The Children Are Home: Hidden Gems Review
Posted by Chris in Hidden Gems, Horror, Movies on November 22nd, 2009
Something is innately scary about children. Their big eyes look into you without the inhibitions of society and their unbridled excitement for newness is ever-present, making them the manifestation of unpredictability. Not to mention the sound of their laughter that can echo like distant bells. Tom Shankland and Paul Andrew Williams tapped these veins dry to create their film, The Children (2008).
The premise is simple. A family, two couples and their young children, gather in the country for a holiday. The heroine Casey, (Hannah Tointon), is a late teen or early twenty-something who is stuck in the middle and is plotting to sneak out mid-weekend to go to a party. Everything is bumping along nicely for everyone until the children start acting oddly and contracting a strange virus.
The build up on this one is like an over-inflated balloon that you keep blowing air into. The tension escalates and even the meaningless subplots make you uncomfortable. One of the mothers keeps forcing her child to play with her sick cousin with the promise of golden stars in an artificial rewards system. The parents make thinly veiled shots at each other about their parenting techniques, and Casey sneaks off to the green house to smoke pot with her uncle that she seems sexually stimulated by.
Once this discomfort inflates past capacity, the balloon pops with a sledding “accident” that leaves one of the parents dead and two of the children missing. Full diapers hit the fan soon after, as the children start outwardly attacking their adults and setting traps for them, breaking their legs and tearing their hoop earrings out with their mitten fingers.
While I think the plot needs to be experienced and can be done no more justice through summary, this movie has many other strengths. Every image of gore is medically precise and wince invoking. Not a single drop of cartoon blood is spilled. The Children uses the proper recipe of gore to avoid the comic book feel that some blood bath movies start to lapse into by the midway points.
The cinematography is also visually appealing from beginning to end. No wasted scenes were filmed to get a person from A to B. Every image blends into next with an artistic ease as the plot gets more intense and the tension builds to one of the most downright creepy endings I’ve seen in a long while. Most importantly, The Children doesn’t cop out with that last scare, that clichéd no-one-lives and “ha ha you thought they won” BS, that every horror movie feels the need to do. The final scene is much more thoughtful than that and left up to personal interpretation.
William Friedkin Annouces Exorcist Mini-Series
The Original The Exorcist (1973) may be the scariest movie ever made to date. Linda Blair ’s potrayal of the possessed Regan, head spinning and vomit spitting little demon child, has been unmatched on screen by any attempts to duplicate or emulate. The Exoricst will always stand alone with a unique brand of creepiness.
Thirty-six years later, writer and director, William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin may reunite to bring their classic horror film to the small screen. Recent statements by the duo confirm that they are both signed on for an upcoming mini-series. While little details are available and no word whether or not Blair will make a cameo, the project does seem to be in the works.
While my opinon of remakes, re-imaginings, and most adaptations tend to be pretty low, I am curious but more cautious. It’s nearly impossible to return home again and reclaim a once found magic no matter what dynamic duo reunites, but we will wait and see. Choice of what network is going to air this project, alone, may dictate it’s ability to have it’s audience’s head’s spinning or just their eyes rolling. Again, we’ll just have to wait this one out.
New Moon’s “Darker Edge” Tries to Tap New Markets
Last month’s Fangoria’s cover sported the Twilight Saga’s dreadlocked pseudo-villain, Laurent. His menacing expression and a headline “A Darker Twilight” were accompanied by an article quoting screen writer Melissa Rosenberg telling fans to expect “something for everyone this time around.” New Moon (2009) is the second film adaptation in Stephanie Meyers’s four part series of novels about a young girl’s love for an eternally teenage heart throb, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).
Twilight (2008) introduced the saga to the big screen with a typical human/non-human romance plot that builds in clichéd fashion until it brings a trio of villains on screen. The movie asserts one of these antagonist vampires is the toughest bad-ass to grace the silver screen since Darth Vader and then he goes out like bitch in under two seconds with dismemberment scene that occurs off screen. WTF?
