, and still has no damage done to him worse than how he was already bruised. Within the context of the first act, it makes no sense how the girls could get to his house again. Within the context of that, it makes no sense that the black friend dies from slipping and falling on grass, or for that matter why he confronted them at all instead of freeing Keanu from being tied to a chair. Even within the context of a universe in which nobody thinks logically about why Keanu has the girls in his house and any character can travel across the state of California by foot in less than a day, there is no logical explanation for how the girls could have been spying on Keanu for weeks, or why they would even follow a list of targets. In theory, wouldn't it be unnecessary to stalk potential victims if everybody you have ever gone after had sex with you and was killed? At that point it's just extra work. No matter who you pick, you know you will win. There is no logic to any action or motive anywhere in this film.

To get back on topic, the ending reveals that the whole movie was a joke. It also reveals the movie's true intent, I guess you could call it, even though as a self respecting and thinking human being you really shouldn't, as supported by Eli in interviews and press events about the flick. It is also a painfully unfunny pair of gags. In the second to last shot of the film, we see that Keanu Reeves is left for dead, nearly buried alive with only his head above the ground. Lorenzo Izzo comes back and drops his phone in front of him. We see that the phone is currently on Facebook, and that Keanu's account has posted the video taken by one of the girls in which he is tied down to a bed and has the other girl ride him in a schoolgirl uniform. You see? The movie was actually about how the internet is a horrible invention, because it allows word to travel faster than ever before. The world of online dating has created more abusive relationships, and more frequently causes married people to cheat, both because they met online and because the internet has a great supply of women willing to cheat. The internet causes men everywhere to have their reputations ruined at unbelievable speeds, destroying their social lives, connections to friends and family, and respect in the eyes of their employers and government. And when Ana De Armas sticks her finger into her own butt, the finger is actually a metaphor for Eli Roth flipping the bird to a metaphor for the audience stupid enough to sit through the entire film. Excluding that last scene, there is just as much evidence to support the Roth approved thematic statements as there is to support my interpretation of figuratively fisting his audience. And if you can even believe it, it gets even worse! Keanu tries to hit the delete button with his face and accidentally likes the post! Not only is this a cheap and annoyingly unfunny joke, but it punctuates quite possibly the stupidest scene in the history of film, and was the moment that I decided this review needed 4000 words instead of my usual 1000. Technology grabbing humanity by the balls was the entire message of the film. First of all, that means the offensive gender biases and portrayals are coincidental, extraneous to the plot and characters, and mot importantly, completely natural to Roth. It is worth noting again that Lorenza Izzo is the fiance of Eli Roth. A big deal is made out of Keanu being twice the age of the two girls. Eli Roth is not far off in years from Keanu, and also twice the age of Lorenza Izzo. This movie feels like a cry for help on his part, as if the entire film were really just a reflection of his lifestyle, such as his belief that cheating is an irredeemable sin, his belief that women are all evil and everybody other than his girlfriend is trying to seduce him away from that girlfriend and lead him astray, and his likely BDSM fetish. If this movie has absolutely nothing to do with society's gender roles, then he actually buys into disgusting philosophies about how men and women should be treated in sexual situations. It is possible that Roth thinks it is crazy that his future wife is half his age, and that he feels bad from time to time because in some ways he is exploiting her, but this is Eli Roth we are talking about, the primary example of a modern director who thrives on exploiting things for attention and money. The technology angle is also ridiculous because it only becomes a theme in the last 45 seconds of a 90 minute movie. Technology gets referenced a few times. He calls a cab from his phone and that cab fails to get the girls out. Was that supposed to represent humanity resisting against technology to do justice to the world? He attempts to call his wife from his iPad but cannot get a stable connection. Was that meant to tell us that technology will fail us in times when we need it most? Roth spends a long time lecturing the audience on gender roles, only to pull the rug out from under us and say that there are no themes to look deeper into relating to sex. Being the skeptical cynic that I am, I would guess that the technology angle was a cover for the real insulting and degrading messages of the film. He created a piece about how teenage girls and grown men are horrible, the studio hated it, and he haphazardly changed a few moments so that he could say his vision had nothing to do with those mean-spirited preachings, and that any political views on sex are not endorsed by him and you are the crazy one for even thinking that he was going in that direction. The second joke is that Keanu's wife and children come home to find the destruction left by the girls, and the youngest kid fires off a stupid one liner about Keanu having some kind of party. This can be chalked up under lines desperately trying to be funny but falling flat.

