10 Recent Horror(ible) Films
As I promised in our debate about the Abhorrible Genre of Horror, here are ten reviews for recent horror films that are not very good. Coming soon will be another sizable lot of reviews focused on good horror films, but I thought I'd give you all the bad news first. At the very least, you should if you read all these have a clear understanding of what I think is going wrong with horror films these days.
So let’s get into it, then.
High Tension is by far my favorite horror film of last year, which may not be saying all that much given that I dislike most horror films I see these days. Recommending this movie is difficult, however, because in order to enjoy it, you have to pretty much disregard whole chunks of the useless plot. There is a twist ending tacked onto this film that is so ridiculous it ruins the movie for most viewers. Lucky me, I can compartmentalize my enjoyment of any given film. Giant flaws in one section do not negate the brilliance of other parts of the film.
Most of the first eighteen minutes of Alexandre Aja’s flick are pure filler (including a pointless scene in a field of corn that goes nowhere), but there is one tossed-off scene that is so juicy and shocking that I recommend you stick it out anyway. Just be patient. While eighteen minutes seems long, it is nowhere near as long as the flabby beginnings of Wolf Creek or Hostel. Basically, a girl brings her friend to her family’s house in the country. Once everyone goes to bed, the movie begins.
The next half hour of the film is pure messy horror, and Aja does everything exactly right. This section of the movie is the reason you should rent it (if you’re a horror fan, that is). It’s a very simple setup: a killer shows up at a house in the middle of the night, and then starts killing everyone. The plot here is plagiaristically similar to the beginning of Dean Koontz’s Intensity, but it is a good setup worth repeating. While Aja is not afraid to show geysers of gore, he also understands the effectiveness of keeping a lot of it off-screen. He grounds the perspective with the friend, and we more or less follow her as she hides in what quickly turns into a house of horrors. The scene in the house is followed by an equally exciting scene in a convenience store (which has one of the scariest restrooms I’ve ever seen on film—to paraphrase Chunk from The Goonies, it doesn’t really look like the kind of place you’d like to go to the bathroom), but after that I recommend turning the film off. You don’t want to know how silly it gets from there, but I assure you—you are better off never knowing.
The critical failing of this movie is its (arguably very homophobic) twist. When it is good, it is good because it understands that horror can be played straight-up, simply, and without much need for exposition. When it’s bad, it forgets all of that and starts trying to be clever.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeSo Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino both ranked The Devil’s Rejects—Rob Zombie’s sort-of sequel to his silly horror romp House of 1000 Corpses—as one of the best films of 2005. Someday, then, I’ll have to watch The Devil’s Rejects again, because I couldn’t disagree more. Was I the only one who thought this movie was supposed to be scary? I had to question whether it was even fair to review it as a horror film, because it is most definitely not a scary movie. Zombie has said that he was trying to capture a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe (a very trendy thing to do, it seems), but The Devil’s Rejects recaptures the look of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without the menace. This film is ultimately more a general throwback to the exploitation films of the 70s—films like Deliverance or Foxy Brown—minus any of the real shock value those films had. We follow a family of criminals on the run from an overzealous lawman. The criminals take hostages, they play with the hostages, they kill the hostages—and then they go and smoke pot and make merry before the law catches up to them. Zombie is in a unique position to do whatever he feels like and make whatever kind of film he wants to, and I was rooting for him to show me something that I haven’t really seen in recent films—something, I was hoping, with an edge. But The Devil’s Rejects is neither sick nor twisted enough for me. The best part of the film is the opening shot, where Tiny (the family mutant) drags the naked corpse of a girl through the forest. After that, the cops show up, the guns come out, and the film turns into just another crime movie.
Looking at my rules that I outlined in our column The Abhorrible Genre, this film disobeys quite a few: it is isn’t scary (rule #1); it’s campy (rule #2); it has guns, cops, and monologuing bad guys (75% disobedience of rule #7); and finally, the “killers” tend not to kill so much as they smoke pot and stare at Sheri Moon Zombie’s dimeslot, which I think compromises both rules 8 and 9 in terms of diluting the menace. I’m also thinking of coming up with a new rule calling for a ban on lame torture sequences, one of which serves as the would-be climax to this silly picture. I suspect this affection for torture scenes stems from the recent surge in devotion to the work of Takashi Miike, whose oeuvre includes the torture-heavy Audition. But Miike for horror is like Tarantino for crime films; what worked once does not work a thousand times over.
