My All-Time Favorite Horror Movie

Damn, I'm a slacker!




So, having seen as many horror films as I have and proudly proclaiming to all that will listen that I am a huge horror buff, a question I get asked a lot is pretty obvious - "What is your favorite horror film?"

For a while, I honestly didn't know. My mind would go blank at hearing this question and I'm sure my credibility as a true horror fan seriously came into question. If you love something so much, how could you not have a favorite?

Other favorites are easy - favorite color: green, favorite time of the year: autumn - but this one required a little bit more thinking. The horror genre itself is actually pretty complex, with lots of subgenres from which to choose. If there isn't a definitive list of subgenres out there, here's some that I can think of off the top of my head:
Slashers (Halloween, Friday the 13th)
Creature features (Tremors, Ghoulies)
Vampires
Werewolves
Supernatural
Zombies
Man vs. Beast (Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Primeval)
Anthologies (Creepshow, Trick 'R' Treat)
Serial killer (different from slasher)

So then I had to break this list down into the stuff that I like. I freaking love zombie movies, and they're my favorite out of the classic triumvirate (Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies - most people would say Frankenstein here but there aren't enough Frankenstein monster movies out there for me to include it in my triumvirate), but sometimes you want to see more than just slow-walking dead guys eating somebody's intestines. Creature features and killer animals are okay, but usually high on the hokey meter. Slashers and serial killers usually contain the most cliches and are hardly ever that original. Again, there aren't enough anthologies out there really to have a favorite, although Trick 'R' Treat was freaking sweet.

That leaves supernatural. And I thought, yes! I see it now, because that is totally my favorite genre. Stories of hauntings and stuff has always interested me, and ghost movies are the ones that ALWAYS make me squirm in my seat like a little girl when I watch them, if they're effective.

So once I decided that I loved supernatural horror, my favorite became easy. It's an absolute classic haunted house film from 1982 that I believe still holds up well against any modern horror film. What is it? Have you guessed?


















POLTERGEIST.

This movie just kicks ass. No doubt about it. You wanna talk haunted house? Here you've got poltergeists, which I like to think of as the "really pissed off ghosts." They're the ones that like to move stuff around and really cause a disturbance, which there are plenty of in this film.

But this movie is also very different from other haunted house movies. It doesn't take place in a dark and creepy castle or mansion, and it's not about finding out how someone died or something, it's just that there are evil spirits in the house and we gotta get rid of them. Plus this movie can be funny as hell at parts, which I think is so clever. Tobe Hooper (director) manages to mix in some very subtle funny moments with some not-so-subtle creepy moments.

The film starts out rather oddly for a horror film, with "The Star Spangled Banner" playing loudly over the credits. We soon find out it is coming from the TV (stations used to play the song when they signed off), which has been left on while everyone in the house is asleep. Little Carol Anne wakes up and discovers "the TV people," which she can hear coming from the static. This is a creepy little scene itself, with Carol Anne smiling while she talks to the TV people. I think it's because of her Village of the Damned reminiscent hair and creepy little girl's voice. But, later scenes show us that this is your typical happy suburban family with three cute kids and two loving parents. How could anything bad happen to them?

When Carol Anne utters the famous line "They're here!", that's when the crazy shit happens, starting the next morning at breakfast, which is my favorite scene of the whole movie. The bottom of Robbie's milk glass explodes and his utensils go all bendy, but the best part is when the mother, JoBeth Williams, pushes in all the dining room chairs, walks into the kitchen with the table out of frame, and the next second she turns around, all the chairs are stacked up on the table. See now, this is what makes for some scary and unexpected stuff. Why? Because it's happening during the day. They're not hearing voices or banging noises or footsteps on a dark and stormy night, which is when you expect that stuff to happen. Ghost movies are all about expecting the unexpected, and Poltergeist takes the unexpected to a whole new level.

Human-eating trees, little girls that disappear into closets, and gross hallucinations of people tearing the flesh off their face (probably my second favorite scene, with the meat sliding across the counter - yeesh!) all make for a movie that starts off creepy and never lets up, often escalating to strange new levels at points. When the ghost hunters show up to help the family rescue Carol Anne, the movie lightens up a bit again like in the beginning - I love the part where they're all talking at the table. Dr. Lesh says that determining that their house is actually haunted is not very easy - just as the coffee pot slides across the table on its own.