I haven't done much explaining of the actual filmmaking elements. They are bad, but as stated in the very beginning of this essay, not so awful that they would warrant such a bad rating. The acting is ridiculous, but they are all being directed like that. This is a remake of a 1970's exploitation film, and to match that atmosphere and let the campy tone set it, he wants his actors Nicolas Cage out in their performances. In that sense I like Keanu Reeves' performance in the film. A stuntman by nature, Reeves is clearly game for just about anything that Roth wants to throw at him. He embodies and embraces spending about half of the movie with his wrists tied to heavy objects. The two girls are less impressive. De Armas at least looks like she is having fun with her role. She goes for maximum ham, which doesn't always come through, but her thick Spanish accent holds her back in some respects and that isn't quite fair to judge her on. Izzo phones this in. At no point does she look like she had fun going crazy. Her acting isn't just bad or insane, both of which would be acceptable in this environment, it's stilted and lifeless. I get the impression that Reeves and De Armas were probably laughing hard between shooting scenes, reveling in how absurd they get to act, while Izzo stands alone in a corner, taking herself way too seriously for the type of movie that this is. The production design is nice. The art sculptures owned by Keanu's wife are often impressive, and the family photos do a nice job of nailing the fake and picturesque vibe that Roth was so obviously trying to capture. The camera spins so much that it breaks the 180 degree rule constantly, to the extent where I was never able to figure out where certain rooms of the house were in relation to others. The script fluctuates from being okay (most of the first act) and garbage (any line after the first act which required an original thought by the writers). I think one of the biggest cinematic flaws was the insistence on making the girls as obnoxious as possible. They are kind of heroes in this story, whether or not they should be. Roth has them positioned as executioners of sinners to preserve marriages everywhere. They are so irritating and insufferable that there was no way I could tolerate them, let alone think about rooting for them, asides from the obvious problem of being morally flimsy characters against a person with a legitimate case written as an ignorant strawman. Their dialogue is filled with loud teenage girl shrieks and laughter. I'm not sure what their characters' ages are, as De Armas never gives a number and Izzo gives about eight, but they act like 15 year olds. They both get lines that would normally indicate unlikable brats that go crazy over a Harry Styles poster. They are just so annoying that I cannot listen to them.

Of course, this movie also contains plenty of the 'offensive' Roth tropes, like an asthmatic, an animal constantly put in peril, constant gay slurs, and an abuse of the word 'retard'. None of these advance plots or develop characters, they are just casually tossed into dialogue to stir a reaction out of people. I think this is the third or fourth time I have written that sentence. Therein lies the problem, that no matter what you think of the words themselves Roth is way too willing to rest on his laurels and has not tried to advance his basic formula in years. It gets even worse though, because in 2015 there is no reaction to get. Those words aren't actually shocking or offensive anymore. American society just shrugs it off and says he's being uncool about his treatment of others. He should not be writing those lines in, but nobody really cares about a crappy B-movie that uses them. There is nobody left to shock. Either people who were offended by old Roth refuse to watch his newer films, or people who loved old Roth watch this disappointed at the lack of genuinely disturbing things that happen. In the gore department, this is probably the most tame Roth has ever been. To his mild credit he does embrace the erotic thriller genre, and his goal is more to get under your skin psychologically than to cut your skin and laugh as a swimming pool of blood explodes on your screen. The death is almost shot in a PG-13 way. The black friend dies in a quick cutting mess with very little blood shown, and Keanu's death is just implied at the end of the film. We never get to see Keanu killed. The biggest physical sign of pain he shows is a bloody chest from being stabbed with a work, but the blood is always hidden under the shirt and could have gotten a 12A rating if the movie around it was Spiderman. There is nobody left to feel an emotion of any kind from an Eli Roth film. Everybody has already picked a side, and Knock Knock does nothing to up the ante for those who decided they wanted to see more. A waste of time, space, and valuable filmography in the Keanussance, Knock Knock is just an all around unpleasant experience, not in the way that Eli Roth wants to be disturbing but in the way that it is an annoying trek to sit through. Filled to the brim with questionable gender politics, a lack of understanding of sexual abuse, and repetitive and generic second half of relatively tame torture, this film is both boring and offensive, and should be doomed to the depths of hell for eternity.

