Cheap Thrills on the Cheap

The world of horror tends to go through phases, often movies with very similar ideas and themes will come out around the same time. We are currently experiencing the "How far would you go for money" phase. It started with Would You Rather and has continued with Cheap Thrills and an upcoming film called 13 Sins. Netflix is currently offering Would You Rather and recently I had the pleasure of watching Cheap Thrills on one of the "Cheap Date Nights" at The Rio Theatre.

I can e-mail these to you if you'd like. 

So far Cheap Thrills has proved the most compelling, pitting a pair of reunited childhood friends against each other in a competition to see who can complete increasingly gruesome tasks first for various amounts of cold hard cash. These two men show just what some people will be willing to do when they've hit rock bottom. Pat Healy (The Innkeepers) did a great job as Craig, the protagonist, crafting a character who you can't help but root for the whole time and Ethan Embry (Once Upon A Time) managed to make Vince, the debt collector, a well rounded and likeable person.

I don't want blood all over the carpet.

Now as great as those performances were, I was surprised by what stuck with me the most by the end of the film. That was the relationship between Sara Paxton's (The Innkeepers, The Last House on the Left) character Violet and Colin played by David Koechner (Anchorman). On first instinct one would assume that this couple was simply a despondent, social media obsessed gold digger and her dweeby rich older husband. But as the film progresses we discover that the two share a depraved, twisted bond and while their marriage is no wheres near typical, they genuinely love each other in their own sick way. What I really took away from this film, rather than the intended "what would you be willing to do for money", was to not judge other people's relationships because you can never really know what it is that brings them together.

Here's a link to an awesome Kickstarter campaign for Luchagore's next project El Gigante, which you should definitely contribute to and share around. After all, a couple of my performances are featured in the video ;)