I've had enough of these damn horror movies
You’ve no doubt seen the commercial with Zachary Knighton tied between what is presumably the cab and payload of a semi. The ad abruptly ends as the cab starts to move forward, his girlfriend shrieks, and he screams, “I don’t want to die!” The first urge upon viewing this is to debate whether this would actually kill a person. I’m guessing his thumbs would be stripped off well before any internal organs received any severe damage. But that is beside the point. This is a remake of a successful and seemingly well-liked movie from 1986. That version, featuring C. Thomas Howell, Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh ended up with a domestic gross roughly equal to its budget and is cruising along with a 7.0 rating on the IMDB. The new version comes in at a 5.0, a number that is only likely to drop (as all IMDB ratings do for brand new movies). This past weekend, the remake of The Hitcher made 3.6 million dollars, bringing its two-week total to 13.4 million. And while I have no idea what the budget was for this movie, I would have to assume that it is somewhere in the $20-30 MM range, meaning that the generated revenue is not likely to match the costs. The “budget” figure does not include advertising expense which, in this case, had to be sizable. I don’t watch much TV, but I must have seen over fifty commercials for this movie. Based on audience response, critical review, and any other reasonable measure, this film is garbage. So why am I picking on it? Because it’s a prime example of the crap we have to continually deal with in our nation’s movie theaters and during our nation’s commercial breaks.
If you’re expecting me to make an impassioned “In Defense Of: Silence of the Lambs”, you’re not going to get it here. Yes, that is arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. Sometimes I begin to tell myself that it’s simply an excellent thriller that happens to be extremely scary. But then I remember a head in formaldehyde, Hannibal Lecter wearing other people’s faces, and Anthony Heald’s lecherous warden. It definitely goes beyond the thriller genre and into horror. As perfect as that movie is, the spate of horror films we get now are appallingly awful. But the genesis of the current run of these films is not Silence of the Lambs. This all began with Scream. And honestly, I have to blame myself a bit. When I was in college, my housemate was doing an internship for Miramax, promoting films on campus. This included work for Dimension Films, the subsidiary company that produced Scream. My friend was in a minor car accident in Canada and could not make it back in time for her scheduled Scream promotion, so another housemate and I took care of it for her. All we knew about this movie was what we had gleaned from the trailer which consisted of the Drew Barrymore scene at the beginning of the film. Based on the information we’d received, we were certain that the movie was terrible, but followed through with the promotion anyway, smirking ever so slightly as we urged our fellow students to see the movie. Little did we know that it would go on to become Dimension’s biggest hit ever, grossing over $160 MM worldwide. The thing is, Scream was a joke. It was meant to nail shut the coffin on a genre which was dead at that point anyway. Wes Craven directed it, claiming it would be his last horror movie ever. He was all set to get going on Music of the Heart, you see. So rather than defend Silence of the Lambs, perhaps I should be here to condemn Scream. But again, proliferation was not Scream’s intent, regardless of its own abysmal sequels.
One could argue that following 9/11 and the continual carnage we see from Iraq, people feel connected to violence and want to experience it as fantasy in their movies. There probably is something to that. As violence escalates in real life, we see it escalate in fantasy life as well. Perhaps if people feel that violence is fantastical, they don’t really have to deal with what they’re seeing on the news. The president talks about the sacrifice people endure by having to watch violence on the news, but if they can convince themselves that it’s not actually real, wouldn’t that make things that much easier? Perhaps if they can see a different monster batter and bloody helpless victims each week, they don’t feel as connected to what’s really happening in the world. So movie studios think that we’re either too connected to violence or not connected enough, but they’re damn well going to exploit that feeling, either way. They’re even trying to convince you that crocodile adventure movies are horror flicks these days (as if casting Orlando Jones wasn’t scary enough).
Look, I’m not naïve. I realize that these movies are cheap to produce and they’re largely selling them to teenagers who are hoping to escape from their angst-filled existences. But I’m sick of my TV turning into a howling strobe light every time I try to watch a basketball game. Really, I wouldn’t care if they made twice as many dumb horror movies, as long as they wouldn’t try to get me to watch them. I’m not going to. And not because I’m frightened of the terror they bring, but because they’re obviously horrendous. I’m not even going to get into the whole “what about the kids” thing. If I were a kid trying to watch the NFC championship game and one of these ads came on, I would probably go hide in the closet. But since I don’t have any kids, I’m merely offended by the lack of taste and artistic merit. America must be ready for a new trend in low-quality, low-budget movies. Can we get a Porky’s remake or something? Actually, please forget I said that.
