From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon 11 Apr 2005 - 23:18:41 GMT
--- Vincent Campbell <VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk> wrote:
> <Contagion movies are pretty popular in
> themselves.>
>
> Movies do go in bursts and waves.
>
> I watched 'Wrong Turn' on digital last night
> (Elisha Dushku getting
> chased around West Virginia by inbreed hillbillies)
> and I've also recently
> seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (as an aside
> why are they still
> referring to the Amityville horror remake as a true
> story? Surely, given the
> family admitted it was a all a big hoax means the
> movie is breaching trade
> descriptions acts?), and saw the original 'The Hills
> Have Eyes' not long
> ago. Wrong Turn actually cites Deliverance in its
> dialogue (blank stares
> from the youthful cast hint at the likely lack of
> awareness of the target
> audience of the film).
>
I made my wrong turn into a movie theater when that
movie was still out in the cheap draught (we call em
draft) theater. It had its better moments and I was
thinking of it as a sort of _Texas Chainsaw_ like
movie. Scary inbred mutants from hell. Rock star Rob
Zombie has cast his lot with a _Texas Chainsaw_ theme
with that _House of 1,000 (?) Corpses_ movie and a new
one coming soon along the same lines (with the same
evil characters I think). These charcters aren't
inbred mutants nor do they live in the woods but they
are about as mentally deranged as the other movies.
>
> What is it with the US meme of the dangerous
> inbreed/mutant
> cannibals who live in the woods/mountains? Why are
> they always white people
> too?
>
Maybe its still PC to bash rural folk.
West Virginia has had its share of stereotyping, not
unlike New Jersey. I get the impression New Yorkers
like to pick on their sister state (remembering a Joe
Piscopo "I'm from Jersey" character from an earlier
incarnation of Saturday Night Live).
>
> Moreover why is this apparently popular at the
> moment?
>
> Are mountain men another way of representing
the
> dangerous
> other_inside_America (I remember studying
> Deliverance as a student and being
> taught about it as a possible allegory of the
> vietnam war- natives in the
> wilds terrorising the unknowing, disrespectful city
> folk)?
>
It could be a more PC way of outgrouping people to
make oneself feel better. I'm not sure poor
Appalachian people have a pressure group that acts as
a watchdog in the media making sure they are
represented well.
>
> You see this is where I think memetics has
merit,
> providing an
> underlining framework for understanding trends in
> the stories we tell
> ourselves- whether entirely fictional,
> pseudo-factual (like UFOs and alien
> abductions), or the verging on factual like the
> moral panics about things
> like immigration, child murder etc. Not least
> because these things can be
> very clearly traced in their appearances in the
> media.
>
The X-Files was a very popular show for some reason. I
recall the UFO craze of the late 80's after _Close
Encounters of the Third Kind_ came out, forever giving
Devil's Tower an eery look. I watched something called
_Project Blue Book_ as a kid that was IIRC a TV show
set in a quasi-factual X-Files sort of way.
Then there was a post _Star Wars_ space craze that
still has some hiccups to this day. A product of that
era _Battlestar Galactica_ has just concluded a new
season with a revised storyline. I wonder what ever
became of the _Star Wars_ franchise itself...so long
ago---in a galaxy far away.
BTW, I saw a little short about _The Ring 2_ on HBO
last night and I can't recall that Koji Suzuki's name
ever came up. I think someone attributed the concept
to the director that did the Japanese movies and this
new one. I wonder if we might have a bona fide case of
"copy the product" here. Instead of going to the
original blueprint of Suzuki's books, maybe they just
focused on the first _Ringu_ movie and took things
from there as they modified it to fit an American
context for both _The Ring_ and _The Ring 2_. If they
would have "copied the instructions", perhaps _The
Ring 2_ would have been called _Spiral_ and would have
had a different storyline.
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