THE MAGUFFIN
Roll Over, Wes Craven
Kathy Hofmeyr
Posted Thu, 15 Mar 2007

It looks as though the days of teenybop schlock are finally over. The Wes Craven ('A Nightmare on Elm Street'), John Carpenter ('Halloween') and Sean Cunningham ('Friday the 13th') generation, having softened in recent years into knock-offs of the hugely popular 'Scream' trilogy, have given way to a new group of screechsters dubbed "The Splat Pack".

While the epithet is handy, it is also an unfortunate tag, since it implies that its very diverse members are virtual carbon copies of one another. It lumps together the very stylish Malaysian-Australian director James Wan, imaginative Aussie screenwriter Leigh Whannell, blackly comic heavy metallist Rob Zombie from the 'States and British prodigy Neil Marshall with rip-off artists like Eli Roth, Darren Lynn Bousman and Greg McLean.

One thing’s for sure, though, the rise of these young filmmakers suggests a nostalgia for the ultra-violent gore fests of the late '70s and early '80s, which saw low-budget, high-body count films like 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and Sam Raimi’s 'Evil Dead' zombie films coining it at the box office and developing a strong cult following.

Cheap 'n nasty

The Whannell-Wan project 'Saw' has had an enormous impact on the horror film industry. Heavily influenced by David Fincher’s 'Se7en', it had a noir-ish quality both in its appearance and in its whodunit structure. Sadly, this original film has itself been franchised, Whannell selling his soul by penning 'Saw 2' and 'Saw 3' — both directed by Bousman and currently disgracing our small and big screens respectively. A fourth instalment is in pre-production; these things have a way of spreading, diluting their freshness and creative merit as they move further and further away from their original intentions toward mindless mass-production.

Eli Roth’s 'Hostel', whose poster’s top billing proudly declares: "Executive Producer: Quentin Tarantino" (always a worrying sign if that’s the biggest draw card you’ve got) is a hateful, brainless litany of gore for gore’s sake. It’s an American exercise in xenophobic misrepresentation, mixed with a kind of perverse, masochistic patriotism. The film itself is sheer torture for viewers as well as the characters, until after seventy-odd minutes one has to stop fighting the gag reflex and start laughing. Once you start, you can’t stop. This way lies madness.

Roth’s first major picture, 'Cabin Fever', was equally horrible. It follows the time-laboured tradition of “bunch of kids on road trip meet cretinous rural stereotypes on their way to secluded cabin, where a harmless weekend of sex and drugs turns into a bloodbath after they accidentally piss off and/or murder a local”, but throws in a flesh-eating virus and a rabid dog for extra gross-out value.

Ripping off the masters

‘Cabin Fever’ owes a pretty large debt to the ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy, but Roth’s film lacks the playfulness and self-deprecating humour of the cult classic, going instead for the kind of infantile, self-congratulatory jokes that would amuse fans of the Farrelly brothers’ oeuvre. If anything, ‘Cabin Fever’ is more offensive than Roth's successor for the way it glories in misogynist nightmare phantasy, reducing interchangeable young women to “pussy” wherein lie contagion, devastation and, ultimately, damnation.

McLean’s recent road-trip-turns-to-rape-and-slaughter movie, ‘Wolf Creek’, is little more than an Australian ‘Chainsaw Massacre’. It has all the trappings, including a hint of cannibalism; rotting, headless previous victims en suite and the tantalising “based on a true story” bollocks that, in the last minutes of the film, seeks to legitimise all that has gone before by turning the survivor into an innocent-accused martyr.

Glimmer of hope

But a glimmer of hope sparkles in the eye of enfant terrible Neil Marshall, a funny little man from Newcastle-upon-Tyne whose track record as the director of great thrillers is thus far two-for-two. ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’ are available in most good video shops and guaranteed to scare the bejeezus out of even the most jaded veteran.

‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002) is the story of a six soldiers sent on what is ostensibly a routine training exercise in Scotland. It transpires that they are in fact the bait in a trap set by the SS to catch a werewolf or two. Not much new there, but the combination of the old “the army wants to study it and use it for the greater good/to take over the world” theme (see ‘Alien’, for starters) with the extremely difficult-to-pull-off werewolf motif is achieved far more plausibly than one might expect.

The cast is marvellous, ranging from nice-guy Sean Pertwee (‘Swing Kids’, ‘Life, Love and Everything Else’) to taciturn, furrow-browed Kevin McKidd (‘Rome’, ‘Bedrooms and Hallways’) and relative newcomer Emma Cleasby. But even these performances are outweighed by the werewolves themselves.

Real werewolves

I had never before seen an onscreen werewolf that even began to match up to those in my imagination. They were always clumsy, mangy, slow-moving animatronic things that looked ready to fall to bits at the drop of a paper clip — never mind a silver bullet. Even the werewolf in the Canadian cult classic ‘Ginger Snaps’ seemed to be based on a cross between a llama and a very old hyena. Marshall has finally conjured up the werewolf equivalent of Dracula — a sleek, glorious and terrifying beast whose sheer power and savage intelligence, combined with a terrible beauty, will mesmerise a victim with fear.

Marshall, too, is clearly a Raimi fan, but rather than ripping off plot, location and concept from his mentor, he pays homage via the visuals and the occasional reference (one of the soldiers is named Sgt. Bruce Campbell and the film contains a kitchen fight scene delectably familiar from ‘Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn’ in which Ash grapples with his own demonically possessed hand). His films are gritty, thrilling and clever, opting rather for the icy hand on the back of the neck than the drawn-out bleeding, screaming, hacking sequence.

His films also are virtually unique in the genre for the absence of That Girl — she of the ripped bodice, no discernible sense of direction and apparently a full frontal lobotomy. The cast of ‘Dog Soldiers’ is almost exclusively male, with Cleasby playing a zoologist who may know more than she lets on.

Descent... into hell

‘The Descent’ (2005), by contrast, features an exclusively female cast (with one minor exception in the opening scene) of relative unknowns. It’s the story of a girls-only weekend away — but not in the usual context of fluffy pyjamas, marshmallows and pillow-fights. These women are professionals and extreme sportswomen, not helpless teenagers.

The film begins with a brief and brutal prologue establishing, with impressive economy, the characters’ relationships and personalities (and their compulsion to stare death in the face, this time through white-water rafting). A year later the same group reunites in North America to seek thrills in an uncharted cave, where claustrophobia and pitch darkness are the stalking monsters which threaten their every move… until they find something lying in wait deep beneath the earth’s surface.

Marshall possesses that rare talent, granted only to a select few, for building tension to an absolute crescendo without ever showing his hand. To call him the next Hitchcock would be stretching things well into the realm of hyperbole, but he does share with The Master the gift of sly suspense; that ability to make the viewer catch one’s breath in surprise and leap three feet in the air in genuine shock without ever resorting to geysering blood or vivid close-ups of stupid, helpless agony.

So let Roth and his ilk keep the moniker of Splat Pack — its cheap, hackneyed reference fits them very well. But the others, particularly Marshall, deserve a slightly elevated epithet which acknowledges their distinction, which sets them apart from the lowlier peddlers of viscera to the masses.

I think I’ll call them the Gore-teurs.