Post by BloodyMonkeyZ on Sept 26, 2017 11:04:29 GMT -6
NOTE: The idea behind the Chainsaw Death Match is we have two reviewers with different opinions on a movie grab chainsaws and proceed to explain why they are right and their opponent wrong. It can get bloody, but that is part of the fun. Feel free to comment your thoughts and vote for who won!
BLOODYMONKEYZ: I distinctly recall seeing this movie in the theater (by myself, but that is a subject for a different time) and enjoying it. Hell, six months later I bought the DVD. It has been about 10 years though since I last saw it, and I have to say that I am not sure what I was thinking 10 years ago. Oh yeah, I remember now why I was keen on seeing it and my expectations were tainted. This was by Alexandre Aja, the genius behind High Tension (yes it has flaws, but that is a different post too!)
Just to start with, the characters we are supposed to be rooting for are a bunch of clichéd morons. None of which I really wanted to live. Ok, I wasn’t rooting against the baby, but her family was ridiculous. Bob the asshole republican dad, Ethel the religious idiot who thinks prayer fixes everything, Brenda the hot daughter flashing her body around, Bobby the punk wanting to be cool, Lynn the oldest daughter now married with a baby doing one last family trip, and Doug the new husband that is very ineffective. Throw them all in a trailer being pulled by a big old SUV type vehicle and send them into the desert. After being guided to a short cut “not on the maps” things start to go downhill. Naturally. One of the bad guy mutants has a spike strip laid out across the road popping all 8 tires on the SUV/trailer and sending Bob careening wildly into a well placed random rock that destroys the front end of the car. They talk about having a tire blow out, but apparently none of them realize all 8 tires are blown out. How do you not notice that? Right here, at this moment, the film makes a leap that I am not willing to follow. Because after the accident they decide that the men of the group need to go back to the gas station a few miles back where they got directions. Well, Bob goes that way. For some reason Doug goes the opposite direction towards an unknown destination.
Velma: First off, how can you dis these characters? Freaking Ted Levine as Big Bob! I love Big Bob. Big Bob is the man that makes his family feel safe. Ted Levine makes even the most detestable characters enjoyable! If you take the first movie completely off the table then you can actually appreciate these characters. At first I didn’t like Doug (Pyro). If you think about the situation he is in, then you can appreciate his demeanor. His father-in-law constantly emasculates him. Imagine having to be stuck in a camper without luxuries when you had the funds not to! That blows. Lynn, his wife and the mother of his child are perfectly appropriate. In fact, she seems to be the quickest to catch on to things not being quite right. Brenda and Billy are the twins that you witness acting like children. And how could you ever forget Beauty and Beast? They are the Codo and Podo of this movie! Do you mean familiar when you say “cliché?” These are personalities everyone can relate to. The intriguing part is once the action begins how quickly they adapt. No one saw Doug coming!
BLOODYMONKEYZ: I will agree that Doug and Lynn were the most interesting characters. Big Bob though, he is the guy who bellows and puffs himself up to make everyone think he is the one making them safe. In reality though, he is the one who set them on this journey to start with. He is the one who decided to take the detour. He is the one who abandons his family to go get help. And then when he gets a vehicle (back at the gas station), he decides to look around rather than go back to his family. At this point, he knows bad stuff is going on here. He should have gone straight back to where he left the family. And then, after he gets out and witnesses the gas station attendant kill himself, he hears whispers in the dark and just starts firing his gun randomly. Until he is out of bullets. Then he jumps back in the car without noticing the bad guy in the back seat! Sorry, but BBQ Bob wasn’t much of a family protector from what I saw of him.
