Hatchet III continues the escalation that Hatchet II began: where the first sequel replaced unarmed tourists with armed hillbillies, the second sequel upgrades to an entire SWAT platoon (and consequently, even fewer female characters). The same intensification is evident in the gore, which is more excessive but less imaginative than the earlier films. Where Hatchet…
Story: Hatchet II retells and reconfigures Victor Crowley’s origin story, which seems fitting given the recasting of MaryBeth (the first film’s Final Girl) and the way its chief inspiration, the Friday the 13th series, would reinvent Jason Voorhees with each sequel. The main plotline is a double-edged revenge story (for MaryBeth and Victor) which is…
Hatchet is generally described as a horror-comedy, but the qualifier doesn’t quite fit. It’s not exactly horror – Hatchet is hardly trying to scare its audience – but its jokes are mostly in-jokes, references or cameos that will put a grin on horror fans’ faces without really being funny. This is a horror film made…
eXistenZ is destined to always be second choice. Looking for a David Cronenberg film that eroticises the unerotic? Your first choice is Crash; eXistenZ comes a distant second. Looking for a film that cursorily engages with videogaming culture before becoming a philosophical treatise on the nature of reality? The Matrix does that better than eXistenZ,…
At the age of sixteen, I came into the possession of a Blockbuster card with the video rental store only a short bike ride from home. I used school holidays to forage for the grittiest-looking R-rated video tapes around. My choices were, admittedly, often motivated by a desire for sex and nudity, but the rewards…
Midway through Slacker’s loose collection of mostly-unrelated vignettes, a girl wanders into a dusty bookstore and idly peruses a paperback pertaining to JFK’s assassination. As she flips through the pages, another customer sidles up to her and reveals himself as a classmate of hers (almost every character in Slacker is a university student), and discusses…
Over the last two weeks, Chris from Terry Malloy’s Pigeon Coop and Mark from three rows back have been running an impressive Blogathon focused around debut films. Debut films have a special appeal, demonstrating a fresh, often rough-edged take on cinema, and much of the focus of the Debuts Blogathon has considered not just the…
It’s surprising that it took five live action films before Wes Anderson tried his hand at animation; the hand-made, stop motion animation that enables this Roald Dahl adaptation is a perfect match for the gentle, whimsical nature of the director’s films. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes Anderson film through-and-through, whether it’s the wistful, pastoral…
“Human life was cheap. Film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture.” Machete Maidens Unleashed! is Mark Hartley’s follow-up to his debut, Not Quite Hollywood, which was an oral history of Australian exploitation (“Ozploitation”) films. Similarly, Machete Maidens is an entertaining romp through B-movie history, now focusing on films made in…
Halloween may not been the first masked killer movie (arriving four years after Leatherface), but the implacable Michael Myers’ shadow stretches long across the genre; establishing many significant tropes (the killer is invulnerable until he is unmasked. A perfunctory backstory that doesn’t disguise how the masked man – it’s always a man – stands in…
ccpopculture 