Horsemen

Director: Jonas Akerlund (2009)
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ziyi Zhang, Lou Taylor Pucci
Find it online: IMDB, Amazon

There's a reason Se7en stars Kevin Spacey as the killer and not a bunch of teenagers. One, because Kevin Spacey can act and (most) teenager's can't. And two, because whingeing teenagers fucking suck. Horsemen fucking sucks, despite the best efforts of Dennis Quaid and a character called 'Stingray'. It's a stupid movie, from its Se7en-lite aesthetics to its predictable and banal use of torture. There's not a convincing or scary villain in the whole movie and it builds to a dull, highly forseeable 'climax' which is in no way apocalyptic, scary, thrilling or even interesting. Dennis Quaid looks tired and the movie's attempt at creating a teenage female Hannibal Lecter (Ziyi Zhang) is laughable. Or it would be if it wasn't so depressingly ridiculous.

It's the sort of cliched cop movie that stars professional 'that guy' Barry Shabaka Henley as a cop boss and wastes Peter Stormare as its signposted red herring. As soon as you see Quaid's hunched, depressed looking cop you can tell that he's probably suffering a dead wife (which he is) and struggling to bring up kids that hate him (he does and they do). As the thing stumbles on and on, its outcome becomes more and more predictable, more inconsequential and more stupid. It's an impressive 'thriller' that makes its villains less scary as the movie goes on. Actually, no, Horsemen is not an impressive thriller; not even in an ironic sense.

"Come and see", the movie's villains taunt, repeatedly. "Come and see." No, don't.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

Director: Samuel Bayer (2010)

Starring: Jackie Earle Hayley, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz

Find it online: IMDB, Amazon

Not quite as bad as everyone says it is. But still pretty bad. A Nightmare On Elm Street is a remake of, well, do I really need to say any more? I will a bit, just so's you know where I stand. Wes Craven's 1984 piece is arguably one of the finest slasher movies in cinema history. And this remake isn't. At all. It gets some things right but most things wrong. Behold.

The characters that aren't Freddy Krueger all suck. Freddy Krueger kinda sucks. There's no John Saxon. There's no Robert Englund. New Nancy is incredibly bland. The did-he-or-didn't-he subplot is stupid (he did). The dream sequences are unimaginitive. The kill sequences are too reminiscent of those from Craven's original. There aren't enough kills. Freddy looks like ET crossed with a puppy. His voice is stupid. He's very rarely menacing. The pacing is off. For the first half, there's a sense of disconnection between the scenes; there's no flow and the introduction of Nancy is hashed. There's no subtext - it's just Freddy growling like Batman and acting like some torture-guff reject. Wes Craven had his Nightmare represent Nancy's awakening as a sexual being. When Freddy's glove emerges from the bathwater, it's heading for her Vajayjay for a reason - Bayer has it happen simply because Craven did it.

And this is the movie's biggest mistake: it tries far too hard to distance itself from previous Nightmares (the casting of Jackie - new makeup for Freddy) but uses too much of Craven's original material to defy comparison. It's not a re-imagining - bar the finale and a few bits and pieces inbetween, much of it is scene-for-scene copying.

The students' reaction to finding Twilight on the semester's reading list wasn't a happy one

There are good bits too, and a few more of them than one might expect given the movie's reputation. The use of the Everly Brothers is stunning. The redo of the flying bed death thing is technically very good. There's plenty of grue. The showdown between Freddy and Nancy is brutal. For all his new faults, it's good to see Freddy again and it's nice to see an attempt to make him properly scary. I liked the return of the "...my world, bitch" line. And the final bit (a homage to the 'pulling-mom-through-the-window-door' shot) is amusing, if only because it looks as shit as it did the first time around. Given the years of improvement in CGI and filmmaking technology, why couldn't they give us some Inception style nightmares? Surely we've seen enough boiler rooms and smelly teenage bedrooms?

Ultimately, it's not quite as bad as many will say, although it does pale into insignificance next to its mighty predecessor. This is Nightmare for people who've never actually had a real Nightmare.