Revenge of the '00s, Part II

26. Final Destination 3 (2006)
Where Scream deconstructed slasher movies, Final Destination performs an autopsy: this is a slasher movie with no slasher, where the victims know their fate but can't escape, and where the final girl has no masked madman to confront. The third is actually the best in the series, marking the return of original creative team Glen Morgan and James Wong (who honed their chops on The X-Files, alongside Glen's brother Darin Morgan, one of the greatest TV writers of all time). Here, the deaths get messier and more ridiculous than ever, and the admittedly stock characters boast more dimension than the lifeless meatbags from part 2. The black humor is also dialed in just right: two bubbly cheerleader-types roast alive in their tanning beds, leading the bumbling jock hero (above) to inquire about his dread fate: "I mean, there's nothing, like, up my ass, is there?" If you only see one Final Destination, make it #3.




25. Dog Soldiers (2002)
How many times have you watched Night of the Living Dead (or Assault on Precinct 13, or The Seven Samurai for that matter) and wished it was about S.A.S. commandos fighting off giant wolfoids in the Scottish highlands? This movie establishes Neil Marshall's technique: a mix-and-match Frankenstein of horror tropes, bricolaged into a better, faster, stronger Thing. This doesn't always work, as Doomsday proved with its premise of a post-apocalyptic waste haunted by Rob Zombies. (Another idea from Marshall's notebook: zombies on an oil rig! I'm not joking.) But in this breakout feature, the method works like a shotgun blast to the brains. Marshall also reveals himself as the spiritual successor to John Carpenter at his most action-oriented: shades of the aforementioned Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing abound here. Fun fact: heroic lead Kevin McKidd (who you may also remember as Tommy from Trainspotting) is also the voice of "Soap" from the Call of Duty video games.




24. Wolf Creek (2005)
Wolf Creek marks the spot on the map where the slasher movie shades into torture porn, and is another case of familiar tropes tweaked just enough to become something fresh and invigorating. In short, it's like High Tension, except with everything done right. You know the score: carefree, middle-class kids on holiday run afoul of a depraved psychopath--but what makes this one different? Two things. First is the awesome desolation of its Australian setting, which gives the pic a vast emptiness that, again, suggests John Carpenter's The Thing as much as any slasher. The other is Mick Taylor, the smirking predator tooling across the outback, towing tourists to their grisly deaths. Taylor is Crocodile Dundee turned inside out, a stale stereotype transformed into a leering, sadistic butcher by John Jarratt's priceless performance. And while Wolf Creek is definitely fictionalized, the fact that the story is based on a loose composite of several actual Australian murders only adds to the nastiness.

23. Cabin Fever (2002)
The horror annals are littered with movie that don't quite know whether they want to be funny or fiendish, dopey or diabolical. Black humor and bloody horror go hand-in-hand, but the marriage is a tenuous one, and most movies skew further in one direction or the other. But Cabin Fever completely nails this delicate balance, in a fashion that can be described as anything but delicate. For American horror audiences in 2002, this was a refreshingly nasty feature, and one that might be called a breath of fresh air were that metaphor not so totally inappropriate to describe such a disgusting movie. Gross, hilarious, and manic, Cabin Fever offered horror fans tired of Scream-alikes the best and bloodiest night at the multiplex in ages. Eli Roth's "no compromise" aesthetic is well-established here, but his comparatively humorless follow-up Hostel managed to be both less entertaining and less disgusting than this gooey, cross-eyed triumph.

22. Donkey Punch (2008)

The best testament to Donkey Punch comes from a review in the Daily Mail, which calls it "quite simply, the most distasteful, depraved and nihilistic film I have ever had the misfortune to sit through. I freely confess that there were times I felt physically ill simply watching it." 2008 was the year of chavsploitation in English horror, and although this movie isn't nearly as laddish as Eden Lake, it approaches the "youth run amok" theme in a similarly unpleasant fashion. Once again, carefree kids on holiday run afoul of...themselves! If Final Destination is a slasher without a slasher, Donkey Punch is a slasher where everyone's the slasher--a fait accompli in the film's world of "morally bankrupt" cretins (that's the Mail again). Stops just shy of making an explicit point about spoiled innocence and scandal in the internet age, but that's okay, because this flick isn't trying to be anything more than one of the nastiest 90 minutes around. The guiltiest of pleasures; it's not that easy to casually recommend a movie called Donkey Punch!


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: girls gone wild, plumbing gone awry, irresponsible dumping, cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers and a sanctimonious puppet.