The Desperate Hours (1955)
Directed by William Wyler
Escaped convicts terrorize a suburban family they're holding hostage.
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What critics compared The Desperate Hours to
Roth begs, borrows, and steals from the best, including a fair amount of George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies) and, of course, Sam Raimiâs first two Evil Dead films, but there are also echoes of other exercises in paranoia, including William Wylerâs The Desperate Hours, of all things.
"Funny Games" is a postmodern variation on William Wyler's once famous 1955 movie "The Desperate Hours," in which a middle-class suburban family is held hostage and brutalized by a gang of escaped convicts led by Humphrey Bogart (Michael Cimino remade it in 1990 with Mickey Rourke).
German director Michael Haneke (precisely remaking a European movie he did 10 years ago) isn't out to update "The Desperate Hours."
From such classics as the play and the subsequent William Wyler film The Desperate Hours (1955) to recent entries like The Strangers (2008) and The Purge (2013), this horror subgenre keys in, so to speak, on the primal outrage of our safest, most secure space being violated.
Debut feature from writer/director Bryan Bertino is clearly influenced by everything from The Desperate Hours, The Shining and Straw Dogs to the more recent Funny Games and Vacancy.
It's not nearly as gruesome or upsetting as Haneke's movie and it has almost none of the agonizing suspense of the genre's classics ("Straw Dogs," "The Desperate Hours").
Similar premises were played out to more disturbing effect in films such as Straw Dogs and the recent The Devil's Rejects; and in more dated but effective fashion in The Desperate Hours (the 1955 William Wyler-Humphrey Bogart version).
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I won’t say what happens, but just as the picture seems to be diverting itself into a melodrama about a threatened family—like the two versions of The Desperate Hours , Panic Room , and even Straw Dogs —it returns to the original conceit with savagery.