The Horror Library - The Best in Horror Fiction

Fixed Fights (A Review)
By jOhn lOgan

What happened to boxing? Why does it suck? Wasn't it a much bigger deal way back when? I don't know.

So what the hell does this have to do with horror movies? Am I calling for another Rocky film, wherein Rocky faces Michael Myers in a ten round fight? The thing is, as a culture we are drawn to such match-ups, because we want to know, once and for friggin all, who is the baddest of the bad. You see it everywhere. How many top 100 lists have been compiled over the last couple of years. I'm willing to bet that there are more lists than stuff in the lists. Check out Discovery Channels "Animal Face-Off" where you can watch a Lion kill a Tiger, or a Walrus pierce a Polar bear. How many times have you seen the movie Bloodsport even if you really don't dig on Jean-Claude Van Damme?

But who the hell is making these damn lists? Is it you? Do you know without a doubt in your mind that Citizen Kane is a superior film to Rosemary's Baby? I mean, without a doubt. Do you really believe Van Damme could have beaten that stocky Chinese guy with seventy pound shoulderblades? Do we really know who would win when a lion takes on a crocodile?

Of course we can't know, there are too many variables. And I'm OK with that. It just pisses me off that I'm promised such knowledge with no real pay-off. I mean when I see a fight, I wanna see a winner and a loser, even if the guy I'm rooting for gets his body cleft in twain. I wanna see a real fight, between two powerful beings ready to do serious damage to each other.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine put a tarantula and a huge scorpion in a tank together. A few days later I think the tarantula starved to death and the scorpion stung himself like forty two times until he crumpled like a dead leaf.

Which reminds me of Freddy Vs. Jason. Hopefully, at this juncture you've seen the movie because I'm gonna dive right into this one. It felt forced, acted, the two monsters fighting themsleves into a draw. Nobody won this fight, nobody could have won this fight. But of course, I'm suggesting one should have beaten the other. Jason or Freddy, I don't care who wins, I love'em both, they're like my sick cousins from Jersey, you know?

So I've compiled a list, gotta love the lists, of some recent fights I'd like to comment on. Just remember, when a fight is fixed in a movie, everyone takes a fall because we're not allowed to know who wins, but with my lists, I'm picking winners and taking sides.

Dawn of The Dead vs. 28 Days Later

All right in one corner we have a slick production stacked with brutal action and goofy humor and in the other we have a dark, brooding visceral experience of rage as a plague. I have to give the director of 28 Days Later respect for three big things: #1. He treated the film as serious horror and didn't go the tongue-in-cheek route. #2 Just his name alone (Danny Boyle, the man who brought us Trainspotting) brings some much, much needed indie-cred to the horror movie field, and #3 he jacked up the speed of the "zombies". The ground work here is wonderful, from the shaky video camera look to the jerking and shrieking infected. Watching Cillian Murphy wander empty streets leaves the viewer filled with dread.

Dawn Of the Dead has less dread but twice the horror output. The opening ten minutes of the film is the big-budget, end of the world, chaos trip I've been wanting to see since they screwed it all up in the abysmal Armageddon. There is more real horror artistry in this opening then in any two hour knife killer film. Zakk Snyder is a great action director, adding a terrific sense of timing to the gory events on screen. After the brilliant opener, the zombies seem to move faster, strike harder, and somehow do it all with a more creative sense of style.

Of course, it's tough for a film to live up to those initial minutes, but Dawn of the Dead comes close enough for me to call it the obvious winner. 28 Days Later never reached a pay-off for me, the ending (even the reworked ending) was weak. It had no deathblow. Dawn Of the Dead has about fifteen or sixteen deathblows, and it uses every single one of them quite well.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I know, not much of a fight. This one lasted 24 seconds and the original kicked the remakes ass all over the celluloid. You can see the buttcheek prints in every frame. If you're new to horror, and you liked the remake more, I can understand. You're young, still rooting for the pretty young face undisturbed by a lifetime of punching. Still, get to know the old guys, when horror was huge and new and truly frightening rather than just a WWF match between killers and pretty teenagers.

The Ring Vs. Ringu

This is where I know I'm gonna run into trouble. I somehow feel like it's my duty to give preference to the original Japanese story. Perhaps if I'd seen it first, but, no, I can't. I'm giving it to The Ring. Sure, Ringu was great, I don't argue, but The Ring was just so much more film for your buck. More atmosphere, more dark, brooding imagery, more superb acting, more English.

The cinematography is gorgeous, perhaps the best horror lighting I've ever seen, awash with the deep, musty greens and black, rotted shadows. The video that kills you is kind of a stretch "very student film" but as the images begin popping up slowly, the student film starts to look more and more like reality until you can't tell the difference anymore. What starts out silly ends up serious, much like the whole movie. It's a mean-spirited joke, like Gore Verbinski is laughing at you throughout the film. It's something I imagine Roman Polanski doing.

Yeah, I know, if The Ring had the same budget that Ringu had I probably would be picking a different winner. But it didn't, and you have to remember: you can root for the underdog all day long, but the super flyweight is rarely going to knock out the heavyweight.

The Eye vs. The Sixth Sense Vs. The Others

I guess it depends on what you're looking for, but hell this is my show if you don't like it, feel free to send in you're requests to eatshit@anddie.net Ah, you know I'm joking. Really though, I'm giving it to The Sixth Sense only (and I mean only) because it came first. Because it set the standard for the creepy ghost story in recent years. Shyamalan is a hugely talented filmmaker, a guy after my own heart really. He writes his own material, doesn't spend a huge deal of money making his films, attracts worthy talent, and uses a great variety of techniques in new and interesting ways.

