The old songs that you taught me

While living in New York City in the early seventies, fine art student turned filmmaker James Szalapski had a roommate called 'Skinny' Dennis Sanchez, a bass player. When Sanchez went to Nashville to visit Guy Clark, a Texan songwriter and luthier who had returned to the South after being disillusioned by Los Angeles, he was enthralled by the circle of musicians who gathered regularly at Clark's house. Sanchez' stories intrigued Szalapski, who was then looking for his next project.

With thirty-five thousand dollars from a single sponsor, Szalapski assembled a small crew and followed Clark and the singer-songwriters he met through him from Nashville to Austin, Texas during 1975 and early 1976. The resulting film - expanded from a planned hour-long television documentary - made the rounds at festivals, but due to bad luck and limited commercial appeal it was not released theatrically until 1981. By that time the original title, New Country, had been discarded in favour of the more poetic Heartworn Highways.

Using loose association rather than a single narrative thread, the film presents a number of singer-songwriters and others across Tennessee and Texas. We're shown the painstaking precision work of recording Larry Jon Wilson's 'Ohoopee River Bottomland'. Townes Van Zandt shows the camera crew around his dilapidated trailer in Austin. David Allan Coe drives to a concert at the Tennessee State Prison. Guy Clark repairs guitars, and at his house a group including Steve Young, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (the latter two only in their twenties) hang out, drink and share songs.

Heartworn Highways exists for the music, and Szalapski gives the performances plenty of room to breathe. Guy Clark opens the film with a stunning rendition of 'L.A. Freeway' (Clark is more self-critical: 'A little loose,' he complains), and David Allan Coe provides its emotional heart with 'I Still Sing the Old Songs', an elegy that caused me to properly admire Coe's songwriting for the first time ('I still sing the old song that you taught me/And I still pray to Jesus now and then/And just like you I wish that he would save me/To see the day the South will rise again'). Then there's Steve Young's heartbreaking 'Alabama Highway', which accompanies Coe's drive through the Southern rain.

Those songs centre the film on Szalapski's fascination with a group of Southern songwriters who had travelled north or to California but found themselves drifting back home, drawn by something they couldn't leave behind. Not necessarily something positive, mind you: these songs are full of misery, poverty and longing for escape, more haunting evocations of Southern life than the celebration found in mainstream country. Szalapski's camera lingers on the ephemera of Tennessee roads: car transporters, overturned meat transports, and cars stuck in traffic. These men are rooted yet itinerant, rambling between states and - in Townes Van Zandt's case - occasionally actually homeless, searching for a Dixieland that keeps slipping through their fingers.

The lengthy sequence at Townes Van Zandt's place in Austin both reinforces and undermines that narrative. According to Steve Earle, the Nashville singer-songwriters deliberately sent Szalapski to Austin in the expectation that Van Zandt would clown around instead of providing footage of the world's greatest songwriter at work. And in a sense that's just what Townes does, introducing his girlfriend and his dog and leading the crew on a pointless but highly entertaining tour around the run-down property. (Because the film doesn't use narration, there's no-one to point out Townes was the son of an oil baron, not the hillbilly he pretends to be here.)

But instead of being a waste of time, the Austin scenes introduce us to Townes's neighbour, seventy-nine-year-old 'Uncle' Seymour Washington, a former blacksmith who explains his approach to horses (being gentle and friendly) and whiskey (God meant for us to enjoy it, but drink in moderation). In a film intended for a privileged white audience, it's virtually impossible for people of colour to be portrayed as just human beings rather than Magical Negroes dispensing homespun wisdom. Such qualms sour these scenes a bit, but they can't overwhelm the easy chemistry between Washington and Van Zandt. Their banter leads into the best performance in the film, Townes Van Zandt's sublime rendition of 'Waitin' Around to Die'.

Like 'Waitin' Around to Die', the prevailing mood in Heartworn Highways is elegiac. The boot-stomping rebellion associated with a term like 'outlaw country' isn't entirely absent: witness Coe's foul-mouthed tirades in front of prison inmates while wearing an awful rhinestone suit that screams 1975! like little else on display here. But all in all it's a subdued, unassuming documentary, quiet to the point of being boring at times. It requires patience and more than a little passion for this style of music. (I have the latter, at least.)

