The Town That Dreaded Sundown

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.

There are some scenes here that are truly awesome and really entertaining. Despite the clichés, some of the death kills and chases are well done and pretty inventive (although having not seen the original, not sure how inventive after all). The acting is decent, and it really feels like an old-school slasher, for obvious reasons. The problem is that it tries to get into the backstory a little too much, ultimately deflating so much of its momentum. Its first act is definitely its strongest, what a shame it couldn't sustain itself. For horror fans, it's somewhat decent and maybe many will love it. But it does show some talent from Gomez-Rejon, who has proved to be the best director of American Horror Story

Some 60+ years since a serial killer left the town of Texaracana in fear the killer seems to be back for more, but one girl will stop at nothing to uncover his identity.

This film is really intelligently shot, it mixes in several scenes from the original film while also creating some copycat scenes with different characters, I really enjoyed it. Good acting all around.

That being said this lost a lot of likability with its death scenes, there are several characters with less then five minutes of screen time, yet they leave us thanking the killer for offing them. you'll notice the mpaa rating says it has strong sexual content, I'm not one to really complain about unneeded sex and nudity that being said the sex scenes were really used to degrade the characters.

Overall this was a nice slasher film, fans of the sub-genre will enjoy it. Not a slasher fan? you should probably pass on it.

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.

A remake of a film that acknowledges the original's existence (and even implies it what an insensitive film to make) - now there's an interesting idea. Or at least a bold idea. It's not the first film to have done it, I know 'The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)' in 2011 played around with the same concept and I'm certain it would have been done before that. For some reason though it just leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. It's like a different form of breaking the fourth wall. If you acknowledge the existence of film inside a film that's fine, it obviously happens all the time. But to directly acknowledge the series of films you are currently making just cheapens the whole experience and makes me wonder why I should care. To be fair though the film itself didn't really make me care anyway.

The whole thing is a bit of a mess. The victims are stupid, the cops are possibly even dumber and the kills feel rushed and never go on long enough to build any real suspense. Numerous times we are introduced to characters only moments before their imminent death. There are two flaws with this, one being that we can be certain that they are going to be victims because suddenly out of nowhere they have been awkwardly brought into the film like lambs to the slaughter, and secondly because we couldn't care less for the characters. We have no connection with them. Similar films like 'Scream' at least put some time and effort into the one scene their victim may have in an attempt to make us feel compassion for the character. That one scene can be enough if done right, but it certainly wasn't here.

The 'whodunnit' side of things is done well enough, I certainly didn't pick it. That's really about all this has going for it though. They really kept the runtime short at 86 minutes. I feel even another five minutes could have done the world of good just to extend some of the kill scenes and build characters a fraction more. It's certainly not unwatchable, but in a genre that has been quite stale for a while now is this adding anything new? I wouldn't have thought so.