If The Hills Have Eyes '05 derives meaning from nuclear guilt, then The Hills Have Eyes 2 is born out of military regret. Minutes into the film, Buck Private Napoli offers a timid defense of his politics and his CONVERSATION NOT CONFRONTATION bumper sticker: he just doesn't think the President should lie so much. Our representative of the military, Sergeant Millstone (nice solid name), offers a reasonable defense - it's the Prez's job - and we have our basic party lines. Well, our highest-ranking representative available; there was a Colonel recently, but he was speared through the chest and thrown off a cliff.

Our highest-ranking military representative, in turn, will die, and sooner rather than later. Our next de facto commanding officer will get his soon after.

We know from Hills '78/'05 that this lanky leftist, whose moment of compassion just cost his entire squad their lives, is to be our centerpiece. The ne minus ultra of an inept squad, he has the longest possible character arc to violent retaliatory rage. Sarge disregards his mild insistence that his name is Napoli - and so PVT Napoli will henceforth be Napoleon: a great military leader.

(Sarge will also refer to Napoli as Private Pyle, longtime military shorthand for incompetence and naïveté, but in post-1987 cinema, also an optional assaultive nickname for a mind who can't handle it, ref. Full Metal Jacket.)

The Hills Have Eyes films ('78 and '05) are both about the journey from average guy (preferably pacifist) to victim to - well, not aggressor, but something resembling it: to violent defender, maybe, or unhinged, unwilling combatant. Both contain a point at which the beleaguered Doug goes into battle by necessity, but with full knowledge of his actions.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 considers a basic parallel, but doesn't quite have the same dedication. Napoleon can't entirely make up his mind - he starts expectably scared, gradually forced by circumstance to move forward. As leadership figures fall away, he rises to the challenge in baby steps, never really gaining momentum. He's pushed along, his reactions mildly, uselessly intelligent, but never as bright as we should expect from the skinniest, least gung-ho soldier in a squad, badly in need of a chance to prove himself. His Eagle Scout background is solely useful for a single knot. He continues his path not with growing, internalized frustration, but with uncertainty: he backs going into the cave, then favors going after the captured Missy. Later, he pleads with Amber not to go after Missy.

It doesn't matter much, really, because the defining moment for Doug comes at the end; we don't get to see what becomes of him. In 2005, Alexandre Aja recreated Craven's 1977 moment, roughly: the film's climax, at which our former pacifist bludgeons, viciously and uncontrollably, his prostrate opponent.

Nap reaches this point about an hour in.

Then Amber reaches it a bit later. Then Missy reaches it. Then Napoleon reaches it again.

It's not that a single downward bayonet stab is the same as an epic, red-washed freakout, but in a film series where the single key moment is a loss of control accompanied by a repeated bludgeoning of a fully horizontal opponent beneath a once-peaceful victim, a downward stab carries more than just another torsoful of M-16 bullets - and the Cravens and Weisz...

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Topics: horror, movies

Caution: contains basically complete spoilers of both Hostel and Part II.

HOSTILE TOO

Hostel opened to $20 mil, but both good and shocked word of mouth circulated rapidly, and it gained steam to wind up with a healthy take of $47 million, ten times budget. Hostel Part II opens to poor box office - only $8.2 mil with a second-week drop to $3m - and executives scratch their heads and wonder why only $8 mil worth of people want to watch Heather Matarazzo get flayed, having thought they understood the current marketability of graphic, torturous violence. Despite what was at the time huge enthusiasm, Hostel's IMDb rating has dropped over time to 5.8, with 11% of voters giving it a 10 and 14% of voters giving it a 1. Roth enjoys (and he does enjoy: "Well, when someone throws up while watching one of your movies, it's like a standing ovation") both a strong following and a rabid anti-fan base. His stuff does polarize, and it's not without reason. If it were only gorehounds going to watch the films, and Puritans staying home, it would make sense. Some decryers simply aren't up for the ride: in a recent Joe Carnahan blog, the director of Narc (R for strong brutal violence, drug content and pervasive language) and Smokin' Aces (R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some nudity and drug use) bemoans the state of the industry even while admitting he hasn't watched the films in question. But seasoned blood fans as well as Friday-evening teens are coming away with complaints.

***

It's not the torture, and it's not the porn. Roth's movies are widely regarded as ultra-violent, but a second viewing of either film will reveal significantly less actual blood than one thought the first time through. They're more violent than most, but less violent than some, so it's not a matter of sfx-and-prostheses extremity. They've got a healthy quantity of nudity, but the word 'porn' is thrown around pretty liberally (even in a non-"torture porn" usage) for a movie with less explicit sexual content than Scary Movie 2.


To find out what it is we're not getting from the film, we need to ask what we're looking for. If it's an exercise in sadism, who goes to see this movie in the first place? This kind of backlash means people are expecting something and getting something else, and the marketing and discussion of Hostel is very clear about what to expect. Audience members come in looking for sadism and torture. Aren't they finding it?


The issue must be in the reading of the film. Hostel looks not unlike certain types of film: a teens-in-peril, a hunting-humans, a wrong-turn thriller, and a slasher, and the conventions of these films serve with some accuracy to guide the viewer along. With the extended first act, Roth allows plenty of time to consider the sexual aspect. The sex/horror dichotomy seems to follow the slasher premise, leading to the obvious questions: is Roth saying the sex sets us up? That we follow sex so blindly? Minutes into the movie, our lead Amerikaner pushes open a brothel door to make sure a prostitute isn't being beaten, though of course we know it's just gonna be some kind of BDSM deal: indeed, the woman is hitting the man. It may hint that the woman preys on the man, as we find out later to be true, but the first, and...

