Why'd it have to be snakes?

Some things I enjoy now were acquired tastes. Horror, for example, I mostly disliked throughout my formative years. But I've loved globe-trotting adventures since I was little. I grew up reading Verne, Stevenson, May and Haggard, even though I didn't realise the horrid colonial subtext at the time. So when I first watched the Indiana Jones films - late: around the time the retroactively reviled Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out - I enjoyed them tremendously.

So I was pretty delighted when the local semi-arthouse cinema did a one-off screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The first of the Lucas-Spielberg films involving Harrison Ford's adventurer archaeologist had been the one I enjoyed least (except for that belated fourth film, which nobody seems to count): I knew it was good, but the earlier incarnation of the franchise couldn't quite match the finely honed machine of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). So I watched it again, had an enormous amount of fun and left with a furrowed brow over all the problematic stuff in it.

Set in 1936, the film opens as Dr Henry 'Indiana' Jones (Harrison Ford) is exploring an ancient site somewhere in South America. Improvising his way around wicked traps, Indy manages to snag a golden idol despite the treachery of a local hired hand (Alfred Molina). He promptly finds himself relieved of his prize by his rival, the ruthless French archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman), barely escaping with his life. Back in the States, Indy is given a new mission by the secret service. It seems that the Nazis are digging in Egypt, having tasked Belloq with finding the Ark of the Covenant. To reveal its exact location, though, they need the Staff of Ra, which is in the possession of Indy's old patron Abner Ravenwood, last known location...

... Nepal, where after Abner's death his daughter Marion (Karen Allen) keeps the headpiece of the staff. The problem: Marion is none too keen on Indy after he broke her heart ten years previously. Fighting for their lives against goons led by giggling Nazi sadist Major Toht (Ronald Lacey), though, does something to repair the lost trust, and the pair make it to Egypt with the staff. There, they link up with local digger Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) to infiltrate the Nazi excavation, and hopefully locate the Ark before the Führer's men do.

What struck me as a tiresome flaw during a recent viewing of Star Trek Into Darkness is a virtue here: Raiders of the Lost Ark is gloriously propulsive, barely letting up from start to finish. Even exposition tends to be loaded with background action: take the dinner at Sallah's, where Spielberg and Lucas throw poisoned dates into an already fun dialogue scene. After the US-bound table-setting the film does not slow down until the dénouement, although Lawrence Kasdan - he of The Empire Strikes Back - is a smart enough writer that by the time the relentless action scenes finally get a little wearying, he switches to a lower gear so that the film's climax is heavy on tension but light on fisticuffs.

The film's idea of appropriate race relations.

The cast is uniformly great. Harrison's perpetually exasperated adventurer archaeologist is of course iconic, played here perhaps with a little more meanness than in subsequent offerings; Denholm Elliott's Marcus Brody is such a delight that it's no surprise Last Crusade expanded his role. I must admit I have a massive fictional-character crush on Allen's Marion, and I hope my judgment is not too terribly clouded by that, but: what a fantastic character! When introduced, at least: Marion drinking a local under the table, then holding her own in a battle against Toht's henchmen is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, Kasdan's screenplay proceeds to defang her. Being put into dresses, in fact, becomes a plot point, and she's an increasingly distressed damsel relying on Indy for rescue and basic common sense.

That's the real problem with Raiders of the Lost Ark: based on 1930s adventure serials, the film somehow sees fit to just bring in all the racism and misogyny of that period instead of challenging it. Marion's demotion is the least of it, alas. The film's racism is ugly and pervasive. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes a lot of flak for racism, and deservedly so; but its predecessor is no better by any real yardstick. Its non-white people, to be sure, are not crazed murdering cultists: they are mostly childlike innocents requiring the kind guidance of the white man. A narrative in which white people are masters and Egyptians mere labourers is never seriously challenged (see the image above). Worse, the ambiguous South Americans are treacherous, lazy and cowardly and, in the case of the indigenous warriors Belloq has allied himself with, primitive and superstitious. It's totally unnecessary and leaves a terrible aftertaste.

Despite that, too, being mostly associated with its immediate successor, Raiders is pretty brutal, featuring multiple unpleasant deaths, mostly bloodless though they may be (and in one infamous scene involving a Nazi bare-knuckle boxer and an aeroplane propeller, it's decidedly not bloodless). There's violence against animals as well, including a whole mess of snakes being doused with petrol and set on fire, and an unfortunate monkey. It's better than an Italian cannibal film inasmuch as it's not real, I suppose, but far from pleasant or called for. Like Tintin in the Congo, Raiders presents the killing of animals is harmless entertainment, and the thought that it might be something else never crosses the film's mind.

If that doesn't sour your appreciation, though, Raiders of the Lost Ark is overflowing with joys. Norman Reynolds's production design is just wonderful: the Ark marries an ancient feel with art-déco chic in just the right way, while the South American temple is a laundry list of wonderfully executed tropes. (Who doesn't love ancient traps?) More than anything, it shows what the people involved were best at: Spielberg, at being the greatest blockbuster director of his generation; Kasdan, at marrying drama and action-comedy; and Lucas, at taking a step back and using his genius for production without directing himself, a lesson he sadly did not heed in later years (see also: Jackson, Peter).

