Ten Days of Terror!: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Film: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I’m always a little suspicious of remakes. Sure, there are a number of remakes that are better than the original film (the version of The Maltese Falcon that everyone knows is the third version of that story, for instance). I’m still wary, though, because even when the remake is good, it’s usually not as good as the first one. I like the idea of filmmakers doing remakes of movies that were bad but had good ideas rather than remaking classics. This is especially true of formative films in a genre. All of this is to say that I watched the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and I have some things to say about it.

The basic premise of this remake is essentially the same as the original film. A family on vacation is driving through the American southwest, specifically through the desert around where the nuclear tests were done and find themselves stranded and attacked by a family of mutants who have been affected terribly by the radiation from the bomb tests around Alamogordo.

Ten Days of Terror!: Mirrors

Films: Mirrors
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television

I remember hearing about Mirrors when it first came out…for about a week and then it vanished entirely from my consciousness. It wasn’t until it appeared on the latest version of the They Shoot Zombies list that it returned to my consciousness, so I hunted it down to watch. This movie is directed by Alexandre Aja, whose career is a bit of a mixed bag. High points are Haute Tension and the ridiculous creature feature Crawl, but he’s had some low points as well. Mirrors is a bit of a low point, so I guess I’m spilling the beans on this one right away.

We’re going to start with the movie giving the game away in the opening sequence. A security guard (Josh Cole) runs in terror through a deserted subway station. He winds up in a locker room, and suddenly realizes that the room contains mirrors—more than he originally thought as all of the lockers open and reveal mirrors inside of them. The man begs for his life, but when one of the mirrors breaks, the largest reflection picks up a shard and cuts his own throat. The wounds appear on the security guard, killing him.

Wednesday Horror: Crawl

Films: Crawl
Format: Blu-ray from Sycamore Public Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

There will probably always be a place for the basic monster movie. That’s all Crawl really is. It’s just Man vs. Nature (or Woman vs. Nature in this case) laid over the top of a disaster movie. It’s Hard Rain meets The Meg, more or less. We’ve got a couple of people trapped in a crawlspace with alligators during a category-5 hurricane in Florida. That’s it, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more.

I could honestly stop there with a plot summary, but if I go a little further, it allows me to introduce the cast. Haley (Kaya Scoldelario) is a student at the University of Florida desperate to maintain her position on the university swim team to keep her scholarship. While struggling at the moment, she learns that the area will soon be severely attacked by the latest hurricane that has shifted and is now headed directly for her. Advised to get out of the state, she instead heads south to find her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), who is not answering his phone. When she arrives at his condo, she discovers he’s not their either, but his dog Sugar still is.

Ten Days of Terror!: Piranha (2010)

Film: Piranha (2010)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on The New Portable.

The success of Jaws caused a lot of copycat films in the years that followed. There were all sorts of “wild animal starts eating people” movies, some of which stayed in the water. It’s how we got movies like Orca and the original Piranha. With the 2010, 3-D version of Piranha, we’ve reached the point where the low-budget derivatives of classics are worth remaking. That’s true at least hypothetically. The reality is a bit different.

Piranha starts with a great joke. We see an older guy on a boat singing to himself, drinking beer, and fishing. It’s soon evident that it’s Richard Dreyfuss and he’s singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Then an earthquake happens, opening up a rift in the bottom of the lake. Out swims a horde of prehistoric piranha. Soon, Richard Dreyfuss is eaten. That’s what we’re here for, after all.

Ten Days of Terror!: High Tension (Haute Tension)

Films: High Tension (Haute Tension; Switchblade Romance)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

One of the classes I teach is English composition. I’ve found over the last dozen or so years that two of the places many students struggle is in writing good introductions and good conclusions, so I spend a great deal of time on them. What I tell them is that a great paper with a weak conclusion is remembered as a weak paper. The same is true with movies. A good, intelligent, and exciting movie that ends on a sour note is remembered more for the sour note than it is everything else. And thus we have High Tension (Haute Tension in the original French, and for some reason Switchblade Romance in the U.K.).

I’m not going to spoil the film by revealing the twist ending that creates plot holes that, as Roger Ebert said in his review, “[are] not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact [do] have a truck driven right through [them].” Chances are good that you’ve already seen High Tension and know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen High Tension, you’ve almost certainly heard other people complain about this very thing, and while you might not know the details of the ending that mar the film, you’re aware that they exist.