I once went to the deli with my grandparents and on the menu was the reuben sandwich. This is corned beef, on rye bread, with swiss cheese, sauer kraut and russian dressing. “My god,” I thought, “It’s everything I hate on one sandwich.” So I had to try it. So it was when I saw this movie was produced by Eli Roth, uber-trendy untalented maker of “Hostel” and similar derivative, terrible gore films, and then, saw it was directed by Ti West, director of “House Of The Devil”, a stylized, paper-thin genre-exercise echo of actual good horror movies. I had to find out.
For those who found the merely derivative “House Of The Devil” to be too original, or whose complaint about the Jonestown tragedy is that they weren’t there to be entertained by seeing it, this creativity-free paint-by-numbers retelling of the Jonestown story should satisfy.
My guess would be, Ti West overheard someone talking about Jonestown at the next restaurant table over, jotted down notes and said, “Ok, that can be my next movie.” He then brought it to the former least creative director in horror, now the least creative producer in horror, Eli Roth, who knew an uncreative thing when he heard it, and boom, the least creative horror movie ever made was born. They had to strip a few ideas and some of the logic out of actual events, but that’s basically it.
So if watching the violence of the Jonestown massacre is your idea of entertainment, enjoy, this is the Jonestown massacre, presented as entertainment. The only question is why they even changed the name of the compound to “Eden Parish” instead of just calling it “Jonestown”. That seems like an odd single detail to add creativity to when you’re otherwise just making a rote retelling of tragic events intended as some form of entertainment for somebody or other.
+1 star because they guy who is a precise duplicate of Rev. Jim Jones, even down to the sunglasses, is kind of entertaining in how he literally brings nothing to the role but a documentary reproduction.
Oh, also, it’s a “found footage”, with conceits like people who remember to keep the cameras running and pointed at subjects of interest even as they’re running for their lives through the woods, or hiding from nearby gunmen, etc. Which is great, because that idea hasn’t been totally overdone.