Was there anything to like about this film? Yes. One scene. The bad guys talk to a chicken vendor. It’s wonderful. The other hundred or so minutes? What a waste. The look of the film was right, but for me it was a pretty box with nothing inside.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeAgain, it is sort of unfair to review Red Eye as a horror film, but I am going to do so because I have a bone to pick with Wes Craven. First of all, he owes me for sitting through that piece of flaming hairy excrement that was Cursed—a film not even worthy of a review. Secondly, like Takashi Miike and Quentin Tarantino, Wes Craven also wins the Good Film That Spawned Unending Reams of Celluloid Trash Award for his 1996 film, Scream (and some of that trash included the sequels to that movie). In fact, Scream is Craven’s best and possibly only really decent film. His overall reputation is something that happens to all horror directors if they work at the genre for long enough and have at least one average film to lean on. In Craven’s case, the seminal film is A Nightmare on Elm Street, which is almost good. It has unfortunately aged very poorly. The music is now nigh-on unbearable, and the death of Rod Lane is pretty pedestrian and really badly lit. Still, it was a good idea and the children’s lullaby is creepy enough to create an effectively haunting mythology for Freddy Krueger. He is the bogeyman that haunts these streets.
So is Craven a master of horror? I think he occasionally gets lucky, but at present he is little more than a technician who has sold out entirely to the Hollywood engine. Red Eye is a good-looking, completely predictable exercise in uninspired competence. Cillian Murphy terrorizes Rachel McAdams onboard a plane. He threatens to kill her father if she doesn’t help him assassinate a politician. Though the meat of the plot is the flight, we are not onboard all that long. There are great, flabby bookends spent doing on-the-ground stuff, and I think the reason for the short duration of the flight is that the writers ran out of ideas. In the end, it is a preposterous story with gigantic plot holes, carried by the ability of its by-the-numbers director and the massive talent of its two leads, McAdams and Murphy. Yet Murphy’s Jackson Rippner, while menacing, is not exactly all that lethal. It is a credit to Cillian Murphy that he can manage to do so well when given so very little. Added to his work in 28 Days Later... and Batman Begins, I think Red Eye is another indication that we can expect a lot of great work from this actor. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Wes Craven, who will be a hack for the rest of his professional life.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeI could see House of Wax really doing well as a short Tales from the Crypt or Tales from the Darkside episode. As a feature film, it is way too long. If you really loved your eighties horror films, you may find yourself enjoying this movie—and I must admit that once the plot started to roll, I was entertained. But it takes a long time to get going, and Paris Hilton is not enough to keep me interested.
This movie is a good example of why rule #3 (stop making me watch unlikable characters) is needed. The teenagers lost in the woods in this film are so unpleasant to watch that as a viewer, you’re just waiting for the bad guys to come and chop them into bits. The reason I rate the original Scream so highly is because for the first time in what had been a long time, I actually liked the characters. I was not (shock of all shocks) rooting for the killer. When your audience roots for the killer, you (the horror filmmaker) have lost, and you have turned your movie into something that encourages the very worst kind of viewing behavior: sadistic cheering for over-the-top dismemberment. A scary film is one in which you don’t want the killer to kill anyone—hence why caring about the characters is so crucial. But when Paris Hilton dies in House of Wax, I thought, “Cool death scene.” Gruesome? Certainly. Scary? No way.
Apart from the unlikability of most of the cast, what really keeps this movie from greatness is its lack of a credible, realistic atmosphere. Everything looks like Hollywood fakery. The town does not look real, and even if that’s the point, I wish the atmosphere had been spookier. A great director like Stanley Kubrick can take a hotel and make it one of the creepiest places on the planet with little to no obviously strange set design. He does it by maintaining a strong sense of realism, so that when the ghosts do appear, you are convinced and afraid. The look of House of Wax on the other hand is very typical of what you usually get from directors groomed in the music video world: expensive and unconvincing.
