+ Most Tasteless Movie of the Year
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| The effective poster for Nicolás Lopez's Aftershock |
Some unbearable Americans and some unbearable Chileans go all in, partying and sightseeing in Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile, before a major earthquake throws them into deadly horrors.
Aftershock has got to be a candidate as Worst Movie of the Year 2012: All of its characters are grotesquely juvenile in their behavior, although one of them, the film's star actor/co-writer/co-producer Eli Roth (Clown (2014)) is really 40 years old. SPOILER The joy in seeing them all get slaughtered, which is the easily predictable outcome, if you know the rationale behind the movie, is, - unfortunately, - as non-existing as our sympathy with them. Once the violence and gore sparks in, we are depressed and annoyed at the characters to the point where seeing their gruesome deaths do nothing to alleviate the constipated downer that Aftershock is.
Roth is flat out embarrassing in the film.
What makes the venture even worse is that it is inspired by one of Chile's terrible earthquakes, the massive 8.8 quake in 2010 that cost at least 525 lives and thousands of homes. This is here turned into cheap exploitation clay in the hands of Roth and co-writer/director Nicolás López (Promedio Rojo (2003)), a very dubious Chilean director. The filmmakers even shot their trash partially at the actual places of the very recent destruction and death. - Sometimes tastelessness can be cool or fun, but in the case of Aftershock, it just smells bad. Really bad. In spite of its cool tagline, - 'The only thing more terrifying than mother nature is human nature', - Aftershock is resounding garbage. Roth and López co-wrote the script with Guillermo Amoedo (Knock Knock (2015)).
It is some satisfaction, at least, that audiences have stayed away from it in droves: Its very limited US release earned it just 40 grand from 110 theaters in its opening weekend, (for a good release, this is possible from just a handful of theaters.) Interestingly, Roth is reported to have gotten the film financed by a group of doctors from Buffalo, NY. - Maybe a new horror film from him could be about how a famous director cheats a group of doctors into spending millions on a shit movie that never makes a buck, - and then gets punished for it a hundred ways from Sunday.
(But no, in actual reality Roth is soon premiering his cannibal genre revival, The Green Inferno (2013), and he is also producing a new horror film with Peter Stormare as a homicidal Clown (2014).)
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Cost: 2 mil. $
Box office: 294k $
= Box office disaster (returned 0.14 times its cost)
[Aftershock premiered 12 September (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 89 minutes. Shooting took place in Chile. The film was cut from an initial NC-17 rating to achieve an R rating. It opened #45 to a 40k $ first weekend in North America in 110 theaters, ending up with a 58k $ gross (19.7 % of the total gross) domestically. North America was the film's 3rd biggest market. Its biggest and 2nd biggest were UAE with 112k $ (38.1 %) and Singapore with 67k $ (22.8 %). Reportedly the film's costs were covered from distribution rights sales, and so the distribution companies took the loss in this case. López returned with Que Pena Tu Familia (2012). Aftershock is rotten at 39 % with a 4.60/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Aftershock?
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