TEETH, TITS & TUNA

The term ‘Guilty Pleasure’ often proves to be a convenient scapegoat when discussing a movie. It’s a little like saying “It’s so bad, it’s good”. ‘Pleasure’ indicates you enjoyed the experience to some measure and ‘Guilty’ obviously indicates you shouldn’t have. Piranha 3D is more like smelling you own farts than eating a second slice of chocolate cake. The ‘Pleasure’ is beyond guilty, it’s practically wrong. Though at the same time, it’s hard to trash something like Piranha 3D that gleefully goes so far out of its way to turkey slap you in the face (in 3D) with its blood-soaked inanity. From it’s under water nude lesbian cavorting to its penis belching titular antagonists, this film is an 80 plus minute parade of the most juvenile sensibilities a major Hollywood release has ever put on the screen. I really wish I could honestly say Piranha 3D was as much fun as it sounds. While there is some genuine humour and some genuine tension, the major flaw of Piranha 3D is the complete dispensing of any story. What we get here is more of a situation, all details are just skimmed over to make way for more boobs and blood. I’d like to say that maybe this was intentional and a subverting of exploitation cinema, and believe me, at first I really thought that’s what we were getting. And where the hell was the third act? Talk about a major prick tease! Maybe a director’s cut will reveal more as the trailer featured several shots that don’t appear in this version of the movie. Even Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) had more of a story. It’s at this point I’d like to make it clear that Aja’s movie is not a remake, it merely shares the title. Infact, I’d say his movie has more in common with James Cameron’s Piranha II: The Spawning. That movie had its fair share of boobs and a strong willed female protagonist. While horror and humour is something Aja’s film does have in common with Dante’s, for all its gore, Piranha 3D has nothing of the horror and brutality Aja elicited for his Hills Have Eyes remake and his debut feature Haute Tension. Aja’s Piranha is basically a gross-out comedy. Points must be given to Elizabeth Shue for giving us a likeable heroine even if we learn next to nothing about her during our brief seafood dinner date. Like most recent horror fair we are encouraged to hate just about everybody else, they all deserve to be eaten alive. None more than Jerry O’Connell’s porn director. While I see why this should be funny, O’Connell was just so vile, even his over-the-top death scene wasn’t penance enough. And what of the all important 3D? I’d have to agree with the detractors of the format. It has little effect here. You certainly know where the effect should be, but it never has that reach-out-and-grab-you feel, which is a real shame, because it should have worked and I’m sure that’s what Aja had intended. So, what is there to like about this scaly feeding frenzy? The piranha look great and all the gore is handled with aplomb. There is one death involving hair and a boat engine I just can’t get out of my head or for that matter what happens to Eli Roth. Aside from the shonky 3D, the movie is shot well, bright and bold. I can’t keep musing that one day this Piranha will go the way of Showgirls. A shameless dalliance in celluloid depravity that actually gets better the more you watch it and, strangely enough, layers of subtext are revealed you never thought existed or were intended.

Would I watch it again? Yes. Will I see the sequel? Yes. Guilty as charged.

Keep your hands off the screenplay Mr. King! A look back at Pet Semetary.

