Movies
Another Take On ‘The Hunger Games’, Write In With Your Reviews!
Lionsgate’s Gary Ross-directed adaptation of The Hunger Games hits theaters today, and judging from it’s $19 Million midnight haul, plenty of you have seen it already!
From my 8/10 review, “Ultimately ‘The Hunger Games’ is almost a minor miracle. What could have been a quick and easy cash-in on an existing property is instead a carefully considered, thrilling and touching piece of populist entertainment. It’s sort of an exciting prospect that, for the first time in a long time, we’re going to have a pop culture “moment” centered around a film that actually made the effort to tell its story well (even though it’s a shame that this is now the exception to the rule).”
We also have another review for the film – through the lens of someone who has read the books – from BD’s Jonathan Barkan. While he didn’t dislike the film, his take is certainly less enthusiastic than my own. “As a book-to-film adaptation, this rightfully deserves a 9/10. But in terms of my enjoyment of the film, I find that I can’t be so generous.”
In theaters today from director Gary Ross, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Dayo Okeniyi, Amandla Stenberg, Chris Mark, Jacqueline Emerson, Wes Bentley, Lenny Kravitz, Toby Jones, and Stanley Tucci.
Write in with your review now! And hit the jump for Barkan’s take! The Hunger Games – Jonathan Barkan
I feel that I have to throw in my view on The Hunger Games film, as it seems I’m the only reviewer at Bloody-Disgusting that’s also read through the series. As a result, I felt like throwing in my two cents couldn’t hurt anyone, right?
So, let’s get the plot out of the way: in the future, North America, now referred to as Panem, has been divided into 12 districts and a major city known as The Capitol. Every year, each district sends one male and one female between the ages of 12 and 18 to a tournament known as the hunger games. In this tournament, the contestants must fight to the death until only one is left alive. Our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), chooses to volunteer in order to take the place of her 12 year old sister, Primrose, who was originally chosen. And so begins the tale.
Split basically into three parts, the movie begins with Katniss and her life in District 12. Thankfully, this section of the film is kept short and direct. Even in the book, nothing of any great importance happened during this segment, aside from the introduction of Gale, Katniss’s best friend and hunting companion. By whittling this down, the film was able to go directly to the second part, which is the preparation for the games themselves. This included training, interviews, planning, etc… And then finally, we get to the games themselves.
This is where the movie shines, but who really expected it to be the most interesting at any other point? The purpose of this book and this movie is to show the games themselves, fueling our need to voyeuristically relish in the slaughter of teenagers (something I fully admit to doing). It would be like saying the best part of Alien is when Kane had the facehugger attached to his face and that the rest of the movie was, well, meh.
For as much as Katniss goes through some incredibly trying and difficult moments during the games, it never seems that she changes all that much or goes through any sort of growth. This could very well be that her character in the book and the movie is just so damn dull. Yup, I said it. I think Katniss is an incredibly boring, selfish character that doesn’t deserve the fascination or appreciation of the audience.
The film was shot very well but had a very bad case of the camera being smack dab in the middle of any sort of action sequence, shaking from side to side as though the cameraman was in the midst of a grand mal seizure. Whatever happened to the days when a fight could be shot from a bit of a distance, allowing the filmgoer to actually understand what is happening?
The movie was also rather uninteresting when it came to the music department. There weren’t any cues that stood out nor did any of them serve to amplify the emotion of the scene. The music was just…there.
I must make it clear that I wasn’t exactly a fan of the books. They were written well enough but nothing about them stood out as anything special. Truly, it felt like (as everyone and their mother have referenced) Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale with a dash of the 1987 sci-fi action film The Running Man. However, the books never captured the same intensity, instead feeling like a lackluster hodgepodge for Twilight fans to salivate over.
That being said, I have to give it to the writers of the film. For a book-to-film adaptation, this movie remained remarkably accurate to the source material. And even though there were a great many details that had to be left out for time constraint purposes, there were several little winks to the audience for those who read the books. For instance, when Katniss leaves the house in the beginning of the film, Prim’s cat hisses at her. Anyone who has read the books will understand how significant that is as the story progressed in the second and third novels.
Speaking of time constraints, the movie, as I said, did a remarkable job of knowing how to take richly detailed scenes from the book and get the most important parts transitioned onto screen. Which is why I found it so strange that I felt like the movie was somewhat too long. At 142 minutes, the film felt like it dragged during some scenes and I shifted in my seat, resisting the urge to look at the time.
In conclusion, I find myself torn. As a book-to-film adaptation, this rightfully deserves a 9/10. But in terms of my enjoyment of the film, I find that I can’t be so generous. In the end, The Hunger Games never thrilled, it never excited, and it ultimately left me bored.
3/5 Skulls
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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