New Moon shows the result of a similar vampire death on screen with-in its first twenty minutes at the hands of the Volturi, the darkest, oldest and most powerful; the royalty of vampires in Meyer’s universe. Unfortunately, this is merely a carrot to be dangled for the better part of two hours in which you will wait to see them again.
The purpose of New Moon is to essentially build the back story of Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) best friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and his abilities as a Lycan, “Werewolf,” Kate Beckensale would specify. If the Underworld saga has not gotten you sick of high flying werewolf antics then New Moon’s dog boys do create some appealing visual effects and generally make themselves more likable and interesting than the bloodsuckers. This conflict essentially fuels the narrative as Bella, Jacob, and Edward find themselves in a growing love triangle while Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre)—the mate of the “ultimate” vampire that got owned in Twilight—appears once or twice; and may as well wave at audiences with a T-shirt that says, “Don’t forgot about my subplot, it’ll matter next movie.” Eventually, all this clutter triggers a series of events that has Bella running through the streets of Italy trying to prevent another clichéd tragedy re-write of when Bill Shakespeare “laid his scene” there in Verona.
Once that silliness is over, we finally get back to the Volturi who are creepy, amusing, and interesting but by no means groundbreakingly original. Most compelling is seeing a maturing Dakota Fanning portray one of these darkest of blood suckers with an ability to crush even her own kind with a thought and squint of her crimson eyes. However, this scene only actually provides a Matrix-style fight sequence and the revelation of another plot point that might matter later (see Victoria’s T-Shirt). The only chilling image involves groups of families being lead on tour of the building, basically lambs; the doors slam behind them and the screaming begins, but the audience only the hears their terrified screams. Remember folks, the PG-13 rating is the tug on this cash cow’s utters.
To answer Fangoria’s question, “Is it darker?” yes, it is darker, but lavender is also darker than pink, and that does not make this film easily accessible for wider audiences or horror fans. If anything, this film is more complex, harder to soak up than its predecessor, and more of just a visual representation for book readers. After the film, I had to ask to my girlfriend—who has read all four novels—dozens of questions to just get up to speed on what the characters’ motivations actually were.
New Moon is entertaining, visually stimulating, and a lot of fun, but don’t allow any magazine to convince you that’s it blacker than blacker the blackest black and brutal, to paraphrase Nathan Explosion, because it’s just not. At the end of the day, it’s there so Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner can walk around with their shirts off and a crowded theater of teenage girls can scream like it’s 1965 again and the Beatles have just taken the stage at Shea.
Three Video Game Movies That MUST Not Suck
Posted by Chris in Horror, Movies, Uncategorized, Video Games on November 20th, 2009
Too often, the most horrifying thing about video game movies is that they’re actually made, and, not to mention, given an astronomical budget to exist and promote awful film making. Why is this always the case? One, no one has stopped Uwe Boll, the genius behind such “masterpieces” as House of the Dead (2003), when on basic principal alone he should have been put on an asteroid with no cameras years ago… Two, often the games chosen are popular but have a weak narrative, and the fact is that video game movies have a build in audience, the most loyal-build in audience, stereotypically – the youth. Why waste time making a good product when a half-assed one is guaranteed to sell?
These days, I do my best to hold my Wii-mote in front of my eyes, secure the wrist strap around my neck, and try to ignore these disappointing money making demons, creatures with the ability to ruin two beloved mediums in one swing. However, there happens to be a trinity of survival horror titles in the works that has me more anxious then usual.
Resident Evil Afterlife (2010) is already filming as we speak, and, at this point, I’m almost too numb from this series to get fired up. The RE movies have all but formed their own mythos, centered around everyone’s favorite T-Virus-infected-chick, Milla’s “Alice.” While Fans tend to be split on whether or not these flicks should even exist, most can agree that each sequel has declined in the decent writing and general relevance department.