* Warning: Major Spoilers ahead*
Watching Pet Semetary has made me understand why Hollywood does remakes. While the title has cache as a brand name and clout by association, originating from the pen of one Stephen King, this 1989 creep show is a strong candidate for re-incarnation. Let me just say that I completely understand the rose coloured glasses with which we sometimes remember films first seen in our youth. Even the best examples of horror, (Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm St. and alike) can often look dated, crappy and lame to eyes witnessing them for the first time, many, many years after their release. Sometimes these judgments can be unfair, not considering the time when the film was first relevant. Other times it can give clarity to a film’s short coming and missed opportunities. Now, with my self-justifying out of the way, let’s turn our attention back to Pet Semetary. Adapted from King’s popular novel of the same name, box-office wise this film is probably his most successful page to screen horror adaptation, King even wrote the script. This alone is reason for a remake. It appears as though King may have been too close to the project, as the pace is slow, taking way too much to time to get to the inevitable and the subplots seem pointless. King seemingly didn’t have the objectivity to self edit. The Shining and Carrie, while based on King’s books were written for the screen by other writers, namely filmmakers, who could cut away the fat and get to the guts of the story all the while keeping a visual language in mind. From the very beginning of Pet Semetary we know the cat will die, the kid will die and everything will go horribly wrong for this generic family. It just takes so long to get there. A remake could pace it up, get to the kid dying quicker, which is the real drama of the story, and maybe spend more time with this evil re-incarnated baby. Another thing a remake could address is the numerous subplots. The whole thing about the wife’s complex with death and her strange back story involving a hideously disabled sister can go or be made relevant in some way to the main plot. There’s also the seemingly unnecessary feuding between the father and the wife’s family which comes to a ridiculously over the top head at the baby’s funeral. And what about the freaky house keeper who commits suicide? What was the point of her? Was she some sort of red herring? Perhaps this is all explained and relevant in King’s book, but on screen it really doesn’t work. I also thought that the resurrecting should have taken place in the actual pet cemetery instead of miles away in the sacred Navajo site. Despite rendering the title pointless, it is hard to believe the father could be convinced to trek all the way to this site not being told where he is going and what will happen there, let alone dragging a body with him. Maybe all this could have been made more palatable had the actors been better. While Fred Gwynne (of The Munsters) is probably the best of a bad bunch, the rest are terrible, especially the mother (Denise Crosby of Star Trek the Next Gen.) and who ever the little girl was who played the whinging brat of a daughter, she should have been the one hit by the truck! At the heart of it all I really think there is a good story, creepy, dramatic and full of the kind of conundrums that make an audience think “Would I do the same?” it just deserves to be presented in a more considered and cinematic way.

Unbelievable True Story

According to the logline for ‘The Haunting In Connecticut’ some things just can’t be explain. Well in the course of this film its makers dam well try to explain everything, obliterating any chance the film has of being genuinely scary.
While the story is quite good and apparently based on fact, the way in which it is presented to us as a film works completely against the idea of reality and truth. Rapid cuts, flashes of ghostly figures, sharp stings of music to highlight moments that are intended to be frightening (these are the canned laughter of horror movies) are all very redundant, as the crux of the story is already quite terrifying. A boy with cancer, close to death himself, becomes a magnet for ill-at-ease specters in an old Connecticut home. This film falls folly to the same temptations faced by many modern horror tales, when filmmakers, producers and studios are afraid to take time to tell their story, build gradually to a climax and let the viewers mind imagine how terrifying the situation presented can be. What disappointed me most of all about this film was the over visualizing of the boy’s ghostly visions. They just seemed too detailed and specific, even logical. The filmmakers seemingly forgot that the epicenter of fear is the unknown and unexplainable. Here everything is given a reason and the characters seem to understand exactly who the ghosts are, where they came from and what they want. So the film’s ominous logline is actually a lie. To be fair, this film is a cut above most recent horror fare despite its short comings. What works about the film rides almost solely on the performance of Kyle Gallner as Matt, the boy at the center of all this ghostly attention. Gallner has gone on to appear in Jennifer’s Body and the Nightmare On Elm St. remake, and I’m sure landed those subsequent horror roles because of his turn in this film. If only the same could be said for the seasoned performers that surround him. Virginia Madsen as his mother, Martin Donovan as his father and Elias Koteas as a priest also stricken with cancer, all seem to struggle abit. Unlike Gallner, their performances didn’t seem very real. I know these actors can be good, so I’m putting it down to direction, sorry Peter Cornwell. It’s funny. Recently I’ve been watching a series on Discovery call ‘A Haunting’. Each episode concerns a real haunting and how people deal with the supernatural. Despite often local-theatre-company standard re-enactments this low budget series regularly provides the chills so many films can’t seem to muster.

DIE LAUGHING: The Deadly Art Of Horror Comedy.

Watching Zombieland (2009) for the first time on DVD recently reminded me how tenuous the sub genre of horror comedy can be.

