“Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman………Candyman.”

As far as modern book-to-film adaptations go, Clive Barker has been pretty damn prolific over the years. If it were a race, he’d be holding his own admirably and keeping a steady pace, beaten only by heavyweights Lovecraft and King, with Ketchum and Koontz bringing up the rear. It’s no fluke that so many of his novels and short stories have been adapted; Barker simply knows horror and can write antagonists that lesser authors can only dream of.

Several of his adaptations have spawned an array of sequels and Hellraisers ‘Pinhead‘ and his cenobite cohorts are arguably some of the most recognisable faces of the genre, iconic to even a casual observer of film. Even Nightbreed; one of his least successful adaptations, and a criminally overlooked gem, has been given the attention it so deserves of late as the quest continues to create the most complete cut of the film, which is testament to how much adoration his work receives, the world over, and deservedly so.

Now a full two decades old, Candyman remains one of his most successful and profitable movies and thrust Tony Todd, as the titular Candyman, into the Robert Englund-esque ranks of genre royalty. Although it reeks of the 90′s, mostly due to the stylistic choices in clothing and decor, Candyman has a classic, timeless quality to it and that’s down to the story at its terrifying centre. Taken from his Books Of Blood, Candyman is one of Barkers finest forays into book-to-film adaptations

Helen, an attractive graduate student writing a thesis on urban legends decides to investigate a local legend which just so happens to be the catalyst for a terrifying journey into her own psyche and what might or might not be real. She soon learns of a wronged man with a hook for a hand who, when his name is said five times into a mirror, appears from nowhere to take the life of the person that summoned him. A non-believer, Helen foolishly decides to do the exact thing said to summon the monstrous legend and delving deeper and deeper into the story begins to have dire consequences on the people in Helen’s life and on her own sanity.

Candyman’s strength lies not only in the strong source material, but in its ability to play on a supremely primal fear in all of us. In the same way that home invasion and haunting horror movies have been so successful in recent years, Candyman plays on the fear of feeling unsafe in your own home; the one place that’s supposed to be impenetrable by all the outside threats usually associated with the genre. It’s highly unlikely that an inbred, cannibalistic hill tribe, a masked slasher out for revenge or a terminally ill serial killer, hellbent on torturing you for your past indiscretions would bother the average person going about their business in their own suburban home. Candyman, on the other hand, depends only on those idiotic or arrogant enough to repeat his name five times and therein lies the films simplistic genius. What’s scarier than not being safe from your attacker anywhere, least of all your own home; your safe haven?

Helen is our every[wo]man. A heroine with whom we can all relate. She encompasses or experiences all the familiar Barker tropes; rejection, prejudice, betrayal, trauma and fear of the unknown, all wrapped up with a neat little supernatural bow. Virginia Madsen lights up each of her scenes; managing to be cocky, naive and innocently beautiful all at the same time. As the principle character a lot was asked of her, including but not limited to, being covered from head to toe in blood, having to act whilst covered in live bees and veering between showing the required amount of restraint as the very ‘proper’ student, to the frightened-for-her-life victim, to the calm and accepting antagonist by the end frames. Reportedly hypnotised for some of her scenes, whether true or not, it certainly adds a layer of magic to the performance. It’s difficult to imagine that the role almost went to a then unknown Sandra Bullock who, while she’s become a mostly terrific actress in her own right, almost certainly wouldn’t have been right in this role. Even more disconcerting is the knowledge that Eddie Murphy was considered for the titular role that eventually went to Todd.

Tony Todd, as the legend come to life, has a tremendous cinematic presence. It’s sad, now, that he’s almost become a parody of the promise he once showed, simply making appearances on the back of his role here and the praise that went with it. He’s a hugely charismatic actor and, along with Barker and Rose, created a monster of almost Biblical proportions, all bass voice and quietly threatening demeanor.

As with a lot of Clive Barkers stories, Candyman is chock full of ambiguity and shades of grey. Is the Candyman truly bad or just a victim of circumstance, forever trapped in a cycle of vengeance due to his treatment whilst alive? Is our doe eyed protagonist Helen really as undeserving of her fate as she makes out? Is everything really playing out as we see, or is she insanely delusional? Is Helen doomed to repeat the Candyman’s curse for all eternity, proving her existence to non-believers and exacting bloody revenge against those who’ve wronged her? It asks a lot of questions of the viewer and provides only as many answers as absolutely necessary, as with all intelligent films, and in my opinion, is all the better for it. This is not a film that spoon feeds the viewer, like so much modern horror.

Bernard Rose’s direction, while not breathtakingly original, serves the material exceptionally well. Candyman is not a story that needs elaborate shots and inventive technique, the dialogue and visuals are all we need. He has a keen eye for the macabre and has created a wealth of memorable set pieces, from the blood soaked toilet stall, to the depressing, graffiti-laden Cabrini Green tower blocks, to the unintentional bonfire/funeral pyre during the final third, they’re all hauntingly memorable.

This is a film that is devoid of CGI and owes all its effects to the skill of the team working on it. For the most part it thoroughly shames any film reliant on computer effects that’s come in the two decades since. The Candyman’s hook is a triumph of design too. Simple but disgustingly visceral; it’s a truly frightening creation.

With a majestically gothic Phillip Glass score giving proceedings a beautifully moody and deeply foreboding atmosphere, all organs and choral voices, Candyman trundles along at a near perfect pace, ramping up the tension with each frame. It’s epic, visionary filmmaking at its finest and an often overlooked classic.

Candyman is a surprisingly poetic film. It’s hauntingly mesmerising and at its core is a tragedy of almost Shakespearian proportions. As is his specialty, Barker created a very human monster in the Candyman, and succeeds in not only pulling the viewers emotions in several directions in quick succession, but demanding our attention and making us question our own morals, values and core beliefs, whilst simultaneously scaring the living crap out of us. This is cerebral filmmaking at its peak and more than deserves a place in the annals of horror greatness.

FINAL DESTINATION? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

Who doesn’t know what Final Destination is? You? Well then this paragraph is for you! All the Final Destination films have a very definite and very simple premise; one person has a vivid premonition of their own death (and the death of others). On waking from this premonition, they realise it is coming true, and they manage to prevent their own death (and the death of others). People think they’re nuts or psychic or evil, then one by one the survivors begin to die… killed off by Death himself, whose original plan had been irritatingly compromised by the precognitive abilities of some random person. What follows is the quickly-diminishing group of survivors trying to find a way to out-wit Death himself, by any means possible…  That’s the premise, and it’s a gleefully fun idea.

FINAL DESTINATION 1

Final Destination 1 appeared in 2000 and surprised everyone. It was a unique premise, and genuinely exciting, thrilling, compelling and memorable, even if it did star Devon Sawa and Seann William Scott. Final Destination was created by X Files aficionados Glen Morgan and James Wong, along with relative unknown writer Jeffery Reddick, who has subsequently gone on to write such classics as Tamara and that godawful remake of Day of the Dead in 2008.

Final Destination was a killer idea executed with charm, wit and smarts; not too serious, not too gory, but tantalizingly brutal. Re-watching it, I realised it has a lot more to it than the sequels that followed – more Tony Todd, more mystery, more foreboding – and featured a dark stalking shadow and some impossible liquid, as if Death itself was a physical thing, stalking the survivors until it claimed their souls back into his demented plan. It featured the symbolic number 180 (for Flight 180, the doomed plane), subtle clever hints at “who’s next” on the list and an interesting twist late on. It is by no means a perfect movie, but it was a solid, excellent start to the franchise.

