Twisted Misters
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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`The Hills Have Eyes' releasing shortly, is a classic example of the new age horror film where Goth and the occult have given way to graphic violence and sadism.
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BLOOD AND GORE Aaron Stanford in `The Hills Have Eyes'.
Two men wake up shackled to a pipe in a dank dark basement with a corpse between them. Each has a saw that is not sharp enough to cut through metal but can easily cut through limbs. The two need to perform some emergency surgery if they have to escape their perverse captor and also save their families.
A family on a happy road trip take the wrong shortcut (they always do it don't they?) and end up fair game for a bunch of flesh eating mutants. Then there are these silly American teenagers with raging hormones who go on a European jaunt. At Amsterdam, after a fill of sex, drug and rock and roll, the boys get a tip to check out a hostel near Bratislava for more of the same stuff. Being young and stupid, the trio fall over themselves to check out their hostel - all to their own peril.
There are also rural psycho-killer families who prey on clueless townies and another lonely soul who sets about visitors with a chainsaw and sundry power tools (now you know why no one comes visiting.)
If you are wondering what these crazy plots are all about - the answer my friend, is blowing in the multiplexes. These are the plots of splatter fests like Saw, Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, House of a Thousand Corpses, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Devil's Rejects.
These movies are all about extreme torture, sadism and the numerous ways a body can be sliced and diced. The Hills Have Eyes, opening today is a remake of master shocker Wes Craven's 1977 film of the same name. There was a message in the earlier film about the danger of nuclear radiation and the like but the new version is all about blood, guts and tons of gore.
Horror films are as old as cinema itself - from the expressionistic German films in the early twentieth century right to the splatter fests in the new millennium. Pop culture is an accurate mirror of the times. The gothic gave way to the alien invasion theme with the rapid advances in technology. The fear of machine taking over man was a fertile ground for movies like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Sixties saw A-listers like Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, 1968) and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) make significant movies in the genre. Rosemary's Baby examines a Faustian bargain gone bad, while Night of the Living Dead is one of the smartest and goriest insights into consumerism.
The Seventies was a time when the social fabric was giving way to anarchy and that was the time of the ascendancy of the occult. The devil made a centre stage appearance and the Bible and the Revelations was mined for deep dire prophecies of Armageddon and the number of the beast. It was the time of movies like The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973).
In the Eighties, the slasher flick ruled while the Nineties was ruled by little twisty thrillers like M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and the sleeper Indie hit The Blair Witch Project. In the millennium, there have been the minimalist Japanese horror films and the graphically violent movies.
Saw has two sequels, each amping up the gore and sadism quotient to such an extent that the third movie had people fainting and ambulances being placed on call. While Saw has its villain Jigsaw devising horrendous tortures for his victims which all involve amputation and what not, the films offer some sort of twisty logic for Jigsaw behaving the way he does. He apparently is dying and wants all the other loser sinners to learn the error of their ways and learn to value their lives. There is a sneaking suspicion that Jigsaw like all movie serial killers is a failed scriptwriter - why go through so much trouble otherwise?
The Hills Have Eyes, incidentally produced by Wes Craven, who was responsible for the self-reflexive parodies of horror movies like the Scream franchise, has no such pretensions. There is the dysfunctional family with two dogs on a road trip. And there are the mutant miners all ready to gobble up all who make that fateful detour.
Is it a sign of the times, which sees fresh horrors daily thanks to the all invasive media, a world of Abu Ghraib and blood curdling reality shows that these kind of gore fests pass off as entertainment to our jaded eyes?
And the horror of The Hills of Eyes is not over till it is over as is obvious from the fact the sequel is being released in the US today. Oh the horror of it!
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