Aftershock

The script by Roth, Lopez, and Lopez’s frequent collaborator, Guillermo Amoedo, giddily piles crisis upon crisis, with none of the customary mercy reserved for leading characters.

The violence is quick and occasionally inventive, with little of the attenuated nastiness that characterizes so many genre pictures, and the photography ranges from brightly sun-kissed to down-and-dirty.

Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.

The ending is sick enough to make it almost worth the wait. Key word: almost.

There's plenty of gore, but none of it is particularly inventive, nor does it engender any visceral or emotional reactions beyond jaded disgust.

The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised.

Hard to call the film all bad. Visually, the film is nice and captured without any jarring cinematography. The directing was great and the actors seemed to shine, even with sludge in the end of the second to third act. Everybody is all dancing and all enjoying in Chile and it would have been a good film if it left out the disaster. How do I describe this without spoiling the film? Well, think about an okay cake. Like a lemon pound cake but for some reason it's sitting in a river of Tabasco sauce. Its nice until you get to the part where reality starts to bend. For some reason the kind of person you are in life means you can become a psychopathic murderer as soon as disaster strikes or someone looks at your tattoo. I felt it was way too stretched out of realism and to more of a silly and stereotypical territory. You can definitely enjoy the film for its sound design, cinematography and mise en scène, if you stop the film right when the crushing starts.

It's fun without being stupid (mostly) Don't presents us a deep thought or a huge strain, but does well as a film devoted entirely to entertainment. But, "Aftershock" carries its problems, is not entirely exciting, well directed and acted, but without doubt, its biggest problem is that it carries the most obvious end of the story. That leaves us indifferent to the future of the characters, since we know what will happen at the end.

An Eli Roth-penned disaster flick set in the midst of a late night at the club in urban Chile. Close your eyes and try to envision a film based on that description alone and chances are good you'll nail it in one shot. Aftershock is thoroughly flippant, sloppy, random and depraved, not even remotely unlike Roth's preceding flicks Hostel and Cabin Fever, so if that's your thing, get after it. Personally, I appreciated some of the more creative kills - the last half-hour basically trots them out one after another - and the liberal bloodletting amongst the primary cast members, but it has little else to offer beyond crimson-drenched scenery and some weak SFX shots. Minor points for jerking the wheel a'la Dusk Till Dawn with the mid-sentence earthquake, though.

"Aftershock" 10 Scale Rating: 2.5 (Awful) ... The Good: It wasn't a bad idea and there are actually a couple of solid twists in an otherwise straight-forward film. The Bad: Zero characterization despite an actual attempt by the director. I didn't care even a little about any of these people. I'm not sure why Eli Roth puts himself in his films, he is a horrible actor. Could have been decent, but falls flat and is ultimately a weak attempt at social commentary laced with gore.

Leave it to Eli Roth to turn this simple tale of earthquake survivors into a morbid blood bath of terror and torture porn. I only gave it one star because of the valiant attempt at earthquake effects.