Movies: Iffy pop?

Digitally-empowered fandom favors the group. Author and journalist Caleb Crain once described the rise to dominance of a mode of reading that he dubbed "groupiness." In the context of groupiness, readers approach works not for entertainment or information, but rather for the purpose of belonging to the network of communities that will grow up around such works. The consequence is that art becomes something that exists mainly to be discussed. It's primary function is to be talked about. It's a milieu in which a book gets read because the reader knows an important TV adaptation of it is coming out and they don't want to be left out of the water-color talk about the televised version.

(Crain and others go on to argue that this has imposed a specific, mass cult, one-sized fits all style on art. I don't know that I buy that. Cults and congeal around just about anything. Few authors get the kind of groupiness going that Robert Bolano does, and you'd have to work extra hard to prove he panders to his audience.)

One of the stranger effects of the culture of groupiness is that, on occasion, the chatter is genuinely more interesting than the object being discussed. For example, the utterly forgettable Captivity will be justly remembered not for anything within the film itself, but for its cultural position as the straw that broke the torture porn subgenre's back. Critical reaction to that film actually became the most important and interesting thing about it.

On a similar note, the 2009 remake of Last House on the Left might be better remembered not for anything director Dennis Iliadis or producers Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham put up on screen, but rather as a trench in the generational conflict between Gen X horror fans and their vastly more numerous Millennial replacements. The film, with a little assist by a dismissive review by Roger Ebert, became a touchstone for older critics who bemoaned the state of modern horror. Kids these days, they aren't creative, they don't know their history, they just want mindless violence. No respect, I tell you. Meanwhile the vast horde of the young answered with votes: On imdb, you'll notice that the remake actually scores higher than the original.

As far as controversies go, the generational conflict was the biggest, but hardly the most interesting. The remake, from both a technical and narrative standpoint, is simply a stronger film. Krug and his gang go from comic book baddies to something more like the highway men of the source material. The transformation of the film's lead family is more gradual, desperate, and genuine. The role of the daughter is bulked up and she becomes heroic in her desperate struggle to survive rather then a semi-disposable casus belli. The conflict between Krug and his own son is emphasized, bringing the tribal conflict aspect to the fore. One famous online essay suggests that the original Left carried traces of the original folk tale's conflict between Christian and Jewish identities in the Dark Ages - but this strikes me as a misrepresentation of the cultural context of the original story. The conflict in Europe's northern countries was not over converting Jews (a nearly insignificant demographic in the north), but rather a conflict over converting pre-Christian pagan cultures. The heart of the tale was about what happens when you ask Norsemen to turn the other cheek. The new film captures this sense of subsurface, reluctant, unavoidable barbarism better than the old one did. Finally, while the film lost its vibrant low-fi look, it is gracefully shot and achieves moments real visual power. The new kids were right.

The more interesting controversy was the bizarre undercard battle about whether or not your head would explode if it was put in a doorless microwave. I kid you not.

The "money shot" of the flick depicts the embattled patriarch of the Collingwood clan delivering death to Krug through the overly elaborate process of surgically rendering him paralyzed from the neck down and then sticking his noggin in a microwave oven that's had it's door broken away. It is, admittedly, the goofiest part of the new film. A self-conscious nod to the McGuyver-ish trap making of the parents in the original, it is uncharacteristic of the remake's Collingwood and feels like an add on. That said, would a dude's head actually explode?

Sadly, this is a proposition I can't test directly. Not because I don't want to, but rather because I do not own a microwave oven. Faced with that limitation, we'll have to just reason our way through this.

Here's your standard microwave oven set up.

Simplified, a microwave's magnetron (which should be a transforming robot, but isn't) takes high voltage electricity from your wall and makes microwave radiation. The use of the word "radiation" summons up visions of nuclear radiation, but you're conceptually closer to the heart of the matter if you think of the magnetron as a radio wave broadcaster; the magnetron sends out radio waves at a frequency of 2450 megahertz. The specifics don't matter so much as the fact that these waves can't pass through the body of the oven and they are absorbed by fats, water, and sugar. The process of absorbing this energy excites the molecules and causes them to move, This, in turn, causes friction. That, in turn, causes heat. This is why plastic won't heat up in your microwave, but a potato or a small cat will. (When you warm up leftovers and your Tupperware container is hot to the touch, it's because the food inside was heated up and this, in turn, heated up the Tupperware. The microwaves bounced off the container itself.)