As the junior generation to the more established outlaw stars of the day (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, etc.), most of these musicians never made it out of the country music underground. The exceptions - Townes Van Zandt, whose 'highly authentic ghost' now belongs to everyone, and Steve Earle, popular with a far larger roots rock crowd - transcended rather than abandoned their origin. In hindsight, Heartworn Highways presents not the outlaw movement per se, much less the birth of Americana, but the gnarled roots of today's Texas country scene. It is, in any case, a surprisingly meditative look at a musical subculture whose critique of Nashville is as valid now as it was forty years ago.

We don't like your kind around here

By most measures the 1950s were a pretty appalling decade. The world was haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation. Women weren't allowed to open a bank account or get a job without their husbands' permission. In West Germany, where I'm from, upstanding citizens decided we'd all best move on and not talk about the recent unpleasantness, and so Nazi civil servants carried on in their jobs. In the US, Jim Crow laws enforced white supremacy. Meanwhile, Western empires fought rearguard actions that left millions of people dead from Algeria to Malaya, Kenya to Viet Nam.

It's really no wonder conservatives love the fifties.

Snark aside, it's much easier to criticise the decade for those of us who don't have positive personal memories of it. To my grandparents, who'd lived through the war, it was a time of peace in which previously unimaginable luxuries - cars, televisions, washing machines - were suddenly available to a far wider share of society than ever before. From the vantage point of the rebellious and crisis-ridden later sixties and seventies, fond reminiscing was all too natural. Hell, I came to pop-culture consciousness in the late nineties and early 2000s, a demonstrably awful age that is nevertheless getting the nostalgia treatment now.*

That's a really long-winded way of explaining the fertile ground for the nostalgia craze that swept Hollywood during the seventies and much of the eighties, when films like American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978) celebrated the youth culture of a bygone age. Macon County Line (1974), though, doesn't do that. In fact director Richard Compton, latterly of a lot of TV series, pretty much sticks up two fingers to nostalgia as he goes out of his way to show the racism, moralism and general ugliness that was in danger of being forgotten (by middle-class white people, anyway). At the same time, there's more empathy and intelligent critique here than we'd expect of an exploitation cheapie. It's really sort of brilliant, even if it's not a very good film.

First, though, there's the gimmick: Macon County Line claims to be a true story In reality, the filmmakers are following the seventies trend of selling an entirely fictional story as real, popular in low-budget shockers like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), that reached its apotheosis with 1980's Cannibal Holocaust. But Macon County Line is more grounded than most of those films, and is careful to include a text crawl at the end informing us of the surviving characters' entirely made-up fate.

In 1954, Chicagoans Chris and Wade Dixon (Alan and Jesse Vint, real-life brothers) drive through the South in search of wine, women and song before enlisting in the army. In Louisiana, they pick up pretty hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters), but when their car grinds to a halt with a broken fuel pump they have to make camp in the countryside, unable to comply with the instructions of Deputy Sheriff Reed Morgan (Max Baer) to leave the county post-haste. Morgan, a practitioner of the busted-taillight school of law enforcement who nevertheless loves his family, is shocked when he finds his wife murdered the same evening. Believing the Dixons responsible, Morgan takes his son Luke (Leif Garrett) along to hunt the culprits down.

On paper that sounds pretty exciting, but in reality Macon County Line spends about four fifths of its running time treading water as we're introduced to a bunch of characters, some of which turn out to be largely irrelevant, like slow-witted comic relief Hamp (Geoffrey Lewis). It's not that Chris, Wade and Jenny are obnoxious, they're just not interesting enough to justify all the time we watch them doing very little indeed; and that goes twice for plot points that are raised but left unresolved, like Jenny's shady past. The film's final fifteen minutes, after Deputy Morgan snaps and goes on his vendetta, are taut and suspenseful, but they could be twice as long without losing steam.