FINAL DESTINATION 2

Final Destination 2 might be my favourite Final Destination film, simply because of the start. Entering cinemas two years after the original, the beginning to Final Destination 2 features an epic car crash on a motorway, which thankfully doesn’t vomit out CGI explosions but instead just trashes an absolute pile of cars and trucks in a superbly disturbing fashion. A logging truck drops its load onto the tarmac and carnage follows, with severed tree trunks blowing up vehicles and smashing through a policeman’s face – nasty, brutal, and something I can’t help thinking about when travelling down a busy motorway! If I ever see a logging truck careening down the M25 I would absolutely crap myself…

FINAL DESTINATION 2 CAR CRASH – VIDEO HERE

Final Destination 2 travels the same route as the film before it, with the saved-by-a-crazy-person group of survivors disbelieving the nonsense about premonitions and then finding themselves at the sharp end of Death’s cheeky sword. Morgan and Wong did not return for this sequel, however, and left the directing to Dave “Snakes on a Plane” R. Ellis and the scripting duties to The Butterfly Effect’s J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress. Like any good sequel they up the kill count and the extremity of the deaths; we’ve got glass sheets crushing kids, barbed wire fences slicing stoners to pieces, pipes through skulls, barbeques exploding and one unfortunate incident with a fire escape ladder… It’s played more for laughs – and thankfully so – with comical moments punctuating the film, along with shock deaths and slow, creeping ones that are a delight to watch unfold.

Final Destination 2 has its faults – major, major logic faults – and only Tony Todd and Ali Larter return from the first film. Devon Sawa is conspicuously absent, and apparently his character Alex Browning was killed by a falling brick between films (we find this out in a newspaper clipping), suggesting Sawa’s absence from the film was not entirely appreciated.

The ending is a bit naff and the timing of the car crash at the start makes no sense post-premonition, but it’s a dumb, fun, silly, bloody piece of filmmaking that betters the original on a number of levels.

Then – two years later – Final Destination 3 turned up. The creators of the original film returned to their baby, with Glen Morgan and James Wong writing again, and Wong back in the driver’s seat. After the second didn’t miss their influence, their return on the third was neither hailed or dismissed. Until everyone saw the film, that is…

FINAL DESTINATION 3

Final Destination 3 is the start of the franchise’s sag, as it returns to the “school kids” route familiar in Final Destination 1 and begins with an appalling CGI rollercoaster disaster, which is shoddy, confusing and really painfully bad to watch. The beginning is such a shame considering how impactful the airplane explosion and motorway pile-up were in the previous two flicks; high hopes were had and not delivered. Tony Todd is also reduced to a voiceover roll and barely noticeable, which is a travesty. The new characters are far too cartoony and incredibly crass; two boob-flashing bimbo BFFs, a goth couple, an aging pervert geek, a yee-ha! egomaniac jock and a random “she’s obviously important” bit-part role from Amanda Crew as the protagonist’s sister. The protagonist? Rather surprisingly it is Mary Elizabeth Winstead (pictured below) as Wendy Christensen, who – even more surprisingly – delivers a wet n’ weak performance devoid of any personality.

So Final Destination 3 has a bunch of crap clichés and a poor central performance from an otherwise decent actress. So what? How were the goddamn deaths?! Similar to the awful beginning, the deaths are lacking in invention and far too bright and colourful – a weight machine malfunction, a sun-bed disaster, a nail gun accident – and the film’s ending (both endings – one at a fare and one on a subway) – are woeful nonsense where we suddenly have to care about minor characters. It is not 100% awful – the sun-bed scene is actually very brutal and very funny – but it’s not a patch on its predecessors.

Then I turned on The Final Destination.

In 3D.

Yep, me and the missus dragged out a pair of crappy 3D specs and sat in front of our television, looking like two time-teleporting dweebs sucked out of a 1980’s rom-com.

THE FINAL DESTINATION

The fourth in the franchise is called The Final Destination. Why they chose this title is beyond me – perhaps they wanted to begin the franchise again (although this is doubtful, as they constantly reference the previous films) or perhaps they genuinely thought this would be the last of the franchise, ending on an in-yer-face three dimensional “high”. Whatever the case, it now sits amongst the many horror titles that claim they’re the final in the series but are merely a speed-bump during an on-going saga. Yes, The Final Destination has become Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter.  It is Freddy’s Dead: the Final Nightmare. It is Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter.  Well it’s the same level of quality, anyway…

The Final Destination is undoubtedly the worst of the franchise, ham-fistedly chucking in some 3D to the detriment of the film’s creativity. Dave “Shark Night 3D” R. Ellis is back in the driver’s seat after knocking out the second film, along with scriptwriter Eric Bress. Maybe it’s the lack of J. Mackye Gruber from the Final Destination 2 team or perhaps it’s the restrictions brought about by 3D, but The Final Destination it is an uninspired, shockingly dull film. But why?

The Final Destination only failed because it lacked a sense of humour and was horribly lazy – and therefore disrespectful – to the franchise. The beginning featured another car crash – à la Final Destination 2 – this time in a Speedway circuit, but whereas FD2 had a powerful and realistic-looking start, The Final Destination features a shockingly bad CGI mess, with tyres and car engines flying AT YOUR FACE and fake explosions engulfing the screen like a cheap episode of Sliders. It’s a slack, obvious start that looks worse than the crashes in Talladega Nights, which was only a ridiculous comedy starring a collection of morons. The start of The Final Destination should have been better.

THE FINAL DESTINATION SPEEDWAY CRASH – VIDEO HERE

The Final Destination features a racist, a dull mechanic, an arrogant mum and a bunch of our heroes’ personality-vacuum friends. Our protagonists are an unbelievable couple and a security guard with a history of alcoholism and child death. It is a woefully morbid set-up and without a sense of wry irony that threads through the preceding three films – even Final Destination 3’s insanely garish, cartoonish feel is better than The Final Destination’s collection of moribund walking blands.

Audiences are not buying tickets to the latest Final Destination flick hoping to feel moved by the plight of the characters, they’re there to see semi-amusing characters – often caricatures – get killed in elaborate, brutal and hilarious ways. Final Destination 1 set it all up perfectly, with Terry Chaney’s “…you can just drop fucking dead!” line being followed sharply by a bus hitting her in the face – it is a shocking and hilarious moment. This is the template for the franchise, mixing comedy with shock violence, and The Final Destination fails miserably to produce this.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Even after four feature length films there still remain some startlingly obvious questions left unanswered:

1.)    Why do specific people get these premonitions?

2.)    Who is sending them?

3.)    How come the method of receiving the aftershock-premonitions (after the first, massive life-saving one) differs entirely from person-to-person?

4.)    Who or what is Tony Todd’s character Bludworth?

5.)    Why does Death have a plan, and why is he / she so bloody incompetent at sticking to it?

6.)    The first ever Final Destination death: Tod (Chad Donella) slips on some blue water in his bathroom – see video –  which then slides back into a crack behind the toilet, as if it was a living being / murderous patch if sentient Domestos. What was it? And why have we never seen it again?

Perhaps some or all of these questions have never occurred to you, or perhaps – like for most viewers – they literally don’t matter.

WHY SO POPULAR?

When a film spawns a franchise, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s awesome (see the Resident Evil franchise for details). Ultimately Final Destination is a heavily flawed franchise from its conception, but it never, ever tries to be more than it is; a popcorn 15 action horror that means no harm and is there to do one thing and one thing only: entertain. And it succeeds admirably, for the most part.

