I spit on your horror movie remakes, sequels

There are exceptions, naturally. Just not many. There’s a pile of brutally extreme Asian horror out there now and if you can sift through it all you’re probably unemployed. There was 2004’s surprise hit “Saw,” which was no masterpiece but knew how to be creepy and unsettling. It was grainy. It was set in dark apartments and wet basements and children’s bedroom closets. It also featured nasty, inventive killings (remember, failing actual horror, all you need are a few really excellent murders and that almost counts as Not a Waste of Time). “Saw” could even be read as a one-dimensional political critique of surveillance culture. It had just enough of everything.

So now “Saw II” is here to cash in on that abundance. No matter that you found out everything you needed to know about the “Jigsaw” killer in the first movie. It’s not important. There will be significantly less fear this time around. Less uncertainty. Just more weird killings. The bare minimum. The ad pretty much promises that with its giant peeled back fingernails. Then there was this year’s no-budget, nuevo-grindhouse, publicity-courting shocker “Chaos,” a movie that, in spite of copyright infringing on “Last House on The Left” so blatantly that it made Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho” look like an original script, was dementedly repulsive and vile enough to make out-of-it thumb-critic Roger Ebert wish he’d never laid eyes on it. That’s cool, even if the movie itself was reprehensible.

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There are others, little blips on the radar like “The Roost” and the gay-slasher-in-West-Hollywood anomaly “Hellbent.” They each come equipped with a few twists that make them interesting viewing, but a few homegrown stabs and some gruesome imports don’t start a Hollywood revolution. And it’s too much to ask the big studios to get on the ball with this problem. The people in charge there need money to support their lifestyles and PG-13-rated, atmospheric yawns starring Oscar-winning actors like the sewage-y “Dark Water,” is their idea of how to get it.  They want certainty and so do we. So let’s keep demanding nothing but what we know and that’s what we’ll keep getting. It’ll be like having warm cookies and milk under a snuggly blanket. And it’ll just be the opposite of horror. Which is scary.

Dave White has a blog you might like more than “The Fog.” It’s called “Dave White Knows” and it can be enjoyed at www.livejournal.com/users/djmrswhite.

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