Cheap Thrills

2013 black comedy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Reunited friends, both a little down on their luck, run into a couple willing to give them loads of money to perform dares of escalating danger.

Why did I watch this? I mean, honestly, what am I doing with my life? I knew while watching it that I'd have to come to this blog eventually, steal a movie poster from somewhere else, and type out this blog entry. And I knew that there would be no audience for that, no other person out there who cares about this movie enough to know what I thought about it, and none of my 3 1/2 blog readers who would want to talk about it.

The whole experience was a bleak one, and I'm surprised I've recovered enough to even write this entry. That guy who played Packer on The Office wore a hat and gave the protagonist and his friend the money. It's never established what he does, but the character doesn't strike me as the type of character who could actually earn that amount of money. He just seems like a more dangerous Packer from The Office. The dares started to feel more predictable, and after a while, any amount of dark humor that might have been in the cracks of this thing kind of wore away. Then, it just felt really mean spirited and misanthropic. I'm all for misanthropic if it's well done and probably a little more subtle than this.

I'm not even joking about my mental state while watching this. There's a scene where the two characters have sneaked into a neighbors house and are trying to defecate on the floor. The scene seemed endless, and I just started feeling sorry for myself for being in a position in my life where I feel like I could spend any time at all watching that sort of thing. "Why am I not trying to be artistic in some way myself?" I asked. Or, "Current events demands that I'm being active in some way and trying to make the world a better place. Why am I watching this?" Or, "How long has this been going on?"

I think I might have even started crying at one point.