Hey folks, Harry here with a pair of reviews from Conductor71 of two upcoming horror delights from LIONSGATE & FOX SEARCHLIGHT! They're on a roll and I've seen HARD CANDY which is just absolutely brutal and great... and I've heard nothing but wonderful word of mouth on THE HILLS HAVE EYES! So seems like we've got a good year for horror started off here... let's hope it keeps rolling! Here ya go...
THE HILLS HAVE EYES
It only seems like yesterday that the bland, insipid and thoroughly uninteresting remake of THE FOG was hitting cinema screens like a slice of week-old salami, and the idea of another similar set-up is enough to provoke groans. Okay, so it’s Wes Craven in the producer’s seat rather than Carpenter, but is there anything to single this out from all the other half-hearted clones that the ‘Horror Remake’ craze has brought us?
Actually, there is, and his name is Alexandre Aja. Say what you like about Switchblade Romance’s sense-defying twist, but it was blindingly obvious that a filmmaker with a genuine understanding of the grimier edge of screen horror had arrived. He’s now made his first US movie, and while his take on THE HILLS HAVE EYES may lack a few of the more interesting aspects of Craven’s punky, ugly original, it’s still one of the more ferocious horror movies to come out of Hollywood for a long time. The TEXAS CHAINSAW remake now looks even more MTV-ised than it ever did- the new take on THE HILLS HAVE EYES ups the bloodshed and gore, as well as throwing in a large number of shocks and a general sense of horrific dread.
-SPOILERS FOLLOW-
Aja’s version is pretty damn faithful to the original movie- after a wonderful prologue featuring scientists testing for radiation and discovering something that… er… doesn’t quite agree with them, we’re into an almost note-for-note cover version of Craven’s Hills. There are little twists, and considerably less of the Hill people in the initial sections (we don’t see any of them until they’re actually inside the Carter’s trailer), but for the most part Aja sticks very closely to the 1977 film, and even losing some of the more obvious bits of exposition, instead using newspaper clippings and the general situation to get the backstory across. With this slow build-up, it’s all about the characterisation, and here Aja does well in painting depth into the squabbling, holidayed-out Carter family without making them annoying. Best of the lot is Aaron Stanford (X2 and X3’s Pyro) who I didn’t even recognise until I looked up his name on IMDB and thought “Him?!?”- he plays Doug, has some great friction with Ted Levine’s Bob, and makes a good audience identification figure when things get bleaker. With great actors like Ted Levine and Kathleen Quinlan around, they can bring the characters to life without having to bring the whole film to a halt, and as a result, you genuinely care about the characters- which makes it even worse when the eventual attack comes.
Visually, this is a treat, using the Moroccan locations to get the kind of surreal, jagged desert world that’s like an amped-up version of the Californian Desert. Aja uses the widescreen brilliantly, utilising wide-angle lenses to give certain shots a distorted, nightmarish edge, and the whole thing has a loose, energetic feel that’s far away from the usual polished feel of Hollywood horror.
In terms of a horror thrill-ride, it’s a beautiful, gory ride that only spares its audience in a couple of moments (the rape sequence wasn’t anywhere near as graphic as I was worried it might be), and it’s possible that these are as a result of the cuts made to get it away from the dreaded NC-17. Aja gets the brutality, the savagery, and the sheer unrelenting horror of being trapped out in the open with people trying to hunt you down. The bleak loneliness and strange, almost fairy-tale atmosphere of the original is there, and he’s also expanded the story in a couple of areas- most notably in heightening the effect that living in a Nuclear Testing Ground has had on the Hill People. Instead of the spawn of ‘devil child’ Jupiter, they’re miners who refused to leave when the Government requisitioned their town for A-Bomb experiments (there’s a fantastic overhead shot looking at a flat expanse of desert punctuated by gigantic craters), and simply dug in, living in the mines and the abandoned “Test Village”, and hunting for food. As a result, we get some crazy make-up work from Greg Nicotero and KNB- some of which is great (particularly the grotesque ‘Big Brain’, which is heavily reminiscent of Chris Cunningham’s short film ‘Rubber Johnny’), some of which is a little cartoony and too bestial. There’s also some funky digital work, particularly on younger hill-person Ruby, to give them impossibly distorted features that are genuinely creepy.
But, this more advanced look for the Hill People does turn them a bit too far into monsters, rather than the tribal nutcases of the original, and the extended sequence in the “Test Village” takes us into more traditional stalk-n-slash territory with plenty of creeping down corridors, and things leaping out from where you least expect. It’s fun, but it doesn’t quite have the nightmare quality of the original, and with less screen time for the Hill People and fewer hints of the relationship between them, there’s fewer of the echoes between the Carter family and their attackers.
And it’s here that the biggest negative point against the film- while it largely does a good job of capturing the punky, low-budget feel of the original, it noticeably backs away from the idea of the Carter family becoming almost as dehumanised as their attackers in their fight back. In the original, the younger survivors end up using their mother’s corpse as a lure in a trap, and the film doesn’t end on the family joyously reunited, but on the actor playing Doug going stab-crazy and psychotic. It’s an idea Craven had already played with in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and it’s arguably the one aspect that does raise the original HILLS above just being a gritty shocker.
The idea is still here, but it’s given very different emphasis. The trap that the younger Carter kids set doesn’t involve the Mother’s corpse- instead, it gets hi-jacked and chowed down by Papa Jupiter (a criminally underused Billy Drago). Doug has to get savage to survive in the remake, but here it’s accompanied by the music swelling, and moments that are obviously designed to have the audience going “YEAHH!!” I can understand them having to approach the story from a more commercial perspective- it’s a much more expensive film- but it’s a shame that they backed away from one of the genuinely unique aspects of the original.