It's such a delightful film that its less savoury aspects are a whole lot easier to overlook than they might be. With the double-whammy of Empire and Raiders, Kasdan clearly had a winning streak in the first half of the eighties (even Return of the Jedi, weighed down by merchandise-friendly teddy bears and material rehashed from Star Wars, is ultimately well-written, devastatingly so in some scenes). Raiders of the Lost Ark is tremendously good fun: populist but not stupid, hilarious without being tasteless, and action-packed without directing that violence at the audience in the manner of twenty-first-century action films.

Weird old America, grinning with sharp teeth

Watching The Devil's Rejects (2005), you can't but notice one thing: Rob Zombie's films are ugly. Zombie wasn't the only director of the mid-2000s to cultivate an atmosphere of overwhelming filth and squalor, but he got there early. House of 1000 Corpses set the trend for the extraordinarily grimy, gory horror pictures that came in its wake, and the sort-of-sequel pushed the aesthetic even further. The Devil's Rejects is a profoundly unsettling, even sickening film.

That, of course, says nothing about quality. Zombie is infamous for directing ambitious, envelope-pushing films that suffer from crippling flaws. Rejects is usually considered the best of his oeuvre; and while that consensus is probably correct, I'll always champion the much-maligned Halloween II for its three-legged-puppy charm.

'Sort-of-sequel', I said two paragraphs ago: for while The Devil's Rejects continues the story of House of 1000 Corpses, it is vastly different in tone and plot. Gone, after an initial shootout with police, is half the Firefly clan and with it the fantastical elements of the first film; gone is the fixation on the eponymous house. Instead, Rejects is a Western-flavoured road movie, a story of outlaws on the run from the law. But here, the outlaws are not romantic symbols of freedom: they're sadistic, murderous psychopaths fully deserving of the 'hundred per cent Alabama ass-kicking' Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe) promises. The problem is that Elvis-loving good ol' boy Wydell is himself more than a little disturbed. His hunt for the remnant of the family - wicked hillbilly girl Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), mastermind Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) and psychotic clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) - turns into a contest between two almost equally evil parties.

Rejects is the odd one out in Zombie's career in not being a slasher film by any stretch of the imagination, but artistically it's clearly more mature than his debut. The acid trip aesthetic of House is replaced by a look that is both remiscent of cheap 1970s stock and anticipates the straightforward grime of Halloween. The opening credits, too, proclaim the influence of seventies exploitation, and in the tradition of Tobe Hooper and his ilk Zombie is much more concerned with creating a sense of place. Instead of the everywhere-and-nowhere countryside revenge setting of House, Rejects emphatically takes place in Texas and uses an exquisite soundtrack of Southern music, ranging from the Lone Star State (Blind Willie Johnson) to Florida (Lynyrd Skynyrd).

Whatever its merits, The Devil's Rejects left me unsatisfied. On their way the protagonists inflict unspeakable depravities on totally random people, making it extraordinarily difficult to sympathise with them. (This is the point, I know; but most horror films at least gesture feebly in the direction of creating sympathetic characters, and those that do not are not easily digested.) Released at the peak of the mid-2000s torture porn boom, Rejects is also by a large margin the most torture-happy of Zombie's films, which does little to earn my appreciation. It is a well-made but profoundly unlovely film.

Night of the living hillbillies

The North American slasher film emerged from two distinct exploitation horror traditions. There was the giallo, the genre of stylish and disturbing Italian murder mysteries that began with Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). Across the Atlantic, the countryside-revenge film explored tensions between city and country in an increasingly lurid fashion (Straw Dogs, Deliverance). In just one week in 1974, the slasher was born with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas, each representing one of the traditions that were beginning to blend.

Why all that history to introduce a film released in 2003? Well, Rob Zombie has always been more interested in the countryside-revenge tradition than the giallo, to the point of turning John Carpenter's quasi-European Halloween series into a very different beast. His unfairly maligned Halloween II (2009) focuses on fields, woods and cabins to an extent previously unseen in the franchise, all the while deploying the freer structure of the countryside-revenge film over the narrative straitjacket of the giallo-style slasher.

If, then, Rob Zombie is all about recovering the countryside-revenge film and the broader church of seventies exploitation in the slasher's DNA, House of 1000 Corpses serves as a statement of intent: it's a blend of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), filtered through grindhouse nostalgia. The film starts with a black-and-white introduction by evil clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig): 'Howdy, folks! You like blood, violence, and freaks of nature? Well then, come on down to Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen!'

And down we go. After a vicious opening scene and a typical Zombie montage of sideshow attractions, grindhouse clips and seventies pornography we meet our meat, four twentysomethings driving across the country in search of roadside attractions: Mary (Jennifer Jostyn), Denise (Erin Daniels), Jerry (Chris Hardwick) and Bill (Rainn Wilson). Spaulding points them in the direction of the tree on which local legend 'Dr. Satan' was hanged, but they lose their way before picking up a weird local hitchhiker, Baby (Sheri Moon). When the car breaks down, Baby invites the group back to her family home.

