Tag Archives: scary movies

April 6, 2013 · 5:43 pm

Movie Review: Evil Dead (Remake)

Last night, I went to see the Evil Dead remake and I was less than impressed.

For those that don’t know, the original The Evil Dead is a horror cult classic that exists in its own realm of awesome. It is a frantic, kinetic, slapstick gore-tastic explosion of excess. The sequels that followed are less innovative, but far more fun and added more to the sub-layers of pop culture than the first. The first was a horror movie that was as much informed by the Three Stooges as it was by George Romero and drive-in horror flicks.

The remake was, in a lot of ways, going to fail before it even got out of the gate. You cannot, absolutely cannot, remake the magic that makes a cult movie a cult movie. And nor do you want to. A cult movie is popular with only a small portion of the movie-going audience, hence the name. The studio is not going to go out of their way to try and please a very cranky, persnickety cluster of fans.

So the remake was far less frantic, more reserved and more by-the-numbers, more tailored for the average Friday night ticket holder. It followed closely along in the footsteps of the original movie and every “cabin in the woods” formula movie that followed.

But the more I thought about it, the more I began to consider the idea that the remake was, in a sly way, tapping into the same ideas that the first The Evil Dead did. It was violent. Ridiculously so. Almost Black Knight violent. It even made me wince once or thrice. Much in the way the first The Evil Dead reveled in the gooshy red stuff, the remake over-indulged as well, but catered to an audience that has been emotionally stunted on a steady diet of Saw and Hostel movies.

And as it progressed, Evil Dead became steadily more over the top and more absurd. At the time, when I saw duct tape routinely used as the cure-all for injuries, including, but not limited to, a severed arm, I thought that there was a very desperate or very ignorant screenwriter at play. But now, in retrospect, I think there were just screenwriters at play, trying to tread a very careful line between the goofy, over-the-top slapstick violence of every horror movie from the 80′s and the grim, ultra real, ultra gritty torture horror that has come to, disturbingly, dominate the market in the last ten years.

I hesitate to call Evil Dead a good movie, but I am willing to give it more credit than I initially gave it. If you’re a fan of the original or of 80′s horror in general (Hello Re-Aimator fans), give it a spin, keep an open mind and see it as an amalgam of the now and then.

I give it one, over-amorous tree.

-D-

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October 20, 2012 · 8:35 am

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Remade

Between 2007 and 2010, all three of the major slasher icons were featured in reboots of the old movies. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers stalked the silver screen again in “fresh” “re-imaginings” of the old movies. Halloween came first, followed shortly by Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The idea that this was even a profitable idea probably came from the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which grossed over $107 million dollars worldwide. And that’s in 2003 dollars!

Of the three remakes, Halloween is the only one that can be even remotely be called “good”, and I use that term loosely. It’s still a slasher movie; it’s extremely violent, has a fairly simple plot and the character development of water-logged cardboard. BUT, even though it’s the one remake that most closely followed the plot of its predecessor, it still brought a lot of new material and ideas to the table that helped to enhance, rather than detract, from the story of the character (the childhood of Michael Myers being the most notable addition). It has a lot of nice touches sprinkled throughout and has some of the best kid actors I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. In fact, the acting across the board is good, which is something you learn not to expect in a slasher movie. And, this is important here, it has some truly creepy moments.

Which cannot really be said of Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. They were boring, did nothing to add anything new or original to the characters, except for stuff you really didn’t want added (Jason the pot farmer! Freddy the goofy man-child pedophile gardener!). They could never have been made and the world would never have noticed the difference. And it’s telling that while Halloween managed to do well enough to warrant a (truly terrible) sequel, the same cannot be said of the other two, though it’s only a matter of time. 

The problem with any remake or sequel, and this is more true for the horror genre than others, is that you will never be surprised or shocked. You will never be scared. You’ve seen this monster’s moves and you know what can kill it and you know how things will proceed. They never change a franchise enough to make it interesting, because if they do they risk losing money and fan ire (see Halloween III: Season of the Witch or Friday the 13th: A New Beginning).

They remake and sequel until the money runs out, but long before then, the scares have dried up. It’s detrimental to the genre and just drives away the fans in droves to try new things like Japanese horror and giallo.

Let them die, so we can be scared again.

-D-

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October 14, 2012 · 1:11 pm

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Rock and Shock (The Event)

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I keep trying to condense all of this into one picture or thought that encompasses the entire event, but it’s just not possible.

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There are the celebrities. The few we actually talked to were absurdly nice and patient with our mumbling and limp handshakes.

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All around me, I see adulation for a genre that gets very little love outside of a small subset of fans. From modern horror to the old classics: everyone is here to share in their love of being scared.

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It’s the feeling of being with a bunch of people who love what I love, who work to create what I love. It’s bring surrounded by creators and artists and fans. It’s invigorating and energizing and l plan on coming back next year.