Reed Morgan, though, is a fantastic character, and that holds the film together despite its ungainly shape. As portrayed brilliantly by Baer, who also produced and wrote the screenplay, Morgan is obviously in love with his wife and immensely proud of his son. Yet he's also the sort of Southern lawman that held the racist order in place, and the film brings that to the fore in a scene in which Morgan tells his son, as kindly as he knows how, to stay away from the black friends he's made. That people who commit evil acts tend to think of themselves as good citizens is a banal point, but it's more subtlety than exploitation cinema tends to muster, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Macon County Line is neither a horror nor a countryside-revenge film in the mould of Deliverance (1972), but it incorporates elements of both. An emphasis on children's potential for evil is shared with Halloween (1978) while the final showdown in a riverside cabin finds visual echoes in Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981). That vicious and suspenseful climax has Compton going into horror filmmaking that seems far ahead of its time; the sound of somebody repeatedly pulling the handle on a pump-action shotgun in a futile attempt to chamber another shell is absolutely harrowing. The film's closing redeems much earlier boredom, but ultimately Macon County Line is interesting less for what it is than what it prefigures.

*Ironic appreciation of a bygone age of irony is more meta than I can handle.

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.

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)

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)

A thousand shall fall at thy side

It's rare for a film to preach an imaginary moral as zealously as Red State does. Director Kevin Smith, known for indie comedies like Clerks (1994) and Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), fancies himself the voice of one crying in the wilderness warning of the dangers posed by... what exactly? Red State (2011) is a transitional film, if a transition to not much: Smith swears his upcoming two-part Hit Somebody will be his final feature.

It's no wonder Smith struggled to find the funding for the production or that he was subsequently unable to find a distributor, leading to the director's infamous 'implosion' at Sundance and the apparently spontaneous decision to self-release the film instead of auctioning it off. During its limited theatrical release, Red State sank like a stone (its total domestic gross stands at $1.065 million) and was eventually foisted on a reluctant public through the uninspiring means of video-on-demand, Blu-ray and DVD.

The director's puzzlingly ill-informed invective against 'belief' will, sadly, turn out to be very much the most charming of Red State's flaws. We open with a teenager, Travis (Michael Angarano), being delayed on his way to school by fundamentalists protesting the funeral of the latest victim in a series of homophobic murders. Clunky plot-dumping reveals that the protesters are members of the insane Five Points Trinity Church, pastored by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).

That's by the by for Travis, though, for he is a teenager in a Hollywood film and thus concerned only with fornication. His opportunity comes when he and his friends Jarod (Kyle Gallner) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) drive off to meet an older woman Jarod has connected with online for group sex. On the way they scrape the car of Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), who's engaged in a homosexual affair, but they flee before recognising the lawman. Arriving at the trailer of Jarod's floozy somewhere in the backwoods, the hapless teenagers are drugged by the supposed sex partner, Sara (Melissa Leo).

When Jarod wakes up, he finds himself in a cage at Five Points Trinity Church, where Cooper preaches an impromptu sermon on the role of homosexuals as Satan's agents on earth straight out of a Chick Tract. This scene, by the way, is genuinely quite good: it's an exaggerated portrayal but still a terrific evocation of folksy fundamentalism. Then the children are led outside by Sara's daughter Cheyenne (the lovely Kerry Bishé, in shorts of a length no God-fearing Christian would abide), and Cooper's sheep kill another prisoner (Cooper Thornton) by wrapping him in plastic and shooting him.

Travis and Billy-Ray, locked beneath the church, manage to escape and find the Five-Pointers' massive underground weapons cache, but Billy-Ray is killed in a firefight with the fundamentalists while Travis hides. The gunshots, meanwhile, attract the attention of a Sheriff Wynan's deputy (Matt Jones), whose investigation is cut short by a shotgun blast to the chest. Before long, a tactical team of the ATF, led by Joe Keenan (John Goodman), has surrounded the church compound, and a siege and vicious gunfight ensue as the agents attempt to force their way in while the surviving teens are trying to get out.

