I'm gonna have to alter my viewpoint on Alexandre Aja a little bit. I was convinced that this guy was one of the most promising young directors in the horror genre today. His breakout film, High Tension was 2/3rds of a great slasher movie, exceptionally well shot, that starts to drag after a while and then reaches a stunningly terrible ending that kind of ruins everything that came before it. But, you know, it was clear he had talent and would likely improve. Then he remade Wes Craven's kinda terrible The Hills Have Eyes, and that's one that I think totally fulfilled his potential, and is one of the best slasher movies of this decade. Exciting, disturbing, tense, great looking and with surprisingly solid writing and acting, and deeper themes and symbolism than you might expect in a movie about mutant hillbillies. I was pretty excited to see what he did next.
Turns out what he did next was take a big shit. I honestly hated this movie, I don't think any of it worked for me except perhaps a few isolated moments, and I would have to be feeling pretty generous to even give it that much credit. There is one aspect of it that I did kind of like, the burned down department store set (even though it doesn't make any sense... why are all the walls and ceilings and floors burned, but lots of random pieces of furniture and things like curtains aren't?), so of course hardly any of the movie takes place there after the first 15 minutes or so.
The movie has a stupid premise, and executes it in my least favorite way possible. Which is to say, it's another ghost movie where the supernatural evil force can essentially do anything it wants, no rules are established, so all the "scary" stuff seems arbitrary.
I'm not gonna call Aja a sellout just yet (even though this movie is another American studio remake of a recent Asian horror flick) because his last film was a remake and it was pretty good. But even with some fairly graphic violence, this movie feels kind of like a ball-less mainstream horror movie without much of an original identity. Aja's next movie is Pirana 3-D, and although I bet I'll go see it, I'm not feeling very excited. It just seems like another step on the path to him becoming a generic, hired-gun sorta director.
1 comment:
do they normally have 24-7 guarded supervision of abandoned/burned down buildings? that was a point that confused me.
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