BLUE MAG

Remaking sequels is becoming a popular trend when it comes to horror films in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It’s 2007 and already you’ve had remakes of “Dawn of the Dead,” “The Ring 2,” “The Grudge 2” and now “The Hills Have Eyes II” (first made in 1985.) After seeing this latest exercise in re-sequeling the phrase “quit while you’re ahead” comes to mind.

I was a fan of last year’s remake helmed by French filmmaker Alexander Aja (who directed the harrowing “High Tension.”) It was clearly the work of a filmmaker who was a fan of the genre and tried some rather stylistically interesting things in the interest of eliciting suspense and disgust. The cinematography and production design were top notch and depicted a barren wasteland uniquely and imaginatively. It also contained some surprisingly realistic and genuine performances from a cast of strong supporting, character actors like Kathleen Quinlan and Ted Levine. It was also one of the most brutal and gut wrenching films I’ve ever seen (on par with some of the more exploitive films from the 1970s and 80s.)

Now you have the inevitable sequel directed by Martin Weisz (known mainly for music videos including Crazy Town’s “Hurt You So Bad” – Yes he’s worked with THE Crazy Town.) and a film I came close to walking out of. It looks and feels exactly was it is a cheap knock off made for the sole reason to cash in on the previous film’s economic success. Everything that made Aja’s film interesting is missing from this sequel, replaced with a by the numbers horror film with none of the pleasures associated with the genre.

The story is written by Wes Craven and his son Jonathan and concerns a squad of National Guard trainees who stumble upon the cannibal mutants from the first film and are killed one by one. There’s really no more to the film than that. Craven has prided himself on using horror films to make comments about society but somewhere along the way he’s lost whatever skills he had in making interesting horror films. “Red Eye” was a great thriller but “Cursed,” his foray into the werewolf sub-genre was another near walkout by this humble reviewer. And let’s not even talk about “Scream 2 & 3” or “A Vampire in Brooklyn.”

What I found myself wondering (as I suffered through this shitfest) was why there has been such a focus on torture in films and television recently? Audiences are apparently demanding more and more realistic gore and flock to films with plot points involving people being tortured and mutilated in ever increasingly brutal ways. “Hostel” “Saw 1,2,& 3” “The Hills Have Eyes” and even the recently “banned” posters and billboards for “Captivity” all depict the limits of sadism. The show “24” is also another regular trip into torture on a weekly basis. Even fantasy shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” feature characters that use torture on a regular basis.

Why? Why this national (or international) obsession with torture? The clear answer may be the climate surrounding the ongoing war on terror. The saturation of Abu Ghraib and beheading videos that engulfed the media in the last few years also seem like a chief contributing factor. Or is it something more deep seeded?