All that said, the titular House of Wax is a very cool set piece. I think the end of the film is a blast, and by that point in time I had actually warmed up to Elisha Cuthbert’s and Chad Michael Murray’s brother and sister duo. There is a compassion the characters have for each other that ultimately redeems their early unlikability, and this bond shepherds the last forty minutes of the film through some bland expository “surprises” to the not quite believable but certainly fun to watch conclusion.
It’s not really scary, but House of Wax has its fun moments, and I am incapable of either recommending it or completely writing it off.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeI am about to commit a horror geek sin: I am going to attack the guru of the zombie flick and darling of horror geeks everywhere, George A. Romero. Yes, he’s an independent filmmaker. Yes, he practically created a genre that I find really effective. No, I don’t think he knows what he’s doing—if he ever did.
Romero is primarily known for what was, before Land of the Dead, known as the Dead Trilogy: it began promisingly in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, reached its peak in 1978 with Dawn of the Dead, and should have fizzled out with 1985’s total misfire, Day of the Dead. There are lots of fans who would love to scream out right now that Day is underrated; don’t believe it. Any zombie flick that involves a subplot where zombies are trained to do human-like things—and which includes scenes of said zombie (cult favorite Bub) listening to headphones and playing with guns—has lost its way in the wilds of horrordom. Day is not scary, and its social commentary is painfully stupid. Land of the Dead, which begins with a goofy shot of a zombie jazz trio (zombies with trombones, man—why, oh why?) continues this trend. Dawn of the Dead (and here I am talking about the original and not the remake, which I think is decent but overrated) had commentary a-plenty, but it more or less worked. If the zombie invasion comes, I wouldn’t mind holing up in a mall. The idea is just fun. The social commentary that resulted from the situation felt natural rather than forced.
On the other hand, the issues of class presented in Land of the Dead are forced, uninsightful, and just plain sloppy filmmaking. George Lucas gets critically raped for putting political barbs in his space operas, but when George Romero does it, the geeks sing praises about the glory of putting such things in a zombie picture. For me, it doesn’t matter if Land and Day have multiple levels if all that means is that both films are failures on multiple levels. Land and Day are too brightly lit, too cheesy, have too many guns, and are filled to the brim with unlikable characters. There’s a shot that should be good in Land—zombies emerging from a fog-covered river at night—that completely fails because of the lighting and makeup. It just looks fake. I watch it, and I know I am watching actors on a set somewhere. None of which is to mention Big Daddy—the leader of the zombies—who organizes the zombies and brings them straight onto Dennis Hopper’s doorstep. He’s a better character than Bub, but he’s just as unscary.
George Romero may have sired the modern zombie flick, but he is also doing his share of heavy lifting in the crusade to kill it off.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeWhere, oh where, to begin? This film is like The Shining made by and for mental midgets. For what it’s worth, I actually liked the look of the film’s production design. It felt credible and was unfortunately wrecked by the foolishly trendy, Tony Scott/MTV-style editing, which has become way too common in horror films dealing with ghosts. It’s kind of a law now, I guess, that if you have supernatural spooks in your scary movie, they must appear with flashy cuts and then vanish (the ‘boo!’ edit, you could call it). Again, I point to The Shining for an example of how to do a quick cut and make it scary. Kubrick had the courage to hang on his phantoms longer than anyone seems willing to today, and as a result those two little girls will be remembered far longer than, oh, freaky-faced-man in the bathroom mirror in The Amityville Horror.
The story here is that Ryan Reynolds’s George Lutz is slowly taken over by demons bent on using him to kill his family. They can only take him over while he is in the house, which leads to kind of a schizophrenic possession where he is fine one minute and raving insane the next. The end result is that his character seems sort of empty—like a windsock battered by shifting air currents rather than a man fighting anything.
The film overall is kind of confused, as well. In one scene, Lutz’s daughter finds herself on top of the house, and so begins a silly scene where almost all members of the family imperil themselves trying to get her down. While presumably the ghosts made her go up there, it is not really a scary scene. It is really no different from any other scene where someone might fall to his or her death. It is symptomatic of a strange phenomenon in horror films to threaten to kill characters (or, even worse, to actually kill them) in ways not related to the main threat. Such scenes seem to me like a waste of either the character’s death or, at the very least, time that could have been used doing something that was actually scary.
