Misery, suffering and nastiness

After my defence of sentimentality in films recently I felt it was time to redress the balance and hail the resurgence in misery, suffering and mean-spirited nastiness in modern films.

First of all, I just recently saw PIERREPOINT which isn't exactly a downer of a movie but it concerns one of Britain's last executioners, how he became the best at his job and the effect that killing hundreds of people has on a person. It's not the most depressing film you'll ever see but it's certainly pretty miserable. But then you can tell that even before you enter the cinema anyway, thanks to a tradition stretching back decades in British cinema.

The rule is this: if you are going to see a British film in which everyone has a well-spoken and/or posh accent, it's either a period literary adaptation or a romantic comedy - in either case you're probably not going to be too down after it. On the other hand, if everyone has a regional dialect (particularly northern England) then the chances are the film is going to be full of misery and suffering. Trust me, this rule works for 9 out of every 10 British films.

Accordingly, PIERREPOINT (littered with northern accents) is this year's VERA DRAKE in the miserable Brit stakes. Worth a watch but if you must see one downbeat British film this year, then so far I'd plump for SHOOTING DOGS instead, a superb drama set during the Rwandan massacre. It's like HOTEL RWANDA, only more religion-friendly.

Neither film can top the despair and misery present in THE 3 ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA however, an arty documentary I watched the other day about the effects of the Chechen conflict on children. It's not the most engrossing film and disappears up its own arse for long periods at a time but the middle segment, in which a woman takes three kids away from their mother in Grozny who is too ill to look after them, might just be the most heartbreaking scene ever committed to celluloid.

In addition to watching a few miserable films I've recently been celebrating the long awaited return of the "nasty" horror film. After the 1970s, horror films seemed to become overly sanitised or had to be witty or ironic in some way - nobody seemed interested in just plain nastiness anymore.

Thankfully there's been a resurgence recently with the likes of: WOLF CREEK, an Aussie tale of backpackers falling victim to a rather unpleasant man in the outback; HAUTE TENSION [aka SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE], a good old fashioned horror flick from France in which the gore is dished out in great abundance and people made to suffer horribly; SAW (and its enjoyable sequel), which features elabourate deathtraps designed to kill and mutilate people in some very nasty ways; HOSTEL, the second film from CABIN FEVER director Eli Roth which sees young backpackers being tortured horribly (again), this time in Eastern Europe; and THE HILLS HAVE EYES, a recent remake of a rather average 70s horror. The remake, also pretty average it has to be said, was directed by Alexandre Aja, who gave us the aforementioned HAUTE TENSION and gives us plenty of meanness this time around too.

You know, I don't actually think I'm going anywhere with this post, I just felt like celebrating miserable and nasty films. But then the lack of a conclusion seems quite fitting in this instance because in talking about films like this a happy ending doesn't really seem appropriate...