The Woman in Black

Hammer Horror Time
Daniel Radcliffe Goes Gothic
By Cole Smithey

"The Woman in Black" is a minor key gothic spooky that feels like visiting with a long-lost friend thanks to its renowned Hammer Films pedigree. The nightmarish movie, based on Susan Hill's 1983 ghost story has the honor of being the first England-made Hammer picture in 35 years. While this delightfully creepy haunted house drama doesn't boast the cleavage-bearing temptations or tongue-in-cheek camp of such celebrated Hammer films as the 1969 classic "Taste the Blood of Dracula." Instead, "The Woman in Black" delivers plenty of gasp-inducing chills in a moody setting where its child characters are more likely to perish than to survive. The simultaneous demise of three young sisters at the start of the movie initiates the viewer into the story’s macabre landscape where horrors pop.

Transitioning out of his years attached to the Harry Potter franchise, Daniel Radcliffe is well-if-not-perfectly cast as Arthur Kipps, a widowed solicitor living in Victorian-era England. The loss of his wife during childbirth has left the heavy-hearted Kipps living as the single father of his four-year-old son Joseph (Misha Handley). Under threat of losing his job due to his bereaved demeanor, Kipps is sent to the eastern coastal village of Crythin Gifford to finalize legal paperwork pertaining to one Alice Drablow, a recently deceased widow with a history of tragedy. The widow's predictably tumbledown home is a cursed mansion named Eel Marsh House. The eerie dwelling harbors more than its share of ghosts. The dauntingly remote property is located at the end of a long causeway. When the tide comes in, the sprawling residence transforms into an island cut off from the mainland. Naturally, Kipps must spend a few nights in the haunted palace where ghoulish faces appear and things go bump in the night. A unique collection of wind-up children’s toys brings a clatter of reanimated weirdness in a room where a rocking chair is home to a female ghost with a proclivity for wearing black.

The filmmakers have a field day with brooding visual shocks accompanied by loud jarring noises. Ghastly demonic faces are deployed with disturbing accuracy. There were at least a couple of screams from members of the critic-filled screening I attended. Kave Quinn’s meticulous production design squares subtly with Paul Ghirardani’s precise art direction to bring every composition brimming with tasteful treats of lurking wickedness. Very little blood is spilled, but when it effuses from a sick child’s mouth the thick red liquid makes a palpable impression. An ominous crucifix protrudes from the marsh alongside the road. It just wouldn’t be a proper Hammer film without at least one looming crucifix. The foreboding object enables one of the pictures most suspenseful sequences. Kipps and his only friend in town, Dally (Ciaran Hinds), do some marsh dredging that furnishes the screen with an especially dark revelation.

“The Woman in Black” possesses a purity of purpose. Its goal is to seduce the audience into a supernatural realm of somnambulist existence with the power of suggestion. It’s an idyllic horror film to reboot a highly regarded horror studio known for depriving young audiences of their sleep. Nightmares will follow, perhaps even for the not so young.

Rated PG-13. 94 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

John Waters introduced a dog-poo-eating Divine as "the Filthiest Person Alive" in "Pink Flamingos" (1972). John Waters introduced a dog-poo-eating Divine as "the Filthiest Person Alive" in "Pink Flamingos" (1972). In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini merged the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" with the three descending levels of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" in "Salo" for a terse satire about the world's implosion of force-fed consumerist debauchery after World War II. Eating society's shit served as the shocking height of bourgeoisie aspirations in “Salo.” It was Pasolini’s last film before he was brutally murdered on a remote beach on the outskirts of Rome.

It would be another 39 years before Tom Six would take the literal and metaphorical implications of eating shit to its most personal if asexual dimensions with a nasty little horror film entitled "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" in 2009. Promise for the sequel was already writ large in Six's mind when he created the diabolical thriller that united three barely clad human beings ass-to-mouth as part of an evil German doctor's clinical experiment/fantasy. With its scat-sex element buried neatly inside a torture-porn horror thriller built on clichés of the genre, Six alluded to a brief if disturbing social commentary about issues of racist and nationalist ideas without hitting the nail on the head. The front of the human chain was a Japanese man. The back of the body-train included two nubile American girls. The film was set in Germany after all.

