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The traps are elaborate, but I couldn’t care less.
The victims are forced to play a game with their lives. Most of them are losing. So what? They half-deserved to die, anyway.
After the second “Hostel” movie and the sixth entry in the “Saw” franchise, I find it increasingly difficult to feel any sympathy for the pawns trapped in some moral sociopath’s bullshit puzzle.
A cynical friend of mine uses a fitting term to describe “Cabin Fever” and the slough of movies that followed in its vein. She likes to call them “gornos,” — a combination of gore and porno. I think that’s the best way to describe horror films where the carnal celebration of violence takes the place of logic and good storytelling.
With gornos, the focus is not on plot or characterization. The only draw is to see how grotesque things get as the story comes to a close. The violence in gornos is not aesthetic like in “Pulp Fiction” or even ironic like in “Evil Dead.” It simply appeals to a person’s most visceral and crass sensibilities.
Apart from forcing audience members to shield their eyes, gornos today get caught up in a convoluted, incomprehensible story line involving murder plans so meticulous and perfectly executed even “the Joker” would have to tip his cap. If a guy dying of cancer can single handedly build a death house, spy on a bunch of people, tie them up and drag them there, then make each of them a VHS tape explaining their demise, I guess it can’t be that hard.
The initial wave of gornos was actually good. “Cabin Fever” had a lot of funny moments and the first “Saw” movie was a gripping psychological thriller — and the best Danny Glover movie where he didn’t repeatedly explain he was, in fact, “too old for this shit.” However, Hollywood milks every good idea until the utters run dry. People started pumping those movies out like “Jason” movies and sequels to “The Land Before Time.” The gimmick grew up to be an annoying cliche.
The best and most timeless horror flicks are built on suspense. Alfred Hitchcock never needed to put a barbed wire cage over someone’s face to make an audience collectively wet its pants. The ominous shadows lurking in the bathroom of the Bates Motel were more than enough.
Filmmakers think, since people have grown more detached to violence, they have to up the ante to catch people’s attention. That may be the case, but the best way to captivate an audience is by appealing to the human spirit with a compelling story. Hopefully, directors catch on to this before the premiere of “Saw VII: Electric Boogaloo.”
Earl can be reached at
entertainmenteditor@theorion.com
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