Roth has always been quite hit and miss with me, and one of the reasons is because his depictions of women are borderline misogynistic, so this doesn't surprise me at all really.

But a really good review overall ursaguy, this was so interesting to read

I really liked Knock Knock, but I can certainly understand somebody else hating it. For me, it was very effective as a cautionary tale for married men. There's one point of yours that I would strongly disagree with though. The first time they had sex, he was in no way raped. Sure, there was some convincing done by the girls, but after that he was a full blown willing participant. Nice review!

This review isn't fair. I don't know if this movie is good or bad. I just know that it gave me something that I wasn't expecting, and in this case that's not a good thing. The Final Girls lured me in with a premise made specifically for me. A trope-biting horror-comedy about a girl who goes into the universe of a cult horror B-movie that her mom starred in, along with her four friends that exist mostly to be slashed. That's such a genius premise. I was expecting a witty and gory joyride that might make a few funny remarks about the nature of cult movies and might even have something meaningful worth saying about The Final Girl as a cliche. I got Wet Hot American Summer, but like there's a serial killer though. I love low budget horror-comedies, but at this point I think even I'm getting sick of them. Why does nobody want to take their scary movies seriously anymore? This is a comedy about horror first, a drama about a daughter meeting a younger form of her mother second, and a horror movie never.

It's barely even a comedy about horror, because it is so unfocused in what it wants to satirize. The movie within the movie is called Camp Bloodbath, an 80's slasher flick that is specifically a parody of the Friday the 13th movies, complete with a Kumbaya circle of summer camp counselors. It frequently ignores this fact to make comments on more modern horror movies, with halfhearted jump scares galore and even a completely out of place Purge reference. I can't tell if the jump scares were supposed to be funny or scary, but they were neither. The film also, I think unintentionally, abuses my most hated horror cliche that isn't shared by many people, the climactic fight scene in such a dark setting that you can't actually tell what happens. This is obnoxious. I prefer to actually see the victims get killed, and so the decision to use poor lightning and frantic cuts, even if I understand why. There is virtually no gore. This movie is rated PG-13, and I'm never one to talk about ratings making something better, but in order to effectively poke fun at R rated material, this probably should have been R rated. The rest of the jokes are quite unfunny, and even mean-spirited in some places. A cast of modern kids gets sucked into the world of an old movie, and as such the film spends time laughing at the old people for being old. Not knowing what an iPhone or internet is makes for poor humor, but there's an insulting sense of anything old being lame and terrible in the air. Ha, old people movies are way worse than new movies! In a more figurative sense, the jokes are slightly mean-spirited towards horror movies. That part is definitely more of an abstract interpretation than a direct statement by the writer, but there is a ton of evidence in favor of it. I think that a good parody needs thorough love, so that the people making the parody understand the subject enough to know what to comment on and like it enough to think like a genre fan. This film gave me the impression that Todd Strauss-Schulson has never watched a horror movie in full, or didn't like the one that he did. There's a difference between fun ribbing and mean jabs, and a lot of jokes fall definitively into the latter category. The character's don't go to a screening of a horror classic, they go to a cult movie classic. They only like Camp Bloodbath ironically, and even then only one of the main five teens actually wants to be there to watch the movie. It's as if by virtue of being new, Strauss thinks he is above the old films. Most of the other jokes are low hanging fruit. There was not a single joke that I couldn't have made myself. I saw every one coming because there were all obvious. There was nothing inventive, risky, or bold about any gag. I suppose one way in which it did accurately capture the spirit of bad horror movies is by letting me relive those seconds of boredom between an obvious setup and a lame scare, except the scares are replaced with bad punchlines, except for when the scare is the bad punchline. As such, none of the laughs come from the writing. The acting isn't enough to compensate but does get dangerously close at times. Angela Trimbur chews scenery with her mouth open, and Adam DeVine played the exact opposite of his Modern Family character. I enjoyed both of those things tremendously, but that might not have the same impact for others. Most of the main cast puts real effort into giving at least decent performances. Because that's just the type of movie this is, every actor other than Taissa Farmiga only gets one note to play, but the bit parts are well executed and Farmiga is fine considering the script she was handed.