The more it goes on the more gimmicky it gets; the 3^rd film has a “choose your own fate” feature on the DVD, which means you can actually decide who lives and who dies, and the fourth film is in 3D. Despite these unnecessary additionals, the franchise does reward its followers, with constant occurrences of the number 180, repeating songs and sly references to the previous films (Clear Rivers, McKinley, Hic Pale Ale and Le Cafe Miro 81 all crop up in more than one film).

For those truly obsessing over Final Destination, check out their Wiki Site – HERE

Final Destination never tries hard to be scary or stomach-churning, unlike the original Nightmare on Elm Street or Saw films, but sits in that easy-watching zone where audiences know they’ll see unchallenging death, dealt out to people who kinda-woulda-died-anyway. It does not tax the morals or the mind. The antagonist is relatable and something we all fear – Death itself – but even this isn’t manifest and the “dark shadow” used in Final Destination 1 was dispensed half-way through the movie! It is a concept that is killing these people, an idea of something unstoppable and entirely untangible, and the audience knows it’s useless to fight it; everyone dies, so get on with it and make it elaborate!

The fact Death is the bad guy makes it even more surprising the films have survived this long. Why? One word: merchandise. Whereas other franchises have Halloween masks, collectable statues, gloves with plastic knives attached, Good Guy dolls, killer soundtracks, inappropriately cute plushies, rollercoaster rides, bobble-heads, comics and more, the Final Destination franchise gets what?

This shit.

A keyring with the film’s title on? A T-shirt? Crap, basically. Final Destination has to survive on Box Office alone as it has nothing iconic to grab hold of and buy. Maybe a big statue of William “Tony Todd” Bludworth? Really? You may as well buy a Candyman statue instead.

So Box Office it is then…

BOX OFFICE

Snapping up the box office bucks was made easier because each Final Destination film has a 15 certificate (in the UK), so is instantly more accessible than the gore-soaked likes of Hostel or Halloween.  This is for teenagers looking for cheap, nasty, fun-packed kicks, and it’s immensely popular in the 15 to 30 demographic.

The original film was made for a budget of approximately $23 million, but raked in over $112 million worldwide, a huge return for a horror movie. The sequel made less of a return (only $90 million on a $26 million budget) , which is perhaps why Wong and Morgan returned / were allowed back for the third! On a reduced budget, Final Destination 3 made over $117 million – the biggest haul yet – and the fourth (and final… ahem) was commissioned. Thanks to 3D and some overambitious set-pieces, the $40 million budget was $15 million more than the previous film, but the box office loved it and thanks to the expensiveness of 3D it sucked in a ridiculous $186 million worldwide! Hence the 5^th film…

FINAL DESTINATION 5

2011 sees another helping of the Final Destination franchise – Final Destination 5, or 5nal Destination as it was originally called, which kind of looks a little too much like Anal Destination… an entirely different film franchise (and hopefully not in 3D).

FINAL DESTINATION 5 TRAILER HERE

Released on Friday 26^th August in the UK, those attending Frightfest on the Thursday night will encounter the UK premiere of this beloved franchise, a day before the usual crowd. Maybe Tony Todd will be there? That would be AWESOME.

A review for Final Destination 5 will appear on Gorepress on Friday 26^th August.

THE FUTURE DESTINATION

The future of Final Destination? FD has no visible enemy. They’ve decapitated Michael Myers, sent Jason to hell (and space!), defeated Freddy and killed off Jigsaw, and this has diminished those franchises’ power – their lore – but Final Destination can keep going as long as someone understands what people want; fun, death and a superb start.

Do I think Final Destination 6 will appear? Hell yes. My money is on FD6 hitting our cinema screens in the summer of 2013. Place your bets now…

THE BEST DEATH

So… now for the really hard part. What is my favourite death in the Final Destination franchise? Not many other franchise’s can ask that – especially recently – because Saw is too grotesque to gleefully admit which horribly torturous death you enjoyed the most, and many other films are about how many ridiculous twists you can slam into a film, rather than about the elaborate ways of executing people!

My personal favourite Final Destination death is probably the demise of Evan Lewis (David Paetkau, above) in Final Destination 2, as it’s cunningly signposted and a tight, smartly created death. Ultimately caused by him throwing some old spaghetti out of his window (he later slips on it, escaping a fire) it’s more about how a fridge magnet message of HEY E hints at his fate when the H falls off into a microwave-destined takeaway, leaving the word E YE subtly stuck to the fridge’s side… the “eye” which eventually gets horribly impaled by a faulty fire escape ladder. Packed with irony and so many “almost dies” moments, it’s a gleeful and smart sequence that is funny, brutal, action-packed and genuinely nasty.

Check it out HERE

This is by far my favourite death in the Final Destination franchise, although second has to be Seann William Scott’s decapitation in the first film and third is definitely Jonathan Cherry’s death-by-flying-fence in Final Destination 2. But who knows, perhaps the deaths from Final Destination 5 will knock these three from their pedestals – I guess I’ll find out in a week.

I’ll breeze over the plot, more for etiquette’s sake than anything else. A group of friends return from a cocktail party to a house deep in the Peak District. After starting to settle down for the night they find themselves being attacked by mysterious harlequin-faced killers. There. Job done.

Now: imagine a big film set. Cameras, actors, lighting, sets, props, boom mics. The director, the producer, the cinematographers; the sound mixers, the set decorators, and countless other crew. The works. Now obviously, the large majority of this will be hidden off-screen, behind the camera. The audience will only ever see what the director wants them to see; namely, the actors and the mise-en-scène (a phrase used to refer to the scenery and props), and them alone. The director will then shoot all the shots he needs from that particular angle, and then everyone will up sticks and ‘reverse’ the shot to get the necessary shots from the opposite side . This has the effect of giving the illusion that the whole room (if indeed it is a room) is empty, whereas in reality, it won’t be.

Now this is all very well and good, because it means that all of the filmmakers and their equipment can be hidden at all times. However, if, in this case, the director reason chooses to film his movie in a single shot, it creates the fairly complicated issue of where to hide the assorted filmmaking gear so it all does its collective job whilst still remaining out of frame, and this concern is compounded tenfold (if not moreso) if the director chooses to film his movie in a rather poky house. Which, of course, is what has happened in Cut.

However, it seems that rather than spending the time trying to hide all the lighting and such in-frame but out of view of the audience (whilst still trying to maintain the relevant effect of the said equipment), Dominic Burns has simply just done away with everything. No non-diegetic lighting (in other words, the whole set is lit entirely by the lamps and lights seen within the film). No director monitoring what is being filmed – indeed, Burns actually plays a role in his own film. I’d be willing to bet that there’s no boom mic operator either, simply because chances are he wouldn’t be able to maintain his position behind the camera without getting in the way of the steadicam (look it up) operator. All of this results in a very messy film; characters that should be in view are often either so bright they become blown out, or shrouded in darkness due to the poor lighting, the dialogue consistently sounds tinny and echoey due to the presumably camera-recorded sound, and the pacing is terrible because there’s no editing to augment the tension. The whole thing is kind of an unmitigated disaster, which is a shame, because I really respect what they have attempted here.

And what makes this all the more frustrating is that they could have actually got away with it by approaching it ever so slightly differently. With a little bit of a rewrite, they could have pulled a Blair Witch and turned the camera into a character itself. By doing this, the film would still maintain its impressive single-shot idiosyncrasy, whilst naturally solving most of the aforementioned criticisms – both the lighting and sound wouldn’t be poor as such, they would be ‘authentic’. And replacing the large studio camera with a lighter, more manoeuvrable hand-held camera would allow for both rapid swish-pans and more fluid camera movements, which in turn would make the action sequences much more frantic. As it stands, they just seem clunky.

