16. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
It's better than the original. Yeah, I went there. Dawn of the Dead is not actually a remake of the Romero zombie classic; it's the 5,679th remake of Aliens (which you could argue was itself reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead), but it's also one of the best ones ever made. Compared to 28 Days Later's revisionist, almost apologetic take on the genre, Dawn is stubbornly traditional (although it keeps the hated "fast zombies"). It's actually more classicist than Romero himself, who has proven eager to "evolve" the genre with each entry, for better (Day) or worse (possibly barring Land, everything since). As such, I'd argue that this is the key movie in the modern zombie renaissance, for that one simple reason: it isn't afraid to take itself and its chosen genre seriously, and it points directly towards fare like World War Z and The Walking Dead (which, to be fair, began in its comic incarnation one year earlier). This isn't to say that the pic is without humor: watch for Modern Family's Ty Burrell in a great turn as a rich, self-involved asshole. This is also Zack Snyder before he became buried under the weight of his own schtick, degenerating into video game farce. I'd contend that if this movie had been titled anything else, it would've been much more readily accepted by genre connoisseurs--even with the fast zombies. A better straight-up, no-bullshit zombie flick is tough to find.
15. Paranormal Activity (2007)
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the world J-horror made, we saw vindictive spirits visiting an apocalyptic vengeance on a lonely, high-tech civilization. Paranormal Activity is a $15,000, back-to-basics riposte: an intimate, quietly devastating story about our fear of what goes bump in the night. It returns to an antiquated view of technology as tool rather than transformative. Even if you bracket the low budget hype, Paranormal Activity works because it's a lean, muscular film, focused like a laser beam. This is a ghost story as pure as Ju-on, but it abandons the J-ghost template to once again draw tension and chills from what you don't see. While the film actually shows us plenty of the title phenomenon (especially compared to a found-footage predecessor like The Blair Witch Project, which relied totally on suggestion and implication), we still never get to face the monster itself. As a result, I personally find it much less frightening than the Japanese greats--but the film is driven by an amazing grasp of our psychology, basing its pull on our own desperate desire to see documented evidence of the spirit world. Just like the film's victims, we are roped in, incapable of turning away even as we see things getting worse and worse.
14. Sheitan (2006)
In America, Vincent Cassel is typecast as a snooty French dickhead, in movies ranging from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean series to Black Swan. But in his native land he's a superstar, and in case you doubted his acting chops, Sheitan is proof positive that he's the real deal. Here Cassel plays Joseph, one of the most unforgettable horror characters ever: a grinning bumpkin oozing with sweaty menace, a cheerful malevolence always just below the surface. It's a totally committed, incredible performance; Joseph not only lives on when he's offscreen, he casts a ghoulish shadow over the entire film. As a major star totally committing himself to such a weird, off-putting role, stateside comparisons are hard to come by: Brad Pitt in Kalifornia, maybe? The film is less about chills and shocks than a queasy, mounting sense of revulsion--and the final frame is almost in the same league as Sleepaway Camp.
13. The Ring (1998; 2002)
It's hard to appreciate in the same way after all the hype and the inevitable backlash, but The Ring is a stone-cold horror classic, with a pioneering mix of medieval spookiness and millennial tension that still resonates. Part Japanese folktale and part Candyman-style urban legend, this is a clever, original, and pioneering movie that was way ahead of its time: The Ring is a ghost story for the age of viral video and social networks, avant la lettre. In Sadako J-horror found the perfect icon: the vengeful female ghost is a longstanding trope in Japanese folklore that pushed some deep cultural buttons, a la The Exorcist; for western viewers, this spectre exuded an even more profound, alien hostility. And again, it's hard to view it the same way today, but The Ring is also a great example of how to do a twist ending right. There is simply nothing else in cinema like the sledgehammer blow delivered by that scene, where the smoldering tension of the entire film explodes like a hydrogen bomb. The American remake is really not that bad: it's very faithful to the original visually, and for the small amount it loses in translation (mostly just the ESP/psychic angle) it atones by upping the hair-raising intensity of the jump scares by about, oh, 10,000 times.
12. Kairo ("Pulse", 2001)
Takashi Miike gets all the press among horror and cult cinema fans, but a bulletproof case can be made that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is Japan's greatest outre/genre filmmaker. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has developed a brand of horror that is very distinctly his own, defined by a crushing sense of isolation and the most perfectly unsettling locations ever filmed. Kairo (which I'm told might be better translated as "Circuit") could be his masterpiece, and it is without a doubt the bleakest and most apocalyptic of all J-horror films. The classic themes are present and accounted for--chief among them, technology as the vehicle for spiritual annihilation--but they are given the ultra-bleak Kurosawa edge, and never has the sense of desolation so key to J-horror been more acute than it is here. The fright does not come in sudden stabs or sharp chills, but in a devastating sense of hopelessness. Note: of all the terrible remakes of horror classics we've seen in recent years, the American Pulse is, by far, the worst--avoid at all costs.
Next time on Revenge of the '00s: death cults, more chavsploitation, bloody misdirection, a final girl fake-out, and a three-hour tour...gone awry.
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