Afterlife has raised the stakes, however, by promising to finally introduce Chris Redfield – the character that probably should have controlled the narrative flow of the franchise like three movies ago. Wentworth Miller—of “isn’t that the guy from Prison Break?” fame—will be portraying the zombie killing machine while his evil counterpart, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) will hopefully play a more pivotal role than he did in Resident Evil: Extinction (2007).
The direction of Wesker may be the deciding factor on whether this film bites worse than the complication of its walking corpses. Since Extinction offered nothing more than a cameo, Afterlife has the potential to do up his over-the-top-eviler-than-Hitler presence with a hint of British comedian wit and a generally cooler than the other side of the pillow attitude. At very least, Paul, do a better job than you did with Shang Tsung.
My final note on Resident Evil is that it’s the lesser of many evils in a world of terrible video game adaptations. However, it often fails by trying to maintain a strange balance between being its own entity and placating gamers by injecting familiar faces for the sake of it and only offering average zombies at best. The series has a few positives – they all start will with “M” and end with “-ovich”. It’s no secret that the girl that we’ve all been in love with since Fifth Element (1997) has been carrying this franchise with her unique screen presence, ability to make Alice her own, and her short dresses with thigh-hi boots might weigh slightly on our minds, just perhaps. Either way, I’ll probably be in the seats when this one hits the screen.
Next up, and ironically linked to RE by Wentworth Miller, is Bioshock. Slated for 2010, Bioshock is supposed to bring the 2007 sub-sea utopia gone haywire video game to the silver screen with Miller portraying the mostly faceless and completely voiceless lead while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is set to direct. They, and everyone else involved with this project, have serious work to do.
Bioshock (2007 VG) set a new standard for what video game storytelling and clever point of view could accomplish; the film should set the bar no lower. Somewhere between Ayn Rand’s philosophies, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Stephen King’s The Shinning, is Rapture looming beneath the sea, its people obsessed with violence, power, and plastic surgery in a shaken snow globe unseen by the world as bloody flakes of torn skin flutter down about the chaos. The setting of a fallen Utopian city rotting in a bubble beneath the sea is going to be an endless challenge to portray, not to mention the millions of ways they could mess up the entire story line.
Fresnadillo, whose most notable work was the not-as-good-as-its-predecessor 28 Weeks Later (2007), has his work cut out for him, but more important than just his direction is that the project has to be taken on by people who care about its art and story. This isn’t the type of movie that anyone has the right to package up into a nice little American-action flick package with a PG-13 rating and a level of intelligence to match. Give us a thoughtful, creepy, darkly funny, and brilliant film that deserves the name Bioshock. Nothing less on this one, please!
The last bit of flesh on the chopping block is EA’s Dead Space (2008 VG). While this one has only just been announced and projects a sometime in 2011 release date, I already have concerns. The something-has-gone-wrong or the we’ve-lost-contact-with-the-space-station-send-a-team-to-investigate plot has been done in Hollywood many times. Most fans of the series recognize that Dead Space’s environment and moods owe a great deal to the Alien franchise and Event Horizon (1997). To make this game a successful film, the creators need to focus on the original aspects that the Dead Space universe has brought to the table.
Since this series has already produced an animated film Dead Space: Downfall (2008), writers already have a touch stone, but a good adaptation needs to go beyond Downfall’s bloodbath violence. With psychological horror, government conspiracy, religions fanatics, and reanimated corpses with ridiculously long claws, the creators will have plenty of material to mold. Molding it into a shape that resembles something watchable, deep, scary and not just a laser light show is another story.
Video game movies have consistently been a mess. I’m not even going to get into Super Mario, Double Dragon, or Alone in the Dark, but with the rise of this triad, I’m hoping that at least one of the three pleasantly surprises me. Is that just too much too hope for? -Sigh- Probably.
