Ahhh, October! What a wonderful time of year. The world turns colder, the trees turn orange and yellow, people start burning fires in their fireplaces, filling the air with that delightful burning smell, and Hollywood offers us yet another Saw film, this one, of course, promising to be the last. Luckily, I haven’t had to sit and watch that movie yet.
Don’t despair, though, as it is October there are plenty of other scary movies to watch before the big one comes out later on this month. As a matter of fact, I recently saw Let Me In, an American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In. Let’s deal with the original first.
Let the Right One In, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, is definitely in the right place at the wrong time. Vampires need to be left to their coffins, or bathtubs, or crates for about the next 20 years. We’ve seen so much of them that they just aren’t scary anymore, and any sensuality or sex appeal they ever had has been destroyed by the angsty, self-aware, shimmery vampires of the Twilight Saga. Happily, that’s not what these two films were going for.
This movie is very dark, perfectly befitting a vampire movie. It’s also rather slow and quiet. This sets up a feeling of loneliness, bordering on despair which is perfect for little Oscar, one of our two main characters. It was something I enjoyed, actually. Not very many movies are written well enough to be slow, quiet and compelling. The only problem is this feeling lasts for the entire movie, so even though I was interested in what was going on, by the 1:45 mark I was hoping they’d just get on with it. The other big problem with this movie is they way they deal with Eli’s (Oscar’s mysterious new girlfriend) backstory. There’s not a lot of detail besides Eli consistently claiming she’s not a girl and a brief glimpse of her while she’s changing clothes which appears to verify her claims. That was just a little too much.
The movie as a whole, though, worked perfectly. Eli and Oscar were convincing even though I couldn’t understand a word they were saying (the subtitles were helpful in that regard, though). The rest of the acting was on par and the action of the film itself was believable and logical, something most horror movies are unable to accomplish. It is, in fact, that reality that makes the movie all the scarier. !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! I say that because at the end of the film we have a dilemma. Oscar’s first friend is evil. He realizes this and he has a choice. He can either let her die or help her live. He knows she is a killer and must kill in order to survive and needs someone to protect her and help her kill her victims; the movie makes no attempt to hide or gloss over this fact. And Oscar is in love with her and decides to run away with her, becoming her protector. Watching Oscar’s life, though, the part of it we’re allowed to glimpse, I’m pretty sure I would have done the same. Now that’s scary.
Let Me In (adapted from the aforemenationed movie, not the original novel, and directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Cloverfield) is basically the same movie. It corrects the two problems I had with the original. It has a quicker pace through the middle of the movie so it doesn’t seem to drag at all. There’s also no showing of forcibly improvised girl-parts. Even with these changes (made for the shorter attention-spans and puritanical minds of American viewers) the movie is almost entirely the same. The acting is still good, especially for a movie riding on the shoulders of two very young actors. All the plot points are the same, if not slightly simplified or switched around for time-saving’s sake. The only real difference between the movies is that this one is in English and it has cameo appearances by Ronald Regan. Oh, and Elias Koteas (the guy that played Casey Jones in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies) plays a cop.
However, as much as I like these changes, I watched the same movie. It was as good the second time as it was the first, but it’s still the same. There was no additional point to be made, and nothing gained by the English being spoken except that I didn’t have to read for two hours. It did however give Chole Grace Moritz another opportunity to do stuff no little girl should really be doing. So that’s something.
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