You can guess where this is leading. The Firefly family, including Mother (Karen Black), sadistic mastermind Otis (Bill Moseley), scarred, stunted manchild Tiny (Matthew McGrory), and Grampa (Dennis Fimple), spend several hours creeping our heroes out over a meal and after-dinner 'entertainment' before turning on them, capturing and gradually murdering the young people as well as the posse searching for them (Harrison Young, Tom Towles, and Walton freaking Goggins). Who will survive... and what will be left of them?

As a conventional narrative House of 1000 Corpses is barely functional. It is instead a pandemonium of the American subconscious as filtered through exploitation cinema. In Zombie's hands, the film's vague southern setting becomes a nightmarish landscape stuffed with gore-soaked meaning, a microcosm of the modern American horror film filled with squalor, inbred freaks and vicious maniacs. When mutants and monsters suddenly push the film into speculative fiction in the third act, it's unexpected but ultimately not surprising.

It's a film awash in references, from the classic (a late scene focuses on an eye in a direct quotation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) to the more recent (Otis wears Norwegian-style corpse paint - in anyone else's hands this would be a savage indictment of black metal, but metal veteran Zombie probably intends it as a compliment). It may be recycling born of love, but the film's total dependence on its forebears is ultimately its greatest limitation: it just can't stand on its own. Zombie displays keen visual instincts in his debut, but he doesn't craft a satisfying narrative.

Even so House of 1000 Corpses is an important film: released in the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it helped usher in a new era for the horror film. Although Nispel's film is less interesting than House, the two pictures share a commitment to a grimy, repulsive anti-aesthetic and to earnest pastiche rather than the winking parody of the Scream films. They're also together responsible for the rise of torture porn, a genre I have no intention of ever exploring. Be that as it may, in 2003 the horror film became dangerous again. And whatever else you think of Rob Zombie, that's a good thing.

Totally swamped

Hatchet wasn't really a horror film. It was horrible, but that's not the same thing. Tasteless, poorly written and indifferently shot, Hatchet thoroughly failed to be a loving throwback, unless accurately recreating the worst inanities of the Friday the 13th franchise counts as success. In boasting that it was not a sequel, a remake or based on a Japanese film, Hatchet only made us wish we were watching any one of those things instead.

It's something of a surprise, then, that Hatchet II is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every department. It's still not a good film, but it's an acceptable way to waste an hour and a half. That has nothing to do with director Adam Green's decision to release the film without a rating: the over-the-top gore remains the worst aspect of the franchise. No, Green gets the job done with old-fashioned good writing and casting. But we'll get to that.

The film opens where Hatchet ended, with Marybeth (Danielle Harris, replacing Tamara Feldman) being attacked by Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). She escapes his undead grip by poking out his eye and flees the swamp, the only survivor of Crowley's murder spree. She's picked up by Jack Cracker (John Carl Buechler), who throws her out when he realises whose son she is, but tells her to see Reverend Zombie in New Orleans. After Marybeth is gone, Crowley attacks Cracker and strangles him with his own intestine.

After the credits, Green transports us back to New Orleans, where an incredibly tasteless establishing shot of someone vomiting on the pavement reminds us it's the day after Mardi Gras. Marybeth drops by the voodoo shop of Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, promoted from a cameo in the first film), who eventually agrees to take her back to Crowley's cabin so she can retrieve the bodies of her father and brother. Zombie insists, though, that Marybeth bring a family member along, while he'll assemble a team to go into the swamp that same night.

The cast duly return to the swamp by boat. Once on land, they split up into several teams of expendable meat plus a central group of five. The former are nought but bodycount padding, and I shan't bother to list their names, personalities of varying obnoxiousness, or their gory deaths. The latter consist of Marybeth, Reverend Zombie, badass middle-aged biker Trent (R.A. Mihailoff), Marybeth's uncle Bob (Tom Holland) and Justin (Parry Shen), the twin brother of Shawn, the previous night's tour guide. Marybeth soon finds out that Reverend Zombie has a sinister plan. It turns out that the three children who killed Victor Crowley were Marybeth's father Sampson, her uncle, and Trent. Zombie hopes that by killing these three Crowley will at last complete his revenge and find peace, leaving the long-forbidden swamp to Zombie's control (or something).

This plot twist means that Hatchet II has far higher stakes than the first film, where Marybeth was merely looking for her father and brother (who we already knew were dead). The element of uncertainty and suspense - will Crowley kill Trent and Bob? will the curse be ended? what of Reverend Zombie's nefarious schemes? - makes the film much more emotionally satisfying than the original's simple-minded 'meat enter swamp & die' schema. It's still full of shameless padding, though: Victor Crowley begins carving the meat 54 minutes into an 85-minute film. Before that, it's mostly inane drama about characters we know will not live long.

Aside from the peripheral meat, the characters themselves are much better drawn and acted. Todd's venal, theatrical performance is one-note, but it's an enjoyable note, while Holland and Mihailoff take sketchily drawn characters and turn them into full human beings (well, full slasher archetypes, but you know what I mean). Harris is better than Feldman, but mostly it's just damn amazing to see Danielle Harris, one of the great scream queens of the modern era (she's done four Halloween films, remember, the same number as Jamie Lee Curtis), get an absolutely terrific final shot that threatens for the briefest of moments to elevate Hatchet II to 'good', before we remember what came before.