Another sin of the remake of The Amityville Horror is that Melissa George’s Kathy Lutz can just drive into town and research the backstory on the Internet. Here we have a violation of rule #7, which places a ban on the use of computers in horror films. The Internet should no longer be used to explain the plot of a movie. Also, if George’s character can get to the library, the family can escape any time they feel like it. Staying only makes them look like idiots.
Much like I looked like an idiot, staying and watching this whole film when the exit was right behind me.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeOh, torture. Why is it so common in horror films these days? Maybe it’s because it is a metaphor for the genre. Maybe it’s because I would rather cut off my foot than live in a world where Saw was the only kind of movie I got to watch.
I was really excited when I started to watch the original Saw, and it opened in a bathroom with two guys in chains with a dead man between them. I thought I was in for a real pressure-cooker of a situation and that the film was going to be a one-room show. The design of the bathroom was right on the edge for me: it was kind of overdone, a little too grimy—but overall I could work with it. It wasn’t too bad, and I could just about believe that it existed somewhere in the industrial part of some nasty city. I had visions of a claustrophobic nightmare situation and a slowly unfolding plot where more and more is discovered about the room and the two men who are in it.
That was before the flashbacks started. That was before the cops started to come out of the walls and pollute the movie. That was before ... Danny Glover.
Flashbacks are bad enough as a storytelling device, but add to that cops—and then make that cop insane ...well, suffice it to say, the film lost me. I feel a little sorry for Danny Glover. I think he deserved a better career. The only thing Saw proves is that whatever career he once had is over. He plays a detective driven mad by his pursuit of Jigsaw, the killer orchestrating various situations that test his victims’ will to live. Usually, the victims have to mutilate themselves someway—cut off a foot, carve into your own eye, etc. The point, apparently, is to get them to choose life in such a drastic way as to make them realize how valuable life is to them. Theoretically, Jigsaw is not even killing people—he’s merely putting you in a position to choose to let yourself die.
Right. Anyway ...
These two films are all about the various death traps the characters confront. Like the Final Destination series, the audience patiently waits through drab filler until the next fun part. I like the Saw films a little better, because at the very least the death traps involve some kind of choice, and choices equal drama. Final Destination has all the drama of a line of dominoes falling down, which is fun in its own way but only for so long.
The precursor to these films is most definitely David Fincher’s great film Seven. Tobin Bell’s performance is a fair grift of Kevin Spacey’s John Doe (Bell’s character’s name is also John; Jigsaw is just a name the papers gave him) with a new plan. Instead of giving victims choices that expose their sins, he gives them choices that expose their shallow nature. The difference is that Seven is actually well made (again, there’s too much with the ultra-grimy sets, especially in Saw II), well written (there are a lot of unlikable characters in the Saw films, and if that wasn’t enough, the cops completely ruin the show—first with Danny Glover’s silliness, and then, in Saw II, with Donnie Wahlberg’s ridiculous anger issues), and well acted (no one apart from Tobin Bell actually bothers to act in the Saw universe).
But these films make a lot of money. Saw III is on its happy way and is set to hit theaters Halloween 2006. You vote with your wallet in this world; with respect to Saw III, I recommend you vote no.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeThere are four big flaws in this film: the pacing, the bad guy, the good guys, and the ending. The one thing this film has going for it: the atmosphere and the general look of the production. It was shot very cheaply, and I think that’s a good thing. Gone are the overproduced, grimy sets of films like Saw. Instead, we get the Australian countryside, which is easily the best character in the film. When all else was going down the drain, I still found myself liking the scenery.
Wolf Creek begins with three people on their way to Wolf Creek National Park. They’re going to see a giant crater. The trouble begins when they climb back down from the crater and their car won’t start. They have to accept help from John Jarrett’s Mick Taylor. It is an interesting red herring that writer/director Greg McLean throws at the audience: for a good long while, the movie could just as easily become an alien abduction story. Is it horrible to say I was wishing that it would go that way? The crater was a creepy and unique place for a movie like this to visit, and I wish that the film had kept that kind of vibe running instead of backing down and settling into an average madman-in-the-wild plot. Even so, I think there is an interesting point being made about people with an extraterrestrial focus ending up in very terrestrial danger.
Good atmosphere aside, what ruins the movie’s first part is the total unlikability of the main characters. The girls are average, but the guy with them is a big loser—not really too different from your average frat boy (Eli Roth, we’ve found your roommate). The girls get negative points primarily for associating themselves with this idiot.
