items tagged with Tobe Hooper

THE HILLS HAVE EYES

The setup for The Hills Have Eyes – Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror classic, with Craven himself on board as a producer – couldn’t be simpler. A vacationing family, headed for California, stops for gas at a filling station near an abandoned nuclear-testing site in New Mexico. The station’s gnarled and suspiciously friendly attendant guides them to a shortcut. The shortcut is a trap, set by the attendant and a family of horribly mutated, not-entirely-inhuman cannibals. And from there on, the plot boils down to three words: Us Against Them.

MYSTIC RIVER

It’s tempting to say that in Mystic River, Clint Eastwood’s complex, heartbreaking adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s terrific murder mystery, Sean Penn gives the most nuanced approximation of grief to be found anywhere in modern movies.

CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE

Everything I loathed about the original Charlie’s Angels movie – the Matrix-as-shampoo-commercial direction of McG, the beyond-senseless plotting, the “Are we hot or what? ” imperiousness of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu – is back in spades in the franchise’s sequel Full Throttle, but this time, it worked for me.