Another great thing about this movie? When Dr. Lesh brings some help in the form of Zelda Rubinstein as Tangina. Nuff said. Oh wait, except for, "This house is clean!" Haha.

I really think this movie has it all, almost. It's scary, it's a mystery, it's got great actors, it's funny at times, it's even a little gory at times. This is no slow to action haunted house movie like The Haunting or The Others, but it's still creepy and probably ten times more entertaining. The special FX are not as primitive as you might think, and I believe they still are effective after all these years. The greatest special FX is of course at the end.

Carol Anne is rescued from TVPeopleLand and little Tangina says all is well again.

Psyche!

The TV people are still around and now they're uber-pissed! But first, they're going to scare the shit out of you via your already scary toy - the clown doll. Now, we saw this eerie little bastard at the beginning of the film when Robbie got scared and threw a jacket over him. Nothing happened there, and the audience thought they were safe. Oh no. First, nothing's really supposed to happen because the disturbances are over. Then there's a faint noise, and when Robbie looks at the chair where the clown was sitting, it has disappeared. Crap. Then the kid actually has the cajones to look under the bed! I would've been screaming for mama at this point. So of course the clown attacks, giving us yet another reason we didn't need to think that clowns are scary.

Then all hell breaks loose and the mother confronts this thing:

I mean, what the hell is that? And it growls at her like a lion, too. Anyway, the closet tries to swallow the kids again, coffins and skeletons come out of the ground, and the family finally gets the f*%$ out of the house before it implodes on itself. And when they go to the hotel the dad pushes the TV out of the room. Awesome ending to an awesome movie. I never get tired of it and I hope I never will. It's the subtleties of classic haunted house films mixed in with the amped-up manifestations of the poltergeists (with great 80s FX) that makes this movie a special classic.

The film is also fairly accurate according to paranormal experts. Carol Anne communicating through the TV static is the now more well known phenomenon of EVP. The word poltergeist comes from the German for "noisy ghost," so that covers the ghosts stacking the chairs and throwing all the stuff around in the kids' room. They also might physically assault people in the house and cause electrical disturbances, all present in the film. So yeah, all the crazy stuff that happens toward the end is not exactly well documented in the real world, but the basic things that usually identify a poltergeist as opposed to a regular haunting are all there.

So there you have it: my favorite horror film of all time, Poltergeist! And it only made No. 80 on Bravo's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments. I call bullshit. Here's a YouTube video of it: 100 Scariest Movie Moments - 80 - Poltergeist.

And yes, I know a remake is possibly in the works. I don't want to talk about it.

The Girl Next Door - a descent into Hell

I got really into true crime novels many years ago when I read Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, her true story of her friendship with Ted Bundy. I've read books about Bundy, The Boston Strangler, the Black Dahlia, Ed Gein, Albert Fish (who is the freakiest, most f-ed up person you will ever read about), and Dr. H. H. Holmes. Their crimes are unbelievable, horrific, and disgusting. However, the only true crime story that has truly haunted me since I read it was the slow torture-murder of Sylvia Likens by her boarder, Gertrude Baniszewski, Gertrude's children, and some neighbor children. 

The details of this crime are best described in the only book about the case, House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying, written by a newspaper reporter covering the story shortly after the crime and subsequent trials of the offenders. Almost all comments I've read about this book and about the case in general say something along the lines of the fact that this is the most horrible crime of which they've every heard. 

A more in-depth and mostly accurate description of the crime can be found on Wikipedia here (although I'm not sure it's the best source - some facts are contradictory to what is written in House of Evil), but I'll give a short summary of events here.

In Indianapolis, 1965, Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny (16 and 15 years old, respectively) came to live with a woman from their neighborhood, Gertrude Baniszewski (bani-SHEF-ski), while their parents held jobs traveling with a carnival. Lester and Betty Likens agreed to pay Gertrude $20 a week to board their two daughters, without ever really examining the house where they would be living. Gertrude was a sickly woman who already had seven children. She was depressed and stressed from having lived such a hard life. She began taking her frustrations out on the Likens girls, and eventually Sylvia was the main target. 