Let’s Go Play At The Adams Review
Since we’ve already disturbed the ghost of Sylvia Likens, I would like to take a moment to review a book that will always have her spirit haunting me. Let’s Go Play at The Adams is a 1974 novel by Mendal W. Johnson inspired by the same subject matter. Unlike Ketchum’s book though, Johnson weaves his narrative around a more fictionalized account of a 20-year-old Babysitter named Barbara who is watching over a brother and sister, Cindy and Bobby Adams, while their parents are on a two week holiday.
Barbabra starts the novel wearing a white dress playing the white keys of a piano with white gloves, but the novel darkens and loses its innocence from here. Cindy and Bobby have plotted to chloroform Barbabra as she sleeps, and Barbara awakens from what she believed was a bad dream into a real nightmare, tied the bed, her mouth filled with medical gauze and taped shut, reduced to a new play thing for the children.
The children invite three neighborhood friends over and Johnson takes you into each of their eyes as they play with their new toy to the fullest extent of their desires. Day by day, the narrative is separated into two segments: the daily events where Barbara is dragged to the bathroom and made to use the toilet with a noose around her neck then prepared for a full day of torture followed by her silent evenings where she has to speak in her mind to imagery friends–since her mouth is taped shut–to hold onto any state of sanity. Her imaginary friend takes the shape of her college roommate who often blames the kidnapping on Barbara for not being able to see the evil in people.
While Johnson wields the claustrophobic horror well–in the vein of King’s Misery or Gerald’s Game–the story is a bit flawed and preachy. His approach to saying that five children under seventeen are capable of this because a violent society breeds violence is spoon feed to readers like a punch bowl full of sugar. Subtle is not Mendal W’s strong point. He goes off on rants throughout, especially when going into deep and lengthy description of rope play techniques and fetishy positions used to restrain Barbabra. This tone often speaks more to the bondage community, which is fine, but seems appealing to the wrong passion when your trying to stir thoughtfulness and emotion in your audience about a serious message.
So, the novel thumps along with this repetitive and often questionable tone – sometimes making me wonder if Mendal had a babysitter as a kid that he had in mind for this treatment – as Barbara starts to lose hope and faith in human decency and begins to realize the danger she is in a bit too late. Some gaps in logic and shoddy police work later we get an ending that takes us into a strange metaphysical final chapter where Barbara is floating above the world with no mouth or something.
While the novel is flawed, Johnson unleashes some brutal images that have stuck for the past nine years even though I only read this book once. Most disappointing is that Johnson never wrote another book, and I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not, but his ability to create uncomfortable tension and overall helplessness in the face of human cruelty and indifference showed great potential. However, I am not sure if this book raises awareness or just serves as another fetishy entry for fans of torture horror. One thing I can say is that the book does provide a unique voice and style. Fans of this type of horror should give it a shot, but the journey may be long as its rare, and most definitely out of print.
The Girl Next Door – Not So Much A Review As A Mental Cleansing
File this one under movies I’ll never watch again. If you don’t know anything about it, The Girl Next Door (2007) is a film based on Jack Ketchum’s novel about the torture, mutilation, rape, and abuse of a young girl by her aunt and a group of neighborhood boys in 1950’s New Jersey. I’m somewhat proud to say that I have one of the strongest stomachs for any type of depravity put to film but this one crossed some lines for me.
After their parents are killed in a car crash, 16-year-old Meg and 10-year-old Susan Laughlin (Blythe Auffarth and Madeline Taylor) are sent to live with their aunt, Ruth Chandler (Blanche Baker) and her children in New Jersey. The film is set in the 1950’s and director Gregory Wilson perfectly sets the scene using the things my generation has come to view as that era’s nostalgia – Ford Mustangs, ice cream trucks, shorts above the knee on boys, and cans of Yuengling beer. David Moran (Daniel Manche), the film’s main character, meets Meg as he’s collecting crayfish down by a local river. The two instantly form a bond and it seems as though David may become a stable friend for Meg in her fragile state.
