thriller

James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi thriller The Abyss took audiences to the steely blue depths of the Caribbean where the film’s plucky, devil-may-care bunch of oil riggers (in these movies aren’t they all?) square off sub-a-sub with a rogue SEAL team. Cameron’s film represents one of the final contemporaneous Cold War allegories in mainstream U.S. cinema. Though multiple edits and a ballooning budget kept the film from financial success it’s stark verisimilitude coupled with groundbreaking special effects endeared it to many critics.

As with any horror sub-genre type, the more films that we consume the more we become aware of the rules and possibilities. The slasher genre had its deep cuts during the early to late 1980’s but eventually their impact became that of a paper cut due to their paper thin plots and supposed ending twists. Even the thriller genre isn’t free from fizzling down to a pile of ash. The number of mystery films released with a solid misdirecting plot has become so dismal that any sign of a new iteration is exhausting.

Hollywood always attempts to make the planets align when it comes to horror movies. Taking every successful film from the past and morphing all of those ideas into one film has to work! Right? Sadly, no, that’s not how it works. At least that didn’t work for Warner Bros. crime thriller with a splash of horror mojo, “The Factory”. Take one part “Silence of the Lambs”, a little “Manhunter”, and add every Ashley Judd crime thriller available and “The Factory” is born. While it may be a distorted love child of the past, it has a strong cast, great photography, and a surprisingly twisted twist.

“Twixt” surprised me more than I could have expected. I went into this film blindly, and by the end I chocked it all up to a valiant effort from a first time director. There were some intriguing concepts strewn here and there but overall it felt like an introductory mess. Needless to say when I saw the director and writer of the film I was floored. Francis Ford Coppola, director of iconic films such as “The Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now”, had taken a stab at the horror genre. The whole feeling of the film changed with that knowledge.

When I watched “Aftershock” by Nicolas Lopez I knew immediately after watching it how I felt. Much like the recent “Evil Dead” remake I went back and forth during the movie but once I left the theater it hit me like a residual aftershock: that was dumb. Pardon my lame and immature word, but it’s the first thought that came to my mind. In big boy words, “Aftershock” suffered from a genre identity crisis and ultimately created a pointless story full of empty character development.

I have rituals in my mind that I like to perform while I’m watching a film. First, I clear my mind of any preconceived notions or assumptions of what I’m about to watch. Second, I try to lay out the flow of each act to see, in the end, if the plot points throughout pay off. And the last thing I do is put myself in the position to ask: if I was given the first half of the script, how would I finish this movie? The first two rituals are to aid in my understanding of the technical side of the filming, but the last part is purely a test on the predictability of the movie.