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

Right before I left for the movie, Larry Mantle had his civilized film guys on to deliver a few sentences on the week's new flicks. In reference to Alexandre Aja's comparatively high-end new remake of The Hills Have Eyes, one of them said that nuclear films, films about nuclear topics, used to mean something, but that this was just "cosmic gore."

Yeah, okay. It is pretty violent. I have a feeling, though, that if this guy watched Craven's 1977 version, he'd find the paint-red blood fake, dated, or campy. Of course, many civilized critics consider that film and its brethren to be flimsy, exploitative junk, and if our critic feels the nuclear aspect of the new film is irrelevant, surely he'd pick a similar bone with the original: the nuclear aspect is more explication there than anything else, just a premise to explain the presence of the family, absence of infrastructure, and appearance of Michael Berryman. An early draft of the script had the cannibal family the offspring of hippies - hence the names "Jupiter," "Pluto," and the other planets, and Craven has stated that the family wasn't really supposed to be mutants at all, but simply a wild clan living outside human law. Craven is much more interested in the family dynamic and devotes a scene to explaining why the family came to exist; his interest is personal, motivational, and familial. As has always been the case, he is deeply interested in fatherhood, and the gas station attendant's role in his son's fate is the motivating factor in the film's interest in setting types of families against each other.

Aja replaces this basic premise, using nuclear and radioactive fear as the primary factor in determining not just the mutants' location, but their reason for being. He too gives a character a short speech of explication, but this one is accusatory, referring to dynamics not familial but nuclear. The locations make it that much more explicit, not merely referring to an empty stretch of desert but bringing back the relevance of the testing grounds, from the hollowed-out scars of the desert to the creepy, somehow sensible locale of the climax.

These new mutants are a tricky bunch. For one thing, they're ugly. In 1977, Ruby was feral but kind of cute, and with that in mind, her appearance here comes as a surprise - so much for a remake of Part 2, predicated on Ruby's acceptance into society. Michael Berryman was always scary-looking, but he was sort of charming in the original Hills (his first major role), a little dim-witted, a little vulnerable, with his own personality, skills, and even - unusual for a movie villain - fears. (His connection with Beast works so well that it seems completely natural when it returns in Part 2.) The new Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) is different - less developed, certainly, but very accurately what he is supposed to be - a large, strong, ugly, lumpen creation of radioactivity with questionable mental function. True, he doesn't have the sense of hurt that Berryman brought to Pluto, but what do we need to like him for? The new mutants don't really want to be liked. They don't rate character development; they don't talk much. The original family was a lot more verbose, but these mutants have less to say for themselves. Though most of them are capable, they converse with each other less, and when they speak now, it's more often to gloat; when they laugh, it's spiteful. Papa Jupiter's more personal reasons for being have...

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Topics: horror, movies

"No matter what you believe, this movie will challenge you in some way," Derrickson said. "I don't know how you can watch it without coming away and asking yourself, or the person you saw the movie with, what you believe about the reality of the demonic, and therefore the existence of the devil and the existence of God."

Of course, as always, this is patently untrue. Scott Derrickson, as director, is invested in the sentiment, but unlike the usual rote press-junket hard-sells, he seems inclined to believe it. A self-proclaimed "orthodox Christian" filmmaker (writer of Urban Legends: Final Cut!, director of the occasionally praised Hellraiser: Inferno!) may be an unlikely candidate to make a well-balanced exorcism film, but Derrickson pulled off a surprise in his story of a sanctioned exorcising priest tried for negligent homicide.

Which is not to say by miracle or fluke. Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman (his collaborator on Urban Legends and Hellraiser) have done their homework, and Emily Rose is rife with evidence that they understand the basic tenets of the genre. They establish visual and thematic motifs (corridors and clocks, the latter appearing in The Exorcist as well), they build character through audience-shared experience. Importantly, they understand something of the gender roles of possession film: Father Moore's defense lawyer is Erin Bruner, who as a woman is able to identify with Emily's vulnerability, knowing she herself is open to the same possessing influence. (Moore himself is a man of faith and not of science, and this allows him the priestly prerogative: to identify with the woman's open mind rather than that of the man of hard science.) It's a mainstay of possession film, and Derrickson lays it out clearly to the audience with Bruner placed in a faithful repetition of a traumatic flashback of Emily Rose's experience, with Bruner taking the role of Emily. The feminine (if not female) victim-hero central to horror film is downright crucial in possession film. The type of mind used in such film (the woman's mind existing as entity in distinct opposition to male mind, not through inherent characteristic but experience) - the gendering of openness and acceptingness, here mentally gendered thus due to blunt fact of physiognomy, means that Bruner can learn during the trial in a way that calculating prosecutor Ethan Thomas cannot.

