Directed by:
E. L. KatzComposer:
Mads HeldtbergCast:
Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner, Amanda Fuller, Claudia Salinas, Pat Healy, Elissa Dowling, Todd Farmer, Ruben Pla, Brighton Sharbino, Laura CovelliPlots(1)
Cheap Thrills follows Craig (Pat Healy, Compliance), a struggling family man who loses his low-wage job and is threatened with eviction. In an effort to delay facing the music at home, he heads to a local bar and encounters an old friend (Ethan Embry, Empire Records). The two friends are roped into a round of drinks by a charismatic and obscenely wealthy stranger (David Koechner, Anchorman 2) along with his mysterious wife (Sara Paxton, The Inkeepers). The couple engages the two friends in a series of innocent dares in exchange for money over the course of the evening, with each challenge upping the ante in both reward and boundaries. It seems like easy and much needed money, but the couple's twisted sense of humor pushes just how far Craig and his friend are willing to go for money and cheap thrills. (Drafthouse Films)
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Reviews (3)
This is a great test of just how far people will go for money, regardless of friendship. The four leads are excellent, the black humour is solid, and the atmosphere is unsettling, especially towards the end, where it gets solidly heavy. Very solid, intense entertainment and surprisingly very intelligent. Recommended. 75%.
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On the one hand, Cheap Thrills looks quite familiar (a desperate person competing for an increasing amount of money, like in this Thai film) but on the other, this film is always fun enough and also refreshing because, instead of one, the desperate souls are two and they are competing against each other. To some extent, it’s predictable and you don’t need much intellectual effort to figure out what the final station will be like, but it doesn’t matter. The fun never stops and the ending is pleasantly sharp. 8/10
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Cheap Thrills is a very atypical and essentially fake exploitation film that I devoured in one go. The plot is very original and unexpected. Then it just speeds up and we are offered basically everything, humor, action, suspense, relationships of the contestants here, which become more and more tense, and also a bit of explicit violence. It was all very cool and the time flew by. It's true that sometimes it's slightly predictable, especially towards the end, but there are much worse cases out there. And because it was Katz's first purely directorial effort, I'm happy to give it four stars.
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