craveonline

By Jeremy Azevedo

Endless hype for stupid entertainment products surround us at all times. Hype that blinds us with enormous glossy turds, making it hard to see the little gems that maybe don’t have millions of advertising dollars helping to shove them right in our faces.

That’s why the C4 Anti Suck algorithim was invented, to scientifically sift through all the junk and find four things that absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, will not suck in any way.

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Funny Games

I’ve seen so many negative things written about “Funny Games”, that I feel something must be said in its defense. Funny Games is neither torture-porn nor art-house smut, as most of the critics would have you believe. Actually, it more closely resembles a classic thriller like “Cape Fear” or maybe the disturbing “Last House on the Left” than it does shitty slapstick shock horror like “Saw” or “Hostel.

In this film, the victims are fully developed and relateable adult characters rather than the usual 22-year-old models running around screaming and crying. The villains, on the other hand, are so disturbingly psychopathic that any explanation for their behavior would seem contrived, and so, no explanation is given. Seriously, when Michael Pitt breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, your skin will crawl. This is where the film really excels, by the way, when it reaches out to the viewer and forces you to react. This is something that most films these days have forgotten how to do.


I'll never see preppy dorks in quite the same way ever again.

Like the 1994 Oliver Stone picture that tackled the same basic subject matter “Natural Born Killers”, Funny Games gives bloodthirsty audiences all the horror they can stomach and more. Although no actual gore is ever really shown, the terror is tangible, and the shots are painfully long and awkward, at first exciting you with promises of bat-shit crazy murder before making you feel like a sick freak for being entertained by such a thing in the first place.

I realize that there are people who are snobs and think that a shot for shot remake of a German film is a stupid and unnessecary idea, but those people are not brilliant directors like Michael Hanaeke, so what the hell do they know anyway? Obviously Haneake felt he had good reason to remake his own film with American actors, not the least of which is simply to have access to the audience that the film exists to condemn in the first place. If Funny Games is still playing in your area, go see it, and witness one of the best and most intelligent horror pictures to hit the theaters in 10 years, even if it is technically already ten years old.