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Do I need to say SPOILER FUCKING ERS?
If not then I look a bit silly.
But yeah.
The problem that I see with a lot of games adaptations is that people will generally want to see their favourite monsters, big screen-size (is that a fair comment?)..the problem is that while complying with this, you're also breaking the "keep it in the dark" rule. I thought the little burned goblins at the start were fucking nasty, they really did rate highly on my scare-o-meter and yeah, I did look away from the screen when they opened their eyes and screamed.
However, when the policewoman had the gunfight with the staggering femme monster, that creature lost all it's scariness as soon as it came out of the fog and the distance. PyramidHead's Pyramidal Head is a good design feature but the big swords didn't work for me because we know that they're physically too big. I know he's a demon but the silliness of the swords really took away from the freakiness of the head.
I thought the nurses failed to some extent because of the whole attempt to make them look sexual, specifically in a completely unsubtle, FHM, "oh look hot nurses" style, cleavages and all. It just looked tacky as did the obvious "for the lads" soft porno moments with the two female leads.
Didn't like the "oh look woman is skinned", "oh look woman is melted", "oh look woman is quartered by barbed wire" bits at all. Ridiculously over the top, even cartoonish, and stopped any real scariness. That's not to say that I want to see women killed in more realistic ways. What I want to see is, should there be brutal violence in a film, that such violence against people and animals is treated as a nasty, traumatic thing that matters for more than a few second's cursory slashwank, because that's what it is. Seriously, the minute the blood started splashing ruined the frightening atmosphere and forced the film into the realm of, er, "dark fantasy" rather than anything genuinely scary/transgressive which is annoying because it really could have been something special.
Also, the shot at the begining with the waterfall where we see hell via cheesy 3D Studio camera swoop. Needless. Irritating. Every book on 3D Graphics/CGI says on the first page "Don't move the camera all over the place just because it's no longer a physical object and you can". Destroys any illusion of reality because we know that in the real world a movie camera couldn't move like that. The waterfall alone was hellish enough and could have acted as a precursor to any later hell imagery.
Sharon's drawings didn't look like kid's drawings. Kids don't crack out the black and red crayons when they're trying to draw nasties, it's Goths that do that. Okay, so she said "I didn't draw them" but, well...if it was a demon trying to fuck shit up would they draw in an average broody teenager way or would they do something wicked and tricksy and draw like a kid?
I liked how the witch-burners were shown as genuinely malicious, as opposed to the zomboid/mindless monsters who were just following instinct. However, the woman leading the cult was a bit amiss. Real witch burnings were to do with an all-male, ignorant priesthood terrified of women's magical bodies- magical in the sense that they could survive menstruation and produce children. That's what all the "she is a devil" talk was really about.
Had I been given control of the film, I would just have an isolated religious community living in a ghost town (caused by coal fire etc) haunted by just those goblin things from the begining. More could have been done with them. Keep the mist, keep the ash fog, all the time- those shots were really menacing. Just have people dissapearing, with just the noises (which were excellent btw). Keep the monsters in the dark or in the distance until the money shot. |
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