For about 10 years, beginning in the mid-2000s, it was particularly tough to be a horror movie fan. The genre will always have its critics, but starting in 2005 with the release of Hostel, those critics were mostly right. What began with 2004’s Saw (a legitimately good thriller that launched an unwatchable franchise) quickly transformed into the very lucrative and mostly terrible horror subgenre that ultimately gave us Human Centipede in 2009, along with plenty of gory sequels and also-ran knockoffs.
But the genre got an unlikely hero in the form of Kevin Smith, who harnessed this tortured trend to give audiences a truly bizarre and mostly unwatchable sci-fi thriller that may have inadvertently ended the entire subgenre in the process.