So, the magnetron makes these waves and they are contained and directed by a wave guide: an empty channel in your oven that directs the flow of the waves. The waves then hit a mode stirrer which scatters them. This is meant to distribute the waves around the oven cavity, so you don't have one intense hot spot right below the wave guide.

This explains how, even with the door off, something in a microwave is going to get zapped. Unlike a conventional oven, a microwave isn't cooking objects by concentrating heat in a closed area. It's bombarding the cooking object with radio waves. The containment helps the process by reflecting stray waves back at the object, but it could be done without any sort of containment.

Without a doubt, Collingwood could cook Krug's head. By jamming the lock of the microwave oven with any ol' object, he could bypass the standard safety features that shut off the magnetron when the oven door opens. Then, placing Krug's head within the oven, our villain would be exposed to the magnetron's waves. These would excite the particles of sugar, water, and fat in his head. Heat would be generated and Krug would cook. The effect would probably slightly diminished because waves that miss Krug's head might bounce off the cavity and escape the oven, but this wouldn't alter the outcome.

But would his head explode?

That's a different matter. Because of the way microwaves cook things, they can sometimes cause a phenomenon called superboiling. When this happens, the liquid in the oven is hot enough to boil, but the lack of gasses in the liquid means that there's no steam or motion happening. You've got a really hot liquid that is just sitting there. This phenomenon is pretty rare because, usually, impurities in the liquids you're cooking (like maybe you're reheating a soup made up of several ingredients of different densities) react to the microwave differently and cause the release of "seed bubbles": gasses that kickstart the standard boiling process.

In a superboiling state, a liquid is basically waiting to explode. Mixing another substance with it or agitating it can cause it to go from a superboiled state to a slightly cooler, but now really active normal boiling state. Though what we're actually seeing is something cooling down to an agitated state, what it looks like is a still, calm liquid suddenly going ape. It looks like an explosion.

In theory, elements within Krug's head could reach a superboiled state and then, because of a shift in his position or a glitch in the power of the oven, go boiling and appear to suddenly explode. But this is extremely unlikely. The human head, like a goat's head stew, is one of those heterogenous environments that would have no problem venting gasses to adjust for boiling. There's a chance that individual elements might react with localized superboiling (his eyes might pop, for example), but this would be a real outside chance. Furthermore, it takes awhile for something to reach a superboiled state. In all likelihood, long before his head blew up, Krug would be dead from the lethal heat the agitated cells in his head were creating.

Preliminary conclusion: Krug would definitely die, but his head wouldn't explode.

And that's my two cents on what was clearly the single most significant film debate of the first decade of the 21st century.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #11.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Publicity still for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), featuring Ken Sagoes.

Movies: QFD.

A sequel to the remake of the original - but not a remake of the sequel of the original - The Hills Have Eyes 2 gets some credit for ambition, but then squanders most of the goodwill it threatened to build up on slick, but vacuous, execution. With hints of occasionally subtle characterization, provocative social subtexts, a genuine expansion of the franchise's backstory, just a hint of a homo-social man crush, and an extended allusion to Greco-Roman mythology, T2HE2 (pronounced "tea two, he two") sounds awesome on paper. Sadly, the finished product swaps high pro glo and frantic action for story development, making this a blood-spattered Goonies for folks who thought The Descent was too cerebral.

The film picks up several years after the close of the last flick. The US Army, eager to cover up that fact that a colony of mutated humans has been living in the caves of the Army's now defunct nuke test site, launched a search and destroy mission that wiped out the remnants of the mutant family left over from the first film. To be sure we suffer no more unsightly mutant flare-ups, the Army sent in a bunch of scientists and civilian contractors to the place electronic surveillance around the mouth of the mine system that served as Mutant Central. The film opens with these folks sending a call for supplies to the base. And then gettin' the business end of a mutant insurgency.

Cut to base. A ragtag group of woefully incompetent National Guardsmen are training, to epic fail result, for a tour in Afghanistan. Because they need to do a little punitive desert survival training, the CO sends them to deliver the supplies requested by the now mostly dispatched scientists. When the citizen soldiers arrive on the scene, the movie begins in earnest and it becomes a straight-forward run-and-gun exercise, with the soldiers facing of against the poor country relations of the X-Men.