The follow-up is much harder to read. Set in London, and clearly filmed on a considerably lower budget than the first film, the sequel is a self-referential bird-flip at the powers that postured toward banning "The Human Centipede II" sight unseen. Cheap, raw, disgusting, and yet cleverly tipping its nightmare hat toward the kind of Halloween spook-house-movie that fans of the genre expect, the black-and-white sequel climaxes with a symphony of farting and diarrhea as it passes through ten people linked in an rough-hewn human chain by a sexually-abused man-child misfit named Martin. The bug-eyed geek works alone as an attendant in a below-ground London car park where he continuously watches a DVD of "The Human Centipede" on his laptop. Martin treasures a carefully maintained "Human Centipede (First Sequence)" scrapbook that features things like a headshot of Ashlynn Yennie who appeared in the film. A telling comic sub-plot involves Martin's successful attempts at "auditioning" actors from the first film under the conceit that Quentin Tarantino is directing the sequel.

Anyone who has read Jonathan Swift will recognize the latent satire that bleeds and seeps from the story even if it seems written with notably less rigor than Swift applied to his work. Still, I wouldn’t call Six's sequel lazy as, say, a typical Gus Van Sant movie. There is a certain Brechtian theory at play, however fortunate or unintentional it might be on Six’s part. The filmmaker toys with the idea of “what is seen cannot be unseen.” Victims are killed only to be revived to suffer greater tortures than their brutal death. Emotional detachment comes with the territory.

“The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)" is a cinematic provocation in line with banned films such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Nekromantik.” It is meant as a right-to-passage movie for young audiences to marvel at, and endure without vomiting if possible. The movie doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a very uncomfortable cinematic experience. To that end it succeeds with flying colors. The viewer’s defense mechanisms flinch to laugh at brutal acts it cannot logically fathom. Will this movie give nightmares to more than a few of the audiences who manage to last through it? You bet. Will it give ideas to sick-fuck prison guards at prisons such as Guantanamo about new ways to torture their prisoners? If they’re anything like Martin, the film will probably have that unintended effect as well. Does that mean “The Human Centipede II” should be banned? I don’t’ think so.

Rated R. 96 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

They Crawl Under the Covers
Television Horror Remake Gives Creeps
By Cole Smithey

Producer/co-writer Guillermo del Toro, the visionary filmmaker responsible for "Pan's Labyrinth," performs the neat trick of adapting the original 1973 television horror shocker "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" into a tastefully suspenseful work of kid-friendly art, directed by newcomer Troy Nixey. In spite of some glaring plot inconsistencies regarding such matters as regional location and creature voices, "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is sure to scare the heebeejeebies out of willing 12-year-old audiences. It's surprising the MPAA gave the film an R-rating considering that, to this critic's eye, the movie is ideally suited to preteen and teenaged viewers.

Bailee Madison ("Bridge to Terabithia") plays Sally, the ten-year-old daughter of hotshot architect Alex Hurst (Guy Pearce). Alex invites Sally away from his ex-wife to come stay with him and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) at Blackwood Manor, a run down Gothic Victorian New England mansion he's busy restoring. The spooky old house holds secrets from its original owner, an artist whose son's death drove him homicidally insane. Things go bump in the night (and in the day) after Sally goes poking around where she shouldn't, namely the basement where a sealed fireplace serves as a kind of Gothic Pandora's box.

Madison's compulsive knowing smirk of approval slyly admits her character's playful attitude toward the ominous danger that threatens her. Naturally no one believes her stories about whispering monsters that haunt her and commit acts of vandalism. It’s Sally’s teeth that the beasts hunger for.

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is not without its problems. The film opens with a truly horrifying sequence of gory violence involving old man Blackwood that doesn't exactly set the right tone for slow-burn horror that follows. For his part, Guy Pierce is too neutral as a caring but oblivious dad. His lackluster performance is all sheen and no grit.

Although the story is set in New England, the action seems like it should take place in a European setting. As the story plays out, it appears better suited for a UK location where a longer history of demonic activity could breed. Still, the most obvious weakness lies in the whispered voices of the dastardly miniature creatures that taunt and attack Sally with an increased sense of purpose. The demons’ fearsome faces—exquisitely designed by master horror-surrealist Chet Zar—don’t match up with all-too-human voices that are more “Wizard-of-Oz” than “Exorcist.”