No, he is not Hitchcock, the comparisons are ludicrous. But I have to say, I have a lot more fun watching a kid with the back of his head blown off wander through an old building in Philly than I do watching flocks of birds dive bomb in vintage fifties Technicolor.

The Eye is probably the superior film in that it's scares are so much more bizarre and effective. Where Shyamalan tries to creep us out with the occasional shock, The Eye goes right for the throat and lets up only enough to give you a chance to almost catch your breath. It's emotional outcomes ring with a bit more truth (or maybe just less melodrama) than The Sixth Sense, less manipulative. Here's hoping for more,

Really, this fight is the beginning of a future column on Ghost movies. I have to mention The Others simply because there was such a big stink all over the world about it and it turned out to be a snooty PBS rip-off of every ghost movie we've seen since The Sixth Sense with the same scares as your Halloween episode of Different Strokes.

***NOTE***

Ju-on and Ju-on 2, from what I hear, are real contenders out there.

Cabin Fever Vs. Donnie Darko

I put this one on here because Eli Roth (Cabin Fever) is making a movie with Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) and I think this is a good idea. Roth is good horror man, not afraid of blood, gore, humor and lots of colorful homage to classic horror. Kelly is a great idea guy, more of a hit and miss visionary with an edge just this side of David Lynch.

Now, I haven't seen the directors cut of Donnie Darko, but I loved the theatrical version. This is the film, along with all the new Japanese horror films, that should save our genre at the movies. Sure there will always be Jason's and Freddies and teenagers dying in the midst of simulated sex, but how many giant, time traveling bunnies are out there haunting us so effectively? Originality is so hard to come by in the horror world – we work in a genre that has seen a lot of reworking over the years – that when it does come we need to embrace it, even if we don't initially understand it. Sure there are downfalls here, the ending feels a little wrong, the Patrick Swayze thing is amusing, but feels out of place. I would have appreciated a little more horror and little less anti-Reagan era crap. But the more I think about it, those are my problems – not the films.

So on to Cabin Fever, the opposite of Donnie Darko. Nothing new here, just another well-worked horror quickie that drives a well placed needle to the gross-out gland and injects the happy juice. Lots of shallow, nasty characters you can't wait to see die in creative, disgusting ways. And it's all so friggin hilarious. I mean, there isn't a scary scene within twenty miles of this flick.

Now you know I can't call a draw, so I'm picking Donnie Darko. But to Eli Roth I say this, "If you can't beat'em join'em." And he's going to! I have this giddy feeling Roth and Kelly are going to SLAY us when they get together. I see horror in a kind of limbo right now, torn between quality and crap and when I see a chance for quality I'm going to embrace it.

Underworld Vs. Gingersnaps

The werewolf. Why am I so attracted to werewolves? Probably because the werewolf is often the hero and villain at the same time. I like the whole supernatural bipolar aspect of lycanthropy. And as a kid, I thought they were way cooler than other monsters, so it's a soft spot thing. (Don't go pokin' it, now)

Throughout the years, films have been fairly unkind to werewolves, giving them a backseat to vampires. But in my world, the beast that howls at the moon is at the top of the heap and I truly think there's a lot left to explore in its mythos. There's still some potential for exploration there. Sometimes I feel like vampires have just been exhausted as a monster and they need to be put away in a closet for about fifty years so we rediscover and appreciate them again.

So it's with glee that I friggin hate Underworld, and I loved to mock every detail of the film. I turned to neighbor at least a dozen times and asked him, "wait, isn't this The Crow?" then switched over to, " Wait isn't this The Matrix?" and then switched to "Blade?" "a Marilyn Manson video?" This movie is crap, pure crap. Now I like crap as much as the next guy, I watch a lot of films and when you watch a lot of films you acquire a certain taste for crap. Problem is, this crap has very little taste beyond a couple of nifty Batman meets Blade meets Neo action sequences. I mean, this is Hollywood incest. Blade marrying Batman and giving birth to a Neo-like uber-babe who wears tight clothes and blablabla. I won't even go into the werewolves.

Until I get to Gingersnaps. And yes, this time I'm not only rooting for the underdog, I'm declaring it the unanimous victor by knock-out three seconds before the first round. Hell, this fight was over before the start bell stopped vibrating. Gingersnaps is harsh and bleak, almost depressing. But thank god for horror humor and some terrific acting. The characters are so damn good it doesn't matter much if the werewolf is new and different and exciting, but it is anyway.

I keep thinking about the grassy plains in the beginning of the movie and the encroaching suburban splat bleeding into it like a toxic mudslide and I can't help but wish something would come out of there and force us to examine ourselves a little more closely. Something needs to rise up and challenge us.

Then something really does come out (there's my wolf) and my fears are represented everywhere: high school was a horrible experience and I wasn't urinating blood and growing claws. This movie makes it look so scary and difficult to be a girl. Had to check a couple times (to my relief) that I was still a guy whilst watching. I don't believe I've ever had to do that before and I don't think I have to tell you but THAT is a good horror film.

There are ever more fights that can be arranged and promoted, but enough blood has been spilled today. So what do you wanna see? Who's next? I hear Michael Vs. Pinhead is in the works. Alien Vs. Predator is on it's way. I find I don't care who wins as of right now. These aren't my fights.

As I write this I'm watching the Detroit Pistons tear apart my New Jersey Nets. I'm tempted to write a new ending for the Nets. One in which the power forwards get to play basketball with baseball bats and the point guards get hockey sticks and shooting guards get compound bows. Hell, the center can use a bowling ball on a chain.

I think it would be great, but they'll never let it happen and as usual, we'll never really know who the baddest ass really is.

jOhn