Speaking of timing, pacing isn’t the only time-related issue brought into light by the single shot. By filming it in ‘real time’, for once the audience gets a truly accurate sense of progression, and the screenwriters need to take steps to make sure the events of the film unfold accordingly. For the most part, this goal is achieved (a highlight of the film involves the camera lingering on a particular clock every time it passes it), but in a few moments it becomes glaringly obvious that the timing is inaccurate. One scene in particular springs to mind: after having drunken far too much, Mia (River George) has collapsed in a bed upstairs. Concerned for his friend, Michael (Dominic Burns) goes to check on her. After a mere three minutes of conversation (with a little bit of boob-groping added in for extra measure), Andy (Simon Phillips) bursts in wielding a metal ladle, having thought – without any discernible or logical reason – that something had happened to them. In the three minutes they were up there. Now to a certain extent this could be forgiven in any ‘normal’ film, because this sort of blatant discrepancy could be easily hidden in the edit, tricking the audience into thinking that more time had passed than actually had. Since Cut was filmed in one shot, however (and thus the timing was entirely accurate), this moment just seemed totally irrational.

The gore effects prove problematic, too. Having had no available time to apply more complex make-up and prosthetic effects, the most gore you’ll see is a little fake blood here and there (and obviously fake blood, at that. Having never murdered someone with an axe in their bedroom – spoiler alert – I wouldn’t know for definite, but I’m pretty sure blood shouldn’t run off a bedsheet like water off a non-stick pan…). A little disappointing, considering the subject matter, but mind you, I suppose in the scale of things this is a minor gripe, especially in low-budget movies such as this.

Despite featuring majorly in all of the posters and such, Danielle Lloyd’s role is mercifully short. Thankfully she only appears for about three minutes, and even then she only appears playing a character on television…so fortunately I managed to retain much of my sanity. Most of the other actors fare a little better, admittedly; Gremlins’ Zach Galligan the most. Mind you, to be fair the plot doesn’t require any of them to particularly over-stretch their acting muscles. As long as they can manage provocative, aggressive, arrogant and / or scared between them, then they’re set.

It’s an odd one, is Cut. From a film perspective, it’s not great; not by a long stretch. But from a filmmaking perspective, it’s astounding. The thing I find most impressive about it is, rather paradoxically, the thing that more often than not makes it as bad as it is; and this is chiefly the reason I haven’t rated it numerically: it’d just be too damn tricky to. It just seems to me that the time and effort spent choreographing and rehearsing such a complex shot would have been better used elsewhere; had the film been better lit, the sound better recorded, the pacing a little more varied it would be much better than it is now. As it stands, Cut’s ‘single shot horror’ distinction just doesn’t seem worth it.

A couple of weeks ago, at Canterbury’s Gulbenkian Cinema, I had the chance to see one of my favourite horror movies on the big screen. First released in 1980 and now at the grand old age of 30 years old, it was still as thrilling, chilling and crucial to the genre as I have always believed it to be. Seeing those rivers of lurid blood pour out of the elevators and down the otherwise silent Hotel corridor on an imposing cinema screen is something that will undoubtedly never be expunged from my memory, whether I want it to be or not.

The Shining, alongside The Exorcist and Psycho, is arguably one of the most referenced and parodied horror movies of all time. Its impact on pop culture is obvious to even the most casual of cinephiles. If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery then that small fact alone is enough to secure The Shining’s place in the annals of horror movie greatness. That fact aside though, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece boasts an absolutely astounding pivotal performance from Jack Nicholson, a claustrophobic tension that’s seldom been matched, some of the most memorable and iconic imagery ever committed to celluloid and a discordant, menacing score.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance who interviews for, and gets the job of seasonal caretaker at the majestic Overlook Hotel. During the harsh winter, he is expected to heat and repair the impressive building during 5 months of off-peak downtime. Taking his wife Wendy, son Danny and Danny’s curious ‘imaginary friend’ Tony, Jack hopes for 5 months of sobriety, seclusion and productivity. The hotel and its chequered, murderous past, coupled with the inescapable sense of isolation however, have other plans and Jacks sanity and grip on reality, slowly begins to unfurl, leaving his family in grave danger.

The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, is famously one of King’s least favourite of the many adaptations of his stories. Kubrick chose to change certain aspects of Kings story tremendously, which is where the rift is documented to have stemmed from. Much of the most celebrated imagery and unforgettable dialogue are exclusive to the film and feature nowhere in the novel. Some of it, including the now much copied “Here’s Johnny!” was even ad-libbed. King is rumoured to have been dissatisfied with the casting of Nicholson in the central role and wanted the character to be closer to his depiction in the novel, an entirely more sympathetic characterization of Torrance. The bare bones of the story might have been Stephen King’s brainchild, but to my mind the film would have been altogether less accomplished without Kubrick behind the lens. You only have to take a cursory glance at the truly awful 1997 made-for-TV mini-series, of which King is so fond, to see what could have been if Kubrick hadn’t had so much free reign with regard to the plot and characterization.

Stephen King adaptations, as we all know, can differ spectacularly in terms of faithfulness and quality. For every Carrie, there’s a god-awful Langoliers, for every Stand By Me, there’s a Tommyknockers just waiting to suck and for every The Shining, there’s a pointless, author-commissioned The Shining TV mini-series. Thankfully, 1980’s The Shining succeeds in taking King’s idea to fruition and turning it into a wildly memorable and truly horrific affair.

At the heart of the film is Nicholson’s remarkably manic, peerless, tour de force performance. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone else could have embodied the role and made it their own like he did. Nicholson is a living, breathing, Jack Torrance. Not simply an actor playing a part, you get the impression that Nicholson could himself have been on the brink of a descent into madness, so authentic is his representation. Kubrick is rumoured to have considered Robert De Niro and Harrison Ford for the role and even, far more bizarrely, Robin Williams. Thankfully, each was ruled out for various reasons and the role was left for Nicholson to play with.

Shelley DuVall, as his wife Wendy has often been criticised for her exaggerated, cartoonish performance but her gawky, wide-eyed innocence is the perfect foil for Nicholson’s menacing, demented and self-assured soon-to-be madman. Danny Lloyd as the pair’s son also manages to hold his own. As child actors go, he elicits the appropriate level of sympathy and has a believable rapport with those around him. (It’s sad then, that he chose to leave the profession with only this one credit under his belt.)

The real magic of The Shining though, lies in its magnificent, inspired imagery. Trying to choose a favourite image from The Shining is akin to asking a fat kid to choose which of the Baskin Robbins 31 flavours of ice cream he’d like. It’s a near impossible task as there’s so much to choose from and it all looks so damn good. The ghostly twin girls in their blue dresses standing silently and holding hands, the cackling old lady rotting in the bath tub, the lush but terrifyingly complex hedge maze, pages and pages of manuscript that simply read ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, a hotel employee being fellated by someone in a bear costume, the Hotels regal dance hall, the list is simply endless.

Kubrick’s direction is brave and assured throughout, displaying absolute control of his environment and a vast knowledge of filmmaking from beginning to end. From the opening aerial shots of the mountains leading up to the Overlook Hotel to the prolonged steadicam shots following Danny in his pedal car through the hallways and corridors to the tracking shots in the hedge maze, it all looks exquisite. The Hotel itself is as much a character as any of the actors. Its impressively high ceilings, elegant décor and desolate emptiness all add to the mounting sense of tension and dread throughout the film. Which brings me to the sublime score. Composed in part by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind with the remainder coming in the form of classical pieces, the imposing, discordant music sets the tone adeptly. Sometimes favouring a loud, grandiose backing but occasionally opting for a simple heartbeat as the soundtrack, the film wouldn’t have been nearly as tense or claustrophobic without it and even listening to it without the aid of the visuals has the power to send a chill down my spine.