The camerawork looked pretty, but for the sake of nitpicking the colors looked too pretty. Everything in the 80s movie was way more vibrant than it should have been. 50's flashback scenes are shot in black and white. I would have expected the 80's scenes to have a weird filter that dulled colors in order to feel more realistic, while the real life scenes would be shot normally. Maybe the studio didn't think teens would pay attention if the colors weren't professionally polished, but it would have been a chance to make this film stand out. Other small things that bothered me were the inconsistency of the killer and how long the final joke was dragged out. It's established pretty early on that the killer is summoned by sexual acts. That's fine, but you need to stick to it so that your plot makes sense. The killer has absolutely no problem killing the new cast, who have no sexual activity in the universe of the movie and never provoke him. Or does he? This movie operates on Marvel rules. Most characters die once but are brought back later. Thomas Middleditch (Richard Hendricks on Silicon Valley, a fantastic actor who really should have been used more) dies three times. The end joke of the movie is what I expected. It's pretty obvious that through some contrived means, the killer isn't really dead. I don't want to get more specific than that to avoid spoiling the joke, but I correctly guessed the exact joke, as well as an alternate joke that would have been more creative and would have played directly off of previously established rules of the universe. Eventually you stop caring because the conclusion is too obvious.

So what did I like? The few jokes that restrained themselves specifically to the world of 80's slashers mostly worked. There's a John Carpenter imitator composing the score, and the characters know the killer is coming whenever they hear the first few notes of his theme. That's a clever plot device, and the score sounds good enough to stand on its own. The drama between Max and her mother is likewise limited in its screen time but usually very good when it does get a chance to come up. While not exploring the deeper meaning of any genre cliches, the film is interested in exploring the logistics of a person talking to a loved one as a character instead of the human being that they held such a close bond to. I think if the movie was just about that, it would be a better made and more enjoyable product, and it wouldn't feel like the bait-and-switch that I got out of it. I might be able to give it a recommendation if you're looking for a fun comedy to casually watch with friends and saw one of the Jason movies on HBO ten years ago, but if you're a horror fan you will probably not appreciate how little horror is involved, and if you're a veteran of horror trope comedies you will definitely have heard these jokes before. This is not a terrible movie, but unfortunately it is one without a lot of value to me.

The short version of my thoughts are that The Green Inferno is a great idea for a movie that looks pretty but is held back by an awful script. Of course, being an Eli Roth movie, there is a long version. This review goes over the entire plot in detail, so if you're spoilerphobic you should not read this, but I think with an Eli Roth movie either you've already seen it or you refuse to see it. I also talk about the ending to Cannibal Ferox, so if you haven't seen that and care you should skip this too.

