Zombieland | Paranormal Activity | Trick 'R Treat
This past weekend my dad came up to visit so we could watch as many horror films as we could in 72 hours. This year we saw 14: 6 in the theatre, 4 of which were double-features, and 8 on DVD, 3 of which were new releases each arriving with a wave of hype.
‘Zombieland’ is a zombie comedy starring Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg as the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse. It’s pretty hard to ignore the comparisons to ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which is unfortunate because that film was so brilliant that it becomes more apparent this film doesn’t have much to add. The opening credits are some of the most inventive and visually stunning I’ve ever seen but this is unfortunately the highlight of the film. The script has a some clever ideas, the “rules for survival”, for example are cute, but surprisingly for a film called ‘Zombieland’ the film manages to shortchange the zombies! The zombie deaths aren’t very interesting, no characters are ever put in danger and long stretches of film have no zombies present at all. When the characters arrive at the mansion 2/3 of the way through, the film begins to sag and never recovers. The film is fun but slight, especially after wading through the zombie films of the past decade and comparing this to the brilliant ‘Shaun of the Dead’.
‘Paranormal Activity’ is ‘The Blair Witch Project’ for kids who probably didn’t see that film a decade ago. Anyone who has seen that film, as I did once (only) during limited release, will know that this film is nothing new. The premise is that a couple sets up a camera in their bedroom to capture supernatural goings-on, which is supposed to build suspense as their situation worsens. The daytime scenes are repetitive and don’t seem to build in intensity, the nighttime scenes take too long for anything to happen and by the time it does it’s over! The audience I saw the film with was audibly disappointed when the film ended and I can’t blame them. The bottom line is that people wanted to be scared and they weren’t. The hype for this film was extremely out of control and we were all extremely disappointed.
‘Trick ‘R Treat’, a Halloween anthology originally scheduled for release 2 years ago, finally saw a direct-to-DVD release earlier this month. Direct-to-DVD generally means that the film is terrible but that’s not actually the case. The problem with most anthologies is that they are always so uneven, certain stories are great and some aren’t. ‘Trick ‘R Treat’ manages to avoid this by weaving all the stories together with a ‘Pulp Fiction’-style chronology that jumps backwards and forwards in time during the course of one Halloween night. The film is actually great fun, a smart fun horror film actually set at Halloween (which is rarer than you would think). I can see why a film like this didn’t get a theatrical release, nobody knew how to market it. At times it feels more like a great TV special than what most audiences have come to expect out of a horror film, but it’s worth seeking out and one of my favorite discoveries this year.
