Eli Roth can make us laugh at something revolting, then regret the laugh. We rate his grisly comic timing, but Thanksgiving needs a better plot and Borderlands gives us little reason to follow him beyond horror.
Fi1m perspective
In Thanksgiving (2023), shoppers scramble for a free waffle iron while people are being injured around them. We laughed at their determination, then felt grubby because Roth keeps the bargain-hunting going while people get hurt. Production designer Peter Mihaichuk’s fluorescent store and cinematographer Milan Chadima’s orange-lit car park give the crowd a clear route from darkness into light. Editors Michele Conroy and Michel Aller cut low, amongst trolleys and ankles, so the injuries arrive in glimpses. This is Roth working well: a nasty joke, timed properly.
With Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), Roth set out to make an audience feel physically unwell. His taste for horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s is plain in the elaborate injuries. He later tried family fantasy with The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018), but the more interesting change comes within his horror work. Thanksgiving, expanded from his fake trailer for Grindhouse (2007), wants us to laugh as we flinch, and for its first hour largely succeeds.
The difficulty is what happens between the set pieces. In Thanksgiving, the jokes about shopping and greed are largely spent in the opening riot, and the thin whodunnit leaves the middle hour marking time. The humour makes this tolerable if slashers are your pleasure, though the opening promises a sharper film than Roth delivers. Once he has stopped sending up the shoppers, he has little left to say about them.
Borderlands (2024) exposes that weakness without the compensating pleasure of a well-timed shock. Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie supply explanations before giving the characters reasons to matter, while muddled shootouts keep everybody occupied. Cate Blanchett brings energy, but the jokes scarcely distinguish one member of the group from another. We found it wearying from the opening exposition, and the busy direction never gives this poor action comedy much life.
In Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Roth’s Donny Donowitz has a baseball bat and a fixed expression. It is a narrow performance in a film whose pleasures lie with other actors, and offers little evidence of the comic timing he can manage as a director. We would start with Thanksgiving, provided inventive injuries matter more to you than a convincing mystery.
Biography
Eli Roth is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He was born on 18 April 1972 in Newton, Massachusetts, and studied at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Roth is known for horror films including Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005). He directed, produced and co-wrote the story for the 2023 slasher Thanksgiving, based on a fake trailer he made for Grindhouse (2007). As an actor, he played Sgt. Donny Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) and appeared in Death Proof (2007). He has been associated with the group of filmmakers known as the Splat Pack.
