Isolate/Annihilate
Hello again, Underlings. From my Kelly-green recliner here in the ethereal void where I view all that is and comment on it, I see that a favorite pastime of the majority of you out there is to visit the Hollywood genre of Horror.
All too many of you minions find a near-sexual draw to these hacker/slasher/blood-n-gore features. It is too bad that for the most part today's thrillers are rehashings of much better, and original, films of the past. Movie makers of today lack creativity when it comes to suspenceful stories that keep an audience on the edge of panic yet craving more. Instead, they go to the make-up and prop departments for faux-gore, or if they have something of a budget they pull in the special digital effects nerd to do all the visuals. That's too bad.
Recently, I managed to find some time to view a pair of recent additions to the genre. The first was "Hostel", a typical teen-killing feature where the audience eventually knows more than the actors. Although I thought the story concept was interesting, I was disappointed in the overall outcome. Q. could have done a lot more to explain the motivations behind the "brothel's" patrons. Additional, the "hero", rather "survivor", of the adventure moved quite well for a guy with deep puncture wounds in both thighs! I'd give it an overall "C".
The other film I watched receives an "A" in my book. "Saw 2" was an outstanding sequel for a genre that can't figure out that sequel does not mean equal when it comes to storyline. "Saw 2" was sufficiently different from the original that it could stand alone. The suspense was excellent and kept me guessing. The twist was great if not unexpected and really gave me pause to rerun the movie through my head as the climax rolled. Few horror movies today can achieve this effect without giving away too much, or pulling it out of their ass.
The main theme of any good horror movie plays on our primal fears; Isolation = Annhilation! The "killer", be it a psychopath, monster, alien, what-have-you, always seeks to Isolate the "victims". We are always introduced to these poor souls early, led to feel sympathy for them in most cases, or hated in others, and then we sit back and watch as over the course of the next 90 minutes they are picked off one after the other. Usually, the "hero/survivor" is easily picked out by the audience before or shortly after the first death, and well before any of the others figure out what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, for we the voyeurs, by this time we have usually figured out what "we" would be doing to stay alive, and it's never what the "victims" end up doing. This leads to an almost comical opera of predictable death and destruction that we've seen over and over. So many of these movies end up fading into the darkness of the bargain bins at the Wal-Mart.
There are exceptions, of course. Most of the original films, such as "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Alien", "Scream", "Saw", "The Blob", "The Thing From Another World", "Assault on Precinct 13", "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", and the like, were creative, original, and excellent thrillers in their time. To see these movies the first weekend in the theater is the true pinnacle of edge-of-your-seat thrills. Nothing can top that adrenaline rush you get the first time the boogy-man strikes in a movie you know nothing about before hand. It is orgasmic!
We crave to thrilled, to be scared, to be afraid of the dark and the unknown once again as we so often were as children. This genre is a door to our youth that all of us, no matter what our age, can enjoy time and again. But we need originality. We need to see what we haven't seen before, to be scared by what has never scared us before, to fear what we've never feared before, to be told a story that we've never heard before. This is what a truly memorable horror thriller must do to become a classic.
Let's see what they can come up with next.
Take care, my Zealots!
All too many of you minions find a near-sexual draw to these hacker/slasher/blood-n-gore features. It is too bad that for the most part today's thrillers are rehashings of much better, and original, films of the past. Movie makers of today lack creativity when it comes to suspenceful stories that keep an audience on the edge of panic yet craving more. Instead, they go to the make-up and prop departments for faux-gore, or if they have something of a budget they pull in the special digital effects nerd to do all the visuals. That's too bad.
Recently, I managed to find some time to view a pair of recent additions to the genre. The first was "Hostel", a typical teen-killing feature where the audience eventually knows more than the actors. Although I thought the story concept was interesting, I was disappointed in the overall outcome. Q. could have done a lot more to explain the motivations behind the "brothel's" patrons. Additional, the "hero", rather "survivor", of the adventure moved quite well for a guy with deep puncture wounds in both thighs! I'd give it an overall "C".
The other film I watched receives an "A" in my book. "Saw 2" was an outstanding sequel for a genre that can't figure out that sequel does not mean equal when it comes to storyline. "Saw 2" was sufficiently different from the original that it could stand alone. The suspense was excellent and kept me guessing. The twist was great if not unexpected and really gave me pause to rerun the movie through my head as the climax rolled. Few horror movies today can achieve this effect without giving away too much, or pulling it out of their ass.
The main theme of any good horror movie plays on our primal fears; Isolation = Annhilation! The "killer", be it a psychopath, monster, alien, what-have-you, always seeks to Isolate the "victims". We are always introduced to these poor souls early, led to feel sympathy for them in most cases, or hated in others, and then we sit back and watch as over the course of the next 90 minutes they are picked off one after the other. Usually, the "hero/survivor" is easily picked out by the audience before or shortly after the first death, and well before any of the others figure out what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, for we the voyeurs, by this time we have usually figured out what "we" would be doing to stay alive, and it's never what the "victims" end up doing. This leads to an almost comical opera of predictable death and destruction that we've seen over and over. So many of these movies end up fading into the darkness of the bargain bins at the Wal-Mart.
There are exceptions, of course. Most of the original films, such as "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Alien", "Scream", "Saw", "The Blob", "The Thing From Another World", "Assault on Precinct 13", "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", and the like, were creative, original, and excellent thrillers in their time. To see these movies the first weekend in the theater is the true pinnacle of edge-of-your-seat thrills. Nothing can top that adrenaline rush you get the first time the boogy-man strikes in a movie you know nothing about before hand. It is orgasmic!
We crave to thrilled, to be scared, to be afraid of the dark and the unknown once again as we so often were as children. This genre is a door to our youth that all of us, no matter what our age, can enjoy time and again. But we need originality. We need to see what we haven't seen before, to be scared by what has never scared us before, to fear what we've never feared before, to be told a story that we've never heard before. This is what a truly memorable horror thriller must do to become a classic.
Let's see what they can come up with next.
Take care, my Zealots!
posted by B.R.Dailey | 8:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home