To start with a complement, I love the concept. Eli Roth wanted to pay homage to the 70's era of foreign rainforest cannibal movies, but understood the need to update those tales. He came up with student activists that go to save a forest and its indigenous people in Peru, only to find out that the people they're attempting to save are cannibalistic. That's a really clever idea. Like Knock Knock, there is a lot of political criticism on the screen, but unlike Knock Knock the messages aren't terrible. Roth really hates "slacktivism", a term used to describe people (usually white, suburban, middle class people between the ages of 18 and 35) who pretend to care about a social cause for selfish reasons, usually to profit or make themselves look like a better person. You could argue that the biggest offender of this trait is almost as much of a villain as the cannibals. I think that by physically going to Peru and risking your life to save a forest and tribe, you've moved beyond slacking into genuine activism, and that very few of the characters really deserved their fates, but it's more subtle than I expected. It's also progressive for a Roth film in a few ways. He only uses "retarded" and "gay" as synonyms for lame once each, and even has a likable character that the audience can root for to see not get murdered. There is a lesbian couple portrayed not negatively. It isn't quite as gory as you might expect either. It has a lot of blood, obviously, but there's a picture in your head when you think of an Eli Roth movie about cannibals, and that picture is probably worse than the actual movie. The first death (the black guy, because Roth) is brutal to sit through, but after that most of the blood is off the screen.

Visually this movie is great. It might be the best looking horror movie in years. The colors are lush, the environments are lovely, but most of all the cannibals look great. The makeup and costume design is fantastic. All of the tribal leaders have a unique set of bones around their face. The body paint varies depending on age and rank of the people. It's a great thing Roth did to establish that each one is different. They don't really get a character, but their grunts and expressions give the audience something, and you can easily distinguish them. The CGI animals are less impressive, but not outright terrible, especially considering the budget. The practical gore effects are gory, and that's really all you hope for from Roth. That death of the black guy works so well to put a bad feeling in your gut because all of the severed limbs look like they're really there, a nice change of pace from artificial gore of recent horror quickies. Probably the biggest thing I can say in favor of The Green Inferno is that it is creative, and if you can be original at worst your movie is okay to me. That's not to say it doesn't take some elements from other movies. Roth credits an extensive list of Italian cannibal films that inspired him near the end, but the film is most obviously influenced by Cannibal Holocaust, down to the title being the same as the movie within that movie.

Eventually I have to talk about characters. They're all stocks, with one thing about the character that is more of a backstory than a trait (being the vegan is not a character or a personality, it's just a small part of the life of a real character). There are two exceptions. Lorenza Izzo is apparently so good in bed that her husband Roth is casting her in every movie he makes until he dies. She gets to be the generic main girl. Her acting is better here than it is in Knock Knock, but that might be because she gets more to do. We see her get tortured by the tribe, and she sells it. We see her get abandoned by her friends and left for dead, and she sells that. It's an adequate performance if not especially challenging, and I respect the decision to have one of the student activists be the main character at all. This is kind of like a cross between a slasher movie and a cannibal movie, and neither one of those genres are known for having a likable and relatable person as their protagonists, usually preferring to focus on the people doing the killing. The other character worth noting is Alejandro, the leader of the group and the student villain played by Ariel Levy. He is too good at his job. The character is obviously supposed to be the annoying one, and Roth doesn't want me to like him, but that doesn't make it any less insufferable. He is an ******* through his actions and words. He works with a construction company to get money from bulldozing the forest after setting up a publicity stunt and tricking other students into thinking that the activism is genuine, and he is happy when the black guy dies because they picked off the fattest one. There is a reprehensible villain, just by doing those two things. Roth doesn't know where to stop, and neither does Levy, and eventually the character just becomes obnoxious. It becomes a cartoon, a caricature of a real person, and as Levy hams it up to an annoying extreme you start to wonder why any of the other students follow him at all. He takes his work way too seriously, throwing people out of meetings for minor offenses and acting like a military recruit telling people that they're not ready or not tough enough to do the intense work of using cell phones to take video. This is obviously an unrealistic movie, but the character is unrealistic with how horrible of a person he is. It's the same problem I have with The Gallows. The unlikable douchebag is unlikable at the ten minute mark of the film, so there is no need to keep on hammering home the point that he's a douchebag, but through a combination of an annoying screenplay that doesn't know when to quit and poor line reads the film keeps on going anyway. The character is done slightly better here than he is in The Gallows, mostly due to the rest of the students turning on him here as opposed to that other horror mess in which all of the characters act like he's a decent guy.

