THE BITERION COLLECTION: Dread

I feel a little unoriginal bitching about torture-porn films, but you know what? I hate torture-porn films. I don't understand the attraction at all. I say this as someone who has no particular problem with onscreen violence. The difference, which is probably obvious, is that violent movies in general use violence as a component of action. And what I really like (and what most people like, I would think) is the action! Blood and gore is the seasoning, and this is a metaphor that would probably feel too condescending if I took it any further.

Torture films divorce the violence from the action. Instead of two people evenly (or somewhat unevenly) matched, fighting it out (shooting it out, stabbing it out), we have two people who are completely unevenly matched; we have a victim and a perpetrator. We aren't watching action, we are watching suffering. And why would you want to watch suffering? I don't buy the catharsis argument, which is what a lot of people say. You know how some vitamins give you %500 of your daily value of Vitaman C? Torture films give you %500 of your daily value of violent catharsis. %100 is plenty. If you need this much catharsis, you also need medication. Incidentally this blog post gives you %500 of your daily dose of metaphors.

In high school I watched at least two Saw movies, Hostel, and a variety of cheap-o, Lionsgate straight-to-DVD releases. (A friend and I sort of had a fascination with the "Thriller" rack at our hometown video store, which was almost entirely composed of obscure releases from Lionsgate Films made with a budget of what seemed to be about fifty dollars each. Did Lionsgate OWN our video store?) I didn't particularly enjoy any of them, and I have actively avoided torture movies ever since. Hence the fact that I haven't seen Saw 4-18 or however many more there are. I find no enjoyment in seeing people die in bizarre and inventive ways, especially in the sort of joyless, faux-gritty, bleak dirges most of these films seem to be. Torture films are distinct from most other horror subsets, but their tropes are slowly bleeding into other horror films; witness the "gritty" remakes of 80s horror films being churned out by Platinum Dunes as we speak. It's what makes stuff like Ti West's throwback House Of The Devil, which borrows so heavily from Rosemary's Baby it probably owes Roman Polanski money, seem new and refreshing. The torture genre is already exhausted, and it's still new! It's like Ring-Tone Rap!

Torture films are also reflective, in a bad way, of the current American moral arraignment, which permits violence of basically any kind and fears sex of any kind. (Which is also a trend we see continued in Twilight, to a lesser extent.) In a way, Saw is this generation's Deep Throat, isn't it? Why are ANY of these movies only rated R? How are they at all less obscene than pornography? I hate sounding like a fucking schoolmarm over here, but honestly! Why do people like this?

This is all a longwinded way of saying that Dread, starring Jackson Rathbone of Twilight, fucking sucks. It was a totally miserable, grotesque, exploitive piece of shit. I enjoyed it less than (500) Days Of Summer, which makes it the worst film I've reviewed so far for this site.

Dread is one of the "8 Films To Die For," which is a part of Horrorfest 4. It's hard to believe there were four Horrorfests, but there you are. The previews before the film were an unrelenting barrage of horrific violence, and it turned out that a lot of it was from the last 30 minutes of this film. Doesn't seem like the best strategy, marketing wise, but I guess at this point they already have our money.

Jackson Rathbone plays Stephen Grace, a film student who takes a philosophy class and meets the mysterious Quaid, who is basically a psychopath from the outset. There is actually no mystery at all about the fact that eventually Quaid will try to kill Stephen and others - early on we find out that both of his parents were murdered by an axe-wielding lunatic, and we spend the entire film waiting for him to snap. Though it kind of seems like he has snapped already.

Quaid is played yellingly by Shaun Evans, who does a terrible job disguising his British accent. It is Sam Worthington-level bad. The film also features Hanne Steen as Cheryl, a film editor who is also Rathbone's love interest (not that the romantic subplot is at all important), and Laura Donnelly as Abby, a girl with a birthmark covering half of her body, who works with Rathbone at what appears to be a prison library.

