THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW – Jim Cummings had an indie hit at Sundance a couple of years ago with ‘Thunder Road’, making a werewolf flick a slightly surprising next move. In many ways TWOSH is the twin of TR, being a film about another brittle ego, again a cop played by Cummings, struggling with bereavement, failing relationships and a life spinning out of control. We follow Cummings as he tries to stay on top of a murder spree in a snowy, cut-off little town, but his attempts to use the investigation to prove his guyish authority only demonstrate how far he’s landed out of his depth. TWOSH is less about moonlit glades than the frantic pinwheeling of a man whose hubris is taking a dive, and perhaps TWOSH works better as a blackly comic character study than a horror movie. It’s pretty funny. Despite the emphasis on the sharp script, it still has an eye for the monstrous. Recommended.
EVIL DEAD (2013) – Seeing as though ED’s back in town I thought I’d revisit the remake from last decade. I still like it, it was and is a nice surprise in a way as there’s not much of an attempt to sanitise – the splatter is pretty riotous and the underlying grimness of the original (often overlooked, but ‘The Evil Dead’ was never as screwball as its sequel) is amped up. The focus this time is on recovering smack addict Mia and her brother, who have decided to use the family cabin-in-the-woods as the venue for another stab at going cold turkey. Apart from this slightly more elaborate backstory and some psychological window dressing, the set-up is basically the same – handful of young adults surrounded by a forest after dark, and there’s demons and blood and guts etc etc. One or two things irritated me. The musical cues were just too “ta-da – a horror moment – isn’t it dramatic?”, and this obviousness seemed echoed by some heavy-handed editing; all that stuff struck me as disappointingly clunky for a movie with such a lusciously skanky visual style. Also, just the characters and some of the narrative ploys dragged it back into the realm of noughties generic horror, although I accept that, like anything, it can only ever be of its time. I guess I was waiting for it to get really nasty, and it didn’t, even though it sort of did. It could never outstrip the wildness of the original, but, for slick product tailored for the multiplex, it doesn’t lack bite.
 |