To Wes With Love...

Sure, everyone has a list of their favourite directors. A lot of cinephiles list Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynch, Scorsese, Coppola and all those names, which I certainly wouldn't disagree with their placements (Hitchcock and Lynch would be my #1 and #2), but one name that I doubt would appear on many lists would be Wes Craven.

Whether it's his original drive-in movies like The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and The Last House on the Left (1972), or his classy thrillers like Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and Red Eye (2005), or his genre-defining slasher films like the Scream trilogy or the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Sure, he's made some clunkers (Cursed (2005) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)), but what director hasn't? And, yes, he whores his name out in those, usually pathetic, "Wes Craven Presents" movies, but if ever a director had laid his claim to rooting for the underdog (ie; the horror genre), then Craven is it. Funnily enough, I have not seen his first and only entry outside of the horror/thriller genre, the Meryl Streep starring Music of the Heart (1999).

Craven hasn't directed a film, however, that he had also written since his anti-horror (where he questions his own place in the world of movie making and how his films have effected people) masterpiece New Nightmare. So it was thrilling to read that he has written and is directing a new film entitled Bug (surely to undergo a namechange soon enough due to the other paranoia thriller with the same name out this year) about a high school and some form of surveillance. He says it is "more Sixth Sense than a slasher film", which sounds ace to me.

A major problem with Craven is his whoring of his name (as I already mentioned). As part of a new deal with Rogue Pictures, he will be overseeing remakes of several of his films (coming after this year's The Hills Have Eyes redo) including seminal fright-factories The Last House on the Left, which itself was a reworking of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. I personally quite liked The Hills Have Eyes remake (it didn't water it down at all, thankfully), but this is sorta ridiculous.

Until Bug (probably late 2007 or sometime 2008), Wes has a segment in Paris, je t'aime (who doesn't?) entitled Père-Lachaise. That's out... soon?