The story can get a little complicated with all the people involved. Gertrude started the abuse with punishments by paddling with a fraternity-type paddle or a belt. Gertrude soon encouraged her children and other kids from the neighborhood who often visited the Baniszewski house to also abuse Sylvia under the guise of "punishment" for various acts. The abuse escalated. Cigarettes were put out on Sylvia's body (she had over 100 burns on her when she died); Gertrude twice roughly kicked Sylvia in the genitals; she was denied food; had the baby's dirty diaper shoved in her mouth; was kicked and/or thrown down the basement stairs several times; was given baths in scalding hot water; had salt rubbed into her open sores; and was twice forced to stand naked in front of Gertrude and other children and shove a Coke bottle into her vagina. The words "I'm a prostitute and proud of it!" were carved into her stomach with a needle and a crude "3" was burned above this with a hot branding iron. Sylvia never received real medical treatment for her numerous burns and sores, and accompanied with the malnourishment, shock, and repeated blows to the head causing subdural hematoma (brain bleeding or hemorrhaging), Sylvia finally succumbed to her injuries and died on October 26, 1965, only 4 months after arriving at the Baniszewski house. 

I cried while reading the book about Sylvia and what she went through. But as horrible as this crime is, and not to diminish Sylvia's death, I had to ask myself: Why does the murder of this one girl affect me so much more than reading about the 53 murders committed by Andrei Chikatilo? Or all the young women that Ted Bundy raped and murdered? What is it about Sylvia Likens' case that gets to me? I believe it is several factors. The fact that an adult gave children permission to beat this girl; that some of her abusers were barely teenagers; that no one ever did anything to stop the abuse; that one girl could be the target of so much hostility and rage; and also that Sylvia herself apparently lost her will to live after suffering so much torture and was not able to save herself. It absolutely blows my mind that something like this could have happened. Many, many children out there are victims of abuse, I know, but this was no behind-closed-doors abuse case. Kids in the neighborhood went over to the Baniszewski house just to abuse Sylvia - it became a game to them. And not one of them had the heart to see the evil that was going on and tell somebody about it?

Author Jack Ketchum (discussed in the previous blog) was also haunted by this case and he used it to inspire his novel The Girl Next Door. His story is fairly similar to the real-life case - Meg and Susan Loughlin come to live with their aunt Ruth Chandler and her three sons after their parents die in a car accident. Ruth starts to show some resentment toward the girls (and goes a little mad) and starts to abuse them, trying to teach her boys a lesson in the process. Meg is eventually tied up in the basement, where Ruth and her sons, and other boys and girls from the neighborhood, beat and torture her. 

Spoilers ahead.

The torture is a little more extreme than what happened with Sylvia - an incident of sexual assault and a hot tire iron to the clitoris are the penultimate events in the story - but that is really immaterial. This book spoke to me because it is written from the point of view of David, the Chandlers' next-door neighbor and long-time friend of the Chandler boys. He meets Meg before most of the other kids do and falls for her. He witnesses her torture and abuse and though he feels horror at what he sees (he never commits any of the acts himself), he also feels what the other kids feel.

The reader will often find themselves hating David more than Ruth or any of the others that torture Meg simply because of his selfish inaction. I remember one part of the book where David talks himself out of telling somebody about the abuse. He says something about how he'd be an accessory to the crime and get in trouble himself. I hated David after that - who cares what happens to you, you little shit! Save this girl's life! But by giving us insight into the mind of someone witnessing the abuse, Ketchum seems to be trying to explain to the reader how a crime like this, and in essence the crime against Sylvia, can occur. It's the repressed society that encourages keeping secrets; mob psychology; the fear that children have of disobeying or otherwise going up against adults; and the responsibility of adults. David and the other kids are fascinated by the things they can get away with, with the all-powerful credo of "We have permission!" ringing in their ears. They have permission from an adult, so that makes it okay. Kids are powerless compared to adults, and to be given permission to exert the highest form of power, the power over another person's life, must have been a high for those kids. I understand that now - even though the whole concept is sick and twisted and totally wrong. But I do understand it, and this is another theory on how such young children could have tortured Sylvia and not feel guilty about it.

In the end, David tries to help Meg escape. But you know what? I don't even care that he tried to help her, and I don't believe he redeemed himself when he killed Ruth by pushing her down the stairs. To me, it was too little too late. He never hurt Meg himself, but he never helped her either. He had the conscience to do the right thing but never followed through. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," right? Ketchum says that Meg is the hero of the piece and I couldn't agree more. She tries to keep her dignity during all the atrocities committed against her and when she has the chance to escape, she ruins it for herself because she refuses to leave without taking her sister with her. Perhaps this was part of Sylvia's psyche, as well. Her younger sister Jenny was crippled from polio and would have been the next likely target for Gertrude's abuse if Sylvia was gone. 