The movie excels however is building feathered layers of suspense. Gradually we see more of the repulsive homunculi that behave in the most menacing ways imaginable. Their intention is to scare as much as it is to wound, and eventually kill Sally. There's very little blood in this horror movie built on suspense--think "The Others." "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is a nuanced horror movie modulated to incur just the right quality of nightmare. You might want to sleep with the light on for a few nights after seeing it.

Rated R. 100 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

The Rite

 

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The Damned
"Exorcist" Knock-Off is a Sin
By Cole Smithey

"The Rite" posits that the Catholic church is doing a record number of exorcisms these days. While the demon boom might be good news for the Vatican coffers, it doesn't pay off for moviegoers. Based on journalist Matt Baglio's book about his experiences apprenticing with a Catholic priest to become an exorcist, director Mikael Håfström's would-be horror movie is a disconnected study in entropy. Wet-behind-the-ears newcomer Colin O'Donoghue plays Michael Kovak. Michael comes from a long line of morticians. His dad Istvan (Rutger Hauer) is a strange old bird. The elder mortician brought seven-year-old Michael into the lab after Mrs. Kovak died to watch daddy prepare mommy's corpse for burial. You can't blame Michael for wanting to leave the family business to become a priest. So it goes that Michael, looking a little like Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," heads off to priest college in Rome. At the end of his four-year studies, Michael still has doubts about wearing the collar until a traffic accident demands he give the last rites to a dying victim. Tacitly emboldened, Michael is assigned by his supervising priest Father Matthew (Toby Jones) to shadow Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins) on his exorcist rounds. After performing a fairly uneventful exorcism on a pregnant woman, Trevant asks Michael "What did you expect, pea soup and spinning heads?" From the audience point of view, we know the answer is yes. However, Father Trevant's exorcisms are more ongoing therapy sessions rather than full-on "power-of-Christ-compels-you" expulsions of demonic possession.

There are two major obstructions that contribute to the complete and utter failure of "The Rite." The most obvious glitch is a cobbled-together screenplay written on a high school reading level. The script doesn't even begin to enter into the realm of dramaturgy. You can sense the screenwriters fumbling around for touchstones to William Friedkin's "Exorcist." They attempt to substitute the strained relationship between Michael and his father for the troubled rapport between Father Karras and his aging mother in "The Exorcist." It doesn't work. 

Casting is the second glaring issue. You get the feeling that none of the actors has a clue about what's going on in the story. Alice Braga, who delivered a personalized kiss-of-death to movies like "I Am Legend," "Predators," and "Repo Men," floats in and out of scenes as if she walked onto the wrong studio back lot. Colin O'Donoghue comes off as unprepared for the duties of a leading man. But it's Anthony Hopkins who makes a travesty of the film. Hopkins makes the sign of the cross with such a lazy effort that you want to slap him. I can see more than a few Catholics being upset at his smug portrayal of a priest. There is nothing holy about his characterization. Anthony Hopkins peaked with "The Silence of the Lambs" and since then his career has involved many a sidelong reference to it in lesser films, i.e. "Titus." In "The Rite" you watch Hopkins slip into his chianti-and-fava-bean-mode, waiting for the audience to shiver at some unseen percolating menace within him. 

Mikael Håfström has made one good horror film. "1408" holds up well. But he's clearly out of his element here. It's doubtful that even Roman Polanski could have made "The Rite" a good horror film, but he would have at least made it a competent one.

William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" is first and foremost a great novel. William Friedkin was able to turn it into the greatest horror movie ever made because he understood the intricacies of the story like the back of his hand. Friedkin's commentary on the DVD for "The Exorcist" is astounding for the depth of reason the director exhibits. I'm sure that one day another novelist will write a great story involving exorcism that will be made into a great movie. But, like "The Exorcist," it will have to be about people we care about, and the interplay between them. As for the characters in "The Rite," you'll wish the Devil would take them all.