T2HE2 has some nifty stuff. First, although the soldiers are – like all soldiers in horror films must be – a hopeless group of jackasses, the film spends less time than average showing us the standard "breaking down under pressure" scenes. We get a few "Game over, man!" set pieces, but the film manages to stay admirably on point with regards to the fact that these people are trained soldiers who are determined to survive. We must still wait for the day when professional soldiers in a horror movie actually exhibit the training and skill that make real life US troops such frightening instruments of destruction. (Hold this ratio in mind for a moment: In the infamous "Black Hawk down" incident in Somalia, just under 20 US soldiers died; enemy and civilian casualties were estimated to be between 1,000 and 1,500, with another 3,000 to 4,000 wounded. This is not to celebrate our ability to kill others, but to illustrate that, when put in a situation where their use of force is unchecked, the average US soldier is capable of bringing a truly staggering amount of violence to bear on a situation. Against what amounts to a handful of particularly ornery Tusken Raiders, it seems to me that contest would be incredibly one-sided.) But this is a nice step in that direction. As a fan of army vs. monsters flicks, a critical soft spot I picked up from watching "military vs. giant bugs" flicks on Saturday afternoon television, I especially appreciated a scene in which the embattled Guards execute a clever ambush to draw one of the mutants out of hiding.

Second, the new mutant designs are nice. The premise of this flick is that the mutant colony shown in the first flick was simply one of several mutant clans. Another group, even more mutated, existed deep within the mines. Their links to the upper world were presumably severed when the surface clan was wiped out, so they just now surfaced. More monstrous and freakish than the first group, they make for pretty nifty beasts. Two standouts include Chameleon, a mutant whose sores and densely-packed goiters resemble the rock surface so closely that he can blend in with his surroundings, and the mutant's alpha male, Daddy Hades. Like his mythological namesake, Big Poppa has a thing for kidnapping womenfolk and dragging them down into the underworld. However, where Hades was ostensibly in love with Persephone, Daddy H really just needs ovum to continue the species. The new mutants, we learn, are an all male society. (Unfortunately, unless you stick around for the credits or read the comic prequel – scripted by the Gray and Palmiotti team behind the current Jonah Hex comic series – you'll never catch the mythological allusion. Director Weisz didn't find it interesting enough to warrant any mutant speaking Daddy's name, wasting that particular opportunity.)

Hades's compulsory mutant repopulation initiative, and what it means for the Guard unit's two female soldiers, brings us to the topic of gender in T2HE2. This film struck me as a movie that really, really tried not to be stupid about gender. But it couldn't help itself. Sure the women get cutesy names while all the guys go by their last names or suitably jockish nicknames (like "Crank"). And sure, once we get down into the caves, the women can't get down to their olive drab GI issue tank tops fast enough. But, on the whole, the women, the next door girl type Amber and the no nonsense MILF Missy, are slightly more likable than their male counterparts, less prone to self-destructive impulses or stupid bravado (though the whole unit is the victim of the piece, so everybody manages to catch more than a few attacks of the stupids), and actually do a respectable amount of the action-hero labor. There's a hint of a romantic entanglement between Amber and one of her male counterparts, but the film wisely dispatches the male half of the duo early, leaving her a clear field of movement for the rest of the flick. The film not only allows its female leads full rights as protagonists, it actually hints at an awareness of their position as "inside outsiders" within the unit. When the women serve as bait in a mutant trap, their discomfort with their male teammates' easy willingness to so use them is palpable. Later, when Missy is captured, the men in the unit – despite having received the same info as the women about what mutants do to lady guests – are quick to write her off. Amber, however, makes it her mission to find Missy and either free her or put her out of her misery. Finally, when Amber is caught slipping a bullet into her pocket – saving one last round for herself – she gets a lecture from one of the men about how dead is never better. Her expression reveals that she's not worried about dead. That this plays out fairly subtly, almost as if it were a decision by the screenwriters or actors that the director was unaware of, drives it home more poignantly than if the female leads had all been post-Buffy style women warriors. One imagines this is how feminism really happens in rigorously all-male environments like the military: on the sly and quietly, in plain sight, but coded.

