Tell me a story

An American, known only as The Gringo (and played by Eli Roth), is on a vacation in Chile with two of his South American buddies. They spend most of their time partying and trying to get laid, and when they meet three single women, that gets a little easier. The six begin traveling together, and it’s all fun and games until an earthquake strikes while they’re in a club. And then the nightmare begins.

Aftershock. Directed by Nicolás López. Written by Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolás López , and Eli Roth.

My Rating

 
I really like the premise of an earthquake unleashing a series of horrors on a group of people, and for half the movie, that concept is executed in an engaging manner. First, as is customary in horror films, we spend some time getting to know our main characters. There’s the horny Gringo, the rich asshole Pollo, the heart-broken Ariel, the nondescript Irina, the party girl Kylie, and Kylie’s serious big sister Monica. We spend maybe a full half hour with them before we settle into the what we all came to see.

Once the ground starts shaking, things get ugly fast. People are crushed and dismembered, and our gang has to find their way to safety. But when an entire city begins panicking, it’s not that easy, particularly when aftershocks keep throwing obstacles in their way. I very much enjoyed watching them try to navigate through the city of Valparaíso, avoiding riot police and looters, trying to make their way to a hospital. It’s when a group of escaped prison inmates enter the story that things take a bad turn. Bad for the characters. Bad for the audience.

What I’d liked about the movie up until that point was that they were running to a place and had to deal with whatever obstacles befell them, instead of just mindlessly running from something. The Earth and the chaos she caused was a far more interesting villain than murderers and rapists. Sure that would have made the movie more disaster film than horror, but I think that would have been the stronger choice.
 

Even though you can sum up all six characters in as few words as I did above, they’re all fairly believable as human beings. You could envision meeting them in the real world, though I don’t know if you’d like any of them if you did. Pollo (played by Nicolás Martínez) and Kylie (played by Lorenza Izzo) were the most interesting characters to me because even though they both start of unlikable, they show some growth once their lives are at stake. Irina (Natasha Yarovenko) and Monica (played by Andrea Osvárt) couldn’t have been less interesting. Ariel (played by Ariel Levy) was likable, where as the Gringo was just a pathetic loser with no noticeable redeeming qualities.

Creep much, Gringo?

Going back to Monica for a moment, the movie starts painting her as the final girl from the moment we meet her. The final girl trope is a standard in horror movies where the last remaining survivor in a group of friends is an intelligent, cautious and virginal girl, often possessing masculine traits like short hair. I won’t spoil the movie and say if Monica is or isn’t a final girl, but I will say you probably won’t care if she lives or dies.

Now there’s a point I’d like to discuss regarding a specific character, but it would give too much away to go in depth. Suffice it to say that in the movie’s climax, a character starts acting in a completely different way than we’ve seen before, and it’s 100% unbelievable, and it totally ruins the movie. That sucks because the final surprise of the movie was actually pretty cool and unexpected. What came right before it though steals its impact.

The final thing I’ll say about the characters, is that I wish we had spent more time with the women away from the men, so that we could have gotten to know them as their own people first. I think we would have been more invested in them, which could only have helped things. If both sexes had gotten an equal introduction in the movie and then met each other before the big quake, there could have been a fun and unique dynamic in that.
 

Nicolás Martínez and Ariel Levy were acting in what was obviously their second language, and I thought they did a good job at it. Eli Roth total nailed the creepy bar guy (source: see picture above). He has a scene where he’s flirting with a girl (played by a celeb in a surprise cameo) young enough to be his daughter, and it’s cringe-worthy.

The women were all adequate, with Lorenza being the stand out. So much so, that it looks like Roth teamed up with her again for his next horror film, Green Inferno.
 

I really dug how this movie looked. The party scenes were very colorful and kinetic. The clubs all had interesting designs and themes. There were moments when I just wanted to look around the space for a while, and thankfully the camera seemed to be aware of that. The movie was actually filmed in Chile, and it shows. I’m a sucker for horror films about tourists in other countries. It’s always a little scary to travel somewhere new, especially when you don’t know the language, so when people start coming after you or you find yourself in a disaster, the fear and the stress are instantly multiplied. Plus it’s just great getting to see images and locations we don’t see all that often. Aftershock did a good job of showcasing Chile.
 

Do I want to see Aftershock again?
Not really, but if it was on TV, I’d probably watch the first hour and then just bail out.
 

[table colalign=”left|left” th=”0″ nl=”~~” width=”500″ colwidth=”80|420″ ]
,”Hostel: Eli Roth wrote and directed this surprisingly good horror film about three backpackers who end up staying at a hostel in Slovakia because it’s rumored that beautiful European women go there to sleep with American men. As is common in horror movies, the desire to have sex leads to the main characters’ downfall. They soon find that there are places in the world where anything is for sale, even torture. Gratuitous on all fronts, Hostel manages to deliver quite a horrifying thrill. Excellent premise. (Buy it on Amazon.com: Streaming, DVD, Blu-ray).”

,”Turistas: More backpackers, but this time in Brazil. After a bus accident leaves several tourists stranded near a beach, they make the most of it and begin partying the night away with the locals (uh oh, did someone say party?), but before they realize it they find themselves the targets of a deadly organ harvesting ring. I’d like to see this one again, as it’s been about 7 years since I watched it, and I’ve probably forgotten enough of the story for it to feel new again. It was directed by John Stockwell, and written by Michael Ross.(Buy it on Amazon.com: Streaming, DVD).”

,”House of Wax: Another group of six find themselves stranded in a strange place. This time it’s a small American town that appears to be deserted, though it has a highly populated wax museum. And it seems the museum may just have room for more, six more. This one isn’t quite as good as the ones above, but it knows what it wants to do and does so efficiently. Fun movie even though Paris Hilton stars in it. Written by Charles Belden, Chad Hayes, and Carey Hayes and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. (Buy it on Amazon.com: Streaming, DVD, Blu-ray).”
[/table]