Hollywood's Crappy Horror Movies

Written by: Xil

I've been having a little bit of a beef lately, and it's been with Hollywood. Throughout the past forty years, many good things have came from the land of glitz and glam. Unfortunately, just as many bad things have, too. Lately (especially in the last year or so), the overwhelming number of cheesy, over done horror movies has gotten to me like my old Furbies did when I didn't feed them for six months.

The Grudge, Saw, The Forgotten. These three wonderful movies all have something in common, besides all having short, ambiguous names and confusing meanings. All three were also poorly scripted, had a plot that involved...no plot, or just had lots of blood and gore. Now don't get me wrong, I love having someone's legs chopped off just as much as the next guy, but when a movie is so predictable that you're laughing at the part where the wife has to cut her husband's nose off to retrieve the key that will unlock the box, which she has to cut his stomach open to get to, just so she can get to the room where the ghosts who came back from the past due to her son's disappearance are probably going to kill her anyways...yeah. Not fun.

You can't help but wonder just why it is these movies ever make it to filming. I can't be the only one who has ever noticed this! All three movies have very cryptic plots and involve less acting from their leads than a cat in a commercial for dog food! Sorry if I have high expectations, but when someone is demanding seven million dollars to scream bloody murder a few times, it gets rather irritating.

Whatever happened to the good stuff? The movies where you couldn't tell what was going to happen at the end? Dorky classics like The Shining or Psycho remain in our minds long after they're done and actually terrify us. When was it that movies lost their luster and replaced it with gutsters?

I love high graphic smasher thrillers, but I also love it when a director can make a person think. Not all scary movies need to be scary - they just need to make you think. A good example was the movie Signs. If you went there to be terrified, you got maybe one or two major scares (I could never get over people actually finding the part where the alien walked out from behind the bushes scary. It wasn't scary, just stupid.), but overall you go to think about the movie, and put yourself in the place of the character. In Signs, you see the characters' faults and triumphs before the attack, and how the things that were once important no longer mattered.

I'm not asking for much, just a bit of plot revision and possibly a beating for the people who think up the screenplays to these mediocre films, just a nice good classic horror movie where I won't be able to regurgitate the whole plot fifteen minutes in.

Short translation: Give me anything but The Village.