The Shining had a notoriously troubled history; from certain shots taking up to an entire year to complete, to Kubrick’s infamous disagreements with DuVall over her performance, to the many script changes that reportedly angered cast and crew on a regular basis. Strangely, although many people now reference The Shining as a superb genre-defining classic, reception of the film was not so favourable upon its release. It remains the only one of Kubrick’s films not to have received any Oscar nominations and actually garnered itself Razzie nominations for Worst Actress, not to mention the ridiculously undeserved Worst Director. Stephen King might have been convinced that Stanley Kubrick had no knowledge of the horror genre before making The Shining and it certainly looks and feels like nothing else of that era but it’s impossible not to note the effect it had on audiences and the influence it’s had in the three decades since.

Although arguably containing some impressive subtext pertaining to ghosts, Indian burial grounds, famous literary connections and social commentary, in truth no-one but Kubrick really knows what was intended and he’s no doubt taken some of those secrets to his grave. Whatever its true meaning, The Shining is best viewed as a straightforward exercise in tension. While it may not be able to offer as much to some of today’s ADHD-riddled teenybopper crowd who are solely interested in frenetic, fast-paced, kill-a-minute, music video-esque horror movies (I’m pointing the finger squarely at you, Rob Zombie), those who are invested in the genre in some way and can appreciate a fantastic slow-burn, psychological, nightmare-inducing horror classic, will find The Shining to be near filmic perfection. It will certainly always be one of my firm favourites.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A Retrospective

In 1981, writer/director Wes Craven could have had no idea that the script he had just completed, entitled A Nightmare on Elm Street (henceforth ANOES) would be such a phenomenal commercial success; a milestone horror movie that would define the decade, launch his career into the stratosphere (Craven had previously been associated only with low-budget horror such as 1972′s Last House on the Left and 1977′s The Hills Have Eyes), as well as kick-off the acting careers of Heather Langenkamp and a then-unknown Johnny Depp. It would also lead to the creation of a globally recognised horror icon in the story’s loathsome villain – Freddy Krueger – whose enduring appeal as a character has sustained six direct sequels to Craven’s initial picture (seven if you want to include 2003′s Freddy vs. Jason, although it’s probably non-canonical in the ANOES mythos), spawned a short-lived television spin-off in the form of Freddy’s Nightmares and whose image, to this day, can be found on a plethora of merchandise – everything from t-shirts and tattoos to comic books, costumes and computer games.  Freddy’s scarred profile may yet be in the media again as this year has seen his resurrection in a new form, courtesy of a lacklustre and lamentable remake, the less said of which the better. Anybody and everybody knows Freddy…

…Or do they? Therein lies one of the problems that newcomers to the original ANOES face, something to do with the series’ meteoric popularity and that old adage that “familiarity breeds contempt”. Today, Freddy is an instantly recognisable name and image, whether we’ve previously seen any of the ANOES films or not. Even children know him from the media, from MTV videos they’ve seen and the Halloween costumes they’ve probably worn, even when they’re too young to have watched one of the movies. Time passes, the children grow up and that’s what Freddy is to them – a costume, a toy, a brand – he’s not the bogeyman, he’s fun old “Uncle Freddy”.

When these children at some point watch one (or all) of the ANOES films, in some ways this image is solidified. As the series continued and Freddy’s popularity skyrocketed, he inevitably became the star, the single component that was consistent throughout while the majority of the casts served only as disposable prey. Freddy became more visible, both physically (no longer a hideously burned creature swathed in shadows) and figuratively (in that the sequels had expanded on the original story to explain every detail about him, not to mention warping the central concept, taking it down different and not always logically consistent avenues to keep the bandwagon rolling despite ever-thinning plots), meaning that as the sequels lurched on he lost his mystique and his power to scare. By the sixth instalment in the series, Freddy’s Dead (1991), he’s all but indistinguishable from the creature born in the first ANOES, instead he’s become a quipping funnyman with an extravagant, comic way of dispatching his successive victims – for instance, one scene has a death sequence that could be right out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, like something that might be inflicted on Wile E. Coyote when one of his ACME devices backfires. A victim is plummeting from the sky (making a whistling sound as he falls), and Freddy appears beneath him, wheeling from right-of-camera a giant bed of nails ready for him to fall on. Freddy then breaks the fourth wall, looking directly into camera and miming over-exaggerated, comical wheezing at the weight he’s just pushed. It’s effectively winking at the audience, all that’s missing is him pulling out a carrot and in a Bugs Bunny voice adding “Ain’t I a stinker?”

In essence, the monster that Freddy was when he first appeared has been diluted, reduced to a friendly, comic presence. There’s an element of practicality in this – as Robert Englund once noted: “If we had tried to top the primal horrors and gore in part one, we would have hit a ceiling very early on… There is not much more we could have done unless we had Freddy…go around decapitating babies; instead he turns you into a giant cockroach. There is a sense of humour which is almost Kafkaesque in the Nightmare films.” It can’t be ignored that there was also a very canny financial reason too – as Freddy became the pop-culture icon that kids loved, the studio became as complicit as the adults who let them watch and realised that there was a huge market to be tapped, and so Freddy, who was the draw and the entire reason for commissioning a sequel regardless of whether the script was any good, was made child-friendly, his claws were clipped.

So here’s what you need to do. In the words of Yoda, “You must unlearn everything you have learned”. Whether you’re a Nightmare virgin or a confirmed fan, to fully appreciate ANOES you have to mentally go back in time (flux capacitor not included). Forget the sequels, the remake, the merchandise – they’re gone. It’s 1984 and this is all brand new, you’re back on Craven’s territory. Eyes drooping, sun setting, it’s time to sleep. Let the nightmare begin afresh…

When the film was released in 1984, ANOES was something new and original. The concept was very astute – as Robert Shaye, producer of the movie and founder of the then fledgling New Line Cinema (a business that this franchise effectively saved from liquidation and afterwards it affectionately became known as “the house that Freddy built”) said: “It was an original idea, dying in your dreams meant really dying. And four kids all had the same monster come to them while they slept… Here was the perfect common denominator. We all have to sleep.” This takes the mechanics of an otherwise normal slasher picture and elevates it to something more psychologically disturbing. The killer is no longer a mere physical being; he has the ability to attack his prey mentally and at the point when they are at their most vulnerable. Nightmares, like dreams, have an elastic reality and Craven exploits this to great effect, such as when the wall behind a sleeping Nancy suddenly becomes rubbery and indents with the impression of Krueger hovering over her prone form, ready to pounce. One sequence has Freddy appear almost as a living shadow, stretching his arms impossibly across the whole expanse of an alleyway, preventing one victim from escape, and though the low-budget FX used to create this are a little creaky by 2010 standards, there’s something still primal about it that recalls tales of the bogeyman, or those twisted Victorian childhood tales of the great, long, red-legged Scissorman who’d appear out of nowhere to cut off the digits of naughty boys and girls who suck their thumbs, or any number of nightmarish archetypes from childhood stories. This is where Craven’s picture is leagues ahead of the remake and most of the sequels, because he understands the power of those sequences is in the symbolic imagery of nightmares as extensions of the subconscious, metaphors and ideas that goes back to fairytales and to the things that haunt us from childhood, and it’s what he draws on to make Freddy in this incarnation a figure of fear rather than fun. What makes it worse, and is the genius of the whole concept, is that just as there’s no escape in the dreams, there’s no escape from the dreams – we all have to sleep eventually, it’s something we can only fight for so long before giving in. It’s the ultimate setting, because it’s not a haunted house or a patch of woods, places we can avoid or entertain the hope of running from in reality; it’s our cosy beds in our quiet suburban homestead, the place we feel most secure, or it’s the sly nap at work or school, or even just the quick droop of an eyelid and nod of a head – the killer is inescapable.