It looks better, too: Will Barratt's daytime cinematography is superior to the nighttime equivalent thereof, although the latter, too, is improved. It's ridiculously, implausibly gory, with far more actual hatcheting than the first film. I'm no gorehound, but I've seen enough slasher films to know that a master like Tom Savini would laugh at the practical effects in the Hatchet franchise. That, of course, still seems to be the intention: to make us laugh. As it is, Hatchet II still isn't all that enjoyable, although a greatly improved sequel. On the current trajectory, it almost makes you look forward to Hatchet III, coming out this year - almost.

In this series: Hatchet (2006) | Hatchet II (2010)

Whom resist, steadfast in the faith

Twenty-odd years on, the satanic panic of the eighties - the days when a sinister cabal of devil-worshippers controlled the world through rock music and Dungeons & Dragons - seems almost quaint. Millions willing to believe obvious falsehoods that, if true, made the world a much worse place than it seems on the surface: ridiculous. Aren't you glad we've outgrown such silly superstitions?

While the panic originated in America's cloistered, hysteria-prone evangelical subculture, it spread to society at large - even across the pond: growing up in Germany in the 1990s, I remember our out-of-date textbooks referring to it. It produced cultural artifacts beyond Chick Tracts, and Hollywood played a big part in that. In the growing tide of retro-horror, it was only a question of time until someone revisited that more primitive age.

After this blog ran into a particularly dire example of abject failure in the realm of retro-horror, I was ready to dismiss the subgenre altogether. That would've been premature, though. 'If I find in horror one righteous among the directors', I thought to myself, 'I will reconsider all the genre for his sake.' And behold, Bryce Wilson arose as one crying in the wilderness, saying, 'Check out Ti West'.

Well, I'm darn glad I did. West's career hasn't been a smooth progression and isn't free of hackwork, but his best-loved film so far is nothing short of brilliant. The House of the Devil, made on a shoestring budget and never able to get more than a limited release, didn't exactly rake in the cash. Barely crossing the $100,000 mark domestically (fun fact: it made just £407 in Britain, being shown on exactly one screen), I'd be surprised if the film broke even. But it was critically acclaimed, and it really deserved to be.

The House of the Devil opens with text providing nonsensical tongue-in-cheek 'information' on the satanic panic and promising that '[t]he following is based on true unexplained events'. It's a lie (which, delightfully, they had to clarify in the final credits), but it's also a wonderful send-up of the old true story trope that originated, if I'm not mistaken, with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ti West wastes no time establishing that we're watching a period piece set in the eighties.

As the film proper begins, sophomore college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is closing the deal on a new place. She has trouble coming up with the money for the first month's rent, though, and decides to respond to a campus flyer advertising a position as a babysitter. After some complications, she eventually arranges to babysit the same night, and her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) drives her out to her employer's spooky large house in the countryside. There, they meet mild-mannered, nervous Mr Ulman (Tom Noonan) and his wife (Mary Woronov).

Mr Ulman admits that the job isn't actually for a babysitter, but to watch over his elderly mother. Samantha is reluctant to stay, but they eventually settle on the exorbitant sum of $400. Megan leaves, as do the Ulmans, and Samantha is left in the house with precious little to do but order pizza and listen to her walkman. And from there, West is content to slowly ratchet up the tension, with precious little happening at all: Samantha wanders around the house, discovering clues as to their employers' weird nature, and becomes increasingly spooked.

It's not until twenty minutes from the end - 75 minutes into a 95-minute film - that our heroine finds herself in the hands of satanic baby killers at last. But even before that point the film is so goddamn terrifying that we don't much care that the details are satanic boilerplate (Buffy: 'It turns out everybody loves a good goat's tongue. Rock groups, covens and Greek cookbooks'). I'm not much of a scaredy-cat and watch a lot of horror films, and while I find many of them unsettling, it's been a while since a film has put me into the state of blind terror The House of the Devil manages just by little details and slow, slow tension-building. I was just about ready to give up the ghost even before the first Luciferian appears.

As Bryce notes, West achieves some of this suspense by breaking unwritten rules: there's one scene, for example, in which the camera suddenly wanders to the other side of a locked door Samantha can't open, to show us the terrors she is at this point totally unaware of. Another hugely important part of the film is Jeff Grace's excellent string-heavy score and the exceedingly authentic period music. If Machete pretends the grindhouse era never ended and Hatchet reminds us why it's a good thing it did, The House of the Devil is the first retro-exploitation film to really look, feel and sound like it might have been made in 1983.

Good casting has something to do with that: Donahue is beautiful in a decidedly old-fashioned way, reminding me of Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas. In a film that is so deliberate and low-key in building its tension, a lot rests on the actors, and Donahue acquits herself very well, although the standout performance is Noonan's, who is a mesmerisingly unusual horror villain. (His wife is much more conventional, which leaves West open to charges of misogyny - domineering woman dragging a weak husband to evil - that I'm not going to discuss here).