One thing unique to this horror douchebag is a masturbation scene. The students need to think clearly to come up with an escape plan. A good release helps you think clearly. Put two and two together and you have a man masturbating in a prison cell on film. Roth tops it off with juvenile over-exaggerated sound effects. There are a few jokes put into the movie, and like I said in my review of Knock Knock, Roth understands that in the modern era of horror it has become common to mix horror and comedy, but he doesn't understand how to cohesively blend those elements together. The contrast is way worse in this movie. It doesn't help that the jokes never rise above frat boy levels of clever. A spider bites a man's penis because penises are funny. We see the cannibals eating human flesh, and then one of the girls has to take a dump in the cell (like the masturbation, an over the top sound effect ruins the joke before it gets started). A tension-filled escape scene is going on, and then the cannibals get the munchies from eating weed. The film regularly builds some scary moments, but it throws them away every time it makes a dumb joke. Not a single one of these jokes are funny. They will leave you more confused than anything. Why put them in the movie at all? Roth actually had something nice going on. The jokes take over the movie in the second half, but I was actually liking the first half. It was almost entirely filler, but it was well made filler. Roth built a really tense situation with the students chained to trees standing up against the Peruvian militia. Humans fighting humans was interesting, and some more of that couldn't have hurt. It was actually frightening because this character that I want to see live is being threatened in a serious context. There were good scenes after the jokes too. One girl gets killed off camera, and you only know after the fact because the cannibals feed the students her skin and her girlfriend sees her tattoos. That was a creepy scene and a way more clever way to kill someone off then seeing another body get chopped up.

The last 5 minutes are just awful. Roth takes bits and pieces from other old horror movies, and I can't claim to have seen them all, but I have seen Cannibal Ferox. In that movie, a girl goes to the Amazon to see if cannibals exist there, she finds out that they do, she returns to civilization, and she claims that cannibals aren't real. Lorenza Izzo survives the cannibals, goes back to her college, and says that no cannibals exist and that the native people saved her life. I don't understand either of those endings. It was stupid 30 years ago and it's stupid now. There is no rational explanation for why the final girl should defend the tribe that nearly killed her and murdered her friends. It feels like Roth just wanted to toss in a reference to Cannibal Ferox, so he lazily tacked on a scene where she reenacts it. After that, Lorenza Izzo has a dream that Alejandro escaped the jungle. She turns into a vampire and bites him. For reasons. I'll get back to you when somebody figures out what those reasons are. After that, the credits roll, and the actors' twitter handles are on the screen next to their name. After that, there's a sequel begging credits scene where we find out that Alejandro is still alive in the jungle. It's kind of funny because no sequel will be made. This film flopped and the studio that produced it went bankrupt between its completion in 2013 and its release in 2015. That's for the best. Sometimes it's scary, and it's fun to watch Roth go crazy visually and technically, and it's even more fun to realize that a movie about rainforest cannibals got a mainstream theatrical release, but the script is really dumb and the acting isn't good enough to overcome it. I mentioned it in passing, but there's only about an hour of plot. The beginning third and very ending are worthless, and that makes it too boring to sit through for me to watch ever again. If Roth cut the jokes out, this could have been a great movie. As is, it's just okay. If you're a Roth fan and you haven't already seen this, you'll probably like it. If you're just okay on him, I don't see this changing your life but it's easily the best thing he's done in years.

This is weird, you're last few films are the exact same as mine (except for Dope).


So to discuss them a little bit:

The Visit was a surprise to me. It had a decent amount of scares in it, despite it being an entry in a tired found footage genre. I am already fed up with them, but this was a decent entry.

