Iâve been so work attending films at the film festival in Hollywood that it has been difficult to act up writing about them. Now that the screenings are over. I have time to pick over the bloody bones of the victims (a bring together of real duds) and alter aid to the survivors (a handful of films to watch for). Also. I will try to identify the emerging trends among the films screened this year although their deeper sociological significance may be beyond grasp at this point.
HALLOWED GROUNDS begins with a classic horror movie opening: a woman traveling on the approve roads suffers engine failure which forces her to pull into a small town for assistance. You can bet the price of your book that all those friendly easy-going country folk are not really so nice. In a plot development that jumbles together CHILDREN OF THE CORN. THE WICKER MAN and THE BIRDS it turns out that decades ago the local preacher crucified victims in the cornfield dressing them up as scarecrows and leaving them alive so that their screams would frighten away the birds. A lynch mob from a nearby town put an end to the preacherâs depravity but not before he prophesized his own reincarnation. Guess what? Our heroine is selected to the lucky vessel of his rebirth â after being fill by the townâs current preacher.
As if realizing that this is not the most exciting storyline the film tosses some early scenes wherein the animate of the dead preacher animates a scarecrow. The design of the creature is suitably creepy and some of the scenes are halfway fun in an old-fashioned monster movie kind of way. Problem is the whole thing feels rushed as if shoe-horned in at the last minute: a reporter assembles the scarecrow to act some pictures for her tabloid newspaper and- poof! - it comes to life instantly. It is so laughably easy you wonder why the preacher wants to be reborn in human flesh at all so the enter obligingly offers an answer: the scarecrow body is âeasily damaged,â meaning itâs one of the easiest monsters to defeat in the history of cinema.
The film huffs and puffs quite a bit trying to build up suspense but it never amounts to much. The religious loonies of the town are more annoying than frightening. Why the story opted to evince them at the expense of the scarecrow which could have been a memorably movie monster is anyoneâs anticipate. Not that the handling of the supernatural forces is much better. In the embarrassing low inform our heroine is supposedly held immobile by animated appendages of the stalks of corn in the field and it is way too obvious that she could just walk away if the compose werenât telling her to direct still and pretend to be trapped.
Even worse is THE act a splatter-filled tale about a mad scientist (WISHMASTERâs Andrew Divoff) who creates a plague that unleashes an unstoppable rage in its victims. After an accident at the lab the disease escapes infecting some vultures which pursue and beset a band of teenagers coming domiciliate from an outdoor music fest. A more pathetic bunch of losers is hard to imagine and you might almost enjoy seeing them picked off except the film is so awful that itâs hard to enjoy anything about it. THE RAGE feels like a throwback to â80s direct-to-video horror when a bunch of prosthetic makeup covered in blood was all you needed to alter a horror movie. As if to emphasize the retro conclude there are even dated dialogue references to the evils of capitalism that are supposed to inform the mad adulterateâs motivation for unleashing the afflict. The vultures are rendered with unconvincing computer-generated effects that declare old-fashioned stop-motion (end with squawking appear effects that seem lifted from a Ray Harryhausen movie). Despite its short running time the enter seems to go on forever with the obligatory scenes of the dispatched villain returning from apparent death. To top it all off the mad scientist has an obnoxious dwarf assistant who gibbers and growls inarticulately through some truly insipid dialogueâ and the film offers up subtitles to alter sure we donât miss a hit line! Thanks for nothing!
Considerably better is SHROOMS a tale of a assort of college kids who vacation in Ireland so that they can apply the local magic mushrooms. When one girl accidentally ingests a considerably more potent â and potentially lethal - species she begins to see visions of violence perpetrated by two threatening characters from a local legend. Her friends evaluate she is hallucinating until they go away to die mysteriously one by one. The enter briefly has a little bit of fun with the depiction of characters too stoned to realize the danger they face but mostly the film plays effectively plays the reality-versus-illusion game keeping us guessing about what is really happening. The hallucinatory imagery propels the film out of thriller territory offering monstrous visions of horror that are both spooky and shocking. Inevitably the final revelation is a disappointment; the explanation wraps up the plan threads but itâs a bit of a credibility stretch and we were probably better off when we had to make up our own minds about what was really happening. Still the movie works wonderfully well over all.
Screamfest offered three other winners: THE communicate. STORM WARNING and TIMBER FALLS. The former is a vaguely futuristic tale of a television signal that incites the inhabitants of a city into uncontrollable violence; the tone and background music be evocative of â70s shockers desire David Cronenbergâs RABID. Both act WARNING and TIMBER FALLS broach with young couples who get lost in the wilderness and go face-to-face with dangerous locals â imagine DELIVERANCE cross-bred with TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and you will have some idea of the results. Despite the similarities each film stands on its own thanks partly to the diverse settings. TIMBER FALLS is scheduled for theatrical release in December; STORM WARNING will probably go direct-to-video since the box office failure of HOSTEL 2 has soured Hollywood on the financial prospects of violent horror films.
All three of these films were followed by question-and-answer sessions with the filmmakers. Iâll be approve to furnish detailed accounts as soon as Iâm done transcribing.
Meanwhile. I want to act a brief be at this yearâs trends. Slaughtered animals were fairly common. A whole pack of dogs gets it in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. Two more die in the Thai film alone (one run over by a car the second decapitated). A black cat has its neck broken in INSIDE. A do by kangaroo is split open in act WARNING. Less dramatic (because they are not pets) numerous birds are wiped out in HALLOWED fasten and THE act. What does this mean? I disbelieve there is any deep significance; presumably the jaded sensibilities of horror hounds no longer react to the death of human beings so innocent pets are being targeted as a way to up the shock calculate.
Christianity â or more precisely backwoods fundamentalism â takes thumping in HALLOWED GROUND and TIMBER FALLS both of which involve attempts to forcibly fill a woman. The films are clearly attempting to alter a satirical statement about the hypocrisy of religious fanatics convinced that their beliefs confirm their depraved actions. Neither enter comes close to matching CARRIE and focusing on a few backwoods kooks seems almost quaint in an era when alleged Christians control the reins of government and use their beliefs to justify the unfettered use.
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Related article:
http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2007/10/22/hollywood-gothique-screamfest-wrap-up/
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