While it seems ever more difficult to craft a horror movie that is actually scary and a comedy that is actually funny, some filmmakers willingly set themselves the task of combining the two opposing genres. In the case of Zombieland, though successful in box office terms, it fails as a sub genre candidate. It’s really just a comedy with some outrageously gory FX, which are played as sight gags rather than shock moments. In my opinion, a successful horror comedy should be just that, the horror before the comedy. Some of the best horror films have often incorporated humour to ballast the terror. In many ways the throwing of the girl into the river by Frankenstein’s monster had a degree of humour to it (it’s sequel Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) may well be the first ever horror comedy) and films like Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982) and Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) are punctuated with humour threw out, the later more darkly so. The same could be said for any number of stalwarts of the horror genre. An American Werewolf In London (1981), Re-Animator (1985), Piranha (1978), Fright Night (1985), Gremlins (1984) and Critters (1986) are just some that use the push-pull of horror and comedy, some weighted to one side more than the other. However none of this films forgot to be scary, even the more innocuous (dare I say cute) examples like Gremlins and its inferior doppelganger Critters, both had death, blood and an overwhelmingly multiplying menace.
Perhaps Ghostbusters (1984) could be branded as the sub genre’s greatest success. I don’t think anyone would find Ghostbusters sitting in the horror section of their local video store (if you still go to one), it’s definitely a comedy, but in a couple of scenes, we are reminded of the ‘evil’ our heroes are up against. The scene in which Sigourney Weaver’s character is abducted, demon claws ripping from her couch, hell hound drooling at the ready, is definitely not played for laughs. There is a certain air of doom in Ghostbusters. While the characters deliver comic dialogue, we understand that the ghosts they are busting are nasty and that the events are spiralling towards some kind of apocalypse. The point being, the film is serious and scary when it needs to be, something Zombieland and many others didn’t quite grasp. *SPOILER* Ironically Bill Murray makes a cameo in Zombieland, and the characters actually watch Ghostbusters, as if saying, “Hey, we love that movie and this is our version of it”. Frankly, they have nothing in common and Bill Murray looks pained for the short scene he appears.
2009 also saw the release of Drag Me To Hell, from director Sam Raimi, a veteran of the horror comedy sub genre. Long before his well deserved main stream success with the Spiderman movies, Raimi had given us Ash (Bruce Campbell) and the Evil Dead. Much like those films, Drag Me To Hell is highly stylised in its photography, FX and score (a must-have from Christopher Young). Following a thunderous opening scene where a young boy is dragged to hell, we meet our heroine and some of the comedy begins, ranging from the mild (listening to self help tapes while stuck in city traffic) to the gross-out (think dentures, drool and bad candy). While the film has some great moments of both subtle and gross out humour, it never forgets the horror and slathers it on by the bucket load (there are moments similar to Paranormal Activity) right up to its knock out final scene. Alas, Drag Me To Hell didn’t reach box office heaven. It aimed for an audience slightly older than Zombieland and wasn’t wrought with Gen-Y conventions, think a classy and really good episode of Tales From The Crypt. The only thing they really share is a zeal for over-the-top FX, which Drag Me To Hell used with far more originality. Speaking of annoyingly Gen-Y, Jennifer’s Body was another horror comedy studio release in ‘09. I wasn’t a fan of Juno, but really like TV’s United States of Tara so was open to this sub genre effort from writer Diablo Cody. The premise sounded great, emo band sacrifices virgin to Satan in return for rock stardom. Unfortunately their ‘virgin’ is the biggest slut in town and she becomes a man eating demon, fabulous! Unfortunately, it never quite takes off. The humour is too self conscious and the horror is ho-hum, despite the quite savage sacrificing of Jennifer (Megan Fox). I don’t know if the budget was too small, but Jennifer’s Body could have seriously benefited from some of the bombastic FX used in both Zombieland and Drag Me To Hell. Like I said, the premise was good, the execution not so, it was neither comic nor horrific.
The horror comedies look to be few and far between in 2010. Though there is Piranha 3D. The 1978 original was director Joe Dante’s (The Howling , Gremlins) first foray into horror under the tutelage of B movie mogul Roger Corman. It definitely served large dollops of comedy with the blood and gore (notably Barbara Steele’s entire performance) and has gone on to be one the more fondly remember JAWS knock offs. The remake, now in the bloody French hands of Alexandre Aja (Hills Have Eyes remake) looks to be a hoot. We know Aja loves his gore and with a cast including Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future), Eli Roth (Dir. Hostel) and even JAWS’ Richard Dreyfuss (reportedly reprising the role of marine biologist Matt Hooper) Aja’s tongue looks to be firmly in cheek. Piranha 3D’s success as a Horror Comedy is yet to be seen, but if the trailer is anything to go by it looks a lot of fun at the very least.