-D-

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October 6, 2012 · 4:24 pm

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Portrait of a Slasher Movie

The slasher movie is, by far, one of the subgenres of horror that most sticks to a formula. And here is the formula:

Pre-Credits Kill+Character Introduction+Cat Scare*+Minor Character Killed Off+Pointless Drama/Comedic Scene+Secondary Character Killed+Hero(ine) and Killer Meet-Up+Hero(ine) Triumphs+One Last Scare=Slasher Movie

This is, for the most part, how every slasher movie plays out. You have the pre-credit sequence kill, which is either part of the back story or is set in modern day and sets off the chain of events. This is where you’ll see characters defiling graves or having sex when they should have been paying attention or telling stories around a campfire about the killer. If this is a sequel, this is where you’ll most likely see a character from the previous movie get killed off (see Friday the 13th Part 2 or Scream 3).

Then comes the cast introduction. During this point you’ll see a barrage of cliches come at you. Don’t worry! Most will be dead in 90 minutes. This is also the point where you’ll meet an ancillary character. Now, the ancillary character can fulfill numerous roles. They’re the Red Herring: “Who’s that?” “Oh that’s crazy Bob, he lives in the woods where we’ll be camping!” The Red Herring will show up lurking, here and there, through-out the movie and then will end up dead at the three-quarter mark.

There’s the Small Town Sheriff. He will say, in one form or another, “Those damn kids!” before the movie is over. Though he’s going to be an asshole throughout the entire movie, he’ll most likely show up toward the middle or end and seem like he’s going to do something to affect the outcome and give the audience false hope. He’s actually going to be murder fodder and everyone’s hopes are dashed.

There’s the Doomsayer. He (or she) is an old and crusty oldtimer who knows more than everyone else, but will be completely dismissed as being either old, crazy or both. The Doomsayer can also play the part of The Red Herring. It’s a toss-up to whether the Doomsayer will show up beyond the Introduction.

Then there’s the Cat Scare. The Cat Scare is when a character hears a noise, goes to investigate and finds a cat. It is almost ALWAYS a cat. And it’s always a cat that has somehow ended up in a cupboard. I have owned numerous cats, but they rarely ended up in cupboards.

Right after the cat scare, Minor Character death. The Doomsayer is a good choice for this, but sometimes it’s the gas station attendant or the lonely hitchhiker or any person who is not one of the fresh young teens.

Then you have the pointless drama and light-hearted comedy to trick you into thinking that that this movie is more than nubile young people being offed with chainsaws.

This is when the secondary characters start dying, one by one and, depending on how many characters there are, depends on how long this process will take.

After all the non-essential personnel are removed, the hero or, more frequently, the heroine meets up with the monster. If the monster is masked, this is where he’ll be de-masked. If the killer is actually the boyfriend, long lost-brother or the mother of a deformed little boy who drowned in the lake, this is where the shocking twist is revealed.

After the Killer is dispatched, the Hero(ine) and her/his Boyfriend/Girlfriend walk away from the body. Then the body moves, or the little boy comes out of the lake or the second killer steps out of the shadows or the Hero(ine) turns around with a crazy look in her eyes and you know SHE’S the killer now. This is the Final Scare. It can be either followed with a re-assuring shot of the Hero(ine) waking up or a freeze-frame of the Final Scare.

Bam. You don’t ever need to watch a slasher movie ever again. Because you just did. All of them.

-D-

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September 30, 2012 · 1:17 pm

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Prequel

I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s descent into madness. I hope I never have to do that again. But it did give you a little taste of what to expect in the coming days.

For the next 31 days, I plan to post more Spoooky Beer Reviews, horror movie reviews, and my occasional over-philosophizing about the horror genre, both in books and in film. I plan to blog from Rock and Shock. I plan to even blog about things that aren’t directly related to Halloween, just to mix it up a little bit.

In the end, I hope that you and I will know each other better  and grow closer together.

And that you’ll buy my book.

-D-

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September 29, 2012 · 10:14 pm

Our Monsters (Entry VII)

Through the years, you can see the evolution of our fears. In the 30′s and 40′s, there were vampires, werewolves and mummies. The old world monsters, the creatures we brought over in wooden sailing ships. They were beasts that had been haunting the imagination for centuries.

By the 50′s and 60′s, we had outgrown them and moved on to Atomic Horrors and Aliens. We feared what our science had wrought. Giant ants and nuclear monsters. Creatures that had mutated and grown out of control. Creatures from the edge of the galaxy that had come thousands of light years to do us wrong.

In the late 60′s and 70′s, things had changed once again. We were scared of the occult and Satanism. We viewed ourselves as a morally bankrupt culture that was on the verge of moral collapse. The End of Days was upon us. Likewise, there was the rise of the Slasher. He was human, for the most part, and stalked Suburbia. He wielded a knife (or machete or chainsaw or something else pointy) and cut hard and deep.

But by the 80′s, horror had changed its tone, yet again. The Slasher ruled supreme, but he was not the real star. He was the vehicle for the gore. Gooey red stuff splashed across the screen in great gouts. Vicious murders and violent slashings, arms, limbs and eyeballs everywhere.