Knock Knock, I didn't hate it as much as you, but it's not a good movie. I never found Reeves to be the bad guy though and never believed anything the girls said.



Since the one girl was his wife, I took it as a way of Roth saying to her "I'll never cheat honey, I swear. Look, this is what happens to men who cheat, regardless of how it happens". Whatever, it was weird. It's also a remake of a 70's flick, Death Game.

The Final Girls I liked this one more than you, but I agree with the problems you had with it. The PG-13 rating crippled this film. The amount of potential here was great, yet they settled for good. More drama than expected and not as many laughs, but still good entertainment.

The Green Inferno I went to a special screening of Cannibal Ferox with Roth there as the host. He did a Q and A afterwards about his 'next' project, which was called The Green Inferno and would be a direct homage to the cannibal films, specifically Ferox and Holocaust. So I didn't expect anything new or different, just a guy who likes crappy movies making one of his own.

__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

I thought The Green Inferno was decent, but what impresses me is that you remember the difference between Cannibal Ferox and Holocaust.

They should have had more drama, no comedy and horror as a background. Emotional interactions between mother and daughter was the best thing, everything else wasn't so good. It looked good, though.

I genuinley love Cannibal Holocaust. It would be on my ten favorites list, but I can't support the animal snuff thing. I think your idea of Knock Knock is interesting, but to be blunt I don't care enough to look deeper at the dialogue. I think you're right about Roth's intended message by casting his wife, but having a deliberately older man play the movie husband and a deliberately older man be the real husband sends some unintentional ideas. I think if I rated it on its quality it would be a little bit lower but pretty close to what you gave it.

@Tugg , you're right. The drama was the best executed of the 3 genres they tried to balance. Ultimately, I think they could have succeeded with any one of the genres as long as they focused themselves on one.

That weed/munchies scene was funny and that's one of the weird elements Roth seems to always put in his films. Odd comedic bits out of nowhere. Pancakes anyone???

You're right about it looking beautiful. One of the highlights for sure.

My thoughts on the ending were that she didn't want them to go back there and possibly find the leader guy alive. She left him back there to die. I wouldn't really consider the people she was with friends, she just met them. Either way, it is a weak ending that is only there to pay homage to those earlier films. That's for sure, but if I had to justify it in someway, that would be my answer.

Also she did not become a vampire. She became a cannibal with messed up teeth. Why would she become a vampire in a movie about cannibal? That makes no sense. The messed up teeth was simply a visual way to tell you she has nightmares about becoming one of them. Weird, again, I know. It needed to end on a better note. It simply fades off, very weak.

Black guy isn't first to die, many people don't make it out of the plane crash alive. If you want to argue that he's the first of those they've captured to die, then sure. Again, in a film that pays homage to those types of movies, I wouldn't expect anything else.

He was also in Knock Knock I believe, as the gay friend picking up the art piece.

I don't know how vampire teeth make sense, but that's what they looked like. That whole scene felt tacked on, which makes sense considering the production history. I would guess Roth's 2013 cut of the film ended at the college meeting, and when Blumhouse got the rights they wanted a scare to end the movie with so Roth had to cobble something together quickly (I know they did that to Unfriended). The body count was probably at around 15 before the cannibals even showed up on screen, but I like to make fun of Rothisms. He was the first guy to die from the thing that was advertised on the poster as the killers. You're right about the black guy being a repeat actor. He was also second unit director on Inferno. Roth has always bounced around tones, but Inferno and especially Knock Knock feel like they have more jokes and less horror than the average film from him. I would be quite surprised if he ever made another movie. Inferno was stuck in distribution hell for years and lost money on release, and Knock Knock went straight to VOD.

I think he is a big enough name in the horror community to keep a career going for a bit. Just because the film went to VOD doesn't mean it won't successful.

Even though it felt tacked on, it makes sense that she would have nightmares from her ordeal.