It looks great, too, shot by Eliot Rockett to resemble an early-eighties film as closely as possible without sacrificing beauty. After Bryce's review, though, the next thing that made me sit up and take notice was the atmospheric poster, which is great pastiche while not feeling old at all. It's gorgeous and spooky, and when you compare it to horror posters these days you do have to ask: why don't they make 'em like this anymore?

Hatchet job

When a lazy filmmaker decides to make a pastiche or genre homage, he designs it to be critic-proof. 'Aha!', our savvy hack will exclaim when a keen-eyed reviewer savages plot, acting and direction, 'that's deliberate! I'm drawing attention to the badness of the works my film is based on!' The conceit seems to be that (a) you're being bold and iconoclastic, as if no-one had noticed those films were stupid before, and (b) making a bad film is an acceptable way of critiquing badness.

It is not; yet sadly Hatchet is such a picture, and writer-director Adam Green is that sort of filmmaker. Hotly anticipated by horror fans for its promise to be 'old school American horror' - unlike those remakes, sequels, and Japanese films - Hatchet failed spectacularly at the box office in 2006, debuting in thirty-ninth place and grossing a grand total of $175,281 domestically. (It later found a much larger audience on home video.)

Nor was it at all vindicated by critics: at 49%, Hatchet's Rotten Tomatoes rating could be called lukewarm at best. Yet I can't help feeling that the trajectory of heightened expectation followed by disillusionment actually represents a sort of weird victory for Green. Recall that the respectable (and a healthy proportion of the non-respectable) reviled slasher films in the eighties, so by being ignored and rejected Hatchet fits right in with the genre to which it's a declaration of love. Hatchet's richly deserved failure becomes unintentional performance art.

We open in a Louisiana swamp at night, where Sampson (Robert Englund) and his son Ainsley (Joshua Leonard) are sitting in a boat waiting for alligators. Englund, a great horror actor relegated to roles in 'all-star horror casts' of late, chews the scenery while telling Leonard he's a 'queer', and Ainsley gets off the boat to urinate. Upon returning he finds Sampson dead and disembowelled and is himself literally torn limb from limb by an unseen assailant a second later. This whole scene is very bad, just like in an old slasher film where you suffered through padding yearning for the inane characters to stop talking and start dying messily.

A pre-credits scene in which random people we'll never see again are eviscerated already gives us grounds to suspect Green really wanted to direct a Friday the 13th installment c. 1982, and we're about to have our misgivings confirmed as Green transports us to New Orleans, where it's always Mardi Gras. Ben (Joel David Moore) has recently been dumped by his girlfriend and isn't enjoying the festival, so he decides to go on a haunted swamp tour with his black best friend Marcus (Deon Richmond). The guy who usually does swamp tours, the Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, obviously shoehorned in just because they realised they might be able to get him for a cameo), points them to another place where they run into...

... two young women doffing their tops for the camera of softcore producer Doug Shapiro (Joel Murray)! The girls are Jenna (Joleigh Fioravanti) and Misty (Mercedes McNab), and they'll periodically expose their breasts for the rest of the film as if Green had decided to be as brutally literal with the old formula as possible. McNab's recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel makes seeing her topless sort of cringeworthy and embarrassing, but hey. The haunted swamp tour is organised by Shawn (Parry Shen), whose Cajun accent is as overblown as his shifty manner. I suppose that's intentional, though. Fuck you, Adam Green.

The other tour guests are middle-aged couple Shannon (Patrika Darbo) and Jim (Richard Riehle), who are transparent bodycount padding, as well as Marybeth (Tamara Feldman), who we instantly know must be the Final Girl because (a) she seems tense, mature and mysterious and (b) she is the only young woman to not have exposed her breasts to the world at this point in the film. Do I even need to say that the best way to point out that eighties slasher casts were generally hateful, lazily written collections of stereotypes isn't to make your cast that, too? Thought not.

As the tour boat, steered by Shawn, prepares to enter the swamp, a homeless-looking man - let's call him, I don't know, Crazy Ralph (John Carl Buechler) - hollers warnings at them, but Shawn ignores him, and the meat depart into the swamps, where Shawn tries in vain to spook his guests with tales of Victor 'Hatchetface' Crowley, a deformed young man who lived in the swamps with his father (Kane Hodder). One Hallowe'en, ill-behaved children set the Crowley homestead on fire, and Mr Crowley accidentally killed his son with a hatchet while trying to break down the door that kept Victor trapped.

Soon the boat runs aground and begins to sink, and the meat have to go ashore, where they find themselves stranded in the middle of the swamp without knowing where they are. Marybeth, who reveals herself to be Sampson's daughter looking for her dad and brother, leads the group. Before long they're assaulted by a very much alive Victor Crowley (also portrayed by Kane Hodder in Grotesque makeup), who slaughters our meat at an astounding rate, and from there it's pretty much bog-standard slasher territory.

I don't feel comfortable even labelling Hatchet a horror film. It doesn't seem intended to frighten or disturb its audience. Green expects viewers to react with glee to the viscera on display. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy gore, that doesn't quite work for me, but maybe you find limbs flying about the place hilarious and delightful, and who am I to judge? Green also tries to wring a lot of broad comedy from ethnic and gender stereotypes, forgetting that while subverting racism and misogyny may be funny, pandering to it generally isn't.

