Well I’ve had worse birthdays, a nine hour massacre of the German Blitzkrieg in 2005 was fairly underwhelming but at least I have the weekend for a 2 stage celebration with friends to look forward to. I spent most of the day at a CRC conference, the venue at least was interesting but the continual gags from the speakers about making Co2 emissions disappear wore pretty thin as the day elapsed. The possible irony of holding a climate change conference at the nexus of subterfuge and misdirection in London is not lost on me.

  

Film-wise I have a couple of reports which I’m going to keep as brief as possible. Firstly I caught ‘The Hangover‘ the day I got my new assignment, I had an afternoon to kill before being able to celebrate with  a friend in the evening. It started off with a promising premise for a comedy, four guys motor over to Vegas to launch a monumental stag party but the film deteriorates badly once they awake post celebration – badly hungover – and have to construct the evenings events and locate the missing groom. It has a couple of good moments but most of the comedy fell flat for me, I mean who hasn’t got inadvertently fucked up on GBH, taken the Bellagio for $50K, married a stripper, stole Mike Tyson’s tiger, lost a incisor and kidnapped a Korean under-boss. Amateurs.

  

I’m not sure how I can explain going to see ‘The Last House On The Left‘ remake which has been violating London screens. As usual I can only excuse such abhorrent behaviour on a drive to make the most of my spare time before launching into a new assignment, this wasn’t half as bad as I thought it was going to be but needed to be twice as good to be anything more than a horror movie completest curio. In chime with the original (both of which are loose reworkings of Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’) two girls get kidnapped by a bunch of marauding weirdos who are on the run from the law after springing their leader from custody. After a nasty scene where (SPOILERS ABOUND FOR THE REST OF THE REVIEW) one of the girls is brutally killed, the other raped and left for dead the scumbags seek solace at a nearby remote house as a storm breaks. Of course the house is the second girls home but the parents generously offer shelter to the seemingly innocuous travellers as they think their daughter is staying with friends. Their abstract suspicions are confirmed once their mortally wounded daughter heroically limps home which launches an intense close quarter battle between the desperate parents and evil degenerates….

   

I caught up with the notorious Wes Craven directed original a few years ago once it finally got a UK uncut release and frankly it was boring. It certainly has that urgent, exploitation snuff movie sense that the film was made from 16mm cast offs from cheap 70’s porno’s and mondo movie weirdness but the whole enterprise left me undisgusted and unmoved. I’m not the biggest fan of these movies, some of those vérité, documentary style nasty films from the 70’s are hilarious fun that deliver a genuine, unsettling chill (”Texas Chainsaw‘ of course) but most of the others – ‘I Spit On Your Grave‘, ‘The Hills Have Eyes‘ – leave me cold despite their alleged submerged feminist and class critiques. The problems are two-fold with this reworking. Firstly it has a defined and conscious shooting style, a dour bleached colour scheme with hints of a graveyard ochre green which befits the subject matter but feels much too polished and forced to immerse you in the horrific events – it’s detached, it’s stylised, it’s neutered.

  

Secondly and most importantly for this stuff the remake is a survival film not a revenge film. In the original both girls are killed which raises the questions of how far would you go to avenge your child, in the wilderness, divorced from civilisation – that’s a reasonably interesting and valid premise for a horror flick as the viewer is encouraged to cheer on the violence inflicted on the transgressors, supposedly questioning his/her reaction on the drive home from the drive-in. In LHOTL2 the daughter is still barely alive and the dispatch of the criminals is an urgent necessity, an obstacle which enables the parents to launch into action movie heroics and ludicrous fight scenes to save the day. The murder & rape scene in version 2, like the original, is pretty hard to watch and kudos to the filmmakers in the remake for not diluting the key driver of the film – at least they got that right. The criminal leader Krug (it took me ages to identify him from other stuff) is suitably nasty and one of the revenge kills has some amusing echoes of the memorable kill in ”Torn Curtain‘, Hitch I’m sure would have been agreeably flattered. A mixed bag then and as I said, a curio if you’re in the mood for some retro reflection.

I pray that we may be entering the final stretch with this faintly dull strain of remakes, re-imagings, reboots and resurrections. Then again the ‘Nightmare On Elm Street‘ movie lurks around the corner and Rob Zombies ‘Halloween 2‘ is also in post so maybe not. I couldn’t care less about the former as I never cared for the Freddy movies back in the day, original included (which my parents rented for my 16th Birthday party, on preview that makes this post exactly twenty years later to the day which is brilliant), the former another pointless, dull, inept and impotent movie like its sibling. Still, at least some sacred cows have been defended. Some other material is en route which may reinvigorate my faith in genre cinema. Finally, a quick laugh.