After struggling through I, Frankenstein not too long ago, this week’s article topic was an easy one for me to come up with – mainstream horror moments that make Nato and Remy very sad pandas. Seriously – did any of you see I, Frankenstein? Sure, there were some decently entertaining fight sequences between gargoyles, demons, and a studly Frankenstein, but at the expense of character development, storyboarding, and proper atmosphere design that couldn’t even establish a hustling and bustling city. What kind of city has zero residents besides living gargoyles and shapeshifting demons?
Most mainstream horror just doesn’t have the same ambitious genre reach that other independent, more dedicated films might attempt, as countless copycats are churned out only to strike while the iron is hot – be it a subgenre like “found footage” or a popular craze like zombies. Sure, every once and a while you’ll get a film like The Cabin In The Woods, The Conjuring, or Evil Dead, but when we do, there are countless other time wasters to balance the good with the bad. I mean, we all saw the A Nightmare On Elm Street remake, right? That’s mainstream horror – why create original ideas when we can just update successful stories of old?
We’ve been awful positive recently, but it’s time to let a little frustration out again here at the Last Stand, and this week we’re taking aim at those big-budget bullies that somehow get millions of dollars worth of marketing and production value, while real horror auteurs are forced to raise funds on their own, take shortcuts, and market themselves – while still making a more entertaining genre movie. Call us haters, call us horror hipsters, call us whatever you want – but these moments in mainstream horror are arguably some of the worst genre work in recent memory. Read on at your own risk, you’ve been warned.