Thomas is introduced in exposition as a devout Christian, a man who spends all his time in the church, and a shrewd sonofabitch. "Shrewd" is not a description that helps characters in possession film. Sight may help you, or compassion. Open-mindedness (of the intentional [intellectual curiosity, willingness to regain your faith after losing it previously] and unintentional [beset by supernatural or unexplained powers due to your unacknowledged possession of the open-mindedness characteristic] varieties) may help you. Faith will help you, though its price will always be high: your job, your life, a lifetime's peace of mind. It may bring salvation, or it may only bring understanding (in spirituo-faithic terms, this understanding often takes the form of resigning yourself to uncertainty forever, the only response to glimpsing a new world of non-fact-based realities [and this a bargain compared to the permanent insanity demanded by Lovecraft of his analogues]). Bruner is open-minded; Thomas is shrewd. Bruner can learn and...

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Topics: horror, movies

Gather round, children, for the legend of Dr. Satan. In a place called Hollywood, a man who stole his name said that he had a ghost story to tell, and a studio (Universal) said they wanted him to tell his story, and that they would pay him to do so. When he told them the story, they said that they didn’t like it, and that they would not, as is the folk tradition, pass the story on to others, and Rob Zombie had to buy the rights to the movie back so he could shop it around to other distributors. MGM said they wanted it, until Zombie told Ben Affleck on the set of Daredevil that MGM would release it since they apparently had no morals, ostensibly in jest; the story was overheard (the film crew, there to shoot Zombie interviewing the cast for an MTV special, must have been eavesdropping), related on the MTV website and then in Variety, and MGM canned the project; Zombie was approached by Lion’s Gate, who finally released it.

The prevailing wisdom on why Universal, at least, refused to release House of 1000 Corpses is that it was overly gory and shocking, but viewing reveals that it’s not noticeably more gory than Ghost Ship, and there’s nothing shocking about it unless the viewer was expecting a Pixar film. Alternate explanations, then: Rob Zombie is a pretentious, self-indulgent guy who refused to make even the slightest alteration to his flick, or b) it really stinks and the studio didn’t want it. A combination of possibilities is that Zombie was under contract to release an R-rated film and Universal didn’t think it could be released as an R, which combines the gore/shock idea and the indulgence.

Zombie’s generally accepted and oft-boasted motivation was to revive 1970s shock horror, which is all well and good, but which in practice means of course Texas Chainsaw Massacre, of which 1000 Corpses is a loose remake, without character or surprise, and with doses of some really phony evil stuff which is neither particularly human-themed enough to be disturbing or realistic nor otherworldly enough to be creative. It’s placeholder evil, MacGuffin evil meriting just the briefest explanation before that explanation - and any possible sense - is scrapped, leaving its arrival so completely nonsensical that it’s unclear why it’s there at all, feeling like nothing so much as the fourth act of a one-act play.

As far as evoking the feel of the 70s, other than its shameless Chainsaw jocking, 1000 Corpses has going for it a sparse couple of straight sunlit shots, some lighting-processing-filter combination that recalls the questionable filmstock of much shock cinema without duplicating it, and used to effect it could have been enjoyable, even insightful in its reference, a formal updating of the lapsed years that does in a couple of shots what Zombie aimed for (and missed) in script, gore effects, and style.

Rob Zombie, for his part, cobbles the thing together in a way that makes it look like he’s still working on the More Human Than Human video he was working on in 1993 or so. In fact, the whole movie is an amalgam of Zombie throwing in bits of his own projects for the last ten years or so. He’s using the same music-video filters and camera tricks from White Zombie videos (not, probably, based on any horror music videos from the 70s, and lacking even the dated-effects charm of old Alice Cooper presentations). He adds, obtrusively, from his obsessions with Bela Lugosi movies, carny-kitsch, and the much more successful melding of the two found in Elvira and Ghoulardi. We get it, you like...

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Topics: horror, movies

How does a movie that's only 75 minutes long have pacing problems? Somehow Darkness Falls manages. Act I proceeds at about average speed, normally if unenjoyably, and somehow stumbles directly into Act III, which then manages to drag on uninterminably. So the structure is kind of like this:

•Act I.

•First two-thirds of Act III.

•Middle 10-minute part of Act III.

•Another two-thirds of Act III.

•Fairly nonsensical special effects.

•Credits roll.

Darkness Falls devotes the least time to villain development of anything in memory, guarding against Unrefuted Champion status by positioning exactly two minutes of perfunctory, pretty much unrelated exposition at the very opening of the flick. Considering the overall length of the movie, this comes to an impressive two and two-thirds percent of screen time devoted to bad-guy development, which is probably a solid half of the time devoted to protagonist-development - so the percentages might be about right. Too bad the movie is awful. On the yardstick of recent movies about kids who see stuff that comes back to haunt them fast-forward ten-or-so-years later but nobody will believe them, Darkness Falls falls a distant second to They, and lest that sound too complimentary to either film, let it be clearly stated: They stinks.

