Review: Borderland [2007]
Dir. Zev BermanCast: Brian Presley, Rider Strong, Jake Muxworthy, Beto Cuevas, Martha Higareda
I have a dilemma with the genre of so-called "torture porn" that has muscled its devious way into the horror movie limelight in recent years, my primary concern is that countless movies are bypassed or just rejected due to this catch-all tag. Such movies as Hostel
and Touristas
are essentially nauseous, inelegant, and of virtually no redeeming cinematic value, whereas films like Martyrs
, Saw
, and now, Borderland
, albeit sharing similarities to the former in tone, brutality and grittiness, have much more depth of story and cogency of execution to just be demeaned by a hip epithet.
is interminably and unjustly likened by reviewers to 
, understandable given its plot, cast of characters and the cinematic mechanisms utilised, but that is undeniably where any similarity ends. Although 
, engendering drive-in screens across a whole nation to drip scarlet and interminably altering the face of horror cinema forever. Every gross-out, effects laden murder to grace the screen in the proceeding four decades have this low budget beacon to thank for it. Now take a minute and reflect on this, dear friends, this was NOT a case of a film that just happened to be shocking at the time, even by today's digitally embellished horror standards, this unpretentious little film, squeaking in at a mere 67 minutes, has more bloodshed per frame than all the slasher films that followed in it's wake. So the question remains, why a 39 year gap between this genre-shifting archetype and it's sequel? Well let's take a look at the evidence and see what turns up...
plows the, as yet, unfurrowed turf of effluvium related horror... baffled? Well read on dear friends. 
is the single most sure-footed entry in the Nightmare series since the original 
, made prior to that other self-reverential, post-ironic box office favourite 
, it once again asserts just how authoritative Wes Craven can be at envisioning hauntingly potent, conceptual horror movies. The film within a film paradigm has been applied many times before and since but here under Craven's dexterous touch fabricates a very interesting sojourn indeed.
the Japanese horror novel by Koji Suzuki and the eponymous 1998 film by Hideo Nakata, this South Korean take is more or less a facsimile of 2002's US remake 
in as much as it is a remake that does little artistically to rationalize its existance at all. 
tersely rehashes the prototype with a new cast, a new language, some praiseworthy moments and the integration of some of the novel’s plot points that were absent from the anteceding film. This adds up to an passable movie that may prove interesting for aficionados of the franchise (or for anybody curious in glimpsing how the same story can be filtered through the lens of contrasting filmmakers), but overall it is little more than a banal accomplishment.
is a film that every self-respecting horror fan should yearn desperately to love, with its miniscule budget, genre referencing, Norwegian roots and it's poetic, snow-blasted mountain locations. Oh, and did I forget to mention... Nazi Zombies. That's right, it's been a long time since we had Nazi Zombies on screen with the turgid Zombie Lake, and sadly 
, what many profess to be the single foremost Bigfoot film of all time, with... this travasty! Disregarding completely 1977’s Return To Boggy Creek, made by another disparate group of low budget psuedo film-makers, which in turn, succeeded in ignoring the first film. This film instead turns out to be a bland assimilation of 
and an erstwhile episode of 
, any concept of mystery and foreboding is dissipated only to be commuted by a sense of utter apathy.
, 
, 
), and now has fancied to take on one of the cornerstones of modern horror history... Jason Vorhees! Bay’s latest production, a quick and dirty remake of 
, is not as excruciating as it could have been, by that rationale it can not be called laudable either. What it does deliver are the staples required to make a Friday 'date-night' horror movie; sex, drugs and buckets o' blood 
(1958) Christopher Lee shattered the anemic, deferential image of Lugosi’s count with a mixture of vehemence and sensuality lacking from any Dracula preceding or, debatably, since and made the role irrevocably his own
lacks on four of the five counts, making it banal by any measure of the genre. Despite having the same title and bearing a passing resemblance to the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis classic (high school kids getting butchered on prom night), this is not... read that again... NOT a remake. In fact, it bears a greater similarity to 
albeit with a bloodless body count.
follows a group of teenage girls who find themselves trapped in their sorority house on Christmas Eve, while a psychopath takes them out one by one – and not for Christmas dinner…
, released a small, blackly comedic film, which would have a major impact on the horror scene for years to come. Widely regarded as a classic, the original version of 
paved the way for the first generation slasher films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th. 
and its murderous “superghost” cousins. Done well it can show off beautiful camerawork, nuanced emotion and slowly develop unsettling scares that go beyond mere jump moments. Maybe a good parallel could be made with music – a virtuoso musician can take a difficult piece of music and make it come alive. Sadly the film lacks many important elements, the lead actress only registers one emotion for the entire movie, the film thinks that showing random flashes of the lead characters screaming at the camera will be a tension builder for when Christy decides to play 'World’s Most Boring Detective' without a good explanation as to why. 
, 
, and more recently 
series, have seen some global recognition, but before that Norway's genre output was nearly nonexistent. As a matter of fact, a Norwegian Horror keyword search on IMDb results in only three genre titles being made before 1990, 