Die laughing with these other notable Horror Comedies:
Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead & The Frighteners. Kevin Bacon with giant earth worms in Tremors. Robert Zemeckis’ morbid comedy with Streep, Willis & Hawn Death Becomes Her. Wes Craven’s first Scream. Bride & Seed Of Chucky. Shaun Of The Dead. Slither. Fido. And for the curious, Teeth, about one nasty vagina.

Reoccurring Nightmare

‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’ circa 2010 suffers from a split personality.

It’s a remake of a modern horror classic, remade one presumes to utilize a known brand that not only attracts those familiar with it but also those who are not (Who are you by the way?). If this is true then our most dire fears are realised. Yes this remake, reimagining, homage whatever you may call it, exists solely to make money. There in lays the irony. How do you make money on a film that fans hold the very idea of in contempt and new comers are ever harder to impress? Poor Elm St. 2010 was off to a bad start long before it even hit the screens. While the casting of Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy garnered some approval it never seemed enough to give fans a good night’s sleep. Nightmare creator Wes Craven was not only nowhere to be seen in relation to the production, it seemed that he was actually being majorly screwed over in regard to intellectual property. This definitely didn’t sit well with his loyal fans, the same fans this new film would need the support of to be successful. Another flag was raised when Platinum Dunes, the makers of this new Nightmare released their take on Freddy’s horror brethren Jason Voorhees. Friday The 13^th 2009 was beyond terrible and the fate of Freddy in Platinum’s hands looked less than hopeful.

Jump ahead to evasive glimpses of the new Freddy online, so-so trailers, and the film finally hits screens. Despite opening at No.1 in the US and making twice its budget back in one weekend, the horror community, ready for a fight, pretty much unanimously wrote it off. Why? Well, here’s where the film continues it’s somewhat fatal duality. The story is pretty much the same yet vastly different to its forbearer. There’s still a girl called Nancy, she still has nightmares about a burnt man, she still takes a bath, her mother is again played by a bad actress and all her friends keep dying in their sleep. What’s different? Pretty much everything else. It’s no wonder Craven is not given a story credit. Names and motivations have changed. Characters are deleted (Nancy’s father is nowhere to be seen but played a pivotal role in Craven’s original). We are also introduced to the notion of micro-naps but most importantly it is made very clear what kind of monster this Freddy actually is where the original only claimed him as a killer. It seems this shaking up of elements from the original is what has upset fans so much, although, had this new film been a complete ‘faithful’ replica of the original it would have likely been derided for that too. Which brings us back to the question of why. For money remember.

Is this film unnecessary? Yes. Is it bad? No, not in my opinion. Though we pretty much know where the story is headed, I felt there were still surprises to be had. The story structure takes on more of a mystery solving rhythm as Nancy and her friends not only try to figure out what is happening to them but why they are all connected to each other. The acting is all quite good from the young cast though they are little over preened in appearance. The film is also quite threatening, which is a significant achievement considering we have lived with this character and concept for over 25 years. While the evil clowning of Robert Englund’s Freddy is ever so slightly missed, Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy is much more of a monster, especially as this film at first makes you feel he is the victim and his dream stalking is in some way a justifiable revenge. Maybe the film does suffer a little from over rationalising. In an attempt to make the proceedings more real and less camp, some of the surreal creativity the series was known for has been sapped out. Pretty much every character has the same dream environment, though this is important to the ‘mystery’ of the story. In all this rationalising of the story it isn’t made clear why this Freddy would have his trademark glove. In the original he was a child killer and the glove was a self fashioned weapon of choice, which we see him construct in the opening sequence. Here, there is no real reason why Freddy would need the glove. We are not told he kills children, we never see him make the glove and we don’t seem him use it for any specific reason during the flashbacks of the ‘living’ Freddy Krueger. As this film is left open for a sequel in much the same way as the original was (I quite like how they did this) we may yet be given reason for the glove and some indulging in good old fashioned nightmare fantasy. Perhaps by finding more of a middle ground with the Elm St of the past, the Elm St of the future will be a road more fans care to visit.