For a film to blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy was not, at the time, an overused concept and Craven’s execution of this is extremely subtle (unlike in the new remake, which hits you like a ton of bricks with its big-budget CGI and loses the point entirely in doing so). It takes but a single flutter of a character’s eyelids and that’s it, they’re in Freddy’s domain. It’s not always noticeable at first to the audience, which is intentional, putting us in the shoes of the dreamer who doesn’t yet know that he/she has finally succumbed to sleep. Slowly, the revelation comes through small injections of surreality, followed by more identifiably nightmarish elements, a process which allows the tension to build as we, along with the character, then realise that the beast is lurking somewhere, waiting to psychologically torture us before striking with his wicked blades. And Craven doesn’t skimp on the gore, though it never reaches laughable excess and none are played for comic value. In the bloodbath of Tina’s infamous “ceiling crawl” demise, the lurid neon blue lighting of the scene and the almost black splashes of of blood are reminiscent of some of the Italian giallos – gripping, haunting, instantly memorable. Compare it to the remake’s cack-handed re-staging of this setpiece, which in trying to outdo the original fails miserably by having the victim bouncing off the walls like she’s in a psychotic pinball machine and looks ridiculous, it has none of the power of the image from Craven’s picture nor the dramatic impact.

Then there’s Freddy himself. He’s not loquacious here, though sometimes he displays a black, cruel wit and sadistic pleasure radiates from him as he plays with his prey, wearing them down before striking. Aside from an explanation that he was a child-murderer and that he met justice at the hands of the children’s parents, there’s no real history to Krueger. At best, the film intimates that a more raw, cosmic evil may reside in this entity (a theme that became more thoroughly developed in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), through the speech delivered by the high school English teacher as Nancy tries to stay awake in her class: “What is seen is not always real… According to Shakespeare there was something operating in nature, perhaps inside human nature itself, that was rotten – a ‘canker’ as he put it…” So again, Freddy is more mythological, more terrifying for this, he’s the local urban legend that lives on to haunt generations of children.

Even Freddy’s choice of weapon – the now iconic razor-tipped glove – was something original and far more disturbing than the average slasher killer’s mundane machete, axe or kitchen knife, before it again entered pop culture and lost its power. Think about it, especially that opening sequence where we see Freddy lovingly construct his glove, caressing it tenderly – the blades become an extension of his own body, giving him sensual pleasure as he penetrates his victim’s flesh and tears them open, a true sadist feeling ecstatic as he bathes in the pain and death he inflicts on others. And who are these “others”? Society’s most innocent and fragile – children. Although the film only explicitly defines him as a child murderer, everything points to more, hinting that Krueger was a paedophile (something which the 2010 remake goes at with all the subtlety of a brick to the face). Englund recalls the original script: “Wes wrote the most evil, corrupt thing he could think of. Originally, that meant Freddy was a child molester.” But this was changed, he goes on to state, because at the time of shooting a child molestation scandal broke out and Craven did not want to be accused of exploiting a terrible situation, happy to go for a more subtle approach, which ultimately works out better.

Speaking of Englund, his contribution into the creation of Freddy cannot be underestimated, as much of what makes Freddy so menacing is given through Englund’s jaunty, swaggering performance. Since the character in the original ANOES is virtually an unknown predator, Englund’s decision to put so much into sheer body language was a masterstroke, and it also helped to separate Freddy from other stalkers populating the slasher films of the day. “The stance was just trying to be as far away from any kind of monster or Frankenstein walk; I decided to put in a bit of cockiness, sexuality and threat.” He also decided to take the initiative and “play” the glove, taking inspiration from Klaus Kinski’s performance in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, which put alongside the series of teeth-setting metallic scratching, squealing sounds used to announce Freddy’s presence long before he’s seen really amp up its cruel purpose.

In all, these elements – the hideous killer, the concept so ripe for a fertile imagination to pick up and run with, and the psychological nature of the horror – are what make this movie formidable. Even today it still retains that initial power to get under the skin and into the mind. The sequels may have diluted the idea, but when given the due respect and consideration it warrants, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains a unique and frightening experience, well-deserving of its accolades, its popularity and its status as a true horror classic. Remember, kids: Evil never sleeps…and accept no substitutes.

My, how this one had the morally righteous brigade positively shaking with apoplectic indignation – “Donkey Punch is the vilest film I’ve ever seen” is the header of one article the Daily Mail saw fit to print, which you can peruse here: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1035810/Donkey-Punch-vilest-film-Ive-seen-says-AMANDA-PLATELL.html . For a horror fan this vilification is a wearily familiar press tactic and brings to mind the whole “Video Nasties” debacle once again, for just as the author of this thoroughly uninformed and confused piece tries to justify her opinion by first stating that she has no prejudices against the horror genre (and sounding for all the world like those people who, when they’re about to launch into a bigoted diatribe, preface it with “Some of my best friends are [insert group in question], but…” as if it somehow manages to balance their hate-fuelled bile), her attempt to seem balanced merely shows that she is versed only fleetingly in the genre and at its most mainstream (referencing her liking for The Blair Witch Project and even commenting “Gory as it was, I adored Silence of the Lambs…” – she must have been watching an altogether different version of Silence of the Lambs to the one I saw to call it “gory”, since apart from in the final act when we see Lecter escape there’s hardly so much as a drop of blood present, Christ alone knows what she’d think if confronted with Pete Jackson’s Braindead). This is reminiscent of the events which led to the “Video Nasties” furore in that it reflects how, back then, people who had no exposure to the genre outside, say, Hammer horror movies (and that might have been at a push) were suddenly having The Evil Dead pushed in their faces, so naturally kneejerk reactions from already conservative-minded individuals followed, and the rest is history. The same applies here, Donkey Punch will be absolutely nothing extraordinary to anyone who’s into horror and that’s even if their tastes don’t extend towards the sleazier shades of the exploitation spectrum, but for anyone with mainstream tastes who comes to this then yes, there’s probably enough on display (drug and booze-fuelled sex, loose morals and death, oh my!) to send them into a tizzy. If Ms. Platell’s comments weren’t enough to display her relative genre-ignorance, at one point in the article she calls Donkey Punch “torture porn”, and the semantic debate as to whether this phrase is idiotic and misleading aside, it’s clearly misused here as it has nothing in common with the “torture porn” stable of horror.  This has to make one wonder whether she was being careless, clueless or perhaps just bandying around a particularly evocative buzzphrase which, like the article’s headline, would be bound to whip up a certain core readership’s fury irrespective of whether they’ve actually seen the movie or not. But then that would be to suggest there’s sloppy, sensationalist journalism allowed to be published in tabloids, and who could ever think such a thing, eh?

