Live or die, make your choice

[vovat]

The seventh Monster-Mania Convention was held this past weekend. This convention is being held increasingly often, and becoming increasingly less interesting. It's pretty much not worth it to go any day except Saturday, which is good because it means spending less money, but I have no clue why they've stopped having events the other two days. This time, the first event bethje and I attended was a panel with Tom Savini, Kane Hodder, and Gunnar Hansen. As happened last time Gunnar was there, someone asked him (who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) what he thought of the TCM remake. It's pretty well-known that he didn't like it, but this time he had a few points to add to his complaint that they basically made Leatherface into a kid from Columbine. I'm not sure I'd mind a panel made up entirely of Gunnar complaining about the remake. {g} He mentioned that he hadn't seen the recent prequel, on which there's more later in this post.

We stuck around for the Devil's Rejects panel, featuring the always entertaining Sid Haig, this time accompanied by William Forsythe. Bill Moseley was also supposed to be there, but he'd been detained at the airport. We didn't attend the Monster Squad panel, since neither of us had seen it, and watched part of The Devil's Rejects while sitting in front of a probably-drunk guy who kept yelling at the characters in the film about dying with honor. He was eventually thrown out, and we eventually went back downstairs to get seats for the Saw panels. These were the Big Events this time around, but they weren't anywhere near as well-attended as other Big Events in the past. I suppose the stars of Saw just aren't the draw that Robert Englund is, which is definitely understandable. Still, they were interesting enough, although Beth said she thought Tobin Bell (who played Jigsaw, and actually talks like the character) came across as self-important, which I could totally see. At the end of the session, a producer took the opportunity to hype Saw IV, which strikes me as somewhat unnecessary. I mean, I guess it was pretty much inevitable that they'd make it, since the franchise has become a cash cow, but it really did seem to be a self-contained trilogy. The producer's spiel on the movie (which was something along the lines of, "Lots of twists and turns! More twists and turns than you'd ever expect! You think you've seen lots of twists and turns in the past? Well, I guarantee you haven't seen this many twists and turns!") didn't really help to sell it either.

After the Saw panels, we went to eat at an understaffed Friendly's, and then came back home. There isn't much more to say about that, but I will go back to Friday night and say that we watched the aforementioned TCM prequel then. Gunnar had complained about how they explained Leatherface in the original remake, and the prequel was even worse in that respect. Leatherface, the chainsaw, and the new round of victims were almost secondary players, though, with the most significant role being R. Lee Ermey's corrupt, brutal sheriff. In this movie, it's revealed that he got that job by killing and stealing the identity of the actual sheriff. Why this explanation is necessary is beyond me. Maybe the real Travis County Sheriff's Department insisted upon it. Nor do I know why it was necessary for Leatherface to have been adopted. In addition to the explanations being pointless, there really wasn't any suspense or actual horror at all. Besides, the kids were supposed to be going to Vietnam, and compared to that, I don't think murderous hicks with chainsaws are all that scary.

Comments

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it was a pretty boring convention based on your experience. I wouldn't have even seen the Saw panels or movies. There's nothing that frightening about "scary" movies these days. Serial killer movies just get grosser and grosser (at the same time with less and less suspense) and monster movies are almost all but gone from Hollywood. The few vampire/werewolf movies that come out seem to be about building a franchise based on a made-up mythology, like the "Underworld" movies and the "White Wolf" RPGs.

[bethje.livejournal.com]

Horror movies don't scare me, and they rarely ever have. It's a genre I enjoy and always have, but not for that reason. Some are good and many aren't, but that's true about everything. I enjoy the Saw franchise a lot. They aren't without their problems, but they're fun and better than most of the other new horror movies I've seen.

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

What do you like about them? About the Saw movies, I mean.

[bethje.livejournal.com]

I like the story. I like the idea that the killer is a terminally ill guy, as opposed to a slasher (although I do love Freddy and Michael and Jason). What I like best is the traps, because I like that Jigsaw sets it up and lets it happen. That's a new element to me. I also like creative deaths, but I also like a good old fashioned stabbing. I like the gore. Each movie has a twist, and I think that's cool. Leigh Whannell wrote them so that they'd sort of play as one movie, and I think he was successful, and that adds to the rewatchability for me. He also did some really cool one-shot scenes in the third one (I had to watch the commentary to be aware of that, because I thought it was just clean editing).

I also like them for what I consider to be their imperfections. I enjoy the IMDb forums for the Saw movies, and a lot of the fans think that there's something noble in Jigsaw, and I find that laughable, too. Like, he's teaching them to appreciate life, and I think the he's never heard that two wrongs don't make a right. Nor do I understand his reasons for choosing certain people for this lesson, like Zep and Adam in the first and a coroner in the third. I also think it's funny to do this as he's dying of cancer. Someone needs to tell him he isn't the first person to die of cancer nor was cancer invented just for him. I say this as someone who has loved ones who died from cancer and loved ones who survived it, and my cat even died of cancer this past fall, around the time when I saw the third at the movies. It's goofy. Anyway, at the con, Leigh Whannell never made the point about Jigsaw being sort of a noble teacher. Instead he wrote it as a terminally ill man just losing it, which is better for these movies.

So yeah, they aren't my favorite horror movies, but I consider them among the best of the last few years and a lot of fun. And a guy got burned alive. That's intense.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

This convention is being held increasingly often,
I was gonna say, 'cause I feel like you just wrote about a Monster convention. Was that really a whole year ago, or are they having them several times a year?

[bethje.livejournal.com]

They had them in May and August the last couple of years, but this is the first year that they're having three. The dates for the next two were in the program. I'm glad that they're more often (you can probably guess that Nathan goes to these things for me), but the quality isn't what it was. No, not the quality; the problem is that the Q&A's are all one day, so there's no reason to go on Friday or Sunday, unless you want to go to the dealer room, get autographs (which are at least $20 apiece), or watch movies, and I go only for the Q&A's.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Jigsaw is definitely a guy with a method to his madness, which I think is always interesting. There are things you can do with someone mentally ill yet really bright in a certain way that you really can't with someone who's just crazy in a "you never know what they're going to do next" kind of way.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I don't think a horror movie necessarily has to be scary to be successful. I mean, there has to be a certain element of that, or it's not really horror (i.e., I wouldn't say every movie about a monster or a serial killer is a horror movie), but I think what I value more (with most kinds of movies, really, not just horror) is a high level of creativity.

I DID find The Ring to be actually scary, but as Gunnar pointed out at that convention, that's really more of a thriller with some horror elements.

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

Oh ok. I understand where you're coming from. "Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein" could be considered a horror movie, but I doubt anyone has ever been frightened by it. Or by "Plan 9 From Outer Space" for that matter. I agree that horror movies, like all movies, should have a high level of creativity. However, I don't think that creativity should be limited to "let's see how many ways we can kill a teen in this movie without repeating ourselves." For example, "Young Frankenstein" (which is technically a horror comedy) is very creative but the gross-out factor is minimal. Gore and blood=/=horror movie, because action and historical films are pretty damn gory too. But many filmmakers these days seem to think that you can't make horror without excessive gore.