Alexandre Aja
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Written by Christie LeBlanc, "Oxygen" evokes a plethora of films before it — you'll have your own touchstones, but my mind goes immediately to Ryan Reynolds in coffin-squirmer "Buried."
Similar experiences have been crafted recently (Buried with Ryan Reynolds comes to mind as the most direct parallel), so it’s not necessarily a new concept but one seemingly always challenging to pull off successfully.
Trying to deliver a fully-formed, three-dimensional and engaging performance from within the confines of what’s essentially a coffin isn’t an easy task, but Ryan Reynolds proved in 2010’s Buried that it could be done with aplomb, so it’s no surprise that Aja cited Rodrigo Cortés’ nailbiter as a direct inspiration.
It instantly reminds me of Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried (2010), which starred Ryan Reynolds as an unfortunate victim trapped in a wooden coffin.
The film is in some ways reminiscent of 2010’s Buried, which took the viewer into a buried wooden coffin alongside Ryan Reynolds.
Though “Horns” doesn’t follow the paces of any specific genre, blending everything from tongue-in-cheek supernatural horror to grounded “Stand by Me”-style coming-of-age scenes (including a terrific near-death encounter on a log slide), the plot essentially reduces to that of just another routine procedural: Who killed Merrin?
A long flashback of Ig, his brother Terry and their best friend Lou recalls the pubescent taunting and near-tragedies of Stand by Me, the movie made of King's story "The Body."
There are even scenes of adolescent camaraderie that parallel Stand By Me and its ilk, similar to what J.J. Abrams slung together with his young cast in Super 8. Horns may take many diversions, but they never feel like they’re spliced in from another movie.
Both urges — the fondness for crude "Creepshow" morality tales, the sentimental "Stand By Me" kid drama — seem awfully Stephen King.
A series of flashbacks to his childhood, when he first meets Temple’s character, trade the humorous implications of the contemporary scenes for a fairy tale-like nostalgia trip that calls to mind “Stand By Me.”
Flashback sequences involving a group of childhood friends may seem familiar to fans of “Stand by Me.”
Straw Dogs (1971)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
influenced The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Plot Characters Themes
Having made his mark with The Last House on the Left, such as it was, by turning Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring into ultra-sleazy and ridiculously amateurish drive-in horror, it took Craven five years to come up with Hills, which was essentially Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs set in the desert with inbred mutants standing in for inhospitable British rubes.
Like Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs," in which meek, bespectacled Dustin Hoffman resorts to his base instincts to repel the British thugs invading his home, Stanford's Doug becomes the vessel for the viewer to work out dormant aggression.
Doug works for a cell phone company and he increasingly resembles the ineffectual character that Dustin Hoffman played in Sam Peckinpah’s "Straw Dogs."
I suppose that may be making light of their violent and thoroughly disgusting predilections, and when Aja steps into Straw Dogs territory the film turns unreasonably nasty, but these aren’t the nameless monsters of the ‘70s.
Just as the recent remake of House Of Wax somehow segued into Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory, Aja seems at some point to have lost interest in remaking Hills, since his movie eventually morphs into a retread of Straw Dogs, with Stanford tackling the Dustin Hoffman role of the nebbishy man of peace forced by circumstances to become a man of violence.
Its notion of tribal viciousness is well developed (marked by some interesting thematic nods to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs), and the other threads are reasonably effective, but by stating its message so openly, the film loses some of the unconscious subversion that defined the original.
About halfway through Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, I was convinced that the film's tag line, "The lucky ones die first," must be referring to the viewers of this entrails-festooned entry in the Inbred Hillbilly Cannibal sub-sub-genre.
My money is on the 70's, which saw the release of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original The Hills Have Eyes, and of course John Boorman's Deliverance.
Catching the current wave of slick, Hollywood remakes of 1970s B-horror hits, Alexandre Aja has updated Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes," adding a few contemporary twists and pumping up the gore factor.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
influenced The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Plot Themes
Heck, Craven's overpraised original itself was a rip-off of Tobe Hooper's superior "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
But despite these shortcomings, this is the most satisfying horror remake since Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and like that film, it fills in some blanks the previous film did not.
"The Hills Have Eyes," a brilliantly reimagined version of Wes Craven's 1977 micro-budget horror classic, is unrelenting in its brutality and contains imagery as disturbing as anything seen on mainstream movie screens since "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974).