In some respects Donkey Punch has this criticism coming, because not only does the film knowingly pick subject matter which is bound to be controversial and stir-up the “This film is the end of civilisation as we know it!” groups out there (who coincidentally also seem to argue that the behaviour on display is a true representation of society’s callous youth – although how they can say that the art is imitating life in one breath, thus implying that the “wickedness” is already out there, and then claim that it’s the movie which is the corrupting influence, thereby suggesting all was innocent and pure before it came along, is a logical Gordian knot that’s yet to be unravelled), but it deliberately feeds that frenzy as the script never has the nous to deflate or turn around these stereotypes, or offer them up in a light that’s thought-provoking (I’d cite Hard Candy as an example of a recent film that does just this, courts controversy with its subject matter but has a script that’s clever enough to defy expectations and never becomes prurient). There is a seed of recognisable reality here and there to the characters, certainly, but it’s taken to excess and caricature, not unlike the recent Eden Lake which also has the potential to divide audiences in that its depiction of the “evil hoodies” does have some recognisable basis in reality, but at the same time can also be seen as somewhat pandering to the overwrought media hype machine over the perceived menace to society. Eden Lake might just about get a pass, but where Donkey Punch goes wrong, however, is that there are times it genuinely feels as if there’s an almost infantile desire to deliberately exaggerate not for the sake of the plot, but merely to appear “edgy”, to outdo its competitors in the shock stakes.  This creates a sense that it’s trying a little too hard, something which disengages the viewer at a time when they really need to be drawn in, because there are plenty of aspects of the plot leading up to and including the titular act which don’t stand up to close scrutiny, the most clunking of which is the way that the explanation of what the “donkey punch” actually involves is worked into the script, it displays the same jaw dropping lack of smoothness that George Lucas employed with the “What are midichlorians?” dialogue from the rueful Phantom Menace prequel.

If it were some rough exploitation flick from the 70′s, these might be traits that were not only forgiveable but desirable, and naturally controversy can sometimes be its own reward in terms of free publicity – after all, what self-respecting horror fan wouldn’t be enticed to see a film that the above article touts as “a morally bankrupt tale of teenage group sex, violence, drugs and sadism”? – but in such a high gloss production which was bound to capture attention, then it’s a substantial failing. Basically, if you’re going to paint a bullseye on your back then at least have the smarts to duck and weave, especially since horror is already a maligned genre in many eyes, so playing into their hands does it a disservice and will have knock-on effects to productions beyond your own. Afterall, is Ms. Platell not in that very article spitting blood over how it was funded by National Lottery (i.e. public) money and government-backed via the UK Film Council? Clearly Donkey Punch is not the second coming, but it’s not a bad film and nor is it devoid of merit, the fact that it got made at all is something that’s a minor miracle with the state of the UK film industry, and if responses like the one featured in the Daily Mail can stir up enough of a hornet’s nest you can bet that the same institutions would think twice before backing another project in the same genre if they think it might involve any supposed “risk” of media-fuelled public ire, even though the journalism that’s causing the fuss is based solely on something as arbitrary and personal as the author’s cinematic tastes.

Speaking of that comment “a morally bankrupt tale of teenage group sex, violence, drugs and sadism”, it’s worth mentioning that this again shows the author of said article’s misreading or deliberate misreporting of certain aspects of the film for the sake of her story having more salacious content – the most important of which is this “morally bankrupt” comment, which she expounds upon further, saying:

“For the sad truth about films like Donkey Punch is that they not only apparently glorify the worst of human behaviour, they also serve to normalise it. They desensitise a society where young people are unsure of the rules any more, where children can be led to think it’s not cool to say ‘No’ to anything not to drugs, to knives, to sex, to violence.”

Steering entirely clear of that whole debate about the media being able to create monsters (although I will say that her point about the young being desensitised and led astray is entirely irrelevant – Donkey Punch was given an 18 Certificate in the UK, minors are forbidden from seeing it, something which she completely skates over in the attempt to link the two points together, and any kids seeing this is a whole other debate, one to do with responsible parenting, but of course by this time the rabid peanut-crunching crowd who are buying into her argument are more than happy to skip such details when they might interfere with their hubris), the sad truth about Ms. Platell’s statement is that it is entirely and wilfully false – Donkey Punch no more glorifies the acts that it shows on screen than Hellraiser glorifies sticking pins in one’s face. Apparently, though she adored Silence of the Lambs and Blair Witch, Amanda must have missed out on Scream, because if she had seen it then she might have had more chance of realising just how formulaic the plot of Donkey Punch is in that it follows the “rules” – in the time-honoured tradition, those who do “bad” things (drugs, sex, booze etc.) more often than not come to a very sticky end. So how can what is essentially a morality tale be “morally bankrupt”? Furthermore, anyone who watches these idiotic characters make one bonehead move after another and sees the predicament they find themselves in as the film progresses and thinks to themselves ”Wow, how glorious! I must go forth immediately and emulate this display of awesomeness!” has to have a slate loose in the first place.

In the long run, Donkey Punch is an average film – I’ve touched on most of the flaws, so on the plus side, the acting from the young cast is decent (albeit it does occasionally feel like Hollyoaks meets Dead Calm), the direction from first time director Oliver Blackburn is tight and the pace enjoyably brisk and even affords some suitably tense moments as it reaches its climax, particularly if you can enjoy it for what it is and not question the leaps in logic too much. It helps too if you recognise it for what it is – for although it initially has the traits of a psychological thriller (and occasionally seems to have pretensions of being a black comedy in the Shallow Grave mould), by the final act it devolves into something that’s more familiar and along the lines of a teen slasher flick from the 80′s, which in one sense is somewhat disappointing as it becomes predictable and with a more adept script the psychological twists and turns in the characters and how far they’ll go to save their own necks, coupled with the confined locations, would have been more intriguing, but at the same time is perfectly serviceable. In fact, if you approach it in the manner of a slasher and don’t expect too much, then many of those concerns about logic go away since idiotic teenagers doing dumb things that get them into trouble is a staple of the genre, not to mention T&A and violence, which it also delivers. On these terms, you can do a hell of a lot worse and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was sufficiently entertained, despite the obvious flaws. If you’re going into it with the idea that you’re going to be blown away by something extreme, then you’re going to be disappointed; if, on the other hand, you’re interested solely for the purposes of tutting and commenting on the depravity of it all, then let’s face it, this film’s not for you…in fact, this genre’s not for you…hell, I’m not sure what is for you, maybe crocheting. So rather than getting worked up and letting your blood pressure rise, why don’t you just walk on by and leave it to us sane people that can differentiate between reality and fiction, m’kay?

Apart from an older generation (and fans of period dramas) to whom the word may conjure images of powdered tobacco being snorted from ornate tin boxes, for the rest of us, especially the cine-literate, the word is associated with death, in particular the (alleged) real on-screen murder of another human being for the purpose of titillating the audience for whom the material was filmed, with profit as a possible motive. The debate over “snuff” continues unabated – the main topic usually being to do with its existence (the “there’s no actual proof” versus “if human beings are capable, it must exist somewhere” argument), but even its definition will often be contested (for instance there are some who would like to include in that definition the selling of material that includes actual footage of humans being killed accidentally or political executions, which would make, for example, the Faces of Death series “snuff”).

It’s almost an urban legend, the cinematic equivalent of Bigfoot, belief is fuelled more by faith and hypothesis than any emergent hard evidence. Its origins are allegedly born in the 60′s, courtesy of a rumour that Charles Manson and his “family” filmed themselves murdering victims and buried this footage (never found), which became the subject of high-profile tabloid rumours, leading naturally to it becoming fodder for exploitation moguls like Allan Shackleton to cash-in on, with the likes of Snuff (1976). Snuff apparently started life as a piss-poor slasher that would have been almost un-saleable, but with the buzzwords being bandied about by the media, Shackleton saw the potential in re-issuing it with the altered title, removed the end credits and added the now infamous tagline: “Made in South America – where life is cheap!”. It was a shrewd move financially, as the concept is one that both tantalises with the possibility of salacious, taboo content and also courts natural controversy, which is great free press – just look at how well Snuff did out of the “Video Nasties” panic in the UK; it had all but been forgotten, but since the short-sighted people involved with that little fiasco declared it banned, they instead only managed to give it publicity and a resurrection, pretty much like every movie on that list which for the hardcore horrorhounds of the day was like a shopping list of “must-sees”.

