Slasher film goes cerebral

• About the ratings
• Write your own review
• Back to main page

'Horror Movie' tries to provoke thought but frequently just manages to annoy the audience

By Chris Garcia
American-Statesman Film Critic

Posted: June 18, 2004

For a prolific serial killer, Max sure gabs a lot. The suave psycho offers compulsive blow-by-blow narration as he dispatches his prey with knife, bludgeon and flame. Afterward, in soliloquized post-mortems, Max addresses us at length, almost accruing new victims by talking us to death. You want to snap, "Quit the yackety-yack and get killin'!"

But you don't because Max has a hypnotic way about him. His Ginsu gaze stabs deep, his unctuous British charm coils around you. It's an unpleasant grip, especially when the blood oozes and the screams curdle on screen. But there you are, a voyeur, half rapt and half repelled by what you're seeing.

That's the theory, anyway, behind "The Last Horror Movie," a faux shockumentary that fancies itself a meditation on the morality, complicity and hypocrisy of voyeurism in the age of reality TV, when everyone watches everyone do everything. Everything but murder people, which is where Max comes in for this skillful if not-quite-convincing essay into philosophical profundity.

The title is a bit misleading, as director Julian Richards' snuff-style feature withholds the twisted delights for which we watch horror movies, going instead for something altogether more cerebral, realistic and troubling. The film demands to know why we are watching Max's extremely graphic murder spree, which he has videotaped and slipped onto the cassette of a generic horror movie for unwitting renters to encounter. The way the movie is structured, you are one of those renters, and Max is addressing you. (Which doesn't work so well when you're ensconced in the communal safety of a theater.)

Hollywood horror pictures studiously avoid too-authentic depictions of death in favor of plastic escapism, the visceral fix of a good harmless jolt. Richards' no-budget chiller is violent without the fun of a popcorn-spilling spook. You watch Max's studied murders as your stomach rotates in a slow loop of mounting disgust.

We're given little background about Max, a wedding videographer by day and, like another noted serial killer, a whiz in the kitchen. Kevin Howarth's Max looks like Denis Leary and exerts Leary's jerky smugness with oily, debonair dash. Max and his hapless cameraman make the killing rounds in much the way characters in the infinitely more effective verité satire "Man Bites Dog" did. (The film's other touchstones are "Peeping Tom," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.")

Max, however, wants his real-time slaughter to serve dual roles as a collection of death and a dissertation. So realistically staged — victims scream for their lives and die absent the glamour of special effects — the murders are tough viewing. But Max's logic is equally tough to digest, because it is the faulty reasoning of a maniac (and of screenwriting that hasn't been thought through).

Max talks too much. He insists we ponder the perversity of his deeds and the fact that we are watching them, but all this does is defuse the perversity. He won't allow us to slip into the situation he wants us to examine. He pulls us out of the moment with redundant analysis. "Man Bites Dog," for example, slyly questioned our viewing motives by giving us room to blur the line between what's acceptable to watch and what is not. Before we knew it, we were accomplices with a serial killer. Only then did we have something to think about.

Richards' "Last Horror Movie" has a lot to recommend, not the least of which is its unflinching integrity. And in Howarth he's given us an insidious charmer who can snake-smile his way into a stranger's home. Once in, of course, that smile vanishes as he extinguishes the host in a ghastly flourish of shrieks and blood.

Director Julian Richards will present the American premiere of "The Last Horror Movie" at 9:40 tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse Village.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649