However, it’s instantly established that Ruth is a severely disturbed woman who acts as the “cool parent” in the neighborhood, giving her children and their friends cigarettes and beer, and lessons on how women are innately whores. She is verbally abusive to Meg and Susan (who has to wear leg braces due to the car accident), at one point calling the latter “a stupid little shit” because she isn’t an efficient helper around the house. One look at this woman and you know she’s not right in the head but all of the neighborhood boys love her because of her whimsical parenting. Perhaps what is most disturbing (initially, at least – it gets a hell of a lot worse) is Ruth’s open display/talk of sexuality in front of her own children. Early on, the movie has this incestuous/sexual vibe that is so creepy because it’s involving children.
The neighborhood boys jump on Ruth’s abusive bandwagon and begin tormenting the two girls physically and verbally. David, who is fond of Meg, feels powerless to do anything about it because of peer pressure and fear of Ruth’s authority. Things take a significant turn for the worse after the boys try to tickle Meg and she scratches Ruth’s youngest son on the face. She runs out of the house so Ruth decides to make Susan suffer for her sister’s actions. In the film’s first truly uncomfortable scene, Ruth bends the 10-year old (clad in her leg braces) over the bed, pulls down her underwear and strikes her 15 times with a toilet brush as the group of boys watch. Meg rushes in to save her sister but is violently held back by the boys. It was during this scene that I first got that sinking feeling in my chest. I don’t think that feeling left until the movie was over.
The next day, Meg tells this story to a police officer who pays Ruth a visit off camera. Ruth is clearly able to assure police that Meg was exaggerating and she escapes justice. This incident enrages Ruth and she multiplies her brutality by 1,000. With the help of the boys, she ties up Meg in the basement naked, blindfolded and gagged her under the guise of getting her to confess her whore-like behavior. I won’t go much further into the plot than to say that over the course of a few days, Ruth and the boys enact the most heinous of torture upon Meg, burning her with cigarettes, and just beating her senseless. Stop reading here if you don’t want any more torture spoilers or are squeamish.
By far the most disturbing scene involves Ruth’s older son raping Meg in front of her younger sister and a crowd of neighborhood children. Her younger son (about 11-years-old) pleads to “let me fuck her, mom” but Ruth draws the line there saying that would be incesteous. Following the rape, Ruth carves “I am a whore” into her abdomen with a knife while receiving enthusiastic encouragement from the other kids. After a moment’s thought, Ruth realizes that even though men will not want a woman with this message carved in her stomach, Meg may still feel the desire to be with men. The solution to that? Burn off her clitoris with a blow torch. Yeah, I actually just typed that. This type of stuff goes on until the film’s close.
Good thing we can just sit back after viewing this abhorrent imagery and say “thank God it’s only a movie,” right? Wrong. What’s profoundly disturbing about this movie is that it is based on actual events that occurred in Indiana during the mid-60’s. Gertrude Baniszewski, a once-abused wife and mother of six, took in 16-year-old Sylvia and 15-year-old Jenny Likens as boarders while their parents traveled around the state with a carnival. Once her parents stopped sending their payment of $20/week, Sylvia Likens began being abused and tortured by Baniszewski and neighborhood kids. She was chained up in the basement and much of the torture depicted in The Girl Next Door actually happened. You can read the whole sickening story here.
This film really touched a nerve with me because of its unrelenting sexual violence toward children. It’s profoundly disturbing to watch – far worse than something like Martyrs, which focused more on physical violence and gore. The violence in The Girl Next Door, while physical, is also strongly emotional. Just watching how a group of people can be complicit while atrocities are being committed in front of them is more unnerving than any blood-splattered Jason kill because it has a basis in reality. The most obvious example is of course, the Holocaust but this kind of stuff happens regularly. Look no further than the recent California gang rape where more than 10 people watched without doing anything.
