Remember in Grindhouse, how they had all those trailers from different filmmakers? And how despite the fact that the movie itself didn’t do that well, those trailers have been spawning actual, feature length movies?
Eli Roth’s holiday slasher movie will be the next one, apparently.
The Grindhouse spawn actually have a good record. Machete is entertainingly ridiculous and marks one of the few times lately Robert Rodriguez has been tolerable. Hobo With a Shotgun was actually a very, very good tribute to the nastier crime B-movies of the ’80s; it was bleak as hell, but Rutger Hauer’s performance combined with the fact that it was the kind of movie willing to torch an entire school bus of children to Disco Inferno made it stand out.
That said, I can’t say I’m excited for Thanksgiving for two reasons. One, there’s literally nothing there whatsoever in terms of, y’know, content. The trailer WAS the movie.
Two, I’d really kind of hoped that Eli Roth had been relegated to the Hollywood dust bin by now. He’s OK, as a filmmaker, but if he hadn’t somehow glommed onto Quentin Tarantino, nobody would have any idea who he is.
He’s also seemingly pretty tone-deaf about this whole thing. He’s promising to make the movie scary. How? That was why the trailer worked: the premise was so inherently absurd that it functioned as a great parody of stupid ’80s slasher movies. So now you’re saying you basically want to make a self-aware, stupid ’80s slasher movie?
Great. Just do us all a favor, and cut the turkey humping.