THE CRITIC-AL LIST
Reviews by Alan Jones
5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH

The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Inception
Predators
The Twilight Saga:Eclipse
Toy Story 3
Hot Tub Time Machine
Iron Man 2
Repo Men
The Collector
Clash of the Titans
Shelter
How To Train Your Dragon
Kick-Ass
Shutter Island
Alice In Wonderland
The Crazies
Case 39
The Wolfman
Legion
The Lovely Bones
Black Death
Daybreakers
Avatar
Ninja Assassin
The Descent: Part 2
Amer
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
The Box
2012
Disney's A Christmas Carol
The Horseman
Solomon Kane
Pandorum
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
District 9
An Education
G.I. Joe: The Rise Of The Cobra
Orphan
A Perfect Getaway
The Imaginarium Of
Doctor Parnassus
Up
Harry Potter
And The Half-Blood Prince
The Taking of Pelham 123
Transformers
The Revenge Of The Fallen
Antichrist
Terminator Salvation
Last House On The Left
Inglorious Basterds
Angels & Demons
Adventureland
Star Trek
Crank: High Voltage
Coraline
Dragonball Evolution
Let The Right One In
Drag Me To Hell
Race to Witch Mountain
Knowing
Monsters Vs. Aliens
Not Quite Hollywood
Lesbian Vampire Killers
Martyrs
The Children
Surveillance
Watchmen
The Unborn
The International
Friday The 13th
Franklyn
Push
Punisher:War Zone
The Good The Bad And
The Weird
Hush
Underworld
The Rise OF The Lycans
My Bloody Valentine
Bolt
Slumdog Millionaire

Directed by Nelson McCormick. Starring Dylan Walsh, Sela Ward and Penn Badgley. Horror. USA, 101 minutes. UK 15.

Another great movie gets the redux treatment with predictably the same end result as the million other dire remakes we’ve seen already this year.

The best that can be said about this one is at least it isn’t as bad as PROM NIGHT, the last disaster from the same duo of director Nelson McCormick and writer J. S. Cardone. Okay, so it might be slightly less disposable, but it’s still a completely redundant retread of another classic chiller completely laying bare both filmmakers’ lack of affinity for the genre. Joseph Ruben’s well-respected 1987 original, in which a methodical multiple murderer obsessively tries creating the perfect family unit, revolved around a creepily charismatic central performance from future LOST star Terry O’Quinn. NIP/TUCK’s Dylan Walsh tries hard to match the same mercurial personality changes and icy delivery necessary to keep his paternal David Harris character constantly on the verge of psychotic explosion. However the whole concept has moved on in these days of identity theft and Internet research so he has a harder time keeping the mundane normality in believable check against a backdrop of lazy tension and basic scares. A virtual facsimile of Ruben and writer Donald E. Westlake’s stripping down of the American Dream to its maggot-ridden glory, McCormick’s disappointingly PG-13 thriller begins with David dispassionately moving on from one slaughtered family who didn’t meet his exacting criteria to lonely divorcee Susan (Sela Ward) and her trusting kids.  It ends exactly the same way in a well-edited, storm-tossed battle of collateral damage wits as David prepares to start over again. In between comes the necessary technological updates (texts, Google, Skype etc) allowing friends and family to check up on David’s ‘America’s Most Wanted’ status, with the unnecessary focus on suspicious would-be stepson Michael (Penn Badgeley, GOSSIP GIRL) and the relationship with his hot girlfriend (MANDY LANE’s Amber Heard spending most screen virtually unclothed). Ruben’s sardonic and unerringly frightening B-movie was so memorable because of the rich layering of dark Reagan era satire and frighteningly inverted family values.

But with that strand impossible to recreate and with the bland feel and look of an average Made for Television thriller, McCormick’s lacklustre reboot becomes just another in a long line of psycho shockers indistinguishable from all the rest.

ALAN JONES

© London FrightFest Ltd. 2000-2009
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