by John Noonan
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rob Zombie, Adam Wingard, Xavier Gens, Alice Lowe, Neil Marshall, Srdjan Spasejevic, Christopher Smith
Intro:
… a perfectly fine way to bathe in nostalgia.
With David A. Weiner’s big chungus of a documentary series, In Search of Darkness, currently eyeing up the ‘90s after its exhaustive exploration of the ‘80s, there’s probably a few wondering if there’s anything left to examine in horror nostalgia. Well, sorry to make you feel old, but the start of the millennium was over 20 years ago. So, it’s time to whack on the Ugg boots, wrap a thin scarf around your neck, slip on some Powderfinger and lament the death of Madge Bishop all over again, as Generation Terror pulls us back to films that made up the early 2000s.
Directed by Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott (The Found Footage Phenomenon), Generation Terror casts an eye over how the events of 2000-2010 wormed their way into the flesh of the more iconic horrors that came out in that decade. However, we don’t hit the ground running with how the war in Afghanistan influenced the likes of Hostel. If anything, Generation Terror suggests, it was 1999’s The Blair Witch Project that encouraged filmmakers to move to something more creative.
With the Columbine shootings and the Millenium bug also playing a large part in 1999, it’s no surprise that Final Destination – a film which said, ‘Hey kids! Death is literally all around you! You can’t escape it!’ – became so popular. Then 9/11 came along and the fantastical didn’t seem so scary anymore.
Generation Terror very much acknowledges this, going so far as to speak to British directors Neil Marshall and Christopher Smith about how the July 7 bombings in London became intrinsically linked to their films, The Descent and Creep. For Smith, the bad publicity was a marketing godsend, but for Marshall, whose movie poster just happened to be on one of the buses targeted, it was more about guilt by association.
The documentary nips along at a fair old pace and there are nuggets of narrative gold to be found. Glen Morgan’s retelling of how his remake of Black Christmas was butchered and hijacked by the production team sounds frustrating to say the least. Speaking of remakes, Steven R. Monroe is on hand to talk about how he tried to bring a 2010 sensibility to his take on Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave. Your mileage will vary on how successful you think he was.
Director Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2) does for Generation Terror what Quentin Tarantino did for Not Quite Hollywood, by being infectiously enthusiastic about the whole genre. In fact, he’s in the documentary so much, he may as well have been credited as the narrator.
Obviously, running at over 90 minutes, Appleton and Escott only have so far that they can branch out, meaning that they need to be focused. However, the inclusion of some things means the absence of others, sticks out like a sore thumb. When talking about audiences looking for blood lust, it’s surprising that the 2005 remake of House of Wax is not even mentioned, given its USP was literally ‘SEE PARIS DIE!’ Surely there’s some meat there to be stripped from the bone? Does the film really need Mr and Mrs Zombie talking extensively about making House of 1000 Corpses, only for them to disappear for the rest of the film? Where is Eli Roth to talk about Hostel being a gateway drug to torture porn? And why do we focus on 2008’s Day of the Dead while ignoring its vegetarian zombies and the much better 2004 Dawn of the Dead?
That’s not to say that Generation Terror isn’t an interesting film as well as a perfectly fine way to bathe in nostalgia. There’s just the feeling that perhaps the film was better guided by the directors than the film’s own subjects, so that you’re not left wanting.
