Hide and Seek
R, 100 min.
Alone in the Dark
R, 96 min.
Both films now showing at area theaters
Nostalgia about the golden age of this or that is unquestionably suspect—except with regard to horror movies. I know I sound like the crazy old neighbor who shakes his fist at kids poaching apples, but dammit, horror movies were better in the 1970s and early '80s when I was growing up. Either they were shot with style and artistry that few people noticed because of their disrepute (like the original Halloween), or they had a no-budget grubbiness that gave off a grimy authenticity (like the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
Best of all, they connected in some way with the simmering unease of the times, from the Vietnam-vet undead of the overlooked Deathdream to the Me Generation zombies of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dawn of the Dead. Today, you have to look to Japan for anything that approximates the visionary squishiness of David Cronenberg's early splatter movies, and even that cycle has wound down. Once the nagging, fearless boxing shadow of mainstream American cinema, exploitation movies—and specifically horror—have become bloated by oversized budgets that can't hide their paucity of new ideas or their irrelevance. Here's a double dose of sad proof.
Nothing hobbles a horror movie faster than the hierarchy of stardom, which ensures the biggest name in the cast will survive to the end while the C-list bites the dust. (Psycho is the exception that proves the rule.) Worse, the better the actor, the more you wonder why he's slumming in a down-and-dirty genre piece. For example: what is Robert De Niro doing in Hide and Seek, a resolutely second-rate psycho shocker—and in a role the Sci-Fi Channel wouldn't waste on Timothy Busfield?
None of the answers are pretty. The Schlock-o-Meter goes haywire as De Niro's widowed psychologist (ding) follows his wife's suicide (ding) by moving to a quaint small town (ding) with his traumatized daughter (ding), who gets a mysterious playmate (ding!) whose games grow increasingly sinister (ding!). When Dad meets a new woman (Elisabeth Shue), daughter Dakota Fanning goes all Wednesday Addams on his ass, dressing in dead mommy's clothes and acting like a trick-or-treater's idea of a Goth chick.
Directed by John Polson with unerring hackery, Hide and Seek marks the one-millionth unpacking of the genre's moldiest tropes. Yes, the cat will jump out of the closet, with a meow louder than the MGM lion. Yes, someone will shut a door to reveal the killer behind it. Yawn. As the capper, there's a third-act switcheroo as dumb as it is distasteful—especially considering a kid has to act it out. If you can't see this cheap "gotcha!" coming, obviously you didn't pay attention to the billing. And speaking of "billing," does De Niro really need cash this badly? The dude must've caught Cuba Gooding Jr.'s agent on the rebound. When De Niro makes his big speech in Meet the Fockers about the importance of legacy—a cruel enough irony in that piece of crap—was this what he had in mind?
Only one thing can be said for Hide and Seek: it ain't Alone in the Dark, the rock-bottom sorriest of the undistinguished videogame-to-movie genre. It starts with an expository title crawl longer than that of all six Star Wars movies combined, only to set up a story about shooting stuff in a dank basement. Granted, a movie that opens with Tara Reid as a brilliant archaeologist is doomed to peak early. (I wonder if she thought of the glasses herself.) But the lousy CGI, murky visuals and pathetic attack sequences—let alone characters that couldn't meet the complexity standards of Super Mario Bros.—won't postpone anyone's date with PlayStation. Fans, do poor Christian Slater a favor and avert your eyes.
Given the studios' cynical belief that horror fans'll swallow anything, the only encouragement in any of this was Alone in the Dark's abject failure at the box office. (The title pretty much described my screening.) Hide and Seek made a fortune, however, and audiences starved for potent scares will continue to bite in vain. It can't be a coincidence that the most vital Hollywood horror movies of recent years have seized upon the inexplicable dread found in recent Japanese movies. Maybe one of this year's many upcoming shockers—the Rob Zombie bloodbath The Devil's Rejects, perhaps, or the French slasher movie High Tension—will finally connect with all the fear floating freely out there. For horror movie nuts, hopelessness springs eternal.
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