Child's Play

Maybe it was the fact that I'd overdosed on a glut of anodyne half-term kids' movies like The Adventures Of Greyfriars Bobby (boring), The Little Polar Bear 2 (sappy) and Chicken Little (incoherent), and was sorely in need of something nasty containing "strong language and horror". Maybe it was the laugh-free wasteland of Big Momma's House 2 which had left me ready to guffaw at anything vaguely resembling a joke, even a cruel one. Or maybe it was the fact that I'd endured two wince-inducing hours watching Gwyneth Paltrow (whose dislike of drunkenness has made me a confirmed alcoholic) whinge her way through the dismal Proof.

Whatever, I really needed to see people getting violently dismembered. And so I found myself this week in the somewhat shameful position of relishing the derivative, puerile, throwback slasher violence of Final Destination 3. I laughed; I jumped; I remembered what it was like to have acne. I'm not proud of it, but hey, it's the truth. And with the only competition offered by the stylish South Korean weirdness of Park Chan Wook's (clearly superior) Lady Vengeance, I can happily attest that Final Destination 3 is indeed the English language film of the week! If that's not an indication of the decline of Western civilization, then frankly I don't know what is.

As regular readers will know, the continued rise of the post-ironic (or post-post-modern) slasher flick is not something I approve of. Having grown up in the heyday of Friday The 13th, The Funhouse , Happy Birthday To Me, Prom Night, Hell Night, Toolbox Murders, He Knows You're Alone etc. etc, I honestly felt that by the time I was finally legally old enough to see one, I never wanted to watch another X-rated movie in which a guy in a mask chases someone in pants around a lake with a knife. Wes Craven's Scream was a welcome exception, since it seemed to have been written by a geek who was as sick of slasher movies as I was, and directed by the maestro who had first invented (with The Last House On The Left) and then outgrown the genre. Sadly, the self-reflexive pleasures of Scream soon gave way to the altogether more retro dreariness of I Know What You Did Last Summer and its interminable sequels. And before you knew it, we were right back in the bad old days of the early 1980s, before Clive Barker's equal-opportunities shocker Hellraiser proved that low budget horror cinema could be savage without being stupid or sexist.

Next page • "Heads, torsos, and backbones being merrily smashed, mashed, and thrashed"