And, by the 90′s, we had grown jaded. We were cynical and looked upon Jason and Freddy the same way a teenager would look at his chldhod fears of the boogeyman. Scream defined our views of the cinematic world.

And now, we live in the aftermath. We don’t watch horror movies to be scared anymore. We watch them for the violence, the gore, the torture. Hostel and Saw are the new rulers. Or…they were. Their day seems to be fading, to be replaced by…what? The found-movie genre? Japanese horror knock-offs?

What is to come?

I don’t know.

And it’s exciting.

-D-

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· 9:04 pm

Cabin in the Woods: Worst Horror Movie Ever (Entry VI)

As a horror movie, Cabin in the Woods is pretty terrible. It’s hilarious, well-acted and my favorite movie to come out this year, but it’s a terrible horror movie.

It’s similar to Scream in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of winking and nodding at the audience, but where Scream decided to be scary, Cabin in the Woods went down a different trail.

I like to think of the two movies as two sides of the same coin: a reverent acknowledgement of horror movies. Scream was constrained, somewhat, by the fact that it was still trying to be terrifying and grounded in a real world. Cabin in the Woods just laughed and away it went. There were nods and smiles to Evil Dead and Hellraiser and The Ring and every slasher movie ever made. It was a movie that felt like it was made by people who knew and loved the genre and weren’t afraid to make fun of it along the way.

They stripped horror bare and showed us what it really was: it’s our fears and our nightmares imprinted on celluloid. When we go to the movies and watch them to be afraid, we’re not just trying to be entertained. We’re trying to exorcise the demons from a time when we were lost and afraid in the woods and we didn’t know what terrors the shadows could hold.

That is the beauty of horror. It lets us be afraid in a safe place, a warm place, with other people and friends.

And Cabin in the Woods is a hurrah to that. It has us look at those celluloid monsters and peels back at the shadows and lets us laugh at our fears.

In no way is Cabin in the Woods scary, which it makes it a terrible horror movie, but it’s of the same spirit and gives us the backbone we need to look into the darkness and just…laugh.

-D-

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· 7:24 pm

Mass-Produced Horror (Entry III)

While watching the remake of My Bloody Valentine (not the 3D version, because beer reviewing and 3D blood splatter don’t make for good companions) I decided that Hollywood will never again make a movie that can legitimately frighten me. They might be able to make me vaguely uneasy or jump in surprise, but they will never scare me.

The last time a movie actually gave me the out and out willies was Anti-Christ, a movie made in Europe somewhere. It was weird, controversial and, I’m assuming here, was not in the business of being a blockbuster.

I need weird. I need unpredictable. I need unrelenting. I need discomfort.

I’m bored by movies that spend half their set-up on characters that are tropes so worn out that you can see the seams and then just try and kill them off in the most creative way possible. It’s boring and tedious and I want something new. 

It’s the complete absence of imagination that frustrates me and you need to have imagination to make a creative work do what it is intended to do. You will never be effective if you’re remaking horror movies from the 80′s.

I hate just bashing on Hollywood because I believe, for all its flaws, it’s a system that still makes some great movies and a lot of good movies. But Jesus, when was the last time they made a truly inventive and scary horror movie?

Said the man who immediately went back to watching My Bloody Valentine.

-D-

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August 6, 2012 · 6:25 pm

It’s on the Air

You can’t sense it, but I can. I step outside and I can smell it, hovering on the fringes, hanging back from the senses; that lingering odor of decay in a basement that promises something hidden under the floor. You don’t notice it.

But it’s coming.

It’s in the way the shadows are cast now; Longer, darker, stretched thinner like tension in a darkened alley when you see a slow movement behind that dumpster. You don’t see it, not like I do.

But it’s coming.

In the back of your mind it tickles; a fingernail running down your spine, the breath of a whisper on your ear in the middle of the night. It’s the hum in the air around a downed power-line. You ignore the feeling.

But it’s still coming.

Be prepared….

It’s almost Halloween.

-D-

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July 7, 2012 · 11:26 pm

Movie Review: Antichrist (Part 2)

I finished watching Antichrist and, as promised, here’s the second and last part of my review.

After I finished watching it, I needed a hug. It’s an emotionally draining movie; filled with disturbing images and grotesque elements. It depicted vile things and at the end, I wasn’t entirely sure what I had seen. I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again and I doubt I’ll ever be able to recommend it to anyone.

In spite of that and because of that, I’m more than willing to say that this is one of the best horror movies to be made in the last fifteen years. It went to the very limited of my comfort zones and stayed there for the duration of the movie. At no point was I ever relaxed or settling back down. It ratcheted up the tension and kept it here and didn’t allow for a moment of respite.

It’s  moments like this that I long for when I watch horror movies. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to be on edge. I want to be swept up in a tide of relentless energy.

It’s movies like Antichrist that give me hope that the genre will not be completely lost in a sea of senseless sequels and gratuitous violence. There is hope that people can go to the movies and experience true fear. Because if we cannot be scared in a theater, that leaves us precious few options.

-D-

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