I happened to run across a couple of interesting posts about HOSTEL PART II. Both are negative, but that’s not the interesting thing. What’s interesting is that both were written without seeing the film - in fact, before the film was released - and both assume the film is going to be some huge success (in the same way that everyone expected GRINDHOUSE to burn up the box office).

Self-Styled Siren comes to the not unreasonable conclusion that there is not enough time to waste on film by Eli Roth when there are still so many movies by Jean-Pierre Melville to watch. Although no doubt true, Siren’s evident disaste seems to be generic rather than specific: she doesn’t conclude that there’s something wrong with Roth’s movies; she just doesn’t seem to like graphic horrror in general, ignoring the fact that there have been some amazing movies made that did not shy away from showing blood (like George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD).

Windmills of My Mind is a little more on target, going after Roth specifically for lacking “some kind of inner moral compass that allows his films to have purpose or meaning outside of the mere desire to shock.”

All well and good, but the post goes a little too far in the next paragraph:

• This is all tied in with something about which I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking lately, and that it is the disturbingly increasing tendency toward sexual sado-masochism in the general culture (movies/TV/music) but particularly in the horror genre (an approach which has spawned its own “sub-genre” of horror films labeled by David Edelstein as “torture porn” and, in some circles, “gorno”).

I hate to remind everyone, but we live in a country that imprisons people illegally and tortures enemy combatants. When the President of the United States, the Vice-President, the former Secretary of Defense, and their various lawyers all think that torture is okay, and their cheerleaders cheer them on (Gitmo was nothing more than a hazing, some young soldiers blowing off steam, according to Rush Limbaugh), then it’s absurd to fret about fictional depictions of torture in the media.

You see, Eli Roth may not have a moral compass or a point, but he does have a context. That context is the ugly reality in which we live, which makes his work seem relevant. It’s a cynical kind of relevance, but we should understand that there is something going on in the world that might make this kind of art resonate with audiences - and it’s more than just the age-old sick fascination to witness grand guignol horror.

What keeps movies like this from being great - from being anything more than a flash in the pan that that almost immediately disapates - is that they approach the subject matter without a sense of moral outrage. Morals are for suckers - they’re something that cynical politicians use to justify their self-serving policies and unjustified wars. But for filmmakers like Roth, the response is not to stand up and demand a higher standard of behavior; they just want to jump on the bandwagon in their own way, laughing as the train takes us all on the Road to Hell.

Wisely, some people do not want to take that journey. Some even want to stop the train and turn it around. Maybe that’s the reason HOSTEL PART II failed to live up to box office expectations.

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Following up on his earlier concerns that the box office failure of HOSTEL PART II and 28 WEEKS LATER signals a potential long-tern downturn for the horror genre, Lucius Gore of Esplatter.Com reposts and expands upon an essay he wrote last year. The gist of the piece is that horror waxes when Republicans are in power and wanes when Democrats take over. With Democrats running both Houses of Congress, and with a likely Democratic victory looming in the next presidential election, Lucius believes that horror is doomed for the next decade.

I do believe Lucius is on to something here. There is no doubt that pop culture - including the horror genre - reflects the current cultural zeitgeist, including political changes. However, I do not think there is quite the one-to-one correspondence that he would have us believe, and if you look at the evidence he adduces to support his case, it’s a little shaky.

Lucius credits PSYCHO to the Eisenhower administration, even though it came out in 1960, the year Kennedy took over the White House. On the other hand, he credits NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which came out in 1968, to the Nixon Administration, even though they had only recently taken over that year from Lyndon Johnson, a democrat.

Perhaps the biggest stretch is when he credits the Republican Congressional electoral victory of 1994 for resurrecting the genre after a dearth of horror films in the early 1990s. For the record, there was only a brief two-year period, from 1992-1994, when democrats won both the White House and Congress. That period includes ALIEN 3, ARMY OF DARKNESS, BATMAN RETURNS, BRAIN DEAD (a.k.a. DEAD/ALIVE), Coppola’s DRACULA, CANDYMAN, CRONOS, THE CROW, DEATH BECOMES HER, DR. GIGGLES, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, JASON GOES TO HELL, JURASSIC PARK, Wes Craven’s NEW NIGHTMARE, and WOLF. Not all of them were hits, and some are only borderline horror films, but that’s not too bad a list for a short period of time.

Skip ahead to 1995 - the year year the Republican Congress was actually in power - and what do you get? SCREAMERS (a box office and critical dud); CASPER (a cartoon ghost remade as a live-action joke); BATMAN FOREVER (not a horror film but shows a distinct trend toward light-heartedness after the dark morass of BATMAN RETURNS); SPECIES (not bad but not a blockbuster); LORD OF ILLUSIONS (a heavily hyped bomb from Clive Barker, the release of which was delayed over and over while the studio tried to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear). The one horrifying blockbuster hit was SEVEN, but just to balance things out, this was also the year of the wonderful, whimsical BABE.

