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This article was published 03/02/2011 (5705 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let Me In

IF this wasn’t a remake of the sublime Swedish horror thriller Let the Right One In, it might have been on my Top 10 list. Another King — that would be Stephen– put it at the top of his.

I find it a tad redundant, but I acknowledge director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) was the right guy to adapt the John Ajvide Lindqvist novel on which the original film was based. Reeves changes the setting from a Swedish backwater to the wintry high desert burg of Los Alamos, N.M, with no damage done to the setting.

Reeves proves equally ingenious in his casting. The Road’s young Aussie actor Kody Smit-McPhee plays Owen, a 12-year-old boy left stranded in a desolate apartment block between his father’s abandonment and his mom’s retreat into a netherworld of religion and booze. (Reeves never puts the mom in focus in any of her scenes.)

At school, Owen is the target of a particularly nasty pre-teen bully (the effective Dylan Minnette) and his minions. Providing the possibility of friendship is the strange Abby (the wonderfully subtle Chloe Moretz), a girl who is equally non-committal on the subject of her age and gender, but fierce in her advice to Owen to stand up to his tormentors using any means necessary.

All we know about Abby’s dyspeptic guardian (Richard Jenkins) is that he seems to have a homicidal pastime involving killing and exsanguinating young men. And if he fails, Abby gets hungry.

The remake is the recipient of more computer-generated visual effects, but in this case, the high tech tends to diminish the comparatively low-fi thrills of the original. Even so, a car accident scene comes close to being the tour de force that was the climactic swimming-pool scene of the original.

The problem with casting such sympathetic leads is that, with this story, it’s wrong to be too sympathetic.

As with the original, Let Me In is like the Dracula story told from the perspective of the vampire enabler Renfield.

The union of the two characters should evoke a chill, and not, as Reeves would have it, warm fuzzies.

 

Saw 3D

CALL it fearful symmetry that one of the best horror films of the year would be released on DVD at the same time as one of the worst. Saw 3D (or Saw VII, as it is known by people who couldn’t be bothered ducking comin’-at-ya viscera) supposedly finishes off the franchise with Jigsaw’s acolyte Det. Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) literally tying up loose ends, including plotting vengeance against Jigsaw’s treacherous widow (Betsy Russell). Yet he still finds time to create hyper-complicated traps to be employed against miscellaneous miscreants.

I was hoping for a DVD extra explaining where he finds the time. The opening sequence (set at the front of Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall, of all places) is especially elaborate, and completely and utterly gratuitous. As with most of the films, it seems the movie would lose no narrative momentum if most of the “games” were excised altogether. But of course, the series was always more an exponent of creepy moralistic sadism than a condemnation of it.

At least there’s a kind of closure involving Cary Elwes’ character from the first movie, whom we haven’t seen since. Elwes set the tone of hammy overacting that has marked the series, so… thanks a lot for that. 1 star

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca