Wherein myself and Brian Salisbury of Film School Rejects / Hollywood.com / HorrorSquad.com debate the relative merits of Neil Marshall’s debut feature, Dog Soldiers.

Wherein myself and Peter S. Hall of the fantastic blog Horror’s Not Dead duke it out over the relative merits of Neil Marshall’s sophomore film The Descent.

B-D by way of Frightfest.co.uk has a low-res copy of the Descent 2 poster, seen above. It’s small but I suppose it gives you an idea. One of the things I loved about the The Descent was the creature design, while the sequel, based on the poster above and screenshots, makes the creatures look a little too….fake.

Judgment should be reserved until I see the film, as the above picture might reflect a new type of creature not seen in the first film. Whatever it may be, however, it still looks incredibly hokey, as if the actor is just wearing a mask. Kinda looks like a geriatric Bat Boy.

This is a list of films that had, in some way, an influence on Neil Marshall when writing and directing his 2008 homage to post-apocalyptic science fiction films, Doomsday. Whether or not he was aware of it is anyone’s guess:

28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
Land of the Dead
Judge Dredd
Waterworld
Alien vs Predator
Gladiator
Resident Evil
Dog Soldiers

Only two of the aforementioned films are included in Marshall’s own list of influences. On this subject Marshall had this to say: “Right from the start, I wanted my film to be a homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn’t seen those movies in the cinema—hadn’t seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporize it, pump up the action and the blood and guts.”²

So clearly Marshall intended this film to lack anything that resembles originality. This is fine by me; originality is not a requisite for a good film and I laud his honesty in stating outright what his intentions are. However, while depicting influence in your own films is never a bad thing, it certainly doesn’t do you any favors when roughly 80% of the film, a statistic I did not just pull out of my ass, is comprised of specific and easily identifiable elements from a wide range of other films.

The plot is generic and, as was noted above, a hodgepodge of other films far superior. Roughly thirty years after a virus ravaged much of Scotland resulting in it being walled off and abandoned, the virus has returned. Thanks to high-tech surveillance, living humans have been found within the walls and it’s up to Major Eden Sinclair and her ragbag team of elite commandos to go behind the walls and find the cure before the virus spreads among the population of London and decimates the city. Hilarity in the form of over-the-top acting and Rhona Mitra’s lack of emotion ensue.

The beginning of the film called to mind both Resident Evil and 28 Days Later in terms of not only style but substance, and given both this and the words out of Marshall’s own mouth, it’s clear he was trying to not only pay homage to classic apocalyptic films, but the newer ones as well. Later on we’re treated to Waterworld and Gladiator, 2008 Edition. Unfortunately, the myriad of influences did little draw my interest, as the film is incredibly disjointed, and manages to shift gears so suddenly and at such inopportune times, that one wonders whether or not it’s actually Neil Marshall behind the lens. It starts off headed in one direction and at one point manages to find a way to become the newest incarnation of The Fast and the Furious, though thankfully without Paul Walker around to fuck anything up; we have Rhona Mitra to do that for us.

He also has said that, “I do think it’s going to divide audiences… I just want them to be thrilled and enthralled. I want them to be overwhelmed by the imagery they’ve seen. And go back and see it again.”¹ Unfortunately – and I say this with a heavy heart, as Dog Soldiers and The Descent are two of my favorite films – I was underwhelmed and have absolutely no desire to see this film again.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad, as Marshall has a masterful eye for gore and manages to do a few things that were both innovative and downright hysterical, the latter of which culminating in a decapitated head flying right into the camera with a brilliant look on its face. Spoon from Dog Soldiers was in it, and I thought he was the best part of the film after MyAnna Buring, who’s just cute as a button. In the end, however, the movie was stale, relatively annoying, and a severely disappointing outing for a director who has come to be known as one of the best in the horror business today.

^{1 http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/doomsday/news/1726180/neil_marshalls_10_post_apocalyptic_picks
2 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/13/entertainment/et-doomsday13}

I have not seen the first three films by Alexandre Aja, though I suspect most have not. His magnum opus might be considered Haute Tension had the script not degraded into a cheap M. Night Shayamalan rip-off, rendering the first half of the movie completely implausible and utterly stupid. Though this made the film absolutely unbearable, it was not without its upsides. The soundtrack, cinematography, and methods of dispatch, if you will, were absolutely brilliant, so I don’t think I’d be completely off base in saying that this was just a fluke and hoped for good things to come from him in the future.

His next film was a remake of the Craven borefest The Hills Have Eyes, which was overtly graphic for the sake of being graphic while being just as boring as the original. This says nothing of its originality, of which there is almost none, falling into an inescapable vortex of cheap horror cliches. The final twenty minutes are ridiculously predictable, and I left the theater wondering what the fuck I just watched.

His next film as a writer was P2, which I never saw. This is a good thing, as it doesn’t seem to be anything more than your run-of-the-mill Hollywood suspense-thriller. After that comes this year’s South Korean remake, Mirrors, doomed to fail because it’s a remake of an Asian horror film. Just because The Ring was successful does not give every fucking big-name horror director carte blanche to adapt every Asian horror film into a shitty one-off American adaptation. The Grudge sucked, Dark Water sucked,and Pulse definitely sucked, so what makes you think this won’t suck? ‘Cause Jack Bauer is in it?

Alexandre Aja is lucky in that he made one successful horror film (albeit a shitty successful horror film). Instead, however, of making more successful horror films that are actually good, he’s selling out by making cheap remakes of classics that also suck, remakes of Asian horror films that are rarely good, and really, really, really, really, really, really shitty retarded suspense-thrillers. His next movie is Piranha 3-D. Here’s hoping it’s a comedy.

Mr. Aja, please stop making shitty horror films. The French are dominating the genre, and you’re sticking out like a black man at a Klan rally. Have some God damned dignity and make something truly inspiring to horror fans everywhere. You’ve exhibited a slow and steady decline, so…well, so I guess you’re like most horror directors. Heh. No one can ever top their first.

Fun note: Aja holds membership in the Splat Pack, “a collection of filmmakers who, since 2002, have brought about a renaissance of horror film.” Of those on the list, the only who is worth a damn is Neil Marshall, ’cause, well, Dog Soldiers and The Descent fucking ruled.