CineNiche

Poster from Alamo Drafthouse Reviews and essays abound for Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon's Cabin In The Woods . Some compare Cabin to Scream while others are convinced that Cabin exceeds Scream as a post-modern text. We belong to the latter camp. If you haven't seen Cabin then you shouldn't be looking at reviews so long after the the film's release. In 1996 Wes Craven along with a brilliantly written script by Kevin Williamson breathed new life into the slasher film. They took all of the archetypical constructs of the slasher sub-genre and directly exposed them to the audiences while staying within the confines of the genre. This was not new, parodies had done this in the past, but Scream kept a straight face and managed to produce fear. Spoof and parody of horror has been around since the days of Abbot & Costello, but more direct to our discussion is the 1982 classic Student Bodies . Made in the midst of the early 80's slasher boom, Stu...

When the original Night Of The Demons premiered in 1988 it was considered the best of B-Horror and created a franchise that lasted two sequels. It is still the only Kevin Tenney film that highlights his ongoing terrible reel – with possible exception to Witchboard made before Demons. The ’88 version gives us gore, bad acting, ridiculous scripting, and a non-sequitur ending. These were elements every 80’s slasher film wanted the perfect combination of. To remake a great trash film does not give you license to try to make it modern cinema. Adam Gierasch, the director of the updated version, does not provide his audience with anything more than a revamping over-sexualized depiction of a once innovative concept. Cineniche does not blame Gierasch, we believe he did the best with what the studio gave him. He is just another young filmmaker that wishes to create horror again – but unfortunately the American horror film is dying. Here is where we’ve decided to rant on remakes ...

After the anger receded from the horrible viewing of He Knows You're Alone, we had to go back to an overlooked classic: The Burning .  It did the trick.  Again this is another slasher from the mold of Halloween, but this one definitely has more of a Friday The 13th feeling - it's another summer camp slasher film.  Released in 1981 along with: Bloody Birthday ,  Don't Go In The Woods ,  Evil Dead ,  Friday The 13th 2 ,  Funhouse ,  Halloween 2 ,  Happy Birthday To Me ,  Hell Night ,  House By The Cemetary ,  My Bloody Valentine The Prowler  It's easy to see why this wasn't the blockbuster success it may have been.  There are a lot of hidden gems here, we get a script by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Jason Alexander's first role, a young gangly Fisher Stevens ( Hackers and Super Mario Brothers ), a brief Holly Hunter, music by Rick Wakeman of Yes, and t...

Or He Knows You're Copying.  Normally this would be unfair, because all of the slasher films of the eighties copied from the formula laid out very plainly by John Carpenter's Halloween .  Even Halloween was an homage to Italian Giallo films by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, but he took those somewhat complex plotlines and cut them down to the bare essentials.  Ironically enough, the slasher films that followed the wake of Halloween couldn't simplify enough and became more complex in trying to render a killer. Lets put some slashers in order here, we'll start off at Halloween and work our way to He Knows You're Alone released in September of 1980.. 1978 Toolbox Murders (released the same year as Halloween) 1979 Alien (yes, it's a slasher film in space) 1979 When A Stranger Calls 1980 Don't Answer The Phone (February) 1980 Friday The 13th (May) 1980 Prom Night (July) 1980 Dressed To Kill (July) Each of these films copied the prototype but d...

When Wes Craven first pitched this screenplay he was turned down by every major studio, they said it was absurd - unfilmable - and uninteresting. That was 26 years ago, and over the course of those years we've been given 9 Freddy related films and an unnecessary 44 episode TV show . So, keeping in mind that Freddy is a modern icon or modern urban legend/myth and there isn't a single person that doesn't at least know of Freddy Krueger - "he has knives for fingers." It is a lot of pressure for a first time feature length filmmaker to create or recreate something so iconic. Now, the general consensus is: why remakes? And no matter how good a remake is you'll always - I repeat always for emphasis - have to say I liked the original better. This leads to the second part of the why remakes question, why remake something that will never live up to or be as good as its original? The simple Hollywood answer: Money! We are in economic crisis and even though y...