 Rated R. 118 mins. (D) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

 

 

January 27, 2011 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Last Exorcism

Genre Embarrassment
Friedkin's "Exorcist" is Still the "Last"
By Cole Smithey

More a sketch of an idea for a horror movie than a fully formed film "The Last Exorcism" is a yawn-inducing attempt to cash in on a combination of exhausted genre tropes. Following in the shaky-cam, found-footage, footsteps of "The Blair Witch Project," Daniel Stamm directs an incompetent script about Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian). Cotton is a religious fraud engaged in carrying on his family's well-established business of conducting exorcisms for illiterate backwoods types who traditionally respond well to the power of material-supported suggestion. An evangelical magician/con man, Cotton takes along a couple of documentarians--the cameraman is never shown but the annoying sound girl (Iris Bahr) can't keep her mouth shut--to record his experiences as a way of coming clean about his dicey religious practices. The trio go on a road trip to rural Louisiana where Louis Sweetzer, a fundamentalist farmer, believes his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed and is responsible for killing their livestock in the dead of night. Home-schooled Nell turns out to be quite a contortionist when the opportunity presents itself, and her freaky brother Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) is just as threatening as thier dad turns out to be. Riddled with poor lighting, inappropriate use of music, and a plot you could fit in a tea cup, "The Last Exorcism" has all the appeal of a glorified, but poorly shot, student film.

"The Last Exorcism" is set up as a fairly traditional documentary. Cotton Marcus and his dad give direct-to-camera interviews about their family, and we get introduced to Cotton's wife and young son who must use a hearing aid. The boy knows that daddy is really an atheist and has a sense of humor about his dad's hypocrisy. If the character development is slapdash, we don't mind so much because there are secrets on the table.

Anyone who has seen William Friedkin's masterpiece "The Exorcist" knows that the movie spends a lot of time establishing the characters of the young priest, the mom, and the innocent little girl who will become unrecognizable by the film's shocking third act that's spent on the exorcism itself. It's a lesson that the filmmakers here would have been wise to learn. Instead of establishing any of its characters beyond a thumbnail sketch, screenwriters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland rush into the exorcism with no idea of how or why the promised event should constitute the finality of the film's title.

Before the exorcism, the family waits outside Nell's bedroom while Cotton surreptitiously preps the room with candles, fishing line, and whatever little magic trick effects he plans to employ during the procedure. Cotton is shown as a master of his destiny, and that of the people he cons into believing that he will exorcise of their demons. 

But then the premature and surprisingly brief exorcism takes place. Cotton apes the priest in Friedkin's film when he demands oh so sincerely that the demon take him instead of the girl. His pre-rigged crucifix emits a few puffs of smoke and bingo, all is done. We know it is us, the audience, that has been conned. The filmmakers squander their only opportunity at raising the stakes of the story into the realm of the supernatural. It's not enough to kill off your protagonist and his helpers in a fit of "Rosemary's Baby" plot-grafting. What if Cotton had accidentally gotten it right, and it really was the demon Abalam tormenting the girl. And what if the demon really did choose to occupy Cotton's body for an extended tour of duty. Then "The Last Exorcism" might have had somewhere to go.

If you want to see a competent horror film, I highly recommend going back and watching "The Exorcist" and Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." By that comparison, "The Last Exorcism" is a comedy.

Rated PG-13. 90 mins. (D) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

August 30, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Piranha 3D

Camp Horror
You Might Never Go on Spring Break Again
By Cole Smithey

"I don't pole-dance for nothing." That's what one of "Piranha 3D's" many frequently topless beauties says before climbing onto a rope that hovers four-feet above the surface of water teeming with frenzied prehistoric toothy fishes. It also expresses the irreverent tone for one of the most gleefully gory horror movies of all time. Director Alexandre Aja's update of Joe Dante's famous 1978 film (written by John Sayles) packs in exposed boobies and dismembered bodies like maraschino cherries filling a 50-gallon aquarium.

The plot mirrors "Jaws" with an opening-scene watery death that presages torment for a spring break hot spot. Lake Victoria, Arizona (a.k.a. Lake Havasu) is the partying ground for a slew of horny college students whose busty females can't get enough of sharing their boobs with every male in site. Jerry O'Connell is Derrick Jones, a "Girls-Gone-Wild"-inspired pornographer who entices Jake Forester (Steven McQueen), the son of the local sheriff (Elisabeth Shue), to work as a location scout for the day's filming of nude-beauty shenanigans aboard his boat. The film's centerpiece is a shallow-water attack by thousands of hungry piranhas against hundreds of unsuspecting revelers. Aja ("High Tension") ramps up the tension and gore to a fever pitch before sprinkling in a hearty dose of gross-out humor involving a severed penis. "Piranha 3D" is a tongue-in-cheek gore fest that's not for the faint-of-heart or for the easily-offended.