Among the actors Kane Hodder is the best by far, even if he and the script are both content to make Victor Crowley no more than Jason Voorhees in Louisiana! Speaking of, True Blood makes the swamps of the lower Mississippi more atmospheric than Green even attempts: as shot by the hack Will Barratt, Hatchet is uglier than the setting should allow, but I'm sure that's deliberate. More interestingly, Green totally eschews standard horror camerawork - the kind that gets close enough to the character to make sure we can fear but not quite see what's going on around them - in favour of a much simpler point-and-shoot aesthetic that robs the film of any suspense or terror; but again, Hatchet is not really a horror film.

I'm honestly unsure who or what Hatchet is for. It's an excellent facsimile of an early Friday the 13th film, before they tried to shake up the formula: young people go into wilderness, get naked, die. But haven't we had enough of those films? By 2006, American horror was far from dead: Rob Zombie had already entered the scene, and Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake had been better than it had any right to be. There's a reason the eighties slasher died, and Hatchet mostly reminds us why it should stay dead.

In this series: Hatchet (2006) | Hatchet II (2010)

The little exploitation gorefest that could

Well, you can't claim they lied.

Well, it's the end of the line: the last of the Grindhouse franchise.* Hobo with a Shotgun is quite a different beast from Grindhouse (2007) and Machete (2010). Where the earlier two films were designed to look like low-budget films, Hobo with a Shotgun is the real deal: shot in Nova Scotia on a budget of $3m (compare Machete's $10.5m), it might as well have been made in 1975. So it's tremendously easy to root for Hobo with a Shotgun, and it helps that the film is good - the weakest of the Grindhouse films, but good nonetheless.

The film begins with the titular nameless hobo (Rutger Hauer) riding into Hope Town, somewhere in Canada, on a freight train. Within minutes he's seen an innocent theatrically murdered by psychotic criminal Drake (Brian Downey) and his sons Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith).** He at first decides to keep his head down and stay alive in a city run by the vilest criminal scum ever conceived, but gives Slick a no-holds-barred beatdown when the latter attempts to rape Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a pure-hearted streetwalker.

Finding the local police hopelessly corrupt, the hobo decides to fight back, choosing to forego his dream of buying a lawn mower as the first step to his own landscaping business in favour of purchasing a (single-barrel pump-action) shotgun. Now he delivers justice one shell at a time!, dispatching paedophiles, robbers and Drake's agents. Eventually Drake puts out a bounty for hobos, leading to mobs of citizens hunting down the homeless, and - after the hobo and Abby survive an attack by Ivan and Slick - he summons an unspeakable ancient evil to deal with his shotgun-wielding nemesis...

Hobo with a Shotgun the trailer was a one-note joke, relying entirely on its title - and what a title! When I learned there would be a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, I immediately wanted to see it. I was consumed with anticipation for months, then, learning to my distress that no cinema in Nottingham would show Hobo with a Shotgun, had to wait until I could catch it on video. When there's a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, not watching it is not an option. The one thing the filmmakers had to deliver was a homeless man dispensing vigilante justice with his trusty smoothbore, and they come through - even if, like Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun is otherwise bedevilled by a serious shortage of plot.

It's a shortage I won't complain of: after all, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) has about five minutes' worth of plot. Hobo with a Shotgun is not about that, but it is about recreating a particular look and feel. The entire thing is almost bizzarely seventies: take, for example, the film's obsession with urban decay and crime, straight out of Dirty Harry and countless other vigilante films, which feels comical now but was serious business at a time when anxieties about race, gender and social relations were channelled into square-jawed men shooting transgressors on sight. The whole thing even looks like the cheap film stock of 1970s exploitation cinema, courtesy of Karim Hussain's mad cinematographic skills.

And while we're on the subject of 1970s homage: yes, Hobo with a Shotgun is ludicrously gory. More so than Grindhouse, more than Piranha 3D (2010), which seriously tested the limits of my endurance. Hobo with a Shotgun is, I believe, the goriest and possibly the most vulgar film I have ever seen. There are beheadings, disembowellings, heads crushed between bumper cars and, of course, countless loving shots of people torn up by shotgun blasts. In the climax, a character uses their shredded forearm bone as a piercing weapon, all shown in lingering detail. It's hard to take at times, but the gore effects are solidly, deliberately old-timey: there are viscera aplenty, but none that look like the real thing. (Although my knowledge of such matters derives almost entirely from films...)

This excess of bloodletting is accompanied by the most over-the-top villainous performances you're likely to see this year: these people are evil, even if they're theatrically, gleefully so, and they deserve all the shotgunning they get. That's the supporting actors, anyway: Hauer's performances is bafflingly earnest, even subtle. His hobo is an increasingly confused old man heavingly implied to be suffering from dementia of some kind, who avenges the humiliations he suffers by lashing out with his twelve-gauge. ('You can't solve all the world's problems with a shotgun', Abby says. 'It's all I know', the hobo replies.) Is it too much to take Hauer's layered turn as a shotgun-wielding tramp as a comment on a great actor's career playing villains in B-movies?