Gorehounds will have little to complain about, as even in the R-rated version there’s a serious level of head injuries, slicing, grue and sprayed blood. It’s one of the strongest Horror remakes so far, and hopefully Aja will be able to move onto some original material with the same level of brutal, balls-to-the-wall horror. It’s not perfect, but it does crank the horror level as far as it possibly can, and in today’s world of timid PG-13 horror movies, a film ready to cross the line is something to be savoured.
HARD CANDY
A 32 year old man. A 14 year old kid. And one seriously unhealthy relationship.
The first twenty minutes of HARD CANDY are some of the most unsettling, creepy minutes you’ll see onscreen this year. First, there’s a flirtatious webchat between what is obviously a young girl and a much older man that gradually gets more and more sinister. Then, they meet. The girl is Hayley (Ellen Page, soon to be the third Kitty Pryde in X3), a gawky, smart, awkward girl who’s flattered and empowered by the interest that’s being shown in her. The guy is Jeff (Patrick Wilson from Phantom of the Opera), a photographer who specialises in sexy pictures of underage models. They talk, and it’s soon spectacularly obvious that something very wrong is happening here, and it’s done very subtly. Using the prospect of listening to a bootleg Goldfrapp MP3, Jeff takes Hayley back to his massive, modernist house. Soon, Screwdrivers are being mixed, both of them are being more flirtatious than is in any way comfortable, and Hayley asks for Jeff to take her picture- at which point Jeff starts to feel distinctly strange, and passes out.
It’s impossible to talk about the rest of HARD CANDY without spoilers, so everybody- consider yourself warned. If you don’t want to know anything else, look at the trailer on Quicktime- a brilliant digest of the first twenty minutes that tells you enough, without telling you too much. For anyone who doesn’t want to stick around, HARD CANDY is a tough, weird, claustrophobic two hander that pushes the levels of believability a little too hard at times, and yet also probes and provokes, asking some seriously heavyweight questions, and building a level of unsettling tension that’s reminiscent of Asian Horror when it isn’t just about spooky long-haired women crawling along the floor.
Okay- anyone who doesn’t want to know more- look away now!
-MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW-
Suffice to say, things are not what they seem. The opening taps into the fears of paedophiles seducing girls over the internet without being too overt or falling into cliché- Jeff is charming without being slimy, and it’s at least conceivable that it could all have a rational (if verging on unhealthy) relationship. But it is set up to make you feel that Hayley is getting in way over her head, expressing and experimenting with her sexuality in the wrong way, and there’s going to be trouble because of it.
Well, there is trouble, but not the way you expect, as Hayley is a long way from the innocent she appears. When Jeff awakens, he’s tied to a chair, and as Hayley puts it- “Playtime is over. Time to wake up.” She’s not in a good mood. She’s happy to hurt him if he doesn’t co-operate. And she’s actually been stalking him- she’s convinced he’s a genuine paedophile, and is absolutely determined that she’s going to prove it. She hunts through his house, looking for his stash of porn. She goads him. She insults him.
And then, she mentions this operation that she wants to try…
If there’s one thing this film will become infamous for, it’s the Castration scene. Or, as it should be described, the “Castration” scene. It’s a lengthy sequence where Jeff is lashed to a table with his trousers off, and Hayley toys with him, tortures him, teases him with the idea that she’s not going to do anything- and then she does. The build up is fantastic, and the performances from both of them are great- but there’s two problems. Firstly, it’s a very big stretch of the imagination for a 14 year old to go this far, and the film never completely comes up with an explanation for this. And secondly, the film never totally convinces that it’s going to go that far- so it’s not actually that much of a surprise when we discover that it’s been faked with lots of ice, and strategic use of a Bulldog Clip.
This is the problem- that as a powerplay between two characters, the ball is in Hayley’s side of the court for too much of the game, and we don’t really find out exactly why she is the way she is. It’s a daring, brilliant idea and one that unearths a whole mountain of creepy subtexts (as well as fantastic line at the expense of Roman Polanski), but without knowing a little more about Hayley, it doesn’t always add up. At the end, we get a major clue to exactly how far she’s prepared to go- but aside from a short sequence where Jeff leaps to some conclusions about her parents that obviously hit close to home, we never really get close to understanding her. We understand Jeff, to an extent that’s almost frightening, and the sequence where, driven by incandescent rage, he drives a knife into the crotch of a girl in one of his pictures over and over again, is genuinely, appallingly horrible. But without some little insight into how Hayley got here, there’s a few too many moments where Hard Candy feels like it’s pushing its luck.
Which is a shame, because as a film that essentially consists of two people talking, it’s a gripping, claustrophobic piece of work that uses widescreen in a stylish way, going from extreme close-ups to the occasional huge wide-shot, and also intersperses long sections of theatrical dialogue with segments that are pure cinema. The sound design only adds to the general sense of distorted claustrophobia, and the issues that the script raises- particularly the way are sympathies are thrown around the room and then virtually beaten up- is daring and brilliantly done.
In the end, it’s the lack of insight into Hayley’s character, and what drives a 14-year old to go quite that far, that leaves Hard Candy as a brilliant but difficult to enjoy exercise in suspense that’s provocative but occasionally a little hard to believe. Devastating, but flawed.
