Revenge of the '00s, Part V: A New Beginning (11-6)

11. Suicide Club (2001)

Battle Royale has become a real cult classic with American viewers, but Suicide Club attacks many of the same themes and anxieties and is a much creepier, more shocking and effective movie. Like Battle Royale, it's a J-horror outlier: no pale, black-haired onryō, but the same sense of social comment and the same earnest desire to shock audiences. And shock it did: Suicide Club became immediately infamous for its opening scene, depicting a mass teenage suicide in that most psychologically fraught of Japanese settings: the subway. In terms of sheer excess, this is as over-the-top as millennial Japanese "extreme" cinema ever got--but the real surprise is that, from there, Suicide Club just gets better and better. This movie is like what might have happened if Kiyoshi Kurosawa had decided to trade in his abandoned, derelict buildings and direct day-glo J-pop music videos (literally). This is a bright, kinetic, and visionary film--and at the same time, an utterly bleak and nihilistic one. Suicide Club truly has everything: there are real scares, real gross-outs, and a gnawing, pit-of-the-stomach sense of dread to complete the J-horror checklist--but this is no formal exercise. It's one of the most original and powerful Japanese films of the last decade, in any genre.




10. Eden Lake (2008)
Donkey Punch had more than a faint whiff of chavviness to it, but Eden Lake is where the nascent chavsploitation genre reaches full bloom. There's nary a Burberry tartan in sight, but this is as classic a "cruel story of youth" as you'll find in modern movies. It's all very rote at first: weekenders-on-holiday-run-afoul-of, and all that. But what puts this one over the top is an incendiary performance by the 18-year-old Jack O'Connell (above, with knife), as one of the most eerily pure film sociopaths of all time. O'Connell doesn't chew any scenery or throw any bombs, but he evinces such a cool, unfeeling malice that he's every bit as scary as 2008's other great psychopath: Heath Ledger's Joker. By the end of the movie, O'Connell only needs to turn his eyes directly into the camera to create a deeper chill than an army of ghouls. (Along with cast member Thomas Turgoose, O'Connell also starred in the critically acclaimed 2006 pic This is England, creating a subtle metacomment: where the hooligans of Thatcher's England had a streetwise soulfulness, the youth of today have nothing but bloodthirst.)




9. Martyrs (2008)
Man, you know a movie is going to be good when the DVD starts with an apology from the director. And unless it's all a huge put-on, it's hard to believe somebody as sheepish and bashful as Pascal Laugier could've directed such a savage, unapologetic film. Martyrs got a lot of hype very quickly as a new high-water mark in "extreme" cinema, for those always on the lookout for the next big shocking, bloody thing. But it's a movie with much, much more thought packed into its (literally) torturous run-time than the average post-Saw bloodbath; this is a movie that has a lot to say about trauma, victimization, and the justification for violence, with a bone-deep existential message as stark and intimidating as Being and Time. And Laugier is right: this is not a movie you enjoy, but one that you endure. Martyrs has to be the signal film on the horror end of what one Artforum critic has ridiculously (but understandably) termed "the new French extremity"; it is also a much better film than overheated shock treatments like Baise-moi or even Irreversible. And Laugier, in his wisdom, has downplayed the kind of hype which would give his movie a place at the Cahiers du Cinema table: in France, much like in America, horror is still a ghetto.

Postscript: of course there's going to be an American remake! And it sounds predictably dubious. Daniel Stamm, the skilled director of The Last Exorcism, is attached, but he says: "[The original film] is very nihilistic. The American approach [that I'm looking at] would go through all that darkness but then give a glimmer of hope. You don't have to shoot yourself when it's over." Very American, Mr. Stamm; we never did really take to existentialism.

8. The Descent (2005)

From the man who brought you Night of the Living Dead: Werewolves comes Aliens: Underground: Vampires. If my writeups of Neil Marshall's films seem flippant, it is only because they lend themselves to it. Don't mistake my irreverence for contempt, because as a moviegoer The Descent thrilled me like nothing in years. (Note that the first two Alien films are essentially my cinematic bible; they contain within them all great wisdom.) Marshall takes the unmapped caverns of the American backwoods, fills them with creeping, de-evolved Nosferatus, and drops a whole pack of spunky Ripleys into the mix (plus at least one Vasquez). The results, quite simply, are dynamite, and go deeper than the entirely respectable thrills and chills on offer: there is a subtlety and a human complexity at work here that dwarfs many similar films. But Marshall still expertly exploits our instinctual fear of the dark, and the movie's real triumph are its drooling albino CHUDs: taking a key page from the Aliens playbook, those are real people! (Who took an underfreak crash course, naturally.) A truly inspired directorial flourish: Marshall didn't allow his heroines to see the creatures in full makeup until they appeared in-scene. Also, bonus points for perhaps the gnarliest final girl transformation scene of all time (above).

Postscript: I discovered after seeing this movie that it shares the title with a surprisingly good 1999 thriller in the Michael Crichton mold, by a guy named Jeff Long. Book and movie share more than just a title: imagine the movie blown up into an epic, near-future saga about the colonization of an enormous world below, populated by the dread underbiters. It's really good, and if you liked the movie you'd do well to check it out.

7. Rogue (2007)
With Wolf Creek, director Greg McLean tapped into the blind spot behind our smug sense of mastery over the world around us, transforming a beautiful (if dangerously isolated) tourist destination into an alien planet, inhabited by a stalking menace wearing a human face. Rogue actually continues in a surprisingly similar vein, and it's also a better, tighter movie overall. More than that: Rogue is the best Jaws movie since Jaws. It's another movie about a big, man-eating bastard of a beast, but a couple things put it over. One, as in Wolf Creek, is naturalism: they may not have the same dimension as Brody, Quint, and Hooper, but these characters are believable, and they behave suspiciously like real people. The other is the simple fact that the titular croc is the best creature effect since The Host: this is, again, CGI done right, at its most subtle, restrained, and effective. The big lizard doesn't tear through the mise-en-scène, wagging its complex modeling in your face, but instead acts like a real crocodile, drifting slowly and inevitably your way before exploding into brutal, even clumsy motion. You will really forget you're watching a special effect, and mistake it for a real crocodile of extremely generous size. And the film's climactic moment is a concerto of suspense, and in its key moment even offers an inspired variation on the perfectly simple, stabbing heartbeat of the Jaws theme.


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: a time paradox, black cats (gone awry), an unexpected zombie, little monsters, and--you guessed it!--a last act surprise.

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.