The quote above is typical of a fantastic script. Beside badass evil lines ('When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat... with razor blades') and laugh-out loud comedic ones (among policemen: 'At least he's only killing the dirty cops.' - 'We're all dirty cops!') there are plenty of deliberate misfires: the hobo tells Abby a rambling, mostly nonsensical parable about bears, while Abby later attempts to rally the crowd with a speech that is frankly incoherent. A special shout-out goes to the hobo's great final line to the villain, which it would be a crime to spoil. He should have remembered not to mess with a hobo... with a shotgun.

*Unless they make Werewolf Women of the SS into a real film, as they should.
**Incidentally, both sons dress a lot like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. It's weird.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Guns! Zombies! Women! Deadly car chases!

I don't usually include huge film posters, but in the case of Grindhouse (2007) I had little choice. It's a film that revels in its overblown garishness, that sets up a plethora of attractions that, despite Robert Rodríguez's best efforts at least, it can't possibly live up to. It seems that's part of the point. Grindhouse can't be evaluated in ordinary terms: it's a film is about the experience of watching itself. It's emphatically neither 'good' nor 'bad' - which is awfully convenient for Quentin Tarantino, at least, but more on that later. Most of all, it cannot be separated into 'two films' - Planet Terror and Death Proof - and sold separately, as the knaves in charge of video releases did.*

In the interest of honesty I must admit to being ill-equipped to judge Grindhouse as a pastiche of 1970s exploitation cinema. Granted, for better or worse I know more of such matters than the man in the street: my knowledge of slasher and countryside-revenge films, in particular, is decent, but there are other subgenres - such as the 'women in prison' and blaxploitation branches - that I've had no exposure to at all. In any case the film is crucially defined by its release in the twenty-first century, and I feel comfortable discussing it as a product of 2007.

As you know, Grindhouse is highly dependent on its structure. It's a double feature with trailers (and an advert for a fictional local eatery) before and between the main attractions. The order is, roughly: the trailer to Machete, followed by Rodríguez's Planet Terror, other trailers, and then Tarantino's Death Proof - a little over three hours all in all. This structure is deliberate and specific, but it immediately sets up a contrast to actual seventies grindhouse presentations, which were often ramshackle affairs. The filmmakers do their best to make the whole thing look improvised: both films have supposedly missing reels, and Planet Terror (but not Death Proof) adopts a deliberately grainy look that emphasises the artificiality of what is presented. It's an integrated experience, reinforced by the fact that a couple of characters from Planet Terror briefly appear in Death Proof.

Let's take the trailers first: Machete (Robert Rodríguez) is about a Mexican cop who is double-crossed and left for dead in Texas by people who soon discover 'they just fucked with the wrong Mexican'. ('If you're going to hire Machete to kill the bad guy, you better make damn sure the bad guy isn't you!') Machete is now deservedly a real film, reviewed here. Don't (Edgar Wright) is a haunted house film, while Thanksgiving (Eli Roth) is an absurdly cheap slasher film (you know, all those Sleepaway Camps and Houses on Sorority Row that could only envy Halloween and Friday the 13th). Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener) has also been released starrin Rutger Hauer. The best of the trailers, though, is undoubtedly Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, 'starring Udo Kier' and another famous actor in a role he really ought to play. (If you're not desperate too see a film called Werewolf Women of the SS - well, what's wrong with you?)

In Planet Terror, an altercation between a bioscientist (Naveen Andrews) and a rogue military unit led by Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) leads to a zombie virus being unleashed on a Texas community. In the chaos, the survivors, led by Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn, whom I've enjoyed in literally everything I've ever seen him in - The Terminator, Aliens, Tombstone, it's all good), one-legged go-go dancer and aspiring stand-up comedian Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) and her ex-boyfriend, El Wray (Freddy Rodríguez). (Other memorable characters are played by Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Tom Savini (the man who created the gore and make-up effects on the original Friday the 13th), and Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, who has her brain eaten.) The missing reel in Planet Terror is cunningly placed to deprive the audience of expected nudity; what's more, when the film starts up again the entire set is inexplicably on fire, and everyone suddenly respects El Wray for reasons that are never explained.

It's a gory film, although, excepting a really rather harrowing scene in which Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) breaks her wrist, much of the violence is wildly cartoonish. That includes the zombies, who are shot to pieces in their hundreds by the heroes. Rodríguez was obviously trying to cram as much awesomeness as he possibly could into Planet Terror: there are zombies, Texans, soldiers, dangerously unethical doctors and, in what has probably become the film's greatest contribution to pop culture, a woman with an M4 assault rifle for a leg. The result is a film that is deliriously, gloriously overstuffed and unbalanced: not, perhaps, 'good' but certainly full of good things. (And unlike Zack Snyder in Sucker Punch, the director is obviously eager to please.)