Since then there has been the occasional decent or half-decent attempt to make a film with snuff as a subject, like Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) which touches on it briefly or Mute Witness (1994), which despite a few silly contrivances manages to be a neat little thriller. But more often than not it’s the idea behind low budget sleazefests which simply use it as a quick gimmick for exploitation purposes, like Fatal Frames (1996) or Snuff 102 (2007). This approach has even been perpetuated (alongside the most spurious aspects of the snuff myth) by big budget garbage like Joel Schumacher’s shameful 8MM (1999) which clunks terribly and betrays jaw-dropping lack of complexity or depth, deliberately churning out every possible stereotype and exploitation trick it can so that it plays to a wider audience out for a little titillation and to tut afterwards, including the same uninformed, conservative audience who would likely have supported the “Video Nasties” censorship based on this kind of trite misinformation.

This is why, for horror fans, “snuff” is a perpetually hot topic for a very good reason: at the heart of it are the same arguments that are generally levelled at the horror genre by those on the outside, those who see it as a corrupting influence, but also by fans themselves who are willing to probe their own feelings as horror continues to evolve. It’s about the relationship between horrific images and the viewer, of sex and violence, of the perverse desire innate in all of us to break boundaries and witness the taboo. Many come to horror and seek to test their limits, to push outwards and perhaps beyond previously drawn boundaries, and that goes both for fans and filmmakers alike. Is there a line, should there be one? When does testing limits of acceptance go from rebellion and experimentation to prurience? They’re questions which have been asked of horror probably since the beginning, and the idea of “snuff”, of someone going from watching faked violence to real may have seemed remote at one time but now with the possibilities offered by the internet, and with even mainstream horror films like Captivity (2007) courting this idea, baiting the critics with the new wave of (erroneously named) “torture porn” flicks or perhaps even closer to the bone of this issue movies like the execrable August Underground series, which are basically faux-snuff, make the issue all the more relevant.

All of which, by way of being a woefully brief and incomplete history of “snuff” and yet a very long-winded preamble to a review, is necessary, because it must be understood outright how complex and thorny an issue this is and how easy any film dealing with it can immediately fall at the first hurdle. What makes Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis (Thesis) all the more impressive is that it not only navigates these pitfalls with ease but for a low-budget picture it doesn’t resort to mining the cheaper tricks of its competitors (though nor does it become preachy or pretend to have all the answers), whilst remaining throughout a taught and intelligent thriller. The plot revolves around Ángela (Ana Torrent), a film student who is writing her thesis on violence in movies. She enlists the help of fellow student Chema (Fele Martínez) who, being a collector of horror, exploitation and porn films is the class black sheep. The two make an unlikely pairing – Ángela comes from a well-to-do middle class family and has a squeamish aversion to violence and viscera, but is also secretly drawn to it through morbid curiosity. Chema, by contrast, is a loner at school and at home and has an appetite for pushing the boundaries and watching with relish the most bloody and horrific images he can obtain, something he is proud of. The duo’s lives and perceptions are shaken to their foundations, however, when Ángela, through the course of her investigation, accidentally stumbles upon a VHS cassette which shows a young woman who is bound and being brutally tortured and mutilated by an unknown tormentor, until she is finally murdered and her body dismembered, all for the benefit of the electric eye of the rolling camera, and the voyeur who will ultimately buy the tape. The worst is yet to come, though, as Chema realises that he knew the girl in question, she was one of their fellow students who disappeared some time ago, the ex-girlfriend of the popular, handsome Bosco (Eduardo Noriega, who genre fans may recognise from his menacing turn as Jacinto in Guillermo del Toro’s ghost story The Devil’s Backbone). It means that the tape was filmed somewhere locally, possibly by someone they know, and distributed by someone within their college…and that person may know them and want the tape back.

Where it rises above its brethren is in the mature, intelligent treatment of the subject matter and avoids the lurid, easy routes that it could easily have taken, with a definite less-is-more sensibility in some cases that make it more effective, never more capably demonstrated than in one scene where Ángela is torn between her desire to see what’s on the tape and her fear of it, and as a test turns off her TV screen and plays just the sound, and so the viewer too only hears what’s going on – a blank screen, the static hiss of dead air suddenly filled with a variety of very realistic and bloodcurdling screams of pain that leave everything to our imagination, which also cleverly puts the audience in Ángela’s shoes. This is also the kind of contradictory, complex duality that’s at work in all of the characters and becomes more apparent as the film wears on, shades of grey where at first glance they may appear black and white (and of course representing the murky debates that surround the themes of the movie). Take the meeting of Ángela and Chema, for example, where Amenábar cleverly juxtaposes a point-of-view shot from each of the characters studying the other, each is listening to music on their Walkmans (Walkmen? Well, probably moot since they’d be iPods these days), both in total contrast to the other, with Chema looking every inch the prototypical horror fanboy outsider and listening to heavy metal whilst Ángela is pert and middle-class, pretty but “ordinary” and she’s listening to something classical. Even the way their notes are arranged is meant to show the difference. But as the film continues the stereotypes are broken down – Ángela is morbidly drawn to the violence that society says are taboo, that outwardly she abhors but cannot help but be curious about and even find perversely erotic; Chema, who openly embraces this from the outset, and seems to enjoy his role as the outsider secretly wants to be accepted, it can be seen in his attraction to Ángela but more poignantly in how we find that he secretly follows her and films her, observes the way she is at home, not necessarily in a “Peeping Tom” way but because it’s the type of life to which he feels excluded and thinks he can maybe find the answer through the method of intake he finds information most readily digestible – through the camera lens and the screen.

Amenábar even uses the film school set-up to address the state of Spanish cinema at the time through the two different professors – the “old school” Figueroa and the younger Castro who fiercely argues the more commercial and competitive side of cinema, believing it should be run as a business and not as art if it’s to survive (and whether deliberate or not, he aptly looks a lot like James Cameron). This isn’t gratuitous or unnecessary, as it’s both integral to the plot thematically but it’s also related to the film we’re watching and how Amenábar straddles the line between commercial and independent, and yet it doesn’t preach one way or the other and presents them evenly with room for interpretation and thought, like most of the issues Tesis raises and ultimately is to its credit.

Just in terms of the film itself, Amenábar’s movie is a success, as it’s a great thriller, with a plot that runs like a Swiss pocket watch in the way it deals out its set pieces and revelatory twists and turns, the pacing is pretty much perfect and works all in the favour of continually building suspense that will have the viewer on tenterhooks. It’s helped too by the fact that the actors’ performances are also uniformly superb and really sell their characters, with very little being said about them through exposition they still appear largely three-dimensional and believable, which goes a long way to making you care for their fates and therefore making any scene where they may be in peril all the more tense for the emotional investment. Even at such a young age (he was in his early twenties), Amenábar’s direction is confident and assured, striking a delicate but satisfying balance between a Hollywood-style big budget picture and its independent roots, which allow it to take chances and not dumb anything down. The one time the balance is lost is in the closing moments of the epilogue which, unlike the rest of the film, feels a little heavy-handed, like its making sure those slow on the uptake will have got the message. In the end though, that is more than forgiveable and somewhat nitpicking.

All-in-all Tesis is an excellent, must-see film for any fan of the genre, it remains leagues ahead of any other film that has trodden similar waters, working perfectly well as a great example of a suspense movie that will leave you breathless but with plenty of food for thought afterwards, should you fancy a nibble.