Even with the books and the two movies made about the case (An American Crime, with Ellen Page of Juno fame playing Sylvia, and an adaptation of The Girl Next Door) there is still no definitive answer how this crime could have happened. Gertrude Baniszewski was found by many to be sane at the time of the crime, but there is no psychological evaluation out there to read that says, "This is why I hurt Sylvia." And with the major perpetrators of the crime long dead, this question will never be answered. We can speculate all we want and we can blame it on the family's poverty and anger at their life situation, but that's just not good enough for me. Sylvia deserves more than that.

My aunt lives in Indianapolis. If we ever make a family trip there again, I will make it a point to visit Sylvia's memorial and leave her the most beautiful bouquet of flowers I can find. 

Rest in peace, Sylvia Likens. Rest in peace.

Jack Ketchum - the horror author that Stephen King loves

Enough about movies, let's talk about books. I have recently discovered an amazing, if not somewhat neurotic, horror author by the name of Jack Ketchum (a pseudonym - his real name is Dallas Mayr, which doesn't sound as horror-y). He is successful in his genre but not so crazy famous that he's completely inaccessible to fans. He has an official website where you can leave comments or questions for him, and get this - he actually responds to them. Within a couple of days. It's amazing. I told him how one of his novels seriously affected me and he actually took the time to show his appreciation for my comments. How cool is that?

Anyway, maybe you're wondering why I say he's somewhat neurotic. I call him that because most authors have a style of writing or general theme in their writing that transcends all their books. Pick any three Jack Ketchum novels to read, and you would swear that they were all written by different people. There is some element of the horrific in them all, sometimes though, it is not what most would consider horror.

Ketchum first made an impression on readers with his very first published novel, Off Season. In this gruesome novel, a group of friends staying at a coastal house in Maine are attacked by a feral family living in the caves on the coast and feeding on human flesh. Reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes, both stories are based on the legend of the Sawney Bean family (an interesting read - check out the story here).

Off Season can be described as a gore-fest. It's a fairly quick read, but there is so much blood and guts and incestuous cave-people sex packed into this tiny novel that it is not something you'll forget soon. We even get a recipe on how to cook human flesh. Nice. But it's totally awesome. Gorehounds like me love this shit - if it makes you do that dramatic thing of putting her hand to your mouth in shock, then I'd say the story is a success. Well done, Jack. (There's also an equally disgusting sequel to Off Season that is worth a read, Offspring.)

Okay, so we have a gore-fest like Off Season, and then the next Ketchum book I read is Old Flames. Whuh? This is by the same guy? Old Flames is this incredibly simple story of a woman meeting up with an "old flame" (oooh, clever title, eh?) and she either still loves the guy or is just a wacko because she becomes friends with his wife just to kill her. It's not that Old Flames is badly written or a bore or anything, it's just so weird that this is the same guy that wrote a scene in Off Season where the cannibal girl stabs her brother in the ass, then takes the blood from the wound, rubs it on his penis and then has sex with him. So I don't know if this difference in the general theme of the writing is really neurotic as I said earlier, or some kind of proof of a mad genius.

Also, in the copy of Old Flames that I read there was another novella in there called Right to Life. Holy crap. Just look at the picture over there. This was about a couple who kidnap a pregnant woman on her way to an abortion clinic. They want the baby so they decide to hold her hostage in their basement until she gives birth - there's some sadomasochistic torture and other fun stuff here, but again, it's another example of this writer seemingly not knowing in what genre he wants to be. It's good that he's got such range, but you probably wouldn't think much of this author until you read The Girl Next Door.

It is one of my new favorite novels. You wanna talk real horror? This novel GOES THERE. I mean, it goes to places that are so dark they can't possibly be something that could ever really happen. But The Girl Next Door is based on a crime that occurred in the 60s in Indianapolis. I'm eerily obsessed with this story - the true crime, the book, and the movies - and have much too much to say about them. Will leave for the next blog.