While Quentin Tarantino’s ubiquitous blurb cites Jarrett’s villain as being one of the all-time best horror heavies, I do not think that any villain who quotes Crocodile Dundee (and of course you know which line) ought to get cult status. I didn’t find Taylor scary or threatening. I thought he was an average, too-talky killer of the kind that horror movies have no difficulty producing. Granted, he looks quite entertaining after the fifty minutes we’ve spent with the boring main characters, but that still only makes him crap plus one.
And finally, the ending: Taylor goes after the last survivor(s) with a sniper rifle. There’s also a car chase. In other words, the film ends in action movie territory, and all the built-up atmosphere fades away. Though the movie follows the formula of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, compare the two endings of these films: one is scary, the other is not. One has a chainsaw-wielding madman wearing a mask made of flesh, the other has a man in a car with a sniper rifle. A brief consideration of the feel of each of those endings will let you know which is really better suited for a horror film.
It is unfortunate that so much is wrong with Wolf Creek, because I agree with a lot of the choices the director made. Roger Ebert thinks the movie crosses some mystical line of decency—where, exactly, I wonder? The film is not half as sadistic as it is rumored to be. It’s average enough that it will be easily tucked away on the horror shelf, and everything it got right will be overlooked and overshadowed by everything it got wrong.
Back to Top | Back to Quadlings HomeI just can’t help myself. I have to say it:
This movie is so bad.
Not a particularly fancy way to begin a review, but there you are. More than any other movie reviewed here, this movie takes the cake for doing everything wrong. Eli Roth may have grown up watching a bunch of horror movies, but he didn’t learn a damn thing from them. I have a soft spot in my cold heart for his first film Cabin Fever simply because it gets so nasty toward the end, but Hostel is meritless.
For starters, beautiful European naked women are not scary. They just aren’t. Like Jessica Biel in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, excessively hot girls can really be a liability if you’re trying to scare people. There is a way to use beautiful women well, and it is exemplified by Kubrick’s sucker-punch bathroom scene in The Shining, or even Roth’s own use of his attractive actresses in Cabin Fever, where having sex meant having very nasty things happening to you as a direct result. But it has got to be a gut punch. The strange thing about Hostel is that where I was expecting a sudden, shocking turn (and let’s face it, we all know what these boys are in for the first time we see the cover art on the DVD or the poster in the theater lobby), Roth instead deals us a rather slow and extremely clumsy unveiling. He turns what is ostensibly a horror film into a very uninteresting detective story, where three friends are picked off one by one. The main character fumbles around, asking the natives if they’ve seen his friends, all the while the audience is way ahead of the stupid patsy, just waiting it out for him to get a clue or get dismembered. Part of the reason the structure Eli Roth has employed in Hostel fails is that he seems to think the premise is more shocking than it really is. Anyone who has seen Surviving the Game, or even the John Woo-directed Van Damme film Hard Target, is no stranger to modern variations on the plot of the 1932 classic film, The Most Dangerous Game, which originally entered the world as a short story by Richard Connell in 1924. Roth’s variation turns the hunters into torturers, which not only recycles the eighty-two year old plot but actually makes it boring. There’s no ‘Game’ in torture.
When the story’s hero finally makes it behind the curtain, the results are lukewarm. The men doing the torturing are not that interesting or even all that credible (the one exception being Rick Hoffman’s American client, whose performance and character suggest a better film ... somewhere), the torturing itself is not all that intense, and the climax of the film turns into an action movie—complete with car chases and a heroic tribe of little street children (I’m not kidding). Hostel also has the typical problems with atmosphere and lighting (once again, we are on a set somewhere with some creatively bankrupt people), and the characters are all completely unlikable. Again.
I think this film could have worked if instead of being tortured the victims of this corrupt business were being fed to the Devil. Lured with beauty and pulled into the hungry maw of Hell itself. And all the characters would have died. That would’ve been a movie worth writing home about.
After watching Hostel, I briefly checked out some of the bonus features on the DVD to see if Eli Roth had anything intelligent to say in his defense. The first thing the writer/director of this film talks about? Toilets in Europe.
Indeed. That’s exactly where this movie should’ve gone.