Adam Green: with anticipation

Right now I'm struggling.  Last night (a Saturday night mind you) I found myself at the grocery store.  At 8:00PM.  With my family, whom I love, but at the grocery store none the less.  So, being that I am at the grocery store and most fun loving adults in the Cincinnati area are drinking pints of wonderful beer at Oktoberfest- I decide to rent some horror.  The least I can give myself is a night of horror glee.  I got my caffeine free diet Coke, my BB-Q chips and the freedom to go rent what I'd like. So I go to my local Family video, with it's crap selection of movies.  I paid part of my late fees, since I never can return movies on time and I rented three horror films. 

Wait, not three horror films, three pieces of crap.  Two of the After Dark Horror Fest selections, Dark Ride and Mulberry St.  Both crap.  Dark Ride I probably couldn't access fairly since I literally shut it off 45 minutes in.  I was wasting my time.  Also, The Cottage, whose cover looked cool, but we all know we can't judge a horror film by it's box art.  That was crap too. 

Rather than waste time reviewing the bad horror- I want to talk about upcoming horror.  Adam Green's Frozen and Adam Green's Hatchet 2.  At times I feel like I am passing time until these films get released.  Frozen i know is coming out on DVD Sep 24th.  Hatchet 2 will have limited theater release, closest to Cincy is a Columbus metroplex.  These two, and a few others are all that I long for.

Adam Green is a great breath of fresh air to the horror genre.  Hatchet was a slasher gem that lived up to its moniker of "old school American horror."  That it was.  I expect more of the same from Hatchet 2.  Frozen on the other hand looks tremendous.  i try not to watch too many previews, but i did here a interview with Adam Green on the horror show fearshop.com/horrorpodcast.  On it, Adam admits that Frozen is his best yet.  I will wait to judge until I can actually view and review the film- but i strongly believe a fresh voice like Adam Green's will be a welcome harbinger to the Fall season.   

Exam: What would Sartre do?

Way back in 1995 I was required by my beloved high school English teacher to read Jean-Paul Sartre's play "no Exit."  This French play intrigued me, taught me about existentialism and at the time connected directly to my love of horror films.  While Sartre's play is not specifically horror, the scenario of situations that happen behind closed doors is.  The family barricaded in their house by zombies.  The rag-tag group of misfits holed up in a gas station, fending off the virus, the plague, each other.  Take any group or cross section of society, trap them in an environment and let the audience rattle their brains on who the sole survivor will be.  Sartre's play has been used as a basis for several films and the scenario makes for a great horror setting.  Some bad like Saw III-VI.  Some great, like Cube.  A recent film that uses this scenario is Stuart Hazeldine's Exam.

i caught Exam the other night on IFC On Demand.  Had to pay the ghastly premium price of 5.99.   But my wife was willing to watch a film, borderline horror and this looked like it might suit us.  The film plays with similar situations, people trapped in a room.  The cross section of society.  The riddles they must solve.  The movie was good, not great, but good.  With a second watching I might pick up on more.  What I enjoyed was that it seemed a little more realistic than Cube.  i love Cube.  Will admit I even am a sucker for the sequels.  When i mentioned in trying to justify the 5.99 price tag, i said to my wife that Exam looks like it might be similar to Cube.  She reminded me that I liked Cube, while she on the other hand didn't see the reality in it.  Exam is more likely to happen. 

My real question here is the No Exit scenario and in what real life settings could it happen.  I see the upcoming film Devil uses the people trapped in an elevator scenario...and one of them is...you guessed it.  But what of these scenarios might happen in real life.  Maybe war, soldiers captured.  Hostage situations, bank hold ups, that sort of thing.  Maybe people are in a real life No Exit, in their cubicle, their semi-truck, their life.  The writer Sartre perhaps explains horror's use of his source material best in the quote from No Exit: "We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing."