Dir - Eli Roth
Overall: MEH
Sixteen years in the making, but Eli Roth finally unleashed his full-length Thanksgiving after dropping the hilarious faux-trailer in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double feature. Bailing on the throwback vibe of the aforementioned trailer, Rodriguez' Machete, and Jason Eisner's Hobo with a Shotgun, Roth delivers a contemporary-set, formulaic slasher outing that is comparatively more in line with your Terrorizers or the late 90s abysmal teen horror boom than anything adhering to 70s exploitation. Hinging on an over-the-top Black Friday fiasco gone deadly, the plot gets cooking in an appropriately campy manner, even if most of the actors take the proceedings more seriously than they deserve. Though Roth's penchant for snarky humor that is either intentionally or unintentionally cringe-adjacent is as on point as ever, the practical, nauseating gore effects and kill scenes are delightfully ridiculous and worthy of some laugh-out-loud gasps. Elsewhere though, this is painfully generic stuff that will hardly convert those who have long tuned-out slasher movies, holiday-themed or otherwise. Its point seems to be in delighting the already converted though so in that respect, it gets the job done.
Dir - Simon Ross
Overall: MEH
Spearheaded by an emotionally exhaustive performance from Natalia Cordova-Buckley, director Simon Ross' full-length debut The Portrait plays a bog-standard psychological horror game that affords few surprises. Scripted by producer David Griffiths, the artwork of the title is a self-portrait of Ryan Kwanten's odious ancestor who was a sadistic scholar and according to his wife Buckley, looks exactly like him. There is plenty going on here as Buckley is wrought with guilt after having inadvertently caused her husband's permanent brain damage due to a domestic quarrel, rendering him mute and unpredictably violent, which is not helped by the unassuming painting in the attic that casts a sinister aura over a wave of frustrated trauma that is thick enough that it could be cut with a knife. There is little doubt that the quasi-supernatural elements, (which are underplayed to begin with), are not entirely in the troubled psyche of our protagonist, which makes this more of a melancholy affair than anything since we are likely just witnessing the impassioned breakdown of a woman who only wants to make amends in a desperate attempt at a miracle that will ease her own grief. It fails to challenge the tropes that have long been laid-out by similar stories, but Ross maintains a sorrowful tone which makes Buckley's commitment that much more powerful.
Dir - Jared Moshe
Overall: GOOD
An unassuming sci-fi drama that removes all of the aesthetic spectacle from the genre, Jared Moshe's third feature Aporia instead has a simple, emotional residence concerning the conundrum of undoing the past in order to negate traumatic episodes in our lives. The pseudo-science details are wisely left vague, since dedicating more screen time to a plausible time travel explanation would have pushed things into unintentionally goofy terrain, not to mention the fact that Moshe's script is about its characters and not its tech. Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, and Payman Maadi are all wonderful in their respective performances as a husband/wife duo and their colleague who undergo a series of universe-altering experiments after each one proves successful. Once things get going, none of their behavior is motivated by selfish impulses as the weight of their actions are persistently debated and mused over until they can justify removing a troublesome life in order to benefit many others. It is a common quagmire for science fiction works to tackle, yet it is also thankfully one that is ideally suited to explore the type of deep-seated grief that comes with fate's cruel gut-punches.
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