Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
Raw, the critically acclaimed French-Belgian movie written and directed by Julie Ducournau is described on many sites as a “cannibal” themed horror movie, but while that’s literally what happens in the movie, it’s as much about cannibalism as the Antonia Bird movie Ravenous was back in 1997. Human flesh may be consumed here, but this is what Stephen King would call a vampire movie, using his archetypical definition in Danse Macabre, his fine non-fiction look at the horror genre.
It’s fair to say that A Serbian Film is the most vilified horror movie of our generation. Other generations had Salo, Cannibal Holocaust, and The Men Behind The Sun, and A Serbian Film, made in 2011, joins the club of horror movies with scenes that are so extreme they come to define the movie itself. I’m willing to bet that just like those other movies, A Serbian Film is also one the most vilified horror movies that’s actually never been seen by its harshest critics. If you’ve heard of the movie, you’ve also heard of that scene, and you may have already made up your mind about it and decided not to see it – which would be a shame, because it’s a truly effective, character-driven horror movie. I don’t often review movies older than a couple of years, but this is an exception.
I’ll begin by getting it out of the way first: I hated Prometheus. In terms of the franchise that was unleashed upon the world in 1979, it’s one of the weakest of the six core movies (I’m choosing to ignore the two crossover Alien v Predator movies) for a couple of reasons. Though in saying that, I give it props for the same reason I do 1986’s Aliens, namely the attempt to try to do something different with the concept. If you’re going to add another film to a franchise, you should at least do something unique. Let’s face it, the actual concept of Alien is not sophisticated: human beings find a desolate planet in deep space, get infected with an alien parasite which becomes something they have to destroy … or they’ll be destroyed by it. It suffers from the same self-limiting curse that comes with success: how do you make it just different enough without alienating the people that filled the studio coffers first time around?
Watching From A House On Willow Street last night, I was reminded of The Atticus institute in a number of ways, but what went through my mind was not so much the end result, but of the premise itself, and how the filmmakers completely failed to exploit it. In The Atticus Institute, the premise is: what if demonic possession was a real thing, and could it be weaponized? Of course, that’s not what the actual movie was about, but to me the real story should have been that laid out in the premise. In From A House On Willow Street, the premise actually is the actual plot, but it’s handled badly: a group of would-be kidnappers abduct the adult daughter of a wealthy family, only to discover that she is possessed by a demon. Ransom meets The Exorcist.
Although I haven’t seen the original The Magnificent Seven for the best part of 20 years, I still retained enough memory of the plot to try comparing it with the 2016 Antoine Fuqua (Southpaw)/Denzel Washington, and from those hazy memories, there didn’t seem to be many large deviations from the plot. Instead of a village being raided by bandits, it’s a small (and kind of unconvincing) western town bullied into submission by Bartholomew Bogue, a mining company owner (played by Peter Sarsgaard) who wants the surrounding land, and the vein of gold under it. After a brutal opening wherein Sarsgaard’s armed goons kill a few of the more rebellious townsfolk, the widow of one takes it upon herself to seek vengeance, and a way to stop Bogue from plundering what remains of the townspeople’s land.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 