Our plot rests on an impossibility: we're supposed to believe that the church - whose members proclaim the imminent outpouring of God's wrath on the LGBTQ community - has been secretly stockpiling hundreds of automatic weapons and murdering homosexuals without raising suspicion. (Cooper blatantly confesses to these crimes in front of his captives, in the best tradition of Bond villains.) What's more, I daresay that if the Five-Pointers are actively ensnaring horny teens to murder them, they'll have their hands full; yet this, being the reason our heroes are at the church, is the conceit underpinning the whole film.

The bizarre behaviour of the church is a direct function of Smith's total confusion as to their theology. That excessive 'belief' is bad, stated baldly by Goodman's character at the end, is the film's moral; but there doesn't actually seem to be too much content. Cooper's church appear as a wacky combination of Westboro Baptist Church and the Branch Davidians: fearful of the government, which it believes is under the control of homosexuals, suspicious of the 'Zionist media' and awaiting the Rapture, Five Points Trinity isn't like any religious group in the real world. Sure, there's a general paranoia underlying the various groups of the religious right, but Smith's liberal bias leads to him simply conflating every cliché he can think of into a chimerical menace.

That leaves Red State oddly crippled in its ambition to be the earnest message picture Smith intended. Is it supposed to warn us of Westboro Baptist? But they're not armed. David Koresh? Dead. Fundamentalism as a whole? But Red State's church is a grotesque, largely unrecognisable caricature of the real thing (which, for the record, I oppose). There's an element of liberal chauvinism to this. The painfully awkward Southern dialogue, used exclusively by Cooper's faithful, suggests Smith believes some rather ugly things about everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Smith's mess of a script leaves us no-one of the huge cast to root for, although Goodman comes closest. Michael Parks strains mightily against the millstone Smith has put around his neck, and his is the standout performance of the film, mixing ruthlessness with real affection for his congregation. In the second tier, there are a couple of actors familiar from vampire TV series (Marc Blucas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kevin Alejandro of True Blood). Ultimately the efforts of the capable cast are undone by the wanton cruelties of a script that delights in killing off characters just for the hell of it.

Smith is relatively new to directing action, but he acquits himself well with some rapid camera movement and Snorricam during chase scenes. Such flourishes, however, can't help stretch out the essentially shapeless plot - despite the large cast, Red State comes in at just 88 minutes including credits. Whatever Smith's intentions, it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing whatsoever. There's little as irritating as being lectured by an ignoramus, especially one moralising from a privileged position.

Carving up America

It's a truth commonly acknowledged that the modern American horror film begins with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Fourteen years after Hitchcock had thrown the rules out of the window with Psycho, Tobe Hooper completed the transition from the stately Gothic pictures of the past to the gruesome body count horror of the 1970s and 1980s.

It would be foolish to consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only in the context of the horror genre, however. Hooper was undeniably part of the New Hollywood wave of auteurs, and the film is ultimately an extreme expression of the deconstruction of the American way of life pioneered by Bonnie and Clyde and later exemplified by Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, etc. Leatherface is a hillbilly Travis Bickle, but without the delusions of heroism.

The film opens with a text crawl, narrated by John Larraquette, informing us that what we're about to watch is a true story. That, of course, is a lie. (But it's an entertaining lie, and in the end, isn't that the real truth?) Hooper claims that this intentional misinformation was a reaction to the American government's recent public lies about Watergate, the oil crisis, and the Vietnam War: and while that is an attractive idea, it's also possible that, like the makers of The Blair Witch Project a quarter-century later, Hooper simply realised that claiming your fiction was based on a true story would sell a lot of tickets.

Then there is darkness, unpleasant noises, and brief flashes of something horrible: and before long we realise that we're watching half-decomposed bodies displayed in garish poses. It seems, according to radio news we hear over the extraordinarily raw and hideous opening credits, that recently there has been a spate of grave robbings in Texas: but significantly that's only one of a number of disasters and violent crimes the dispassionate news anchor tells us about, signifying a society - indeed a world - dissolving into murder and chaos.