Another Ketchum novel I recommend is probably The Lost. Great story with some unforgettable characters. Ray Pye is this nihilistic, egotistic, evil person who shoots two girls he sees in the woods because he thinks they are lesbians. He drags his two "friends" into the act as well, and manages to not get caught for the attack, even though one local cop is sure that he committed the crime. The novel is a rather slow burn as the reader gets to know Ray and the other characters around him. The big question throughout the novel though is, Where is this going? How is it going to end? Is Ray just going to get caught? Will there be a big shoot-out or something? These characters have gotten themselves into some serious stuff and with Ketchum, you're not really sure what to expect.

Everyone seems to love Red as well, but it didn't really affect me as much as it did others. Perhaps I have no heart. I'm very curious about several other Ketchum novels, but I find he's a little hard to come by at chain bookstores. Go for Amazon.com or a used bookstore to find some of his more obscure novels.

My favorite horror remake

The third and final classic horror film remake on my list is my personal favorite, although not necessarily the best. The Last House on the Left remake is perhaps a better film cinematically in my belief, however, I still contend that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the best because it was much more successful and popular and appealed to a much wider audience.

This is probably going to be very long because I love this movie so much, so I apologize right now!

The Last House on the Left is another Wes Craven classic and was in fact his very first feature film. He had a very intriguing story inspired by an Ingmar Bergman film (The Virgin Spring), but perhaps not all the resources at the time to make the best adaptation of his vision. The resulting film was a shocking and violent gore-fest that put the country in a tizzy. People went absolutely nuts over this movie. It received an X rating when first sent to the ratings board and was banned in several countries for many years. Roger Ebert, however, liked the movie (yet he railed against I Spit on Your Grave - I don't get it), and over the years it has gained more credibility and admiration and is now considered a classic.

But classic or no, there was definite room for improvement on this film. Another first film by a first time director with a low budget and no-name actors. All of that turned out well, though. Some of the actors were in fact very impressive in their roles - David Hess as the leader of the gang Krug, and Lucy Grantham as Phyllis stand out the most to me. No, the biggest problem I have with the film is in terms of story.

Okay, for those that have been reading this and have no idea what this movie is that I'm talking about, here's a synopsis of the original. Two teenage girls, Mari and Phyllis, go into the big city one night to go to a concert. Trying to score some weed from a guy on the street, they end up in the clutches of a murderous little "family" of convicts. After some rape and humiliation in the woods, Phyllis is stabbed to death and Mari is shot. The convicts are left without a car and seek help at a nearby house which happens to be the house of Mari's parents. The parents discover what happened to their daughter and seek bloody revenge on the gang.

In my opinion, this basic storyline is a fantastic one to explore. However, Craven misses a few beats along the way. First of all, the scenes of rape and humiliation are interspersed with comical scenes of two bumbling sheriffs as they search for Mari, who has been reported missing by her parents. Craven has explained, and I certainly understand, his intent with these scenes - to create some uncomfortable-ness in the viewer by juxtaposing these horrific acts of brutality with an almost Three Stooges reenactment, with some wacky 70s music to go along with it. I don't think this was the best choice for the film. The second part of the film, the revenge by the parents, is completely dependent on the initial crime. It would have been so much more effective to concentrate on getting the emotion out of the audience for what happened to these girls, to make them so sad and pissed off at the people that hurt them that they will totally go along with the father taking a chainsaw to the guy who raped his daughter.

This is the main part where the remake succeeds. The story was stripped down to the basic emotional elements - here's the crime and here's the revenge. The first scene is the murderous gang busting Krug out of a police car and brutally killing the two police officers, so we immediately see how despicable these people are and just what they are capable of. The Collingwood family seems very loving, but have experienced some trauma recently from the death of a son. Mari does not die in this remake, so their revenge on her rape and attempted murder is more about protecting her and salvaging the remaining parts of their already torn family.

The other part of the film that was greatly improved upon was the scene of the discovery of Mari after her attack. In the original, Mari's dead body is found by her parents near the lake. The scene is literally less than minute long with hardly any real believable emotion by the parents over their daughters death. Boom, she's dead, next scene. They spent longer on the scene where the sheriffs get a ride from the chicken lady! The remake takes the scene much more seriously. In both films, the father, John, is a doctor but he actually gets to use his skills to try to save his daughter's life in the remake. This makes for an extremely emotional scene of him cauterizing her bullet wound, sticking a tube in her side to fixed a collapsed lung, and, as he's checking her for other injuries, discovering that she was raped.

