It’s amazing how James Wan once went from the man who brought us movies about a maniac torturing people to one of the most horrifying ghost tales ever brought to the big screen. “The Conjuring” lives up to its hype as a slow boil and immensely scary supernatural tale about an average family terrorized by a vicious demonic entity that’s intent on ruining their foundation from the inside out.
For a very long time I avidly avoided Tod Browning’s “Freaks” simply because it was one of those films that I was intimidated by. While very few films leave me tainted, “Freaks” is a film I was afraid would be cheap, exploitative, and nauseating. “Freaks” is by all accounts one of the most downbeat horror classics ever made. Especially in the face of director Browning’s horror classic “Dracula.”
You have to wonder if Gus Van Sant either garners an enormous amount of hubris, or just has a masochistic streak in him. Why else would he dive head first in to a remake of a hallowed horror and cinematic classic? And why else would he deliver a remake that’s exactly shot for shot? And “Psycho 1998” isn’t a remake that’s shot for shot with some liberties taken. It’s shot for shot to where director Van Sant copies every single shot of the original film, except with new actors. Van Sant fills the remake with a surreal tone in the vein of David Lynch to where the movie is adrift in a time period blurred between the fifties and contemporary time.
Director Alfred Hitchcock managed to set a precedent in 1960, not only for creating one of the greatest psychological thrillers, but for films that could become masterpieces despite their low budget. He also helped pave the way for the classic shocking twist that many directors continue copying today. Adapted from the novel that was based on the murders of Ed Gein, Hitchcock offers film-goers as much twists and turns as possible while managing to scare us at the same time. “Psycho” is the psychological examination of the twisted human psyche, the darkness in every human as Hitchcock was brilliant in conveying.
Comic Bucket List #4: The Supernaturals
SUPERNATURALS
1998
Brian Pulido, Marc Andreyko, Ivan Reis
My original thought was how the hell they’d explain Jason Voorhees fighting uber-Jason from Jason X. And the writers do a piss poor job of it. Maybe there are two realities in the future in where the space scavengers form a time rift? Who knows? What we learn is that Uber-Jason is not really Jason, but the head of Jason with a body compiled of nanobots, and robotic parts. He is kind of a pseudo-Jason, to be exact.
We learn in the two part mini-series that he’s convinced he’s Jason and is trying to re-claim the psyche of the original Jason to complete his memory and continue his mission to murder everyone and anyone who steps foot in Camp Crystal Lake. So Jason belonged to Earth Prime, which is now a wasteland, and the space crew from “Jason X” froze and destroyed Jason from Earth 2. That Jason was re-invented as a science fiction monster known as Uber-Jason. They then went to Earth Prime to capture Jason again, and learn from his regenerative tissues. That failed. Duh.
And now Jason is thawed and lurking on the abandoned ship. We now have two Jasons. So does that mean we have two Freddy Kruegers and two Pinheads and two Leprechauns? In either case, taking off from the “Jason X” special, the characters from Earth Prime that survive their confrontation with Jason end up on the party ship where Uber-Jason is, and as one female pilot attempts to flee, she ends up caught in between the battle of Jason and Uber-Jason for complete dominance.
As with the usual slasher fare, there are no characters we can root for, but this comic takes it to a whole other level. There are literally no interesting heroes or heroines here, and it’s mainly just pages of slaughtering hapless victims. The fight between uber-Jason and Jason also doesn’t warrant much sense, especially considering the Jason the writers chose to go with, in the end. Uber-Jason kills Jason, and puts his brain in to his own head to garner the crown of Jason Prime. So then what? Is Uber-Jason the primary design now? It’s all so unsatisfying, in the end.
When Uber-Jason crash landed in to Earth in the end of “Jason X,” it turned out to be another virtual reality. In an effort to grab a part of his regenerative tissue to learn about his healing properties, a young scientist is able to snare and trap him. Since that doesn’t last long, things get worse when Uber-Jason’s psyche re-invents the memories of his mother as a computer system who begins controlling Jason’s thoughts and commands.