Now at last it's time to meet our van-driving cast. Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her brother, wheelchair-bound Franklin (Paul A. Partain) are travelling to a Texas graveyard to make sure their grandfather's grave is not among those disturbed; they're accompanied by their friends, Jerry (Allen Danziger) and Kirk (William Vail), both of whom are men without qualities, as well as Kirk's girlfriend Pam (Teri McMinn), whose sole identifying characteristic is an obsession with astrology. Along the way they pick up a seriously disturbed hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who rambles about slaughterhouses ('My family's always been in meat') before cutting himself and attacking Franklin with a straight razor, and being thrown out of the van.

Stopping at a petrol station our heroes are told that fuel has run out, with new supplies not arriving until later that day. To pass the time they decide to explore the Hardesty family homestead, where Sally and Franklin lived as children. Kirk and Pam go off to a swimming hole, but are attracted to a nearby house that has a generator (and hence presumably petrol), where both are murdered by a big man wearing a mask made of human skin (Gunnar Hansen). Jerry goes to look for them and meets with the same fate; and eventually, after dark, Franklin and Sally set out to find their missing comrades.

From there, it's a straight line to Franklin ending up on the wrong end of Leatherface's chainsaw and Sally being invited to a family dinner with Grandpa. The sheer quantity of plot recap points to the least but still pleasant achievements of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: it's never boring. A bad body-count horror film is at heart a tedious and inert thing, treading water between gruesome murders; but that's never the case in TCM, and the screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper gets points for that - even if the paper-thin categorisation of most characters does not sit well with that sort of quality.

Upon release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gained a reputation for gore and brutal violence it has to this day. Indeed the victims do not die cleanly and quickly, the way they might have in an earlier horror film, but all in all TCM is not particularly bloody. The only chainsaw death - one of four murders in the film - happens in darkness, while other killings are handled reasonably discreetly.

To end there, though, is to miss what was so shocking about TCM: its extraordinary nasty-mindedness. We often jokingly call the cast of slasher films 'meat', but here it's true. From the defiling of corpses to the theme of cannibalism, Hooper's magnum opus reduces the human body to flesh to be lacerated and devoured by the murderous Sawyer clan, and this is underscored by the slaughterhouse images and the animal noises made by Leatherface.

What really gives The Texas Chain Saw Massacre its punch, though, is Hooper's direction, which marks a revolution in the genre. I can't put it any better than to say that TCM finally abandons the pretence to objectivity that previous horror films had challenged but ultimately upheld. Hooper's very unsteady, jerky, obsessive camerawork (he doesn't use handheld, praise Jesus) gives the impression of psychosis: the camera is not a neutral observer but a deeply disturbed participant and sufferer. His frequent use of uncomfortable high and low angles, his habit of crowding the foreground, and his invasive, nervous zooms on human agony all violate what is classically thought of as good direction, but this is precisely what prevents the audience from ever settling into the film and being able to steer its terror into a predictable, familiar experience.

Despite the claim of factuality, the direction marks TCM as a nightmare. The scene in which Pam discovers the Sawyer clan's living room, covered in feathers and human bones, is edited as a surreal and disturbing montage by Larry Carroll and assistant director Sallye Richardson. (Incredibly, neither of them has ever edited a film again.) The sound design, too, is outstanding: beside the creepy prevalence of silence early in the film's run, the harsh, dissonant chords used in the family dinner scene mark TCM as a film that goes out to hurt its audience; lastly, cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl's deliberately harsh and hideous creation of a bleached landscape is crucial to the film's sense of isolation and despair.

It's often assumed that there must be something deeply wrong with those who enjoy bloody horror, but it's the attitude that makes the difference. A film like Wanted gawks at its hero slaughtering dozens of people in cool blood and gasps, 'Isn't that awesome?' The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, on the other hand, presents deeply unsettling killings and seems to say, 'Isn't this terrible?'. As a result, Wanted left me disgusted with the film and its makers, while TCM leaves me horrified but on Hooper's side. Besides, those same critics who extol The Wild Bunch - as they should - hardly get to recoil at TCM.

