like joan of arc coming back for more
The Hills Have Eyes. Not Lake Dead.
Lake Dead = The worst rip-off of The Hills Have Eyes. EVER.
- Worse even than The Hills Have Eyes 2. And boy, that movie was bad.
Real problem with movies like The Hills Have Eyes: they generate so many awful rip-offs that think they're doing the same thing - good people vs. murderer-rapist-cannibals (wait, didn't Faulkner first do this?) somewhere in uncivilized America - but they completely lack everything that made THHE good: blatant gore (not fake cut-away gore), political critique, character development, good acting, good make-up, an unsensual eye, and atmosphere. Oh, the lacking atmosphere.
I don't think I've ever written about how much I love, love, love the remade THHE (I've never seen the original). I knew I would since seeing that "Mein Teil" AMV and reading the Wikipedia entry - and I actually bought one song off the soundtrack, "Beast Finds Beauty" (Beast and Beauty are the family's German shepherds - Beauty, the male dog, is killed and eaten by the mutants, but Beast, the female dog, survives and helps the protag Doug save his baby) before I ever saw the movie. It was my "favorite movie I've never seen". I wasn't disappointed when I finally did see it over the summer. When survival horror is good, it's very, very good. THHE's the kind of movie that's going to get a lot of flak for "gratuitous sex and violence", but I'm so tired of cut-away, assumed violence that I wouldn't care even if it was gratuitous. It's not. Sometimes I wonder what these people would do if they ever read a Western. I mean, I'm reading about dead babies hanging from trees like every other page, and this is widely regarded as one of the best American novels of the past quarter-century.
I'm not saying Blood Meridian's not great - it is - but "regeneration through violence" is part of humanity's thematic landscape, not some twentieth century slasher-flick trend. And it's a lot worse when there's no regeneration at all, no catharsis, because violence has no consequences and is never really that bad. Because people are that bad, and they're not that bad because they watched THHE or Cannibal Holocaust or Tom & Jerry or a Madonna video or whatever. What the fuck are they going to blame the Inquisition on? Have they read Bartoleme De las Casas' "Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account"? Again - television did not exist then, and the Spanish were already feeding babies to dogs and ripping open pregnant women and massacring like millions of people.
It somewhat reminds me of this LJ comment I read today (with a peace sign userpic!) on a controversial!photoshoot featuring naked men and guns, "dominating" each other a la war on terror:
"I hate these. I hate the use of guns in this 'fashion' shoot. Shows how militarized our society is."
What, are you serious? I don't understand people like this (the user also claims to like Chuck Palahniuk, which just makes me doubt Chuck Palahniuk's credibility as some kind of countercultural iconoclast even more). My cousin-in-law is similar. She hates watching depressing movies (and by depressing, I mean Apocalypse Now, because she just had to know what my favorite movie is) because she doesn't like being depressed. I would clearly fail as a hippie.
Oh yeah. I'm going to be changing my username soon. So if you see some unfamiliar person hanging around LJ, please don't take 'em out back and shoot 'em.