So, as the political pendulum swings, do I expect to see horror die a slow, lingering death, kept on life support only by direct-to-video releases. No, I think the current torture-trend in horror will come to an end, but something else will come along to replace it. Maybe it won’t even be called horror (a label filmmakers often eschew, preferring “thriller” or some such other label), in one way or another there will be frightening films at least as good as the ones we’ve had over the last twelve years.

Horror never dies…

UPDATE: Looking over this post, it occurs to me that I begin by saying Lucius is on to something, then spend the rest of the post only offering evidence that his theory is wrong. My take on it is this:

The great horror booms seem to be ignited by times of great stress in the culture. WWI gave us the first great wave of silent thrillers, when Lon Chaney became a star by playing deformed characters like the Phantom of the Opera. The Depression launched the Sound Era’s classic movie monsters: DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY. The Nuclear Age ushered in a decade of radioactive mutants and alien invaders. The Vietnam War begat NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

When things are bad, people look for change, and that change can involve politics. Horror films perhaps seem more apropos during cynical times. If a new election sweeps in a wave of optimism, then yes, the apetite for horror can dwindle somewhat. But how much it dwindles depends on how much the underlying desire for change is addressed. If people elect a Democratic congress to end the war in Iraq, and they do not end the war, our culture could remain in a state of anxiety that make audiences receptive to horror entertainment. 

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While posting some new pics from Rob Zombie’s upcoming HALLOWEEN remake, Lucius Gore at E-Splatter.Com opines that the future of the horror genre is riding on the box office performance of the film when it opens on August 31. Lucius points to the poor performance of HOSTEL PART II, 28 WEEKS LATER, and GRINDHOUSE as evidence that, if HALLOWEEN likewise bombs, horror will descend into “the moribund direct-to-video-only mess that it was in throughout the first half of the 1990s.”

Though I have no doubt that a certain weight of expectations is riding on the shoulders of HALLOWEEN, I think Lucius is a bit off the mark with this analysis, which is premised on the idea that these are all really good films that tanked for mysterious reasons, perhaps a “paradigm shift” in our culture.

GRINDHOUSE was, frankly, a dud whose box office failure was not only utterly deserved but also, at least in retrospect, completely predictable. It was a rehash of movies that were never terribly popular to begin with. HOSTEL PART II and 28 WEEKS LATER are both sequels to movies that were successes only in terms relative to their costs. HALLOWEEN is a remake of a film that launched a franchise that long since wore out its welcome.

In short, they’re rehashed horror at best; even if well done, it’s just the same old stuff we’ve seen before. Is this really the best the genre has to offer? And if the answer is yes, should we despair if the box office kills off the current trend?

Truly, there is little mystery as to why audiences would not turn out in droves for these movies - these are films that were not necessarily designed to appeal to audiences. They were made by and for hardcore gore-hounds. They’re the equivalent of an initiation-hazing ceremony: you’re not supposed to be entertained; you’re supposed to be proud that you could stand the acid test while those around you were chickening out and hiding their eyes.

Consequently, it seems a bit of a stretch to blame the audience, not the films themselves for the poor box office results. If HALLOWEEN and/or SAW IV bombs like the rest of the recent horror films, it will not be the death of the genre; it will merely be the death of the current “splat-pack” style - which could make it one of the briefest trends in the history of cinema, on par with the brief 1953 craze for 3D.

Fortunately, “horror” and “splat-pack” are not interchangeable terms. The later is a sub-set of the former. If the splat-pack kids have to be sent home for failing to entertain audiences, there will be others waiting in the wings to send the genre in some new direction. In a sense, the failure of HALLOWEEN might even be a good thing: if reliable gambits like remakes and sequels no longer work; Hollywood might be forced to try some creativity.

Out with the old, in with the new, I always say.

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The title may suggest a story about a boy and his dog, and that’s not far off - except that, instead of a dog, the titular character is a zombie. The premise is that, years ago, the Earth passed through a cloud of space dust that turned the dead into flesh-eating zombies. After the “Zombie Wars” put down the undead uprising, a giant corporation called ZomCom managed to domesticate the the walking dead with an electronic collar that quells their urge to eat warm human flesh. Zombies now work in menial tasks, as milkmen, paper boys, and servants; in fact, it somewhat embarrassing for a family not to own at least one zombie.

This set-up sounds like an amusing premise for a mild little low-budget spoof, but FIDO is much more than that: it’s a full-blown social satire with zombies at its center. Equal part LASSIE, old TV sit-coms, and 1950s movie melodramas, the film pokes fun at contemporay society in the tradition of the old TWILIGHT ZONE series - by hiding its commentary in another time, another place. It’s not very scary; it’s not even always hysterically funny. But its satire is always sharp as steel, cutting through the facade of happy, everyday “normality” with almost as sting as David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET. Continue Reading »