Tony Goldwyn is fantastic in this scene, in the whole movie really. He's a talented actor that I had all but forgotten about and I'm so glad that he chose to do this movie (he was hesitant at first because of the violence). I'm still on the fence about Monica Potter in the role as the mother because at times it seemed like she almost didn't want to be there, to be in the movie, but then at times her crying and emotion was very believable. I'm not sure if it's not just her style of acting, though. She gives the same kind of awkwardness in the only other movies I recall seeing her in, Saw and Con Air. Going into the movie, I was most excited to see the actor playing Krug and if he could be as good as David Hess. Garrett Dillahunt does not disappoint as Krug. He's apparently played a bad guy before and it seems to be his forte. A mustache and beard and some black hair and totally looks the part of a bad-ass - but thankfully, not a bad-ass that you sort of like, which would have ruined the movie. He is a bad guy that you never like right from the start. He taunts the policeman in the beginning as the man is dying, he treats his son horribly, it's his decision not to let the girls go when they have a chance, he stabs Paige, he rapes Mari, and he shoots Mari. He has no respect for human life, therefore the audience has no desire to see him live. I would love to see this actor in more stuff.

I could go on and on about the directing and cinematography in the film as another way it improved on the original. I think, however, that the improvements in story were more important in the remake being about 10 times better than the original. I will say that I was incredibly impressed by the camera angles, composition, coloring, and just overall cinematography in the film. Some people look at me weird when I call this a beautiful film, but it really and truly is. There are also other things I could talk about, like responding to the controversy about the violence in the film, but that is perhaps left to another blog.

The Number 2 Classic Horror Film Remake

The Hills Have Eyes!!!

I loooooved the remake of Wes Craven's classic, The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Alexandre Aja, the man behind the awesome, inspiring, kick-ass, bloody, gory, and delicious High Tension, THHE was the perfect film for him to take on (after THHE, Aja directed Mirrors, another thrilling and creepy movie - the jaw rip scene is probably the most horrific thing I've ever seen).

Perhaps I shouldn't really be writing a blog comparing and contrasting the original and the remake because it has been WAY too long since I've seen the original.

No, wait. I just found it on YouTube. I love that site.

But seriously, the remake is such an exceptional horror film. It defines horror in both the aspect of gore and violence, and also in the sense of revealing the real horrors of humans. The basic story is a concept Wes Craven used in his first film, The Last House on the Left - two different families, one (for lack of better terms) good and one evil. The families clash in some way and the good, or normal, family is forced to become just as evil and ultimately murderous as the other family, so who is really the evil one?

In THHE, we have the quintessential mutant hillbilly "family." They are grossly deformed due to evil government nuclear bombing or some crap, and live in the hills in the desert, terrorizing, attacking, stealing from, and eating people that happen to travel through their smorgasbord of gross-ness. We really get a taste for what these mutants are capable of in the famous scene depicting their blitz attack on the trailer. I love this scene, and I love that the filmmakers had the balls to keep this scene just as relentless and horrible as the original. The dad is burned to death, the mother is shot, the younger daughter is raped, the older daughter with the baby is ruthlessly shot in the head, and the baby is kidnapped. Holy crap. Oh, and the one mutant bites the head off of a bird and drinks the blood from its neck.

I'm so surprised that a lot of this stuff made it into the final film... so many taboos in one scene. But that's what it takes to make a really successful and gripping horror film. You've gotta have the balls to show people things that they might not want to see. This is reality, this is what it takes to get people to show what they are really made of. What can a person or group of people endure and still have the will to live, to fight?

Such a great message behind the guise of a violent horror film. Viewers that just see that part of the film, though, don't know how to dig deeper and see the beauty that can exist in these types of films. The cinematography in THHE is gorgeous. The colors are all muted to blend in with the background of the dirt and other shades of brown of the desert. Splotches of color pop up in certain places - the red hoodie, for instance - but most of the film seems drained of color, which gives the viewer a real sense of place and feeling like they are in the desert too.

We've got some faces you might recognize in this movie from other small roles they've done, and the acting couldn't be better. The scene where Kathleen Quinlan, the mother, is dying, is so heartbreaking. Her facial expressions, the way she's shaking and obviously in immense pain... gosh, it's horrible. Vinessa Shaw's character is sweet, a new mother who lays down her life for her baby. I wanted so much to see more of her in this movie, and her character died way too soon. But it was a very good shocking moment for the film.