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Topics: horror, movies

Once again, I find myself in the position of reviewing a show that has, by the time of review, already been cancelled. In the case of Six Degrees, at least, I don't feel too bad about delaying, mostly because it took me months to sort out my opinions on the show.

For starters, the premise of the show is really pretty trite and annoying. Follow a handful of characters and, over time, show how they are all connected because, even in a giant city like New York, this is a small world and we're all neighbors and so on and so forth. Still, you have to figure that after a half season, they'd have pretty much exhausted that premise and we'd just end up with a drama about a variety of people who kind of know each other, but with a somewhat inexplicable title. That's fine with me. I don't need a hook for a show, provided the characters are well-acted and well-written.

And, I guess that's sort of the problem. The acting is really quite excellent. Most of the cast are people who were highly acclaimed for their first high-profile role, then sort of fell off the map a bit (in the case of this cast, they were the much-remarked upon actors from Dying Young, crazy/beautiful,Next Stop, Wonderland, The Sum of All Fears, and Traffic). I'm particularly fond of Hope Davis and will watch her in just about anything, but everyone does a nice job, at least given the material, which is a little subpar. The storylines are rarely original-feeling, to the point that I spent most of the few episodes that aired complaining about the writing.

Then the show went off the air for several months, and I found myself missing it a bit. Sure, quite a lot of that has to do with suddenly losing a weekly opportunity to watch Hope Davis act, but I ended up kind of caring what happened to the characters. I was actually pretty excited (in a very guilty way) to hear that the show was coming back.

When it was back, I was actually able to set aside my complaints about the writing better and just enjoy the performances (though, I should note that I did not stop complaining about the truly bizarre costuming inflicted on the actresses on this show). Of course, given my track record, a whole-hearted endorsement of the show is a certain kiss of death, since Six Degrees only lasted a couple episodes this time before disappearing forever. Ah, well.

Rating: B+ (Will be missed by me, at least)

Topics: dramas, television

It took a couple seasons, but here's the first of the blatant House knockoffs. Take an underutilized character actor, have him play an incredibly skilled, but socially maladjusted professional - instant hit. The only problem with this approach is that it depends almost entirely on the actor. Hugh Laurie is almost good enough to offset whatever other missteps the show makes (note the word "almost" - the back-to-back arcs featuring Chi McBride and Sela Ward were enough to drive me away), but the same cannot be said for, say, Jeff Goldblum (whose House-knockoff we'll review closer to air date).

Fortunately, the producers of Shark had the good sense to cast James Woods. I'm sure there are other who don't like James Woods as much as I do, but I'm willing to watch James Woods in just about anything as long as he's an asshole and berating people. Fortunately, a significant portion of Shark involved an assholic Woods berating his staff.

The premise is kind of flimsy. Woods (whose character is, in fact, named Shark) starts off as a high-priced defense attourney who suffers a crisis of conscience when he gets a very guilty client off on a spousal abuse charge, after which said client kills off his wife. After a little wallowing, he ends up running an elite unit of the Los Angeles' District Attourney's office working with high profile media cases. Which is to say, the legal equivalent of House's elite unit of diagnosticians.

What's really impressive is that this show is virtually the same in its "behind the scenes of high-profile media cases" as Justice, which completely failed to hold my interest in any way. Maybe I'm just easily entertained, but having some James Woods to fall back on makes even a trite legal drama enjoyable.

Topics: dramas, television

Did anyone else read Alas, Babylon when they were in jr. high? I'm pretty sure that was one of the books I selected at random during the semester when I got sent to the library instead of having to go to gym class, and that book both terrified and delighted me. It was written back in the day when nuclear war was more likely to simply decimate urban populations (as opposed to the global annihilation I grew up with) and depicted a small Florida town cut off from the outside world by nuclear war. As one might expect, things get bad pretty quickly (although they do become less racist, so I suppose that's a plus).

As a socially awkward (and largely misanthropic) teen, I was very fond of any of the "survivors of global apocalypse" books like The Stand) (which, I suppose, led nicely into the teenage draw towards apocalyptic zombie flicks). That combined with ongoing fear of nuclear holocaust made Alas, Babylon a pretty cirtical element of my adolesence.

All of which goes a long way towards explaining why I have high hopes for Jericho despite a severely flawed pilot. Granted, the pilot has a lot of ground to cover, so it's perhaps reasonable that things are strained a little bit. It's got to introduce Skeet Ulrich (the prodigal son of the family), his family, an ex-girlfriend, the local police department, assorted townspeople, and a bus full of schoolkids. And then introduce a nuclear war and the first rounds of local panic.

As a result the show's a little overstuffed and resorts to some sort of hamfisted narrative twists to cram everything in in forty-eight minutes. That said, it's certainly got some nice casting elements to recommend it. Skeet remains about the same as he always is - a slightly lethargic version of Johnny Depp. Gerald McRaney continues his Deadwood-intiated work on eradicating his Major Dad image with a nice bit as town mayor. Shoshannah Stern seems to have transitioned off of Weeds to do this, which was perhaps a bad decision show-quality-wise, but it's nice to see her getting work. On the less positive side, the show features Sprague Grayden, whose arrival on Joan of Arcadia signalled the rapid decay of that once-good show. I'm not sure whether to blame her for it, but the temptation is strong. Hopefully, she'll be able to redeem herself here.

Rating: B (Worth watching if you like nuclear war)

Topics: television