You always hear stories about crazy things happening in the theater whenever some gross new shock movie comes out. Somebody storms out of the place in protest, somebody has a seizure, or what have you. Well, Cheap Thrills will always have the distinction of being the first movie I ever saw that made someone start puking in the theater, and for that it will always have a special place in my heart.
The film stars Pat Healy as a down on his luck family man looking to find a way to keep his house after he loses his job, Ethan Embry as an old acquaintance he runs into in a bar, and David Koechner and Sara Paxton as a very eccentric and very rich couple they come across who start paying them an ever-increasing amount of money to perform an increasingly dangerous and disgusting series of stunts. These stunts start somewhere around dares to slap a random girl’s ass for a few extra bucks and develop into performing terrible acts of self-mutilation for six figures, and beyond.
Director EL Katz has made a gleefully deviant movie here. His camera is always peeking around corners, giving us the sense of being voyeurs who are seeing things that we’re not supposed to be seeing, and clearly he’s taking joy in getting as imaginative as possible with the stomach-turning nature of the events we’re spying on. Cheap Thrills is the type of movie that doesn’t just give Koechner free range to be as big of a loudmouth blowhard as he can be, it puts a damned laser pointer in his hand while he’s doing it. That’s next-level obnoxious. There’s a slow stretch of time somewhere in the middle, after the fun setup but before the stunts start to have real danger and stakes attached to them, where the stuff going down starts to feel like consequence-free time filler, but the places the film ends up are so intense and affecting that the wait ends up becoming worth it anyway. I mean, a dude started puking right in the middle of the theater. That’s nuts.
