The Wes Craven Horror Collection – DVD
THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988)
**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Bill Pullman, Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Richard Maxwell and A.R. Simoun, based on the book by Wade Davis
directed by Wes Craven
SHOCKER (1989)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Michael Murphy, Peter Berg, Cami Cooper, Mitch Pileggi
written and directed by Wes Craven
THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, A.J. Langer
written and directed by Wes Craven
by Jefferson Robbins The three late-’80s/early-’90s films gathered in Universal’s DVD set “The Wes Craven Horror Collection” are far from the director’s best, but they show him gathering his powers for the satirical play of the Scream franchise. It’s as if Craven careened into the ditch a few times trying to talk about Big Topics before finally deciding that what he was best suited to talk about was slasher movies. That’s not to say these pre-emptive excursions have no value, it’s just that he had to scout the territory thoroughly before drawing a definitive map. He had to shed some dependencies, too–most notably, given his legacy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, his fondness for dreams as an interface with horror.
by Angelo Muredda
by Jefferson Robbins
by Walter Chaw
by Bryant Frazer
by Walter Chaw
by Bill Chambers
On August 19 of this year, the West Memphis Three–the no-longer-young men railroaded in a triple homicide that left a humble Arkansas town mobbishly seeking justice–were finally released from prison, making Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premiered at the TIFF on September 11, instantly obsolete. (The film reveals their parole in a postscript that feels laughably abrupt after 100 minutes of handwringing.) Where 1996’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills dealt with the role of religious paranoia in the scapegoating of the West Memphis Three (who were accused of killing a trio of boys as part of a Satanic ritual) and its 1999 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was profoundly if not explicitly about the ineffectuality of the original as an agent of change, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is mostly a lot of housekeeping, a refresher course for viewers of the first two films and a lint trap for details about the case that have emerged in the media over the past decade. More a glorified DVD supplement than a documentary, the picture’s at its best when it shows how easy it is to work up a head of righteous anger for dead kids by framing one of the fathers of the victims, Mark Byers, as the killer with “evidence” no less flimsily circumstantial than that which was used to condemn the West Memphis Three. (He had priors, his son’s death didn’t curb his criminal lifestyle–he must have done it!) In fact, Byers is compelled by his moment on the other side of the torch-wielding villagers to write a letter of apology to Damien Echols, the only one of the West Memphis Three on Death Row, whose head he called for back in ’93. But by the end of the piece, another of the fathers, Terry Hobbs, has implicated himself in the killings by virtue of suing the Dixie Chicks‘ Natalie Maines for slander, and Byers hastily commits to this new version of events, drafting a giant pros-and-cons list that seals Hobbs’s guilt in his eyes. Hobbs may well be the culprit (the DNA does not work in his favour), but the point is, eighteen years later, nobody has learned to let nature take its course–except the Zen-patient West Memphis Three.
by Angelo Muredda
****/**** Image 