Rating: D- (Darkness Falls: flat)

Topics: horror, movies

As a devoted insomniac, I find myself watching a lot of television late at night, which means I have, for the most part, three options.

Infomercials.

Porn.

Bad horror films.

All things being equal, I will choose the bad horror film, and have so chosen for the past ten years or so, which means I have seen way too many bad horror films of every conceivable variety.

So believe me when I say that Kolobos is a bad horror film.

Five people agree to be on a reality TV project where they are put in a house and filmed. Being as this is a bad horror film, they all get murdered in not terribly creative manners. The directors occasionally try and give the film a little Williamson-esque self-referentiality, in which the characters talk about how bad horror films are, but soon give up on that in favor of over-the-top slicings and dicings.

Is there any reason to watch this, you might ask? Not especially. It's no worse than most of the bad horror films out there. The plot kinda falls apart at the end, and the special effects (such as they are) are nothing to write home about, but if you're looking for something to lull you to sleep, it's not bad.

The one vaguely noteworthy aspect of the film is Promise LaMarco who plays a hipster/fast food worker. I would put down as much as $5 that, within five years, she has a part on a sitcom or comedic drama (e.g., Northern Exposure, Gilmore Girls) as a wacky townsperson. She's certainly the only actor in this film that caught my attention. Unfortunately she gets chopped up about thirty minutes into the film, at which point I had a pretty hard time staying awake. Would it have been that hard to do an on-the-set rewrite (presuming there was, in fact, a script) and bumped off the bland blond actress first?

Rating: D+

Topics: horror, movies

One last thing about the Blair Witch Project

One can’t help wondering if the people complaining about Blair Witch Project are the ones silly enough to have a few beers for courage and sit in the first five rows. Sit a reasonable distance from the screen and you’ll be fine. Ignore the backlash from the unreasonable waves of hype and you might actually like it.

BWP is very little to do with witches and witchcraft; its greatest strength may be its refusal to pin itself down to any single folklore beyond the townspeople’s crackpot grocery-store gossip. While this nicely lays the groundwork for some speculation about the conclusion, some of the best moments - the stick figures in the forest - are left alone without stuffing them into a specific set of Gremlinesque "Witchcraft Rules." For werewolf, a silver bullet, for mummy, a blowtorch, for vampire an order of scampi, but without adding a "From Dusk Till Dawn"* scene to review the steps for dealing with a witch, we can count out any chance of fighting and concentrate on the remaining options - which ain’t much: walk.

The escalating hysteria has nothing to do with any witch. While the low-budget 50s schlock that relied on zooming into the face of the victim wasn’t always terrifying, it had something going that Full Moon video doesn’t: knowledge that, while looking at something scary can be very unsettling ("In the Mouth of Madness"), looking at a rubber mask will often as not backfire (oh, let’s say "Blood Diner"). BWP is a rare creature among horror films, avoiding both of these possibilities by making creatures scarce and concentrating only on the victims, who can concentrate only on swirling concepts of myth and folklore.

This is what everybody’s so eager to talk about lately - unseen horror - but BWP is the only one to master the concept. Despite a small bit ofsuspense, the supposedly scary stuff in "Sixth Sense" is all seen. In "The Haunting" (1999), it’s all scene, and in "The Haunting" (1963), it might not even be there. In BWP, it’s unseen and very unknown, but the realization slowly dawns that it’s definitely something.

Haunting 99 played off Haunting 63 in this, the same way that failed Haunting 63: it sets itself up as psychological horror. Meaning it’s all an experiment to see if people in a scary house will drive themselves batty with fear or whether there is something in the house to do the job for them.

Yes, it’s very scary when you’re alone at home and hear a noise outside and don’t know what it is. Probably it’s much scarier when you know it’s not your imagination, but something coming to get you. It’s not knowing the specifics, not knowing how to stop it, that can get to you.

BWP delivers a few chilling moments - the figures, the stones, the climax - but don’t let those set the pace for you or you’ll miss the rest of the movie waiting for more such moments.

BWP doesn’t really need to be very scary. It’s at its best carefully pacing those few moments between stretches of dry quiet woods (no birds, no crickets, no chipmunks), as well contrasted as the weary day and tense, awake night. The stretches of day are not an exercise to create fear but a chance to study it: days as futile, shortening spans that become just a reprieve, not the safety of the sun’s rays but a lapse, a gasp that, in Harlan Ellison time-is-an-arrow terms, can do nothing but lead to night.

Heather, Mike and Josh are three kids in the woods whose situation is decreasingly likely, less plausible for them (but not for us**) and increasingly desperate - but the...

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Rating: A- (Don&3039;t not believe the hype)

Topics: horror, movies