To this day, I have never walked out of a film. When I was fifteen, I had to fight not to walk out of “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.” In that case, the thought of sitting in the lobby waiting for my ride to pick me up was less appealing than sitting through the remaining sixty minutes. As far as “Generic Thriller” goes, had it not been for this review that needed writing, walking out would have been worth walking home even if the trip would take longer than the movie’s running time. At least with the walk home, there’d be something interesting to look at.
One good thing about “Generic Thriller” is that placing blame on the project’s dismal failure is extremely easy. The guy who wrote is the same guy who directed. Scott Sublett. Sublett’s script is utterly painful and not even the best actors Hollywood has to offer could have made something out of this mess. Something must have happened in his past to make him hate audiences. Maybe he attended a bad screening of “Pizza Wars: The Movie” (the other feature he’s written) and now attempts to cope with an insatiable need to insult the intelligence of any viewer unfortunate enough to see his work.
I’ll keep this short. “Meet the Spartans” works better with genre conventions than “Generic Thriller.” It should be noted, however, that “Spartans” was most likely meant to entertain. The same cannot be said about “Thriller,” which only has one purpose: to break the fourth wall and obnoxiously explain even the most basic building blocks of the genre. There’s even a floating head, which Sublett labels a “muse,” which feels the need to lecture about theatre history and an uncountable number of unnecessary and tedious tirades. Unfortunately, the floating head muse is played by Shirley Jones (“The Partridge Family”) who probably didn’t even get paid for her time. To get a better idea of how stupid the director thinks we are, there’s a caption reading “FORSHADOWING” when the characters say something that, well…foreshadows. It’s meant to be a joke, I think, but ultimately, it just adds to the laundry list of amateur filmmaking clichés and mistakes that aren’t exactly rare in poorly made films. But with “Generic Thriller,” there’s the laundry list, the grocery list, and the Bottom 100 list all thrown together to create an absolutely unwatchable piece of celluloid whose most interesting feature is its title.