If you’re expecting me to make an impassioned “In Defense Of: Silence of the Lambs”, you’re not going to get it here. Yes, that is arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. Sometimes I begin to tell myself that it’s simply an excellent thriller that happens to be extremely scary. But then I remember a head in formaldehyde, Hannibal Lecter wearing other people’s faces, and Anthony Heald’s lecherous warden. It definitely goes beyond the thriller genre and into horror. As perfect as that movie is, the spate of horror films we get now are appallingly awful. But the genesis of the current run of these films is not Silence of the Lambs. This all began with Scream. And honestly, I have to blame myself a bit. When I was in college, my housemate was doing an internship for Miramax, promoting films on campus. This included work for Dimension Films, the subsidiary company that produced Scream. My friend was in a minor car accident in Canada and could not make it back in time for her scheduled Scream promotion, so another housemate and I took care of it for her. All we knew about this movie was what we had gleaned from the trailer which consisted of the Drew Barrymore scene at the beginning of the film. Based on the information we’d received, we were certain that the movie was terrible, but followed through with the promotion anyway, smirking ever so slightly as we urged our fellow students to see the movie. Little did we know that it would go on to become Dimension’s biggest hit ever, grossing over $160 MM worldwide. The thing is, Scream was a joke. It was meant to nail shut the coffin on a genre which was dead at that point anyway. Wes Craven directed it, claiming it would be his last horror movie ever. He was all set to get going on Music of the Heart, you see. So rather than defend Silence of the Lambs, perhaps I should be here to condemn Scream. But again, proliferation was not Scream’s intent, regardless of its own abysmal sequels.
One could argue that following 9/11 and the continual carnage we see from Iraq, people feel connected to violence and want to experience it as fantasy in their movies. There probably is something to that. As violence escalates in real life, we see it escalate in fantasy life as well. Perhaps if people feel that violence is fantastical, they don’t really have to deal with what they’re seeing on the news. The president talks about the sacrifice people endure by having to watch violence on the news, but if they can convince themselves that it’s not actually real, wouldn’t that make things that much easier? Perhaps if they can see a different monster batter and bloody helpless victims each week, they don’t feel as connected to what’s really happening in the world. So movie studios think that we’re either too connected to violence or not connected enough, but they’re damn well going to exploit that feeling, either way. They’re even trying to convince you that crocodile adventure movies are horror flicks these days (as if casting Orlando Jones wasn’t scary enough).
Look, I’m not naïve. I realize that these movies are cheap to produce and they’re largely selling them to teenagers who are hoping to escape from their angst-filled existences. But I’m sick of my TV turning into a howling strobe light every time I try to watch a basketball game. Really, I wouldn’t care if they made twice as many dumb horror movies, as long as they wouldn’t try to get me to watch them. I’m not going to. And not because I’m frightened of the terror they bring, but because they’re obviously horrendous. I’m not even going to get into the whole “what about the kids” thing. If I were a kid trying to watch the NFC championship game and one of these ads came on, I would probably go hide in the closet. But since I don’t have any kids, I’m merely offended by the lack of taste and artistic merit. America must be ready for a new trend in low-quality, low-budget movies. Can we get a Porky’s remake or something? Actually, please forget I said that.
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1 comment:
Good point on getting pulled between the trucks. Maybe they can use that in a parody (Scary Movie 5). I noticed they flipped the roles: it was the woman who was getting pulled in the original. The original was an effectively scary movie from what I remember. It seems too early to remake it, but that's just me showing my age. I think the discrepancy in that movie's popularity and its take at the box office might be because it was a much bigger success on video. That was around the time that renting movies was the new thing and it wasn't until then that people really found out about it. Just guessing. You could say that about several movies nowadays, but not Gremlins, which seemed like it was in theaters for over 3 years.
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