It's not the first slasher, but the importance of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to the development of the genre can hardly be overstated. Its vicious, relentless creation of a world in which man is man's wolf was shocking at the time and remains so today. As a literal, physical dissection of the evaporating optimism of the sixties it could hardly be bettered.

The mud and the blood and the beer

When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in October 2003, the crusade against all that is good and right producer Michael Bay would unleash in Hollywood could be just glimpsed over the horizon: after Pearl Harbor had killed Bay's ambitions to be a serious director, the extraordinarily crass Bad Boys II, released one week before TCM, made millions upon millions and showed us the Bay to be.

On the other hand Marcus Nispel, the former music video director Bay hand-picked for the project, was a total unknown in 2003. Ever since, he's been one of the most ubiquitous - if oddly obscure - directors of genre pictures. Nispel's remake of Friday the 13th makes him the only person beside Wes Craven to have kicked off two horror franchises, while his dread Pathfinder and Conan the Barbarian remind us why sword-and-sorcery films should stay buried.

The first and most important thing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gets right is that it's not exactly a remake of Tobe Hooper's notorious 1974 original. Sure, it's still a story of a group of bland twentysomethings passing through Texas who are murdered and cannibalised by a clan of hillbillies, and the beats of the story are similar. But the film reprises exactly one character - Leatherface - from the original, and it toys with fans' expectations just enough to keep the audience on their toes.

After a black-and-white prologue setting out the case after the fact à la Tobe Hooper, we open on August 18, 1973; and that date ushers in some of the most over-eager period cues you'll ever see on film. Five young people are driving through the backwoods of Texas in a van, on their way from Mexico to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Dallas. There's Kemper (Eric Balfour), who owns the van, his girlfriend Erin (Jessica Biel), who's getting impatient for Kemper to propose, college boy Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), blond muscleman Andy (Mike Vogel) and Pepper (Erica Leerhsen), who are all over each other despite having met a mere nineteen hours before. Erin is annoyed when Morgan accidentally reveals they're transporting two pounds of pot bought in Mexico, and tosses a spliff Kemper gives her as a peace offering out the window.

This bold rejection of drugs in a film set in the 1970s marks Erin out as our Final Girl beyond all doubt. That, and the film that she's played by Jessica Biel, easily the most recognisable of the cast even in 2003. Recall that in the wake of Scream, they began casting TV starlets in horror films instead of random nobodies willing to take their clothes off, and thus the most famous person tends to be the Final Girl, provided they survive the opening credits. (Incidentally, if I may be allowed my dram of lechery: I've never been one of the innumerable Jessica Biel fanboys out there, but she can wear a midriff-baring tank top and a cowboy hat any time she likes.)

Anyway, our meat travel through Texas in a number of shots borrowed from the original - van moving from left to right seen in long shot, suggesting immobility and impossibility of escape - and almost hit a young girl (Lauren German) wandering on the road. They take the shellshocked and terrified teenager into the van, but after rambling that 'I won't go back there' and 'They're all dead', she pulls a revolver and blows her brains out. The reaction shot to this is seen through the hole in her head, which is deeply tasteless, anatomically implausible and stunningly terrible as a directorial choice; thankfully, we never see the like again.

Obviously, the cast freak out: no-one expects a suicide in the back of their van. They ask the owner of a petrol station (Marietta Marich) to call the police for them and are told that they're to meet the sheriff at the old Crawford mill. This seems fishy, and when they get to the mill Morgan is in favour of simply dumping the dead body and driving on; would that they had, for when Kemper enters the house of a man in a wheelchair living nearby (Terrence Evans) he is murdered by Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski). The rest have to deal with the arrival of Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), who generally acts like a total psycho even before Leatherface turns up for more murderin'.

In many ways The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an otherwise unremarkable countryside-revenge horror film, if thirty years late for the genre's heyday. The cast are just as nondescript as they were in the original, with the juiciest parts falling to the villains: R. Lee Ermey follows Jim Siedow in hamming it up as much as he possibly can, creating one of the most memorable and enjoyable madmen in 2000s horror. Andrew Bryniarski isn't a patch on the original's Gunnar Hansen, but he does all right with the part of Leatherface.