As with Ti West's 2008 retro-horror-homage "The House of the Devil," "Piranha 3D" is a meticulous throwback to a kind of horror movie that never actually existed. Where Aja pushes the envelope is in the realm of gore and nudity. The Sapphic attraction of the movie is an underwater pas de deux between two nude beauties, as witnessed through a transparent viewing box in the hull of Derrick's hi-tech boat. There's an unexpected poetry in the sequence that goes on for much longer than anyone could comfortably hold their breath. Aja knows how to take artistic license. He explodes the film's campy tone of sexual liberation during the beach attack sequence where the party revelers pay dearly for their lusty transgressions. A sense of authentic panic sets in as bathers try desperately to escape not only from swarms of flesh-hungry piranhas, but also from one another. A frantic kid attempts to flee in a motor-boat whose propeller rips through the flesh of wounded and escaping swimmers until a girl's hair momentarily brings the motor to a halt. A few seconds later her scalp, and most of her face, are pulled away like a peeled grape. The feeling of pure terror matches the shallow-water shark attack in "Jaws," before going much, much further.     

The most glaring problem with "Piranha 3D" is its less-than-remarkable 3D effects. If you're going to use "3D" in the title, audiences have every right to expect that those grotesque little fishes are going to be swimming around with them in the theater, six-inches in front of their noses. 2010 has been the year of 3D movies. But it's misleading because none of the computer-generated 3D films released this year exhibit any of the effect's famous quality of pouring images out from the screen. The deep focus virtual depth you see in films like "Toy Story 3" and "Piranha 3D" doesn't come close to what you experience in an IMAX3D film like "Hubble 3D" where you really feel like you're sitting inside the movie. Production companies seem to be counting on audiences having selective memory about what 3D means. It certainly costs more to see a "3D" movie, but the experience doesn't bear out the additional money spent. On principle, 3D movies should not cost anymore to see than your typical big-budget Hollywood film. Yet, the only way the studios will learn this lesson is if audiences refuse to plunk down the additional 50% for a ticket to a 3D movie. "Piranha 3D" is a fun horror movie, but it isn't worth paying anything extra to see.

Rated R. 89 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

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August 21, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Survival of the Dead

Only a Thread
Romero Loses His Credibility
By Cole Smithey

Sometimes nothing is better than something. George A. Romero's latest zombie retread demotes the 70-year-old filmmaker to a pale imitation of the groundbreaking director who invented zombie satire in 1968 with "Night of the Living Dead," and then shifted to full-on postmodernism with "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985). This time around, anachronisms abound. On the Delaware island of Plum rival Irish families feud about how to handle their kith and kin after they've been infected by the ever-approaching rampaging zombies. A rogue military squad led by Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) learns about the island refuge from a hipster boy (portrayed inadequately by Devon Bostick) they capture along with an armored truck filled with three million bucks. The team ends up embroiled in the crossfire of a family squabble after making their way onto the idyllic island. Strident patriarch Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) has no hesitation about killing anyone infected by a zombie bite, while his rival Shamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) would rather keep his zombie relatives on a short chain. Muldoon hopes to train them to eat animal flesh rather than human meat. Athena Karkanis plays Tomboy, the unit's token lesbian, whose chances of finding love are zero. Zombie blood gets gratuitously splattered, but there's nothing at stake in a movie that should never have been made. "Survival of the Dead" doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

Zombies represent hell on earth. Brueghel the Elder's 1562 painting "The Triumph of Death" shows a terrible vision of an army of skeletons attacking a village while dark fires burn across the sky in the background. It's much more than a nightmare. It's a scenario that no matter how much you study it, the more bewildering and frightening it becomes.

We have come to understand zombies very well. We know they are slow but tenacious, mindless creatures singularly obsessed with ripping apart live human flesh. Unlike Brueghel, Romero has lost sight of the nightmare of such an environment. He prefers to embrace it as more of a dream from which the viewer might not be bothered to be awoken for all of its comforting elements. There's no horror, and as such no satire.

