Main cast: Eli Roth (Gringo), Andrea Osvárt (Monica), Ariel Levy (Ariel), Natasha Yarovenko (Irina), Nicolás Martínez (Pollo), and Lorenza Izzo (Kylie)
Director: Nicolàs López
Now, I’m all for exploitation flicks, but yikes, Aftershock is too dull to qualify as anything remotely resembling exploitative. Eli Roth and Nicolàs López are the masterminds behind this story, and I can only imagine that they conceive this idea in between binges of alcohol and other substances best left unmentioned in case there are impressionable kids reading this.
“Dude, let’s do something like Hostel, yeah?”
“Dude, isn’t that like, the only time you make some crap flick that brought in some money?”
“Shut up! I have a great idea, it has hot chicks, you see – ”
“Dude, is it just me or the ground is shaking, man?”
“Oh, great idea! Earthquake, earthquake! That’s our story!”
“Huh?”
“Lots of hot chicks getting raped and killed, guys getting killed too, ha, ha…”
That’s basically Aftershock. Three loser males pair up with three loser females, and they spend 40 minutes – that’s nearly half the movie – wandering from club to club in Chile like the worst kind of tourists: the boorish kind that scream out their issues in front of strangers and mope around in a daze while seeking desperately to get laid. It seems like a reprieve when an earthquake hits a club these are in, but naturally, they survive – for that moment – while characters that show more life than these losers combined, like that random stranger to the left or Selena Gomez’s appearance as a club tart, get pushed or sometimes literally splattered out of the picture. The rest of movie is basically these people getting brutalized and tortured in a perfunctory way until the expected stereotypical “designated survivor” character predictably reaches the ending scene alive only to be hit by a predictable “twist”.
Hostel does some have merit in its shock value when it first came out, but Eli Roth and his friends are clearly in need of a new shtick by now. Aftershock is a lifeless rehash of the formula with barely any innovation included to make this one worth a look. It’s pretty much a low-rent splatter flick from a group of people who are basically plagiarizing themselves at this point.
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