Horror fans must have an almost permanent feeling of deja vu these days. It seems that the horror films that we grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, like The Amityville Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are all being re-made, which makes the new releases list in the newspaper occasionally seem like it came from the Twilight Zone.
The latest cult horror film to find a new life in 2006 is The Hills Have Eyes, the 1977 Wes Craven film that gave us the immortal line, “We’re going to be French fries! Human French fries!”
The 2006 version is directed by the French director Alexandre Aja who gave us the deeply unpleasant, but rather effective thriller High Tension last year. For the most part Aja takes his lead from the original film about an unfortunate family of vacationers who get stranded in desert of New Mexico, falling prey to mutant cannibalistic hillbillies. The bad guys are descendents of miners who worked in this remote location and continued to live there even after the government started testing nuclear bombs in their backyard. A generation later they have mutated into some very unpleasant creatures with bad tempers and a taste for human flesh.
Aja’s version takes one major liberty with the source material. In the original Craven established that the mutants, although they were evil, were a family. In fact they mirrored the poor family they were terrorizing—all American verses Americans all messed up by their own country’s experiments. I thought the contrast was one of the strong points of that film and lent a tone of social commentary about nuclear testing to the piece.
Aja forgoes social comment for shocks, and although he takes his time getting to the hard-core action, once the thrills arrive they’re worth the wait. This movie is not for the easily disturbed or the faint of heart, but if you like your scares gruesome and fast paced the Hills Have Eyes is for you.
Why I am left nursing a nasty Hangover after drinking in too many movie sequels?
There is a great scene in Ken Russell’s 1971 forgotten masterpiece The Devils. Oliver Reed as the whiskey priest Father Grandier has been tortured by a church sanctioned witch hunter. His legs crushed, his tongue pierced, he refuses to confess to heresy. His tormentor leans in one last time to question the priest’s commitment to his faith.
“Do you love the church?”
After a long pause the broken and battered holy man says, “Not today.”
I bring this up because I have just read that 2011, with a sum total of 27 movie sequels scheduled to hit theatres, is the biggest year yet for sequels and I feel like my cinematic church has been defiled.
This weekend alone offers up two part twos, the imaginatively titled The Hangover Part Two and Kung Fu Panda 2.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with movie sequels. Arguably The Godfather 2 outstrips the original, and The Bride of Frankenstein is unquestionably a better movie than its predecessor. So are Aliens, Toy Story 2 and Dawn of the Dead. It’s possible to make sequels that improve on the source, so why doesn’t Hollywood do it more often?
Because they don’t have to, that’s why. Audiences get the movies they deserve.
Need proof. Look no further than last week’s box office. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which I called a “monstrosity” in this space just seven days ago, soldiered on despite my scathing review to gross $90 million domestically, $260.4 million world wide.
Hollywood wouldn’t spend the time or effort to make these photocopy quality sequels if we didn’t line up to see them, so the next time you’re wondering why you haven’t had a truly great time at the movies recently, think back to the amount of movies you saw with a 2, 3 or 4 in the title and hang your head in shame.
I love going to the movies, sitting with strangers and getting wrapped up in the images flying through the air, but when I leave the theatre after watching—or should I say, enduring—PotC: On Stranger Tides and its ilk, I feel like Grandier. I love the movies, but catch me on the right day, ask me the question, and my answer would be, “Not today.”
I get paid to watch these things, what’s your excuse?
Horror fans must have an almost permanent feeling of deja vu these days. It seems that the horror films that we grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, like The Amityville Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are all being re-made, which makes the new releases list in the newspaper occasionally seem like it came from the Twilight Zone.