Unfortunately, all of this interesting work is undermined by the light handling of what might be one of the most cynical scenes in modern horror. At one point, in their desperate search through the mutants' mine structure, the remaining soldiers use the sound of Missy getting raped to "echo locate" her. What is notable about this scene is how unaffecting it is. We're subjected to a few seconds of Daddy Hades forcing himself upon a bent over Missy, then we cut to a handful of soldiers going, "Hey, that's Missy. We'd better hurry up. Though, you know, if anybody wants to stop and discuss strategy and stuff, I'm sure Missy will be fine. It's not like they're killing her, right?" The blogger behind the excellent Day of the Woman blog has justly pointed out that genre cinema and its fans have long copped a trite attitude towards the subject of rape. She points out that most film reviews of Cannibal Holocaust mention the violence done to the characters, but tend to simply skip over the multiple scenes of sexual assault and rape (including my own review, I'm sad to say). I recall I a blogger– I don't recall who now – opining that he assumed "goodthink critics" of the super-bomb Watchmen would attack the film for its depiction of Dr. Manhattan splatting VC. The possibility that somebody might take offense at the idea that a sexual assault so brutal that it breaks ribs would leave its victim pining for more wasn't mentioned. [UPDATE: The reviewer in question was Sean Collins. Sean explains why my mention of this particular example is misleading the comments.] Genre works, and horror especially, have a long tradition of trivialized sexual violence. T2HE2 falls into this tradition of casual sexual brutality and suffers greatly for it. What was meant to be a lively and entertaining run-and-gun exercise, in the vein of Aliens or Dog Soldiers, derails in that scene.

This weird one step forward, two steps back approach is apparent whenever the film stumbles across a socially relevant subtext. The situation our heroes find themselves in, by the admission of screenwriter Wes Craven, was meant to parallel the Afghanistan/Iraq Wars. This analogy holds true in the sense that America got in over its head, but it also seems to argue that Afghans and Iraqis aren't pure strain humans and, by extension, suggests that the only "solution" to the threat they inherently pose (the mutants are cannibals who can only breed through rape, so open dialog and humanitarian efforts would be lost on them – a point made in the film) is complete quarantine or extermination. In the filmmakers' defense, I don't think they hold such views. That their film can be said to express such views is more a sign of the film's lazy construction and not the filmmakers' political convictions.

Visually, T2HE2 is proficient, but not particularly interesting. Filmed in the desert hills of Morocco, the breathtaking landscapes conspire with the film's cinematographer. There's hardly any external shot that doesn't contain some startlingly pleasing terrain. Still, compared to the sun-blasted, dried out, overexposed color palate of Aja's flick, these shots seem a little simplistic and inert. Once we go inside the tunnels, there's a gory charm to the whole thing, but nothing we haven't seen before. Despite the grime and guts, it is certainly less startling than the freakishly macabre test ground homes of the first flick. The acting, like the filming, is functional rather than inspired. The cast hits their marks and delivers their lines, occasionally sliding in bits of admirable work. Quite admirable if you think of how little the script demands from them (mentally and emotionally, I mean – physically, I suspect the shoot was torture).

T2HE2 is more a curiosity than a success. Mechanically entertaining in the disengaged and automatic way that movement and sound inevitably draw our attention, the meat of the film is only passable. It does have the advantage of containing some subtexts that you might have fun teasing out and mulling over, but you'd have to be pretty generous with the flick to claim they are interesting and substantial enough to redeem the flick as a whole.

Movies: People are people, so why should it be . . .

For some reason, I've always mingle the titles of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and The People Under the Stairs. I don't know why this is. The former, which I've seen several times over the past two decades, is a grim and nasty low-fi shocker. The latter, which I saw for the first time this weekend, is a bizarre marriage child's adventure flick, dark fantasy film, and grindhouse brutality. Think Goonies meets The Girl Next Door with a dash of family-style Chainsaw Massacre thrown in, if you wrap your noggin around that mess of mashed-up elements. Two less similar films would be hard to find.

The plot of People involves a young boy known as Fool who joins ghetto-Fagin Leroy (played by Ving Rhames, the flick's only "star" in one of his occasional pre-Pulp Fiction roles) to rob the house of the cruel landlords who are threatening to toss Fool's family – completely with deathly ill mother – out onto the street. The target of the robbery is the gold coins the landlords supposedly keep in their home.

The robbery, as these things so often do, goes all pear-shaped on our heroes when they find that the intended victims of their larcenous ways are, in fact, a crazy pair of violent nut cases who count among their many hobbies the preservation of Victorian furniture, the firing of large caliber weapons, the feeding of human flesh to their killer dog, and the keeping of a small tribe of cannibalistic teens locked in their basement.

Oh, they also have a waif of a young girl pulling a solo Flowers in the Attic bit in one of the upstairs bedrooms and a teenage boy living behind the walls and in the crawl spaces of the house.

Fool survives his original encounter and returns home with some of the loot; but he made a promise to return and free the young girl. Will Fool survive the final showdown? Duh Duh Dum!

I think that covers it.