The film isn't important for its own sake, anyway: it marked a major watershed in horror cinema. After the prolonged death throes of the old slasher film, the horror genre was reinvented by the phenomenal success of Scream (1996). If Wes Craven's deconstructionist picture proved that horror could still make money, its greater significance lay in its longer-term impact on pop culture. After Scream, horror films had to be smart, ironic and knowing; they boasted a clean, uncomplicated aesthetic and celebrities aplenty, and generally toned down the profanity, nudity, and graphic evisceration of earlier films.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on the other hands, was really quite nasty. Although most deaths in the film occur off-screen or in poorly lit areas so that most is left to the imagination, the same is not at all true of the cruelties inflicted on the human body before, around, and after death. Andrew's prolonged agony - involving mutilation, fingore, and impaling on a meat hook - is so appallingly vicious that I'd much rather I hadn't seen it and could forget now; the moment in which Leatherface attacks Erin while wearing her boyfriend's face is similarly harrowing. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is thus the clearest precursor to the torture porn genre that took off with Saw the following year and afflicted the silver screen for half a decade.

What's more, TCM looks nothing at all like the crisp fare that came before it. It's grimy and filthy, owing the largest debt not to Scream but to David Fincher's Se7en; its Texas is a profoundly unsafe, dirty place, and Greg Blair's production design underscores just how run down, impoverished and neglected the setting is. The film's biggest visual asset is one man, though; for they did something that almost never happens and brought back Daniel C. Pearl, the original film's cinematographer. The new TCM is dark and, as Tim Brayton noticed, has a sort of deeply unsettling yellowish tinge to it, so that the sky is not quite gloriously blue: it's more gorgeously unpleasant, if you follow my meaning, than any film set in August has any right to be. This aesthetic - stylised, gritty - has totally dominated the horror genre since.

If we were looking for one person to embody the 1996-2003 horror film, it would be Kevin Williamson; for 2003-2009, it'd be Rob Zombie. (It's possible, though too early to tell, that a new epoch began in 2009-10 with Paranormal Activity and Let Me In.) It may be a rote horror film - never a slasher: although they've been interwoven with the slasher genre, the TCM films have always been countryside-revenge films, but that's an arcane debate we can have elsewhere - but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made $80 million in the States alone on a $9.2 million budget, and that's more than enough to kick off trends.

That it's largely responsible for the rise of torture porn I can't blame Bay and Nispel for; that it unleashed Bay 2.0 and Nispel, on the other hand - well, we've had eight years of Bay's Platinum Dunes churning out sub-par remakes of classic horror films to date, and after the middling performance of the expensive A Nightmare on Elm Street the engine seems to be sputtering at the very least. It's sad, perhaps, that the mediocre TCM is their best film; but it's a tolerable effort, and I won't complain about that.

Words fail me, as does Willie Nelson

It's rare that my spirit has been so utterly crushed by a film. Not that I hoped for much from a picture whose main draw appeared to be Jessica Simpson in skimpy shorts, but I did not expect this abysmal attempt at action comedy. The possiblity that The Dukes of Hazzard is a bold avant-garde work that deconstructs its genre in wildly innovative ways is explored by the great Tim Brayton. To his mastery, all I can add is deep sadness as I stare into my glass.

I suppose this thing has a plot, so let's open her up: the Duke cousins, Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke (Johnny Knoxville), run moonshine for their uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson) until their family farm is seized by corrupt county commissioner Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds), who is planning to strip-mine Hazzard County for coal with the help of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (M.C. Gainey). Now the Duke boys must stop Hogg's wicked plans, while also winning the county rally with their car, a 1969 Dodge Charger nicknamed the General Lee.

Or, you know, something, because the plot is a mind-boggling mess. It's full of oddly superfluous characters like the race car driver Billy Prickett (James Roday), whom Boss Hogg has persuaded to join and win the race, or Annette (Jacqui Maxwell), the college roommate of Luke's old flame Katie (Nikki Griffin), who is used for one Australian joke and then tags along for the rest of the film without doing anything else. Perhaps these characters were in the 1979-85 television series, which I have not seen, and shoehorned in for that reason. Or screenwriter John O'Brien is simply not very good at his job - the more likely explanation, since his only other scripts are Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) and Starsky & Hutch (2004), and nothing at all after The Dukes of Hazzard.