Oh yeah, I did forget to mention Beauty and Beast. The run away dogs that are always taking off. When Bobby finds Beauty and sees that she had been killed, he decides to keep it secret. Why in the hell would he keep it from everyone that someone killed the dog. At that point he knows something bad is happening. And as for Beast, well, when Beast goes off with Doug in search of the baby it got a bit weird. Yes, Doug shines in this part with his Louisville Slugger (did he ever even swing it?) But I hated the moment where he sees the baby through a window and the guy in the street hears Beast and comes to investigate. Somehow in that 2 seconds Doug and Beast silently get into a car (closer to where the bad guy is coming from!) and hide. But then he abandons the dog in the car. Not cool man. Going in the house and encountering the bad guy with the axe, over and over and over, with narrow escapes every 3 seconds felt silly to me. When he is suddenly about to be killed, Beast shows up and saves him. He doesn’t grab something and fight the guy, he runs and hides in the bathroom. Abandoning Beast yet again. Doug, you suck! (You are right though about Lynn being the first one to really sense something is amiss with the rest of her family blissfully unaware. . . Oh wait, how could I forget. The scene where the bad guy gets in the trailer and is over Brenda holding her mouth closed, but somehow mom and Bobby manage to not see him in bed with her as they leave the trailer to examine the fire. Really?)
Velma: Okay. Blame the gas station attendant on this blood fest. He saw Lynn snooping and made a last minute decision to send this family to certain doom. Bob was lost. The attendant had pretty much redirected him to safety until he got spooked. Seriously, you can’t judge how people react in these movies. How often have you stumbled upon your family dog gutted in the middle of a desert when your car is broken down? Would it have made sense to make everyone else freak out? Bobby was keeping watch. And honestly, if you hear someone screaming, your gut reaction is to run and help. There was enough distraction to keep Sloth’s twin brother unnoticed. I will give you my one big problem with this movie. I like Billy Drago as an actor, but in the pinnacle role of “Papa Jupe?” No way. We didn’t even get any of those prize winning lines from the first movie that made it a classic. I try not to compare the two, but Billy Drago was grossly miscast.
BLOODYMONKEYZ: Obviously it was the gas station attendant who set them on the path of their destruction. A path Bob willingly accepted. I am sure he wouldn’t have gone that way had he suspected anything. So I don’t think Bob intentionally put them in danger. But we shouldn’t get totally wrapped up with Bob. After all, this isn’t really his story. It is Doug’s story. He is the one whose character transforms as the story unfolds. And his journey is an epic one. Like you said, he is completely emasculated by Bob, and even by Bobby. When Doug can’t get the AC working, it is Bobby who jumps in and gets it working again. By the end of the movie, he has changed into a strong character willing to take on the world if need be. For the safety of his child as well as for the memory of his wife. At the beginning of the movie, I could totally see Doug being spooked by whispers in the dark and emptying his pistol wildly at flitting shadows, but by the end of it all he is a force to be reckoned with. Come after his family at your own risk (well, the bits of family still alive anyway.) Although technically Beast is just as formidable as Doug, they both have two mutant kills at the end of the movie! So while he has come a long way, he was kinda upstaged by the dog and perhaps emasculated once again.
You do bring up a great point though, and that is with regards to the mutants. It really didn’t feel like we got to meet them. Seems like Lizard and Ruby were the only two that didn’t get killed shortly after we are introduced to them. The credit montage gives a little bit of their history, but we don’t really get to see much of their characters. I honestly think it could have benefitted from some deeper characterization here. The original movie had a very distinct social commentary underlying the story, as did many of the horror movies of that era. And yes, this one puts a bit of social commentary in with regards to the atomic testing. If you miss the first 5 minutes of the movie you will not likely get any of that commentary, but you won’t really miss out on any beats of the movie itself. I don’t recall learning why they do what they do. Leatherface and family did it for food. Freddy did it for revenge against those who he sees as the legacy of his killers. Jason has a childish morality and sense of revenge. It would make sense that they want the women for breeding purposes, but after Bob the next two that are killed are women.
Velma: I totally agree with you about the mutants. In the first one, they all were named after planets! There was a completely interesting back story. Not that the nuclear backstory here wasn’t interesting. But we grew to care about Ruby in the first one, not this one. Well, I still cared, but she got a bum deal. I didn’t get the impression this crew used the women for breeding. I know in the second new Hills Have Eyes one they started it out showing the purpose of the women they took. I also found it really disturbing with the mutant breastfeeding. I could have gone a lifetime without that. This was a very curious adaptation into the horrors that could be out there and that we hope we don’t stumble upon. How many times do you drive through the desert and think, “Not taking that short cut and end up like the people on the hills have eyes!” I saw a movie once called Barn of the Naked Dead and every time I pass a dilapidated barn, I get the heeby jeebies. So, I hear your complaints, but I still love it!!!