Ce dernier reprend d’ailleurs quelques éléments du remake somme toute respectable de The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Meg (2018)
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
influenced by Piranha 3D (2010), Crawl (2019)
Visuals Plot Themes
Alexandre Aja’s brilliant B-movie excursion “Piranha 3D” transformed the horror movie premise of the original into a live action comic book that flaunted outrageous genre tropes like a firecracker; Turteltaub never gains such confidence in the material to let it go all-out bonkers.
Essentially a PG-13 version of Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D with fewer jokes and even less of a point, The Meg is a faceless, lifeless, workmanlike, unimaginative, lowest common denominator-courting, movie-like substance.
Imagine a trashy empty-calories combo of Sharknado and the gore-and-nudity-heavy Piranha 3D—two horror movies loaded with lovable dumbness.
There are plenty of big set pieces, which either rip off or pay homage to everything from Jaws to Piranha 3D to Deep Blue Sea , depending on your view.
I don’t need Piranha 3D -type levels of brutality (though, let’s be honest, that would’ve been welcome) but when you come to see a giant shark make lunch out of a slew of cardboard cut-out characters, I don’t want to have their supposed personalities “explored” instead.
The answer arrived in the film’s final act, a portion of which is set on a crowded beach in China’s Sanya Bay that instantly nods to both the fictional Jaws town of Amity, MA and Lake Victoria, home of Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D.
Aja has professed an admiration for genre classics like The Evil Dead and Halloween, and at least until the killing starts, he threatens to match them, creating an almost unbearably intense air of peril.
Oozing into a theater near you soon will be remakes of "The Evil Dead," "The Wicker Man" and Wes Craven's "Hills Have Eyes," an atrocity exhibition (family + cannibals = trouble) that is being directed by the 26-year-old French filmmaker Alexandre Aja.
While Haute Tension (that’s High Tension to us American folks) starts out with the feel of The Evil Dead or Cabin Fever, it never quite makes it to anything enjoyable.
Não há sangue escorrendo durante toda a projeção, como por exemplo em "The Evil Dead" ou "Fome Animal", mas nos momentos onde ocorrem as mortes, o roteiro faz questão de evidenciar a violência e a terrível dor das vítimas.
It’s similar in nature to Fede Alverez’s Don’t Breathe from 2016, another late-summer programmer that was also produced by Sam Raimi which found an audience through a solid understanding of horror fundamentals and a novel concept (if, ultimately, it came to a pitiful conclusion).
In that respect, Crawl reminded me of 2016’s Don’t Breathe , also produced by Raimi, in that it works despite mostly taking place in a single location with just two actors.
In the lackluster summer of 2016, The Shallows (in which a stranded Blake Lively matches wits with a shark) and Don’t Breathe (in which trapped young people match wits with a wily, murderous blind man) provided more efficient and consistent thrills than a lot of their super-sized, mega-budgeted counterparts.
Equal parts "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "High Tension," this elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense overcomes some of its more ridiculous ingredients thanks to endless invention.
Oh, and if you had hoped that the film might open in a matter that brings to mind the still-horrifying moments inside the UFO from 1993’s “Fire in the Sky, ” you’re shockingly in luck.
Deliverance (1972)
Directed by John Boorman
influenced The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Visuals Characters
Aja has come through on his stated intention of making "a realistic survival movie in the tradition of John Boorman's Deliverance" (albeit with the usual cheats of superhuman stealth and apparent teleportational abilities of horror-movie bad guys).
The villains in Craven's Hills were cannibals, but came across more as deranged inbreds similar to the ones in Deliverance.
Evil Dead (2013)
Directed by Fede Álvarez
influenced Crawl (2019), The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Visuals Themes
From the Evil Dead franchise to Darkman to even his three Spider-Man films, Raimi’s talent is using a combination of workman-like craftsmanship and winking self-awareness to make movies that are technically proficient while never losing their sense of fun.
Crawl isn’t as well-crafted as either The Shallows or Don’t Breathe, though it shares a producer with the latter: Sam Raimi, whose first two Evil Dead movies are gonzo versions of the limited-location thriller.
But when you realize the film’s producer was the guy behind the “Evil Dead” movies, it’s tempting to wonder if with a little more craziness, “Crawl” could have been even better.
With Raimi’s experience in the Evil Dead films and Aja’s campy style in Piranha 3D , Crawl would not hesitate to make you cringe in your seat.
While some are pretty cool, like Alexandre Aja’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” others (like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Rob Zombie’s atrocious “Halloween”) have been really awful.