By contrast, Death Proof is terrible, and bafflingly so. In the first half-hour it sets up a group of expendable meat who appear to be our heroes - until, Psycho-style, they're slaughtered by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). Then we're introduced to a whole new set of protagonists, including Zoe Bell (Zoe Bell) and Rosario Dawson Character, who do nothing but drive and talk for an hour while nothing whatsoever happens, before - diabolus ex machina! - Mike reappars and attempts to murder them. It's a strange, unstructured beast, and its endless middle section lacks the rising tension and subtle power struggles that make the extended dialogue of, say, Tarantino's own Inglourious Basterds so thrilling. What's more, it seems an immense waste of Russell, whose brilliant performance as an over-the-hill stuntman and serial killer deserves better than to appear in but a couple of scenes.

There's a theory, of course, that that's the point. Really, Tarantino had nothing to prove by this point. Death Proof may be a deliberate letdown, the infamous second feature that doesn't deliver on its promise. I was reminded of actual terrible exploitation films, which are like this: endless time spent with unlikeable characters, followed by sudden carnage without build-up. (All the more awful Friday the 13th sequels follow this pattern; Death Proof also resembles The Dukes of Hazzard in places.)

Really, Death Proof is exquisitely crafted. The dialogue ('Who the hell is Stuntman Mike?' - 'He's a stuntman') is vintage Tarantino, and the film, being about stuntpeople and featuring Zoe Bell as herself, constantly draws attention to its own creation process. All that strengthens the impression that Tarantino set out to disappoint his audience, and put all his considerable film-making skill in the service of that aim. Well, he succeeded. Hurrah?

But here Tarantino has his cake and eats it, because I can't just complain that Death Proof is 'bad': I must accept that my disappointment at Death Proof is part of the experience of Grindhouse. You come for a 'death-proof' car, an ageing badass and women; instead you get to experience the exquisite sensation of being ripped off, disliking Tarantino just like gorehounds in the seventies might have despised Roger Corman. All in all, Grindhouse isn't 'good' so much as it's unique. I can't imagine another film like it. It can only be experienced.

*Incidentally, this review draws heavily upon Tim Brayton's never-bettered discussion.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

La Revolución, exploitation style

By way of an introduction: Machete is awesome, of course. I mean, look at the poster. Or at the announcement, in the movie itself, that 'Machete will return in Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again'. Or the fact that Machete is not a nickname, but the protagonist's birth name. If you type 'Machete' that many times, it stops looking like a word. In any case: Machete is awesome, by which I mean to convey that I more or less squealed with giddy delight throughout the film.

Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo) is a former Mexican Federale ('CIA, FBI, DEA, all rolled up into one mean fucking burrito', according to one character) who has fallen foul of drug lord Rogelio Torrez (Steven Seagal). Now Machete works as a day labourer in Texas - until, that is, he is hired by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate far-right anti-immigration senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). But he's double-crossed: one of Booth's gunmen wounds McLaughlin in the leg and shoots Machete to guarantee the senator's re-election. Now Machete must take revenge and uncover a conspiracy involving a racist vigilante organisation headed by Von Jackson (Don Johnson) - a task in which he's aided by honest immigration cop Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba), his brother, a priest (Cheech Marin) and a network helping illegal immigrants run by Luz (Michelle Rodriguez).

Ultimately the film comes down to a showdown between the vigilantes and Mexican immigrants. It's awesome, but it's also the one part of the film that director Robert Rodríguez treats without any irony. 'La revolución', as Luz calls it early in the film, is of course a fantasy - the marginalised and maligned immigrant working class rising up to overthrow the oppressive order, symbolised by racist paramilitaries. But it's an immensely gratifying and empowering fantasy, in tune with Frantz Fanon's assertion that the colonial subject's desire is not for equality but for the defeat and death of the coloniser. That Rodríguez takes such a clear stance is not self-evident in a B-movie; but at a time when immigrants are under fire (sometimes literally) both in the US and in Europe it's something to cheer every leftist's heart.

That, then, is politically pleasing to me; but what about other aspects of the film? Does Machete reinforce patriarchy, for example? For Machete most certainly does 'get the women', as the trailer promises - seven by my count, excluding his wife who is murdered roughly three minutes into the film. That the male gaze predominates in Machete I cannot deny. But I'd like to protest that the topic is treated ironically: with respect to sixty-six-year-old Mr Trejo, it is not quite plausible that Machete is irresistible to every woman in sight, and Robert Rodríguez makes not the slighest attempt to make it plausible. It's merely another homage to the conventions of 1970s exploitation films, in which heroes would womanise like nobody's business.

It's all a delight: the performances from an all-star cast (Rose McGowan was left on the cutting room floor) are over the top in just the right way. The villains stand out, from Jeff Fahey's magnificently purry drug dealer to Don Johnson as a murderous redneck ('There's nothing I'd like better than to see that Mexican dance the bolero at the end of a rope'). I don't need to mention that Michelle Rodríguez is bad-ass as usual (nay, more so than usual), and even Jessica Alba manages not to grate. Lindsay Lohan, as a 'nun with a gun', has a small but functional part. Of course, Machete is intensely violent. If you're squeamish about the severing of limbs, I recommend you do not see this. Nonetheless, if you have seen something utterly vicious like last year's Piranha, rest assured Machete is less depraved than that. Meaning it is still quite depraved. Be that as it may, Machete is ultimately a full-throttle thrill-ride, bloody and sexy and hilarious. A guilty pleasure, of course - but oh, how very pleasurable.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)