A couple nights back, in my continuing effort to see every movie Blockbuster has ever stocked in the New Release section, I watched The Cave. Absolutely horrible. The only thing it has going for it is that I didn't technically see it until 2006, which means it didn't get to be listed as the Worst Movie of 2005 on my Big Movie Roundup. The whole thing is an utter mess and entirely unlikable.
But it did get me thinking (during the movie, which is a very bad sign) exactly why was I so offended by this piece of crap? And since I came up with a lot of reasons, I now present a rambling manifesto on what makes a good scary movie. (I love making sweeping uninformed pronunciations about things I know nothing about. Makes me feel extra special.)
The primary problem with The Cave is what's usually wrong with all really bad horror movies - they equate "Some Thing That is Scary" with "Something Scary."
Don't give up on my madness yet, I'm going somewhere here.
In the movie, the Thing that is Scary are these huge bat-like humanoids that fly around sightless in a cave. Yes, in general, giant bat-humans with Alien-type teeth are scary, in that empirical "anything that can disembowel you in the dark is scary" sort of way. But that does not mean that a movie about them will be scary. Or interesting.
To put it another way - Alien was not a scary movie because the creature was Scary (which it rightfully was). Alien was scary because the atmosphere in the ship, the interaction of the crew, and the resultant hunting that followed all combined together to create something creepy and realistic and stunningly scary.
The Cave starts with a Scary Thing, puts a bunch of people together that you don't really care about and has them get picked off one-by-one, expecting that the bats will do all the work for them, scare-wise. This is a colossal miscalculation on several levels - you only get flashes of the monsters initially and they aren't so much scary as just teeth, there is no sense of what they are or what they can do, all you know that they like to kill humans. It's not so much menace as it is just, y'know, violent.
Maybe the problem I really have is that there is a level of promise that you can almost see hidden behind the movie - the claustrophobia of being trapped miles underground in total blackness, the actually almost plausible concept of a closed ecosystem evolving in a bizarre manner, the resulting "infection" storyline - all the parts are there to be a much better movie than what resulted.
Instead of compelling dialogue and interesting character dynamics, though, you get stale lines and stereotypes that hurt the brain. Instead of ratcheting tension from dark and claustrophobic caves you have lighting everywhere and gigantic expanses and entirely gratuitous waterslides. Which I guess is a function of the action-movie side of things, but that doesn't make the movie any less bad.
I will admit, action-horror is a genre in itself and it's unfair to compare it to the more straight-up conventional horror, like say The Blair Witch or The Ring. This is your Alien, your Predator, or your AlienVsPredator (blech) type film, but still, the same rules still apply. You have to either make something directly relatable (tap into a real life fear - lost in the woods in Blair Witch), cohesive and atmospheric enough to work (implausible but still crazy scary like The Ring), or tensionally scary and frightening all the way through (Alien, Predator, or, in a different but similar way, The Grudge) to make me care. I need something to hang my horror on in a movie, and a bat with big teeth is not going to cut it.
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Oh, and a final note, don't even try to spring a twist at the end unless you've earned it, for serious. Nothing raises my ire faster than an undeserved parting shot. In other words, I have seen The Sixth Sense, and you sir, are no Sixth Sense.
Movies that I forever hate due to just such an offense - Fallen, Ghost Ship, and The Cave just to name three.
1 comment:
The Fog.
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