The sets in this movie are the most ridiculous part: Quaid lives the mother of all haunted houses, a collapsed, condemned shack in the middle of the woods with an endless supply of new rooms. It's amazing how many different basements this dude seems to have. Rathbone and Donnelly work at the aforementioned bookstore or possibly-library from hell, which cinematically consists of an employee break room and a single book shelf. I understand budget constraints; these filmmakers obviously spent most of their money on fake dirt and dried blood to cover everyone with at the end of the film, (everyone is so dirty for the last act! Take a shower, someone!) but can't we get another angle of this bookstore or library? A few scenes take place at a hospital, which literally has a bunch of flickering fluorescent lights in the hallways. Really? We're going to do the flickering light thing? Okay.

So Quaid proposes that Stephen do a "fear study" for his senior project, and he brings on Cheryl because apparently he is a senior film student who doesn't know how to edit fucking video? We first see her cutting real celluloid film, so we know she's an old soul, but those skills don't necessarily translate to using Final Cut Pro. But whatever, she's on board. There's a long montage of people talking to their camera, saying a bunch of stupid and gross bullshit, like a 14-year-old's tribute to the "audition" scene in Audition.

Quaid also likes to paint portraits of topless women, and so there are plenty of boobs in this movie: gritty, bleak boobs, and eventually slashed up boobs, so if you have a lot of unresolved sexual aggression like this movie does I'm sure you'll dig that. There's also a fairly reductive subplot about Abby's body issues that culminates in a particularly brutal manner.

Jackson Rathbone is fine. He doesn't have a lot to do. Mostly he yells at Quaid for being a creepy asshole and then continues to hang out with him. Quaid seems to be taking their fear study too seriously (basically from the outset - it's not like there's a real turning point in this movie. At some point it seems like Director Anthony DiBlasi just got bored and decided now would be a good time to start killing off some characters. More like Anthony DiBLAHsi, am I right?) and pretty soon he's pushing his collaborators to face their fears (Jackson Rathbone's fear is dying, so how exactly do you face that fear?) in semi-ridiculous, low-rent Jigsaw ways.

If the 50's were the "alien invasion and body-takeover" era, the 70s were the "post-hippie Satanism" era, the 80's were the "Reagan-era morality-based slasher film" era and the 90's were the "serial killer," era, the aughts are what some have termed the "media horror" era. A trend kicked off my The Blair Witch Project, continued by The Ring, Paranormal Activity, [Rec], The Descent, and even Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden). Every one of these movies have a meta-angle to them, and the argument could be made that Dread is a commentary on horror movies. There is a lot of ridiculous dialogue about "touching the beast," and using this fear study to glimpse real fear as a way of being truly alive. Like seeing a horror movie allows us to face fears and be thrilled and blah blah blah. It's a fairly obvious thesis (and this is coming from someone who opened this blog post by opining about what makes Torture Film violence different from ordinary film violence! This post and a DVD of Dread can be found in this month's edition of Duh Aficionado Magazine).

(And you can trace the alien invasion stuff to fear of Communism, and the Satanism stuff to backlash from all the Free Love, but what exactly does this "media horror" trend reflect? Reality TV? Our collective obsession with navel-gazing in general?)

Interestingly this movie isn't really all that different from Summer's Moon, but the latter film fails to realize it's torture-porn aspirations which ironically helps it in my estimation. It also isn't nearly so determined to rub our faces in gore and disgusting imagery, and it also stars Ashley Greene. Hence its ranking over (500) Days Of Summer and Dread's ranking below it.

Even if Dread had something clever to say about horror films, which it doesn't, it would still be a universally unpleasant viewing experience. Jackson Rathbone is about to star in what will surely be a (non-Twilight) blockbuster, The Last Airbender, which looks fucking great even though it's being directed by M. Night Shyamalan, so I hope for his sake it will pull him up out of these kinds of awful films forever (the last few seconds of that trailer: holy shit). The word is he is a nice guy (isn't it weird that we are impressed when it turns out actors are nice? Don't we normally expect people to be nice under ordinary circumstances?) so I hope he succeeds. If only so I won't have to watch another movie like this ever again.