The horror! Uncle Sam fails to chill the spine
Posted by Dave Söze on 14 Oct 09
The most disturbing thing about the recent slew of American horror movies...is that they don't disturb. In fact, they don't do much at all, save pose the question why the ruddy hell have I paid upwards of £6 to see a retread of some 1970s slasher pic that wasn't much cop first time round.
Time was when you'd crowd into the local Gaumont, giggling nervously as you clutched your Kia-Ora and Westlers hotdog, and then sit stupefied as the likes of The Exorcist or even The Blair Witch Project did their unholy best to frighten the Bejaysus out of you.
These were genuinely challenging films, determined to avoid deadening formula and priding themselves on their ability to come at you from an unexpected directions. Nowadays, the direction they tend to come from is the accountants' office of a big studio settling for easy money.
Recent flesh-filleting fare from Uncle Sam's moribund movie imagination has been a non-stop deluge of dull join-the-dots mediocrity. Boxes are being ticked rather than barriers being pushed. It doesn't help that the unchallenging audiences for this gruel are undemanding teens with large trousers and NASA-level mobile phones with which they text their chums sitting a couple of rows away.
Tempting harsh legal redress under the Trade Descriptions Act, the most horrifying thing about these cash-driven exercises in unoriginality – i.e. modern horror films - is that they make money... so there will be plenty more. Take Halloween II, Rob Zombie's sequel to a remake. It's nasty, but it's not horrifying.
Back in the mists of movie-making time – 30-odd years ago, in fact - John Carpenter made the original Halloween, a gruesomely accomplished psychological thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis as the stalked and the late Donald Pleasance as the helpless shrink.
That minor classic also invited audiences to say hello to Michael Myers. Since that cordial introduction, it's been a nightmare trying to shake him off. Thanks to three brain-dead – yet highly lucrative – variations on the Halloween theme, he's refused to lie down despite being shot, stabbed, electrocuted and torched in fourteen outings.
Yet the paying public seems uncomfortable with anything that veers away from the tried-and-tested, the terror template that seems terrified of departing from the well-thumbed script.
Do not abandon hope. For this week there is Pontypool. No, not a gritty documentary about the south Welsh town founded on railways, coal and, erm, lacquer ware, but a sublime little horror from Canada. OK, so it's Canada and not the US 0f A... but it still occupies most of north North America. It's also the home country of super-chilled director David Cronenberg, the master of body horror. So that's a promising start.
Pontypool rarely strays outside the grubby confines of a small-town radio station where the graveyard shift DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a heavy-drinking has-been, broadcasts to the lost and the lonely. One night his humdrum world is blown apart by the news – from the station's roving weatherman – that zombie-like locals are attacking everything and everyone. Where's Tony Blackburn when you need him?
Pontypool does things that studio-sanctioned American output doesn't dare. Practically everything – the rising panic to the impending doom - is conveyed by word of mouth. Which, in itself, is pretty clever because the virus that has turned the town into drooling psychos is born by language.
You won't get that level of contrivance in Friday the 13th Part XIV. It's cool, assured film-making that treats its audience as fully functioning adults who might appreciate the fact that you're most scared when outside your comfort zone.
Creeping insidiously under the skin, this torments the mind with nightmarish thoughts and quietly suggests you better check the back seat of the car after exiting the cinema and race for the light switch when you've reached home.
Pontypool is front row stuff.