People Under the Stairs is a very uneven flick. I give it credit for trying to pull together so many disparate elements and, remarkably, it manages to fuse quite a bit of its curious material into a lightly involving bit of cinema. There is something genuinely exciting about the "treasure hunt" plot and the surreal fairy-tale trappings. It is hard not to root for Fool as the stakes mount and the situations he faces get weirder and weirder.

Unfortunately, the patchwork approach is also the film's greatest weakness. Deft directors can blend shocks and laughs, but Wes Craven occasionally dips into that sort of inky dark behavior that isn't so much shocking and disturbingly dispiriting. For example, for all the horror unleashed by the creepy landlords, they are mostly absurd characters who strike the viewer as vaguely comical in their excesses. What, then, are viewers supposed to feel when they get treated to a scene in which the female landlord forces her girl captive to take a bath in steaming hot water in order to wash away the dirt touching an African American boy has left on her? Suddenly we've gone from a cartoonish evil to a genuine sliver of nightmare. And the film just as suddenly wants to turn back into a cartoon and carry on as if nothing happened. It leaves a bit of a bad taste.

The People Under the Stairs is a mostly entertaining flick whose spastic exuberance sometimes gets the best of itself. Its strange combination of children's adventure and adult horror brings to mind a sort of American, suburban, silly answer to del Toro's more accomplished, more serious dark fantasies. Using the fan-favorite Concepts from Differential Geometry Movie Rating System, I'm giving People a fair Pullback rating. This weird little flick will deliver the goods provided you don't expect a hardcore horror film or demand to much of its modest fantasy plot.

Movies: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb . . . and the taste of human flesh.

I did not have high hopes for the remake of The Hills Have Eyes released earlier this year. The original, while fun, was not a particular favorite of mine. Perhaps more importantly, it wasn't the sort of film I thought would be improved through the simple addition of more gore and slime – the overarching concept behind remakes since Bay started producing his somewhat tedious remakes of iconic '70s horror flicks. Happily, and somewhat to my surprise, the remake was better than I think anybody has reason to expect.

The plot, a reasonably close adaptation of the original, involves a family traveling West who takes one of those many unfortunate short cuts that litter the imagined landscape of the modern horror film. It is this family's bad luck to run afoul of a clan of mutated flesh-eating morlocks – the descendants of a mining community that refused to leave the area when the US government decided to use the area around their mining town for nuclear testing. The how and why of the situation is interesting, if not particularly convincing, but it does efficiently get all the elements into place: stranded family, harsh desert, mutant cannibals. What we've got is the classic Beau Geste trapped and surrounded scenario. Will the family pull together? Can they fend off their relentless attackers? The same plot has served Hollywood in across genres, from Rio Bravo to Aliens, for as long as people have been going to the ol' picture show, and it is so popular for a very simple reason: done well, it gives good movie. And, for the most part, The Hills Have Eyes is a well executed, tense, and worthwhile addition to the long tradition of the "circle wagons" sub-genre.

Much of the credit goes to the dramatic sensibilities director and screenwriter Alexandre Aja brought to his remake. One of the secrets to his success was the realization that tension, and not gore, is the real core of the "circle wagons" style film. Yes, there's gore in them there Hills, but the real core of the flick is the ever increasing tension and the cat and mouse game between our fish-out-of-water protagonists and their cannibalistic counterparts. The gore, what there is over it, is deployed to elevate the stakes and not as a sort of nerco-porn collection of travesties to wallow in. For comparison, think to that banner movie of the new horror revival Hostel. How much abuse was really necessary to tell the viewer that the characters were truly and deeply in horrific danger? Certainly some torture helps heighten our fear, but eventually we're not adding to tension so much as emerging ourselves in the details of bodily mutilation as a form of shocking our jaded sensibilities – pursuing excess as a way to get the jolt of the new (and it is at that tipping point that the guiding imagination behind Hostel shifts its sympathies from the side of the tortured victim to the sadistic thrill craving torturers). Instead of simply throwing around buckets of gore, Aja, who is not shy when it comes to aesthetic splatter, uses every violent incident to add an edge to the mounting levels of tension. This strategy explains why Aja is happy to off characters in the blink of an eye or even off screen, denying the gorehound his or her visual money shot, but increasing the viewers' sense of the protagonists' powerlessness. This is not to say Aja has made a gore free film – we get treated to a meat freezer of human parts that would make the Texas Chainsaw Family salivate as well at the now obligatory "hero loses some fingers" shot (the wound of choice for the new horror director – it is the perfect damage as is induces crazy squirming among audience members, but does not kick in their disbelief when, despite the pain and blood loss such a wound must actually cause, your hero continues to fight, run, and otherwise generally function). Interestingly, much of the gore comes from our heroes picking off mutants with axes and the like and from the violence the mutants bring down on our heroes. Again, the gore functions dramatically, emphasizing how savage our once innocent family has become in response to savagery.

