EJ Moreno ranks Eli Roth’s movies…
Thanksgiving marks Eli Roth’s return to horror after years of kids’ films, documentaries, and one of Bruce Willis’s last theatrical releases. With that, the filmmaker has around twenty years of filmmaking, and Roth has made a name for himself in the modern horror landscape.
Love or hate him, Roth has been part of the conversation for quite some time, and his films have reflected the times quite well. If he’s making the most out of a post-9/11 landscape or attempting to bring a video game to life, Roth makes sure to make a splash no matter what he does in films and knows how to create buzz.
Now, we’ll look at seven of Eli Roth’s films and rank them from the very worst to the most bloody ones…
Death Wish
Very rarely does Eli Roth dive into the world of franchise filmmaker, let alone a remake of the most notorious cult classics ever. That’s what makes his 2018 film Death Wish that much more of a shock.
With this action-revenge movie, Roth teams with Hollywood icon Bruce Willis to reinvent the Charles Bronson original, but this time giving it a modern edge. With decades in development, Death Wish saw a few interactions before landing on Roth helmed the project, and it proved to be a confusing one from start to finish. While the horror filmmaker can be more than that, it was shocking to see all the grittiness stripped from Death Wish and replaced with more mainstream appeal.
Nothing worked, leading to negative reviews from fans and critics. Some even went as far as to say the film felt like right-wing propaganda, which Roth adamantly refuted. It was a mess from idea to execution, and something many Roth fans like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Knock Knock
When Eli Roth announced he’d team with Keanu Reeves, no one knew what to expect from the pairing. Would it be some brutal action film or some return to torture porn? Knock Knock was none of that.
In a shockingly tame film, besides some somewhat saucy sex scenes, nothing about Knock Knock feels like a Roth production, and it suffers from that lack of personality. While the outline of trashy men and women who seek to bring them down works well on paper, it felt like far too “been there, done that” when we saw the final product. At least the acting was deliciously campy, and we got to see Keanu Reeves right before the entire John Wick franchise took over the world.
With Roth trying out the erotic thriller drama, you can applaud the filmmaker for trying to stretch himself. Still, it feels like a better script, and more of a “wow” factor could’ve put this beyond another tired entry in an already exhausted sub-genre. Points for that WTF ending, though!
Hostel Part II
You can see the improvements in Eli Roth’s filmmaking with the Hostel sequel. The sleaze factor is dialed down, the social commentary is richer, and his overall direction is more potent, but that’s about it.
Even with a stronger female-led cast, you can’t help but feel this is more of the same following such a memorable first installment. Hostel Part II does offer more outlandish horror and a more explicit villain to hate, but it just feels too much like a studio-mandated sequel than something Roth wanted to do. Not to say he wasn’t trying his hardest, but the second Hostel movie lacks the punch that made the original so memorable and shocking. There is no shock here; it barely touched what Roth first crafted.
Looking at this, it could be precisely why Roth rarely does his sequels; he seems to throw himself headfirst into a universe and wants to move on to the next project. And when your next project is the Bear Jew for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, you can see why his mind was elsewhere.
The House with a Clock in Its Walls
For long-time Eli Roth fans, the idea of his children’s movie ranking higher than his traditional gorefests could be blasphemous, but don’t blame me that Roth completely knocked this out of the park.
The House with a Clock in Its Walls sees Roth adapt a classic 70s mystery novel to an adventure the entire family could enjoy. You’d think for the decades that the man spent grossing people out that Roth would lack the skills for small-scale scares, but he ultimately feels at home with family-friendly horror. Backed by an all-star cast that includes Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, Roth’s first PG-rated movie came prepared to win over audiences, and it did become his highest domestic grosser.
With Roth working on a children’s animated series and the success of this, we should be so lucky that Roth didn’t cash out on horror fans and become the gateway for kids to fall in love with the genre. That said, the range his film showed Roth has helped him stick around longer.
The Green Inferno
As we see, Eli Roth’s track record with remakes and adaptations can be tricky, but it seems like making an homage is the way to go. The Green Inferno is a love letter to a cannibal classic, and it’s lovely.
Trying to remake the Cannibal Holocaust is nearly impossible, but what Roth did was take the soul of that film and infuse it with a new modern energy. Gone is the found-footage/documentary style, but somehow, the filmmaker finds a way to immerse you as if you’re right there. It wasn’t his biggest hit, but it had the impact you’d expect from a massive moneymaker. It saw praise from horror icons, offended more conservative viewers, and grossed us out years after torture porn was “cool.”
Much like his mentor Tarantino, Roth knows how to do an homage, and there hasn’t been a sub-genre love letter like this since. For fans of the drive-in era of horror, Roth did everything in his power to bring us back to that, and he made it look so sleek and visually arresting.
Cabin Fever
Offensive, shocking, totally in-your-face: they don’t make horror like Cabin Fever anymore. Watching this even transports you back to the early 00s, and Roth did a wonderful capturing that time in pop culture.
By no means is the film perfect; it reeks of a first feature film and can be a bit too edge-lord. But at the same time, there’s an undeniable charm to a movie where a master discovers his tools. Eli Roth made one of the splashiest genre debuts and quickly entered the world of horror. Just as the J-Horror craze began and teen slashers were in the rearview mirror, Roth knew it was time for something new, and he brought forth an era of horror we hadn’t seen in decades: splatter films.
With an earnest cast trying their hardest, some of the best low-budget gore effects, and a willingness to do anything, Cabin Fever needs to be studied as a way to show younger filmmakers how to start their careers strong while still giving themselves room to grow into their perfect selves.
Hostel
With one movie under his belt, Eli Roth decided to go bold and swing for the fences, crafting one of the best films of its era and making Hostel a staple for genre fans for years to come.
It’s wild to look at Hostel and see what Roth was attempting. We were early into the Bush era of politics, where war and xenophobia were all the rage. Americans felt unstoppable and superior to those in other countries, and here comes a young filmmaker to shock them to their cores. Hostel is gory, but it’s an insane, brilliant social commentary at a time when it felt like only rap music and horror films were willing to speak on issues. Roth said that while also making us puke.
Hostel is long overdue for a reevaluation, with one side calling it woke garbage and the other a rad political statement. The film never got its due in that sense when it dropped, even though it certainly made some money and entered our pop culture lexicon quickly; truly Eli Roth’s classic.
How would you rank Eli Roth’s movies? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
EJ Moreno
