K8 the GR8

I just adore the horror film genre.

What I love about it is its ability to produce fear and adrenaline within the person who is watching it, even though they aren’t taking part in the horror themselves.

Take ‘SAW’, for example.  A girl is thrown into a pit full of used hypodermic needles.  She claws around desperately trying to reach the edge of the pit to escape, and becomes impaled horribly by these needles, screaming in agony.  As horrifying as this seems, I can watch this with a big smile on my face, knowing that what I’m seeing is just the product of a screenwriter’s deranged mind.  It’s all just prosthetics and tomato ketchup, after all.  When the film is over, I can let go of the horror, and this is healthy.

‘I am Legend’ is different.  It’s horror is entirely more realistic.  It re-defines the term ‘edge-of-your-seat’, and left me with a complete inability to think about anything else but the film for the rest of the evening.  I also had a very hard time stemming tears at several points during the flick, and I’m not the sort to blub during films at all (nope, not even during E.T.).  Will Smith plays an entirely new sort of character, one with depth and a desert-island mentality that beats the pants off Mr. Hank’s ‘Cast Away’.  His acting is supreme in this film, he is now the almighty master of the pregnant pause in my book.

So what’s it about? 

Emma Thompson appears at the start of the film in a cameo role.  She is being interviewed, and tells the world that she has discovered a cure for cancer, by mutating virus activity.

The film then skips forward a few years.  We are shown a dead New York City.  The buildings are surrounded by grassland and deer wander amongst abandoned cars.  It soon becomes obvious that there is something evil now lurking on the streets - that something horribly wrong happened with the cancer cure that turned the world into sunlight hating zombies.  (Zombies?  Hurrah!!!)  Smith and his faithful doggy seem to be immune to this virus, and choose to stay on ‘Ground Zero’ to continue work on a cure.

As the film progresses, you’ll find with delight that