Another oddity in the screenplay is the Duke Boys' cousin, Daisy Duke (Jessica Simpson). She only shares one scene with the two leads, and that indirectly, which leaves open the fascinating possibility that she does not exist, but is merely a projection of the fevered adolescent imagination of the fictional Hazzard County's menfolk, who seek to blame a sultry temptress for their repeated failure to stop morons like Bo and Luke Duke. (For this is a plot that 'would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot'.) To explain all this, I'd venture that a woeful original screenplay was chopped to pieces by concerned producers and reassembled into a ghastly, misshapen imitation of life.

That necromancy is the job of actors, and here we have a parade of great and not-so-great actors turning in awful work. I shan't mention the highest-billed stars, save to say Jessica Simpson is a worse actress that I should have considered possible. It's in the supporting roles that the tragedy lies. For here we have M.C. Gainey, a great actor who's recently been nothing short of fantastic on my new favourite show, Justified; and, on a somewhat lesser scale, Nikki Griffin*, who is much worse than she was during her enjoyable run as Jess the Coke Whore on The O.C. Perhaps I should not be angry with Burt Reynolds considering this has been his career since before I was born. But you see, this is not the first film set in the Appalachian backwoods of Georgia Reynolds as acted in. There's the little matter of Deliverance (1972), the finest of the countryside-revenge films, whose memory Reynolds has retroactively sullied. (Incidentally, both films share a fixation on bows and arrows. Coincidence? Hopefully, yes.)

But they pale before Willie Nelson, country singer extraordinaire and good old rebel against the Nashville establishment. I'm listening to Red Headed Stranger (1975) as I write, and weeping honest manly tears. This is, perhaps, to uphold the film's country cred: the television series was narrated by no lesser man than Waylon Jennings, on whose grave Nelson has now spat. Or perhaps not: maybe this is business as usual. Nelson himself certainly did not seem embarrassed about his part in perpetrating The Dukes of Hazzard since, unlike even its normally shameless leads, he consented to appear in the direct-to-DVD sequel.

Well, so it's not good: but does it deliver the goods? There is a lot of deeply unfunny comedy, although a couple of jokes could have worked in other hands than those of director Jay Chandrasekhar. It's largely hicksploitation and terrible sex jokes, although humour dealing in bodily functions is, much to my surprise, mercifully absent. So, no on the humour front. There's a significant amount of titillation, a good part of it on the part of Jessica Simpson in her character's eponymous Daisy Dukes; and although Simpson is certainly ridiculously attractive, the lingering shots act as a turn-off to the audience, who feel disgusted with themselves.** (See also: Bay, Michael.)

Finally, there's the action, viz. the numerous car chases. Make no mistake: the General Lee is a snazzy ride, for all that's worth from someone who failed his driving test twice and then gave up. But Chandrasekhar, largely a director of comedies, is clearly inexperienced at directing car scenes. He invariably uses far too many close-ups and rather too few wide angles, which makes it quite impossible to keep track of what's going on; crane shots would also have helped. And because everything else is so bad, the lack of realism irks me in a way it never does in better works. For example, a scene in which the General Lee drags a safe at high speed ought to have resulted in the messy death of Luke Duke, but is instead played as causing fear and mild discomfort; likewise, the many car jump scenes should lead to less exhilarating slow motion, and more broken axles and smashed skulls.

The series must be much better than this, since it ran for seven seasons. Or so I hope, if the eighties were indeed a more innocent time than an age in which the Transformers franchise rakes in billions. Them Duke boys, I like to think, lived in a colourful, creative universe that their lesser descendants just cannot hope to emulate. But I'm so back to watching Justified.

*I typed 'Nick Griffin', then realised my mistake. Perhaps I should have my head examined.
**This is an hypothetical member of the audience, and in no way me.