By Simon Thompson
Director/ co-writer Gille Kabin’s Weekend At The End Of The World is a perfectly pleasant supermarket own brand version of Tucker And Dale Vs Evil, that, while managing to hit the two joke minimum required for a comedy to be at least semi decent, doesn’t quite hit the heights that it should do due to most of the jokes and supporting characters being about as obvious as a scam pop up ad informing you of your victory in the Spanish lottery. This is a shame, because from a visual perspective this film is great and is able to pull off some pretty complex effects on a largely inexpensive budget.
The plot of Weekend At The End Of The World follows Karl and Miles (played by Clay Elliott and Cameron Fife respectively), Karl is a sort Mark Corrigan by way of Jason Biggs in American Pie type loser, whose girlfriend has had enough of his deal and splits up with him. Miles, on the other hand, is like a slightly nicer Jeremy Usbourne, and decides to take his heartbroken friend to his dead grandmother’s cabin in the woods, that he wants to sell off to make a killing in the house market. As this is all going on it turns out that Miles couldn’t have picked a better weekend for a lads’ trip as the cabin contains a portal to an evil dimension.
Shot in only 12 days and on a budget of $350,000, Weekend End At The End Of World is a top notch piece of work technically. The effects, clearly inspired by 80s horror classics such as The Evil Dead and Re-Animator look superb, the lighting and editing perfectly complements the comedic tone that the movie is aiming for, and Elliot and Fife are both well cast in their respective roles.
The issues that I had with this movie are that the characters themselves, from the protagonist duo to the various wacky characters that are dotted around the film’s remote rural setting aren’t particularly interesting, and represent the sort of comedic observations that films such as Scream or Mark Gattis’s The League Of Gentleman made back in the 90s. The plot is also a by the numbers job, as by about half an hour in anyone who has seen more than three horror movies in their life can guess exactly what is going to happen, therefore removing any sort of tension or jeopardy in the process.
Overall, Weekend At The End Of The World resembles a sandwich with impressive looking bread and an average filling. While it’s a movie with considerable effort behind it, that makes its various flaws and lack of originality even worse. If this was some kind of Neil Breen all-star extravaganza instead I would feel much better about not giving Weekend At The End Of World a shout from the rooftops level recommendation, but alas sadly we live in a cruel and unusual world where Rome was cancelled after two seasons and Joe Rogan’s comedy career exists.
Weekend at the End of the World screened as part of Grimmfest 2025.
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