The Viet Nam War weighed heavily in the gritty subtext of "Night of the Living Dead." Romero's commentary on race relations gave the film an unmistakable backbone of au currant import that hit you in the gut. "Dawn of the Dead" foreshadowed the military industrial complex and radical right wing extremism that have come to rule every spectrum of America's social and political spectrum.

By comparison "Survival of the Dead" represents a throwing in of the towel. It's a cartoon rather than a work of rigorous cinematic art. Rather than contextualize the breakdown of global societies (witness the current crises in Greece, Thailand, and the U.S.), Romero has written a story that would fit better into a '60s era "Star Trek" television episode. The film doesn't come anywhere near the thematic heft of a half-hour episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" (also from '60s television). 

Horror films shouldn't necessarily respond to the overwhelming circumstances of economic, natural, and social catastrophes, but when you are the progenitor of the myth, you do have a certain obligation to rise to the level you established. Where "Night of the Living Dead" was a tapestry, "Survival of the Dead" is barely a thread. 

Rated R. 90 mins. (D+) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

May 25, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Taking Pedophilia Seriously
The Nightmare Grows Cold
By Cole Smithey

More contemplative and thematically muscular than Wes Craven's 1984 original slasher flick, Samuel Bayer's updated version has a quieter surreal edge rooted more in suspense than in the former film's regular bloodletting. That's not to say plenty of quarts of the red liquid don't flow freely from a group of teens who had the misfortune to be molested by Freddie Kruger when he worked as a nursery school janitor a dozen years earlier. Jackie Earle Haley breathes fearsome life into the horribly disfigured monster that lives in the dream-lives and waking realities of his victims. The movie has a sustained sense of morbid dread abetted by the narrative's adult characters who conspire against the truth of their own complicity in their children's sustained terror. In place of constant electronic music cues, there's a brooding silence here. Subtle nods to films like "Psycho," "The Exorcist," and "The Shining" work to create a grotesque universe of the sleep deprived where nightmares nestle like Russian Dolls. Where Craven's film was campy, Bayer's movie is just plain dark.

Remaking horror films is a dicey proposition that hasn't fared well in recent years. Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's "Halloween" was such a wrongheaded failure that it should put producers off from ever giving Zombie such an opportunity again. You'd have to go back to David Cronenberg's re-imagining of "The Fly" to come up with a horror remake that reworked its original material to an entirely new level of entertainment. It's this elevated transposition that's nevertheless missing in the Elm Street update by screenwriters Wesley Strick ("Cape Fear") and newcomer Eric Heisserer.

Where the contemporary film gains on the original is in the casting of Jackie Earle Haley as the demonic monster with a mission. In flashback we see the small frame of Haley's pedophile character playing with small children in the school yard as narration informs us about how much he enjoyed spending time with the kids. Bam! We're drawn into the psychological aspect of the narrative that sides with the traumatized victims who, as older teens, must now be sacrificed on an altar of warped insanity. Where audiences got a googgily-eyed disfigured Freddie that hid behind a mask in the original, we now see the grotesque scars of a man punished by fire in an act of public mass vengeance similar to the treatment the Frankenstein monster received in James Whale's 1931 film.

The new Elm Street also eschews the false start scares, self-referential jokiness, and teen sex frolicking of Craven's franchise starter. There's no lonely Johnny Depp character announcing "morality sucks" while listening to the exaggerated moans and cries of his friends as they get it on in the next room. The teens in Bayer's film are too damaged to engage freely in sexual expression. Absent too is the religious iconography that the original overstated with crucifixes that fell from their wall hooks.

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" is ultimately about the post traumatic nightmares that pedophile victims experience. That the murky imaginings fold inside one another between waking reality, points out the depth of mental destruction such experiences inflict on human beings. Like the never ending stream of revelations about sexual abuses by Catholic priests, Freddie Kruger represents a pernicious threat that will not go away. Hence the film's final shock of terror. Taken in these terms, "Elm Street" is a cautionary horror film that links the participation of negligent parents to sociopath molesters that prey on children in their own churches, homes, and schools. If this doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

Rated R. 95 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

May 3, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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