I saw 13 Tzameti (pronounced "za-meddy") yesterday.
Go see it. Go watch the trailer. And then let me segue into why it's superior to movies like Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek, those trashy beeyotches.
There's a cratering trend of horror movie these days that puts the Average Joes (i.e. demographically-correct dumb teenagers) in gory & relentless peril by irredeemable Evil Folk (usually crazy cracker hillbillies).
In these movies, the Evil Folk eviscerate the Average Joes simply for evisceration's own sake. Witnessing these "who 'dat?" victims being put through their joyless, fiddly, die-gruesomely paces like the "Finishing" kill move in a Mortal Kombat game is (to me) boring as all get out.
Saw. Hostel. Wolf Creek. I mean you, you dummies.
From a purely screenwriting point of view, Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek are not, by definition, "scary." They don't technically satisfy the classic definition of horror. Gory, sick, depraved, sure. Splatter or slasher film, maybe.
But Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek are witless, and artless, and mostly (here's where I sound like a condescending & grumpy old Andy Rooney, but am only half-joking) a Generational Condition Of Our Times™.
The Kids These Days™ suffer from the degenerative disease of desensitization. Probably from all the video games growing up, and the more permissive content allowed on television, and the private immediacy of The InterWebs. It's getting increasingly more difficult to get any rise out of them at all, any ripple in the facade. So stakes get raised. Until you reach the critical mass of the pseudo-snuff film like Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek.
Seriously? YAWN.
The gulf in quality between movies like Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek and 13 Tzameti is the size of a galaxy. Far, far away.
13 Tzameti is a lean and mean 90 minutes. It's shot in black and white so it doesn't get to use the color red in its palette as a crutch. But it's a superlative thriller & true shocker. It's everything that Saw/Hostel/Wolf Creek is not for one simple reason: it creates characters you care about so that everything that comes after has real resonant weight & high impact. The characters' actions seem inevitable, like they HAD to happen, because it's borne from their excellent set-up characterizations. And you care what does transpire — what does happen to them, and not in a "sucks to be them" kind of way.
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