The Town That Dreaded Sundown

Hate to tell the truth but whether or not you personally "liked" a film does not necessarily qualify you to review it.

This reviewer was hosting horror festivals when the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD came out, and the hardest thing to do in a horror flick is be subtle.

But this director has mad skills. And can do subtle.

The framing in many of the scenes is incredible, there are times you almost feel the characters on-screen are the only people left on the face of the earth.

And Gomez-Rejon also is shrewd enough to get more mileage out of Addison Timlin's face than a Prius.

And a nice face it is. I counted over 50 closeups and then stopped counting. Her character is the glue, the connection, for this story and she is set up as a shy girl who (quote) never gets asked out.

Which is why this story is fiction and not a documentary.

And you the viewer get to watch the whole story through her eyes.

The juxtaposition of the new movie and the "old movie" only makes my point -- putting this film alongside Whedon's Cabin in the Woods for cleverly deconstructing a tale from within the story arc itself.

The original true crime slasher flick "Town That Dreaded Sundown"(1976) directed by Charles B.Pierce was based on true story of a mysterious serial killer called the Phantom Killer,who during spring of 1946 killed five people and wounded three in a small border town of Texarkana.The perpetrator of these heinous crimes was never caught.The new "Town That Dreaded Sundown" remake plays more like "Scream" influenced modern teen slasher flick with plenty of references to the original movie and the Phantom Killer unsolved case.Addison Timlin plays teenage girl who after seeing her would-be boyfriend brutally murdered by masked maniac decides to find who really the Phantom Killer AD 2014 is.The movie-within-a-movie premise is certainly well-played and there are some gruesomely bloody kill scenes.Frozen in time Texarkana is also a nice touch.Unfortunately the final reveal of the killer is disappinting.7 trombone deaths out of 10.

Post-modern take on the 1976 film of the same title, which was based on a series of murders that occurred in Texarkana on the Texas/Arkansas border a few decades earlier. The first film is frequently referenced but setting the story aside, the two have little in common. The original could sit comfortably in the video nasty genre, while the 'remake' is a stylistic tour-De-force with sound and photography that give off an art film vibe. The acting is solid in part thanks to veteran character actors Ed Lauter Gary Cole (the arms expert in The Good Wife). Although using a few genre tropes, this is not your average slasher flick. It's a scary movie but not a Scary Movie.

Two things they attempted here, one is the usual slasher where a skulking presence moves about in the small town after dark, haunting the whole of space. It offers up the blood sacrifice the genre demands, the Texan locations are nice, a sparse setting for the knife to slash.

But they also had the ambition to not just redo the same horror as every other thing on the shelf but to layer that stage where horror unfolds so that we get the mechanisms that give rise to it. This is a sequel of sorts to the 70s film by the same name that was about the real Texarkana murders that shook the place in the 40s.

So this becomes layered here as events unfolding in a place where gruesome reality of that day is relived each year through fiction, re-entered, thus neutered, through fiction; the original film playing on a drive-in on Halloween night as this one begins. The events aim to relive the original murders so that forgetful spectators will remember again the real impact, this at the behest of a new murderous narrator who fastidiously restages the real thing around town.

The heroine is chosen by him - as the narrative demands - to be the first victim who survives to tell the story, herself an aspiring journalist looking to document truth. So she finds out that it's all happening because a part of the original narrative was omitted in the telling, not given its place in the fiction.

So this is more ambitious than its ilk. One obvious source is Scream. A less obvious is Citizen Kane (don't jeer). The camera tries to swoop into rooms like Welles had it do, there's Kanesque deep focus, even that a journalist is looking to piece together truth from narration we might see as not wholly accidental.

It's not enough to understand Welles as technique he mastered or topics he illustrated though. You must now what for. The filmmaker doesn't so we get obtrusive technique, structure without narrative depth, views without import, in the end it's all strung together in a film schoolish way, and this goes back and even ruins the slasher and sense of place.

It ends with one of the most inane twists.

The original TTTDS was one of the earliest slasher films in the genre that even came before (in 1976) popular franchises like Halloween & Friday the 13th and I've always been a fan of that flick for its humor, suspense & docu-drama like narration style & last but not the least the haunting ending. So when I first heard about there will be a new TTTDS, I thought it'd be another pointless, some cash-in effort but last night after watching this new take on T3DS, I'd like to admit...I was pleasantly surprised!!

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (the most frequent director of American Horror Story), this new film is a strange version to categorize as a remake, reboot or a sequel; actually it's neither a straightforward remake or sequel...I'm not sure but I think REQUEL (a sequel-ish remake!) can be a more appropriate term for it. After more than half a century of the actual events of The Moonlight Murders that resulted the very making of 1976 original film, this new story is set on present day at the same town, Texarkana that once again begins to plagued by "The Phantom" murders. Interestingly, the 1976 original film is also very much alive in this movie as a film that we know in our 'reality', as in the film the town now maintains a tradition in every Halloween to show a drive in screening of the original film. So, as the film progress we see a fine blend between this version & the original film where some scenes from the original brought back through a kind of flashback style while also creating some copycat murder sequence in this new one. I liked this approach of providing homage to the original; bring it to an entirely new generation. This new & refreshing kind of take & treatment to this already known & filmed story is the most appreciating part of this version. And overall the film is beautifully shot, liked the camera works, the character development was fine for a slasher flick, but still as a slasher it's not above the clichés as well as it comes with a routine ending & weak motive for the killer which I couldn't find much point to it. And lastly there's another strange part of it and that's the Town itself! It looks like the town hasn't really age after all this years!! May be for the homage issue but though the film is set on late 2013, it still got the 70s vibe almost all over it.

Anyway, there's not much masked killer-slasher flick comes out this days with good or decent budget & film making like this one and still despite some clichés & the ending, as a slasher flick it's pretty good one, IMO.