Clickonline writes: "Cheap Thrills has all the right elements in place – from a decent premise to strong performances and a gruesome element which will please hardy fans – but the final result isn’t quite as compelling as it might be. Katz excels at pacing individual scenes but can’t quite sustain the tension throughout the entire 88 minute running time. So it all ends up feeling oddly unsatisfying."
Made on a modest budget of £100,000 and shot in just under 2 weeks, EL Katz’ Cheap Thrills inverts the traditional notion of torture porn as a moral lesson inflicted on the sinner.
Somehow another year has come and gone, so now it’s time for listing. 2014 sped by fast for me, mostly because it’s been one of the best years for movies in quite some time. If you were huddled around Netflix all year, you missed out on an impressive damn stream of genre entertainment almost every week. Oh sure, there were still plenty of crappy movies out there.
The best indie genre flicks are the ones that sneak up on you. A little movie that you throw on idly without much in the way of expectations that takes you on a ride you never imagined and leaves you gob smacked as the credits roll. Cheap Thrills is one such movie. Shot in 14 days, the miniscule production packs a punch that few movies ten times its size can muster. Indie horror veteran E.L. Katz delivers a directorial debut that toys with audience expectations from start to finish. He leads audiences down a road that they think they can predict, only to pull the rug out whenever possible and leave the audience in a battered daze. For someone with a sense of humor as sick as my own, it’s a brilliant dark comedy. For others, it will be a horrific thriller. Regardless, the flick isn’t one that you’ll easily shake off.
