I've been a fan of horror movies and thrillers since I was a child. I'd like to think I know a little about the way they work, having studied film at university (not that that makes me an expert, mind you). In the post-modern world we live in now, there is a glut of cinema verite in our televisual entertainment, what with the plethora of reality TV shows and so on. Horror movies seem to have moved in a similar direction in some ways: witness The Blair Witch Project, Rec, Cloverfield etc. There is also an emphasis on taking the horror to its "logical" extreme by exposing the viewer to total violence and sadistic torture - note for instance the current trend of torture porn with films like Hostel and Saw. All these movies aim to place us in the action and make it seem more "real".
Taking this theme of placing-the-viewer-in-reality, the writer of The Last Horror Movie would like to think he is being desperately clever, but the script in this film is so patronising and transparent it can't even pass as "art".
The lead actor is just plain awful - his performance is incredibly affected and bland, with almost no nuance. Others give good performances however, especially the Assistant.
The serial killer constantly looks at the camera intensely and asks us "insightful" questions like "why are you still watching?" and "don't you want to see what happened?" and so on. Utterly tedious. We KNOW why we watch horror - we don't need to be lectured about it. Horror performs a sort of ritual of exorcism for our daily lives - it enables us to live vicariously through the fictional suffering of others, knowing we would never do it ourselves (and hoping that it will never happen to us). This sort of thematic material was explored with so much more finesse and artfulness in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (which is truly shocking in its coldness), Pasolini's incredible Salo (the end sequence where we are looking through binoculars at soundless torture scenes), Belgium's excellent "Man Bites Dog" (which was ahead of its time) and even less graphic movies like Hitchcock's Rear Window and the excellent "Peeping Tom" from the early 60s. Voyeurism being explored in film is nothing new. The premise of The Last Horror Movie therefore appears incredibly naive to me, with nothing new to say. The murders are rather silly, and the whole "I followed you from the video store" line just tacky. It's one thing to take the tack of "the viewer is complicit in this murder" theme, it's quite another to shove it down their throats.
Taking this theme of placing-the-viewer-in-reality, the writer of The Last Horror Movie would like to think he is being desperately clever, but the script in this film is so patronising and transparent it can't even pass as "art".
The lead actor is just plain awful - his performance is incredibly affected and bland, with almost no nuance. Others give good performances however, especially the Assistant.
The serial killer constantly looks at the camera intensely and asks us "insightful" questions like "why are you still watching?" and "don't you want to see what happened?" and so on. Utterly tedious. We KNOW why we watch horror - we don't need to be lectured about it. Horror performs a sort of ritual of exorcism for our daily lives - it enables us to live vicariously through the fictional suffering of others, knowing we would never do it ourselves (and hoping that it will never happen to us). This sort of thematic material was explored with so much more finesse and artfulness in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (which is truly shocking in its coldness), Pasolini's incredible Salo (the end sequence where we are looking through binoculars at soundless torture scenes), Belgium's excellent "Man Bites Dog" (which was ahead of its time) and even less graphic movies like Hitchcock's Rear Window and the excellent "Peeping Tom" from the early 60s. Voyeurism being explored in film is nothing new. The premise of The Last Horror Movie therefore appears incredibly naive to me, with nothing new to say. The murders are rather silly, and the whole "I followed you from the video store" line just tacky. It's one thing to take the tack of "the viewer is complicit in this murder" theme, it's quite another to shove it down their throats.