The violence and gore are at just the right levels, if not a little too much at times. The nerdy guy ends up carrying an axe and covered in blood by the end of the film, so what does that tell you? You'd think they wouldn't have much to work with in the way of setting, way out in the desert as they are. However, one of the characters stumbles across a very creepy makeshift town, apparently used in those nuclear bomb experiments in the fifties. The town is complete with mannequin families and fake appliances... plus some members of that mutant family that seem to make this fake town their home. Creepy little girl that has the face of an 70 year old shows up in one of the houses... *shudder*. Some excellent fight scenes take place in this setting, as well.

A good movie on its own, and an absolutely solid remake of a classic story from horror master Wes Craven.

Stay tuned for the number 3 best horror remake, which also happens to be my personal favorite of the three.

Remakes of classic horror films

This is going to be my weigh-in on the onslaught of remakes of classic horror films. A Nightmare on Elm Street just came out not too long ago, and it sucked. It sucked really hard. I Spit on Your Grave is coming out soon, and it's probably going to suck. Friday the 13th was probably the biggest suck of all remakes. No, wait, that award goes to One Missed Call... which was actually a remake of an Asian horror movie, which is a category all it's own. Let's stick to remakes of classic American films.

I have seen the remakes and the originals and I have a top three of the best remakes (thus far... 'cause Gosh knows there are going to be more). The best remake is not necessarily my favorite, but we'll get to that later.

The number one best horror remake is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In terms of sticking to the original storyline but making improvements where need be; characters; actors; and directing, TCM 2003 was a huge success. As much as you may love that classic original first film by Poltergeist-man himself, Tobe Hooper, you have to admit that the film is seriously flawed. It's a low-budget movie from the 70s with actors that are still unknown to this day. Yes, it has some creepy and gross-out moments (Grandpa sucking the blood off of Marilyn Burns finger?????? So wrong.) and the whole concept of this whacked-out cannibal family and a giant 'tard with a chainsaw is incredibly disturbing, but it doesn't really hold up well over time.

The remake improved the TCM legacy in so many ways. First of all, the characters. The most annoying film character I can think of right now is Franklin (the guy in the wheelchair) from the original. So they totally cut him out. Yea! Now add in Jessica Biel, a hippy chick, and three modestly good-looking guys and you've got a pretty good cast. There's no overly blatant stereotypes among the kids, no bitch or slut, or douchebag dude that the girls seem to love even if he is a douchebag... just some normal people in their 20s. They got good actors who took the film and their characters seriously and really turned it out.

The best and most memorable characters, though, are of course the members of the Hewitt family. In the original they were all kind of skanky, dirty, back woods dudes. They gave these new characters some real thought and got great actors, again, to play these roles. R Lee Ermy as the sheriff is the most memorable. An awesome character actor who really gets into his roles (maybe a little too much) and makes them special. Uncle Monty, no legs man in the wheelchair, is perhaps not as well developed, we just see him as a pervert because he keeps grabbing Jessica Biel's ass while she's helping him into his wheelchair. I don't know who the actress is who played the mother but she was absolutely fantastic. An old crone, the HBIC, just as disgusting and depraved as the men in her family. She can hold her own. Leatherface's character didn't really change much, but he didn't need to. Big guy, mind of a child, but knows how to work his power tools. You feel sorry for him, maybe, but not really when he's chasing you around the house with a chainsaw.

The action and chase sequences were awesome (although we didn't get a reboot of the famous dinner table scene until Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), with great set design and locations. The Hewitt house, its basement, the slaughterhouse, the crazy neighbors' trailer... they all give you a great sense of time and place in the context of the film. Set design was especially helpful in getting the real feel of the film. The whole movie is just DIRTY. Dirty characters, dirty deeds, dirty houses. The people in the movie are sweaty and dirty like they haven't showered in a few weeks. The house and other sets are dirty, cluttered, dripping with water, covered in dried blood - ook! I just wanted to jump into the movie and hose down everybody and everything I could touch.

They totally upped the gore and violence and I loooooove that. The movie can't be called Texas Chainsaw Massacre and not have someone getting their leg cut off or getting split down the crotch with a chainsaw. So thank you, filmmakers, for that. You know what we want.

All in all, great improvement on character, great actions, great gore and violence. Awesome horror film, that is just as good as, if not better than, the original.

The number 2 remake is coming next blog.