On a critical level, The Girl Next Door is a fantastic film. The performances by the child actors and Baker are top-notch. Coupled with Wilson’s excellent pacing and Daniel Farrands/Philip Nutman’s screenplay, it’s hard to find a more harrowing tale in recent years. That said, I’ll never watch this again but I’m glad I did once.
Book Review – Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone
A demon stares up at you from behind a veil of paper and ink, pleading you to burn the book in your hands. He’s a spiteful, murderous bastard who threatens bloody violence if you don’t comply with his wishes. But you don’t – you just keep turning the pages toward (as he says) your inevitable death at his hands.
Such is the conceit for Clive Barker’s 2007 novel, Mister B. Gone. This piece of metafiction follows the book’s narrator, Jackabok Botch (”Mister B”), a lesser runt-of-the- litter demon, as he travels from the fires of Hell to the world of the living in search of meaning. After years of physical abuse at the hands of his father, including being burned from head to toe, Botch decides to flee his home. While being chased by his father, Botch comes across a steak and a beer that appear to be floating in midair. Just as his father closes in on him, Botch grabs the steak and triggers a trap set by some unknown force above, hurling the two demons upward in a net. As the two travel through the circles of Hell, Botch’s father (in a fit of fear) pleads for his son’s forgiveness. Botch turns a deaf ear to his father, cuts the net and sends his father to fall to his death.
We learn that Botch has been literally fished out of Hell by a corrupt priest and his two lackeys who are in the business of selling demon parts during the 14th century in Europe. After escaping, Botch finds himself struggling to be the wicked demon he wants to be and eventually befriends Quitoon, a powerful demon who is on a quest to investigate rumors of a world-changing machine being developed in Mainz, Germany.
The book follows a pretty rigid formula, with Botch berating you to burn the book for your own good and then obliging you by telling more of his tale. This idea seemed interesting at first, as I’ve never read anything quite like it, but after a while it gets stale. Barker is obviously a gifted author with the ability to conjure up spectacularly gruesome and demonic images, but even he can’t write himself out of the predictable pace he establishes in this novel.
Botch’s tale, which comprises the bulk of Mister B. Gone’s 248 pages, offers a unique premise that fails to go anywhere intriguing. I was drawn into the novel immediately as I’m innately fascinated by the architecture of Hell, its various Circles and classes of demons. However, once Botch enters the world of the living, Barker lost my attention. I will say that Botch is a well-developed character. He’s adverse to what you think when you hear the word “demon” – diminutive, insecure, confused, and possibly homosexual. Beyond this development, the story isn’t the least bit scary, suspenseful, or exciting. All the way up to the book’s underwhelming climax, I kept hoping Pinhead or Nix would step in and unleash some classic Barker carnage.
Don’t get me wrong, though. There are some terrific passages throughout Mister B. Gone and I can appreciate it for that. There’s probably even a good short story in there too. I just wish Barker’s editors had felt the same way. It took me an inordinate amount of time to finish this book (8 weeks) and I’m normally a very fast reader. It just felt like a chore to pick this up because I had the suspicion it wasn’t going to pay off.
Still, I’m far beyond giving up on Barker. I’m a big fan of his work, especially The Hellbound Heart, The Inhuman Condition, and In the Flesh. He’s a less “accessible” writer than say, Steven King, but his material tends to provide depth that isn’t present in contemporary horror fiction. Mister B. Gone must have been a misstep.
Why Jason is THE Man
Maybe, it’s just because you never forget your first penetration. I’m, of course, talking about slasher flick villains and why Voorhees is my favorite. I was twelve, on vacation at a beach house that had HBO—in the days when there was only one—and Friday the 13th Part III (the episode that gives birth to the iconic hockey mask) was on and my twelve year old eyes couldn’t believe a pupil had just popped like bull’s eye when Jason offed some chick in the lake with his harpoon gun’s dart crashing right into the socket. I knew I had to see more, and since it was 1992 I had seven more movies ready for me.