The second secret to Aja's success is the use of imagery so seductive and powerful that it overcomes logical objections. This is, I think, what shows that that, despite the English dialogue, its origins in an American cult classic, and its American setting, Hills is very much a European horror film. Europeans have made an entire subgenre of horror that operates primarily on style over substance. From the iconic Eyes Without a Face to nearly any film from the Italian masters of horror – in the old world, creating an luxurious dream vision of the horrific trumps narrative logic or even the use of cause and effect. This is way Europe elevated the work of Poe and Lovecraft years before Americans realized what these homegrown horror masters had produced. There is even a familiar Euro-horror pattern that we see in Hills, namely: Take hero, remove to dream-like setting, sever ties from real-world, now pile on psycho-horror images. Think Susperia and Phenomenon. Heck, think Oasis of the Zombies or Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory or Murder Mansion. All these movies start with our heroes not just finding themselves out of their normal surroundings, but in a surreal, almost magical and otherworldly place. The viewer is prepped for the illogic of what will follow by repeated warnings and ominous suggestions that they are no longer under the old order of the real (think of Phenomenon's wind that everybody suggests always blows and drives people mad – the idea is that the very weather in the place is insane).

In this film, Aja uses decaying fencing, faded signs with warnings from the government on them, the fading cell phone connections of our primary hero to suggest a drift into an alien otherness. His sun-blasted desert reminds one of an alien, lifeless landscape – even down to a visual allusion to Luke Skywalkers high-tech binoculars from Star Wars. This family didn't just drive into the desert; they've driven to another world were the normal rules – not just of civility, but of logic – don't apply. This division is necessary because there is a lot that is illogical, if not outright stupid, about the plot. For example, though the mutants' isolation is the key to their continued existence, apparently enough people come through their desert hellhole that they can live pretty exclusively on long-pig and even manage to keep a meat freezer full of seemingly fresh human parts well stocked. Also, though authorities are well aware of the missing folks these mutants have been offing regularly (and presumably in great numbers) since the 1960s, they've been unable to find either the above ground town the mutants call home or the giant crater full of victims' cars. This is especially absurd given the first people we see killed are a government research team. While one presumes a good number of the civilian victims could have all been lured off their path and therefore lost to any who might look for them, the government research team was presumably intentionally in the former radioactive zone, with their bosses fully aware of where they were sent. Still, while watching the film, these objections get rolled over by the excellent pacing and superior visuals. In our case, my friend and I even commented on some of these problems as we watched, but we were to into the flick to let our brains ruin it.

Aja pulled this same trick with less success in his breakout film, the much loved and much reviled High Tension. There, he attempted to use strong visuals to cover up a plot that simply does not work. Though the film has its fans (I'm one of them), even the most devoted of its supporters must try to explain away that films confused and unnecessary ending. I've heard nobody say the ending "works." At best, people argue it should be ignored in the light of better parts of the film. Here, the trick is much more effective.

There is a second way in which this is a very European flick. The somewhat pointless display of the target family's ultimately useless faith, the simplistic conflict set up between the clichéd right-wing thuggish father and the initially ineffective liberal wimp, the Lolita-ish teen daughter, the cultural artifacts the viewer sees are limited to barely heard crap rock and a short clip of Divorce Court – this family is some sort of Euro-intellectual's stereotype of the all-American family. The setting, a vacuous nowhere-land that swallows its residents whole, is the "no there there" visions of America related by Baudrillard, Bernard-Henri Levy, and dozens of other slumming French philosophers given horrible, literal life. The mutants are an odd study in the American body. Their deformed bodies are metaphors only slightly less subtle than the bloated American forms waddling through The Triplets of Belleville. It is an odd study in America has horrible nightmare vision, a weird byproduct of European's love/hate relationship with the US.

All and all, despite its flaws, Aja proves that he's a developing a real mastery of that uniquely European hallucinatory style of horror. In this case, he may have outdone a lackluster original film by bringing his Continental style to it. He certainly out did his previous film. Head for the Hills, it's worth the rental.