Having made his mark with The Last House on the Left, such as it was, by turning Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring into ultra-sleazy and ridiculously amateurish drive-in horror, it took Craven five years to come up with Hills, which was essentially Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs set in the desert with inbred mutants standing in for inhospitable British rubes.
The plotting, taking inspiration from the Japanese "Ringu" and its 2002 American redux " The Ring ," draws the viewer in, but becomes more strained and contrived the longer it goes.
Unfortunately, there is also nothing that you probably haven't seen before in The Ring , The Grudge , or any number of exhaustingly similar American remakes of Asian spook stories.
Loosely based on the Korean original, Mirrors is actually a mad splicing of 24 and The Ring, with Sutherland in full Jack Bauer mode.
So if you’re a hardcore horror fan who bothered to track down ALL of the recent Asian-to-American remakes, then you’ve already experienced The Ring, The Ring 2, The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Dark Water, The Eye, Pulse, Shutter, One Missed Call … which means that a whole lot of Mirrors will feel pretty familiar to you.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Visuals
With his inspiration firmly rooted in the no-budget beginnings of the genre ("Blood Feast," "Night of the Living Dead," Craven's own "Last House on the Left" and, especially, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), Aja has managed to imbue his film with a feeling, if not a look, of impoverished cruddiness that harks back to the heyday of the z-movie grind houses in which it once flourished.
But he’s also responsible for his fair share of turkeys, Deadly Friend and Cursed being among the most widely reviled.
Us (2019)
Directed by Jordan Peele
influenced by The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Mirrors (2008)
Characters Themes
Whatever Peele did to his actors to get them to the point that Us requires, I'm impressed by him and sorry for them: there is a palpable sense of soul-death in Duke's Abraham, of starving carnivorous rage in Joseph's Umbrae, and unfathomable inhuman curiosity in Alex's Pluto (I can't quite bring myself to believe it's any sort of accident that the creepy little boy, maybe the most actively upsetting thing in the movie, shares a name with Michael Berryman's horrifying cannibal manchild from Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes).
“Us” borrows several tropes from such landmarks of the horror genre as George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes.”
Horror buffs may realize that Alexandre Aja’s “Mirrors” touched on similar doppelganger fears, but they’re merely a starting point here.
Throughout the years, moviegoers have bitten their nails to The Student of Prague (1913), The Man With My Face (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), The Other, Sisters, The Stepford Wives (all from the 1970s), Mirrors (2008), Enemy (2013), and of course Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017).
Horns aims higher, handing Aja the upmarket London-born actors Radcliffe, Minghella and Temple — all nicely attuned to the cramped gestures and speech patterns of the Pacific Northwest — and the illustrious cinematographer Frederick Elmes, who shot Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart for David Lynch and, recently, the four-hour drama Olive Kitteridge , to be shown on HBO Nov. 2nd and 3rd.
(Heather Graham’s small role as a diner waitress, and the beautiful cinematography by Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart DP Frederick Elmes, both back up that impression.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oxygen reminded me of the indelible horror of the automated-abortion sequence in Prometheus .
Either way, “Oxygen” is essentially an entire feature set inside the automated surgery table that Noomi Rapace uses to perform her own c-section in “Prometheus” (incidentally, Rapace was once tapped to star in this), and Aja works with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre and the rest of his crew to extrapolate bonafide action sequences from the Cryosalide’s basic functions.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Directed by S. Craig Zahler
influenced by The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Plot Themes
The sudden, queasy lurch into horror isn’t entirely successful: it is as if Zahler has bolted The Hills Have Eyes on to the end of The Searchers.
The surprise is that “Bone Tomahawk,” while overlong and awfully leisurely (as well as remarkably gory in its latter stages), is quite enjoyable, rather like a version of “The Hills Have Eyes” transplanted to the old West and enriched by a strong cast and a good deal of flavorful, if often digressive, dialogue.
If you ever wondered what “The Hills Have Eyes” would look like remade in to a cheap C grade Western, look no further than “Bone Tomahawk.”
Descriptions of this gorehound oater as “The Searchers” meets “The Hills Have Eyes” are all too accurate.
“The Searchers meets The Hills Have Eyes,” is the simplest and most efficient way to describe the gruesome, brutal, and oddly compelling western / horror combo called Bone Tomahawk.
They’re bizarre, true savages, and the hints we get of their home life point towards something akin to The Hills Have Eyes.
But Aja is also reminiscent of other unique exercises, like Buried or even another Duncan Jones title, Source Code .