Throughout my teens, I dabbled in all the other slasher flick franchises, but Friday the 13th always appealed to me the most. Why? Simply because Friday the 13th was all about the killing and Voorhees was a blue collar worker that got the job done. He didn’t wax philosophical or have witty dialogue to spice up each death like colleagues Pinhead and Krueger. He didn’t have hobbies like Leather Face and he wasn’t gender confused like Angela or Bates. And while a small uneducated bunch might say Myers was interchangeable with the same edge, Voorhees had a slightly more rustic charm. Jason was the working man’s slasher—a guy us middle class stiffs could relate to…
The series itself has a had a rollercoaster of inconsistencies with risks and just plain dumb choices. Yes, Jason fights a telekinetic girl in part seven. Sure, he turns into a worm that switches bodies in Jason Goes to Hell, and yeah, the franchise commits the major my-slasher-flick-jumped-the-shark-sin and shipped him off to space for Jason X. However, Voorhees has taken on Manhattan, Hell, Freddy, and even got owned by Corey Feldman, but somehow still dusted off the mask and emerged on top. The series contains twelve movies, three slashers, almost 200 victims and it’s hard to believe the heads will stop piling up.
As Matt covered, rumors of his demise are being whispered behind the trees of Camp Crystal Lake, but I’d rather doubt that. Even Superman and Sherlock Holmes met their deaths but the reaper was never able to fight the public’s need for more. This was true in 1893, 1992, and will remain so in 2010. However, if they do send my boy over Reichenbach Falls then they better give him an end worth of the name Jason Voorhees.
Regardless, Happy Birthday, man. Slash on.
Friday The 13th Reboot Sequel To Finally Kill Jason? I Don’t Think So….
Pajiba had an interesting post today claiming that an inside source indicated that 2010’s Friday the 13th Part 2 will be the end of Jason. Forever. According to post author Dustin Rowles (who, despite his apparent disdain for the horror genre, is an excellent writer), “But, going in, anyway, producers Brad Fuller and Walter Hamada want this to be the last of the Friday the 13th movies, and you can bet your ass that that proposition will make its way into the marketing, spoilers be damned.”
I’m calling bullshit here. As Rowles later indicates, if the movie makes money, we’ll see more of Mr. Voorhees. Granted, Marcus Nispel’s reboot only turned a profit of about $71 million and this one may not do any better. Still, that’s a lot of money. Worst case scenario (or best, depending on your viewpoint), this movie bombs and Jason Voorhees gets put on the Hollywood shelf for a few years. After some more time passes, another money-hungry producer will say, “Hey! What about a reimagining of the reimagining of the original?! Brilliant, I say.” And the next thing you know, we’ll all be lining up to see 2017’s Friday The 13th. Or at least I know I will because I’m a glutton for punishment.
I don’t think there’s any way to really kill Jason the character or especially the idea and that goes for any of the genre’s elite. Just because it’s already been made and remade once doesn’t mean it won’t come back again. But maybe Rowles is right – some ideas just die. I mean, we’ll probably never have another have another Evil Dead film. Oh wait, never mind -Evil Dead 2010. Maybe that was a bad example. I mean, we’ll probably never have another Hellraiser film. Fuck – Hellraiser 2011. You get the point…
We’ve Been Slacking: A Letter To You
Dear Faithful Reader,
First of all, happy Friday the 13th – I hope it finds you sitting comfortably on your couch watching some Jason Voorhees carnage. Chris and I have been equally inundated with our jobs, hence the lack of posts. I just wanted to get something up here to assure you that we’re not throwing in the towel. We have some great stuff planned for the next few weeks and I look forward to having more free time to write again. Coming soon – a new Trash review (hopefully this time I won’t be called out by the film’s director) and I’m working on a “state of the genre” type piece. Keep the faith.
Sincerely,
Matt
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