Revisiting the Hills Pt 1 (The Hills Have Eyes, 2006)

In the early part of the aughts, studios started to remake Wes Craven’s films. To a certain extent, this was, I believe, an attempt to give Craven more financial benefit from his work. He was tangentially involved in these films as a producer, they were all written and directed by different people.

The Hills Have Eyes was probably a good place to start. It is a film known mainly to fans of Wes Craven and horror. However, a lot of people in the mainstream are likely to have simply heard the name.

Bringing in Alexandre Aja to write and direct. He had made a real impression with 2003’s High Tension, and honestly, was probably a strong choice. High Tension was part of the French Extreme trend in horror where stories could be messy and plot twists do not make sense. Here, the extreme violence of his work really is at home.

The core story is there. A family is on vacation in their RV. They go on a detour to shorten their drive time and the car appears to break down. They discover there are other people hiding in the hills and those people attack them and kidnap their baby. And then the family must fight back.

The original film is about a family from civilization versus the feral family. The film plays up the family divisions, with Big Bob’s tough Republican versus Doug’s “weak Democrat” played up big time. In fact a lot of the film is devoted to Doug becoming a violent badass. This is not an exaggeration. Doug goes from a guy barely able to think of using a gun to hand to hand violent killer. The film is pretty good at manipulating the viewer, because Doug is trying to save his baby.

The remake’s biggest alteration is that the feral family are ravaged by radiation. They are basically mutant monsters. Visually, this is really effective, though it loses something to make the Jupiter family outright inhuman monsters.

This is a decent remake and I think gorehounds will find it enjoyable.

October 24, 2020 0

They’re Pretending to Be Alive (Land of the Dead, 2005)

It took 20 years for Romero to decide on a new zombie film. In this film? Set well after the zombie apocalypse, we are introduced to a small city that has grown, fortified against the dead. The culture is divided between the haves and the have-nots. Those with riches live in comfort in a high-rise apartment complex. Everyone else lives alone, where life is a day to day struggle.

In this world, there are those employed by the rich to go out and scavenge the land for supplies. Riley runs one such crew, under the employ of Kaufman. They have all sorts of tricks to distract the dead, though it is still a very dangerous job. One such expedition has an unexpected side effect. a Zombie begins uniting zombies in a march towards the city. It is unclear fully what causes this, but there is a rudimentary communication.

Meanwhile, Riley plots with his friends to get out of town and on their own. His second in command, Cholo, wants to become one of the elites and is trying to get in with Kaufman. Of course, Kaufman does not care about helping Cholo and uses his greed and ambition for his own benefit.

It is clear at this point, Romero has lost interest in the survivors. He is done suggesting mankind might win, and any attempt to rebuild is clearly futile. Land of the dead feels like it really is the end of the road for the franchise (it was not). It is a fairly decent film with some fun characters and interesting ideas at play, but at the same time, it never quite achieves the levels of its predecessors.

October 14, 2017 0

Killer Duality (The Dark Half, 1993)

Young Thad Beaumont experienced painful headaches when doctors performed surgery, they found the remains of a twin Thad absorbed in the womb. Years later, Thad is a teacher and writer. He is approached by Fred Clawson and asked to sign a book. Thad claims he is not the author, pointing to the author being George Stark. but Fred has worked out that Thad and Stark are one in the same. And he is threatening to expose Beaumont as the writer of the lurid books by Stark.

Thad decides to head him off at the pass and he publically “kills off” Stark. And then people related to the event start getting murdered, making Beaumont look like the prime suspect.

The film plays around with whether Thad is losing his mind or if Stark has somehow found a way into our world. There is the motif of birds within the story. Thad hears birds in his head, but birds also seem to amass when Stark is around.

Romero does a pretty decent job with this adaption of a Stephen King novel, but it is not really a memorable film either. But it is passable entertainment for horror fans.

October 12, 2017 0

The Hunter or the Hunted? Pt 11 (Alien vs Predator: Requiem, 2007)

While critics and plenty of fans pummeled the first film, it was more than successful enough to get a sequel greenlit. Directed by the Brothers Strause (that is what they direct under), Requiem is a real mess in more ways than one.

The cast is immense, so you start figuring out who will die sooner than later based on how much attention they get. The film picks up right after the first film, with a xenomorph bursting from the body of a predator. It has the predator mouth and dreadlocks., so it gets nicknamed the Predalien. It rapidly makes trouble for the Predator ship crew and their ship crashes in a forest.

The predator and a couple face-huggers escape, a new Predator comes to earth after getting an emergency alert from the crashed ship. Soon the town is besieged by Aliens.

It is all pretty much what you would expect, unfortunately there is little to set it apart. Oh, the “Predalien” looks big and aggressive, and instead of laying eggs, the Predalien shoves it’s secondary mouth in your throat and feeds live larva into your stomach. It gets pretty gross when the Predalien takes over a hospital and assaults multiple pregnant women. The vast majority of characters are there to be alien fodder.

Time has no meaning in the film…the Predator make it from his planet to Earth in a couple hours, aliens grow to full size in a couple hours…as usual, the practical effects are the high point and the digital a bit dodgy. This film also messes with the timeline, at least the first film ends in a way you could argue humanity is not aware of the Xenomorphs. That is wholly implausible in this film. I can understand why Scott blew this crossover off for Prometheus.

June 7, 2017 0