It wastes no time setting the tone at all with the resulting human meat dragged behind a truck. The film begins in the New Mexico Desert as a group of people in hazmat suits testing radiation are slaughtered by a hulking figure with a pickaxe. The early online buzz was that this was a remake worth watching, so one Saturday afternoon I went to the local multiplex to give it a look. Two years later, in early 2006, a year that would also give us Pans Labyrinth and Children of Men, Aja’s remake hit cinemas. It didn’t really live up to other classic horror films of the ’70s which held up, and still hold up today. The original Hills Have Eyes felt like kind of a slog, it wasn’t quite Swamp Thing (1982), but the pacing was really bad and it felt like when the supposed carnage did occur, it was kind of too little too late. Films that just don’t work and don’t have any real substance other than attractive stars and screams. For every Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) or The People Under The Stairs (1991) there are about five films like Cursed (2004) or Shocker (1989). Craven’s films for me are very hit and miss. To be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed with the original. Interestingly enough, in the gift bag for attendees of FrightFest that year was a DVD box set of four of Craven’s films which included The Hills Have Eyes, which at that point I hadn’t actually seen. It was clear that Aja was the real deal, even if the final twist in his film felt unnecessary and contrived.ĭuring his brief Q&A at the festival, Aja told us all that his next film was a remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977) which Craven himself would produce. It had no sense of humour at all and set out to shock and make you uncomfortable with no time to wink at the breathless audience. Switchblade Romance was a true cinematic experience, it looked incredible and was absolutely merciless in its depiction of constant violence. Things were coming out of the Scream (1996) influenced self-aware period, Saw (2004) hadn’t yet come out, and as a result, the 2004 FrightFest had a lot of variety in its programme.
#THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 MOVIE SET MOVIE#
At the time, the slasher movie wasn’t really in vogue and horror was in a kind of flux. I barely had time to recover from that experience and was then thrust directly into Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance aka Haute Tension (2003). The first film on the bill was Park Chan-Wook’s masterpiece Oldboy (2003). Shortly before moving out of my parents home, I took what money I had left and went for the whole four day event. A real community and air of celebration has built up around the festival, so much so that filmmakers and regular attendees look forward to going so that they can catch up with old friends. The London FrightFest has been going for twenty years, starting in 1999 and constantly shifting venues and sponsors for much of that time. I attended my first film festival in 2004.
0 kommentar(er)
