Halloween is the best time of the year. It’s when the best horror movies come out, it’s when a lot of amusement parks have monsters and goblins running around trying to scare people, and it’s when all the classic horror films are being played on television for great marathons of death and destruction.
I guess it is my macabre side that holds Halloween so dear, the side of me that loves movies like “Faces Of Death” and websites like Rotten.com. My friends sometimes think I’m crazy, but I just like scary, gruesome and bloody stuff.
Horror films are oftentimes misunderstood by critics and the public. Most of the time directors go for cheap scares, shunning the “smart” horror film which contains cerebral, methodical and realistic horror, and venturing into the genre of camp. That isn’t inherently a bad thing. There are many campy horror films that are great films in their own right. “Army Of Darkness” and “Drag Me To Hell” are two such films that quickly come to mind.
What really makes me mad, though, is when the general moviegoer, an idiot, is too stupid to understand when he has seen a great film.
Such was the case last weekend, when I saw the brilliant film “Buried”, by Rodrigo Cortes.
Starring Ryan Reynolds, the movie takes place entirely within a coffin. You read that right. An hour-and-forty minutes inside a coffin. How can this possibly be a good movie, you ask?
Cortes pulls off the impossible, injecting “Buried” with suspense, drama and terror, but not in the typical horror way. Imagine waking up in a coffin with little recollection of how you ultimately ended up there and the panic that would quickly set in. It’s a scary thought, right?
Claustrophobia is a subject often covered in horror movies, and while “Buried” isn’t technically a horror movie, it is scary. It deals with claustrophobia in the same way the horror film “The Descent” did, making the viewer uncomfortable with tight-spaced sets, almost placing you in the situation itself.
After the movie was over, however, I heard a few people in the audience voice their opinions. “I give it a negative ten,” one guy said to his friends, as if he was a regular Roger Ebert – albeit one wearing saggy pants and a sideways Dodgers cap. “That sucked,” said another Rhodes scholar, clearly a film graduate who knew what he was talking about.
I’ve written about the movie industry before, but this just proves to me how blatantly stupid the American viewing public is. “Buried”, which has an 86 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is a deep character-driven story focusing on a man caught in an unthinkable and helpless position. It will also go largely unnoticed and misunderstood by a lot of audiences.
The movie industry has been saturated with crap for a long time, which makes it so frustrating when hardly anybody sees a movie such as this one. Featuring nothing but one actor in a coffin with a lighter, a cell-phone, and a few other amenities, “Buried” is more entertaining and scary than the majority of movies being released.
“Buried” proves movies don’t have to be all special effects and giant set-pieces. Sometimes a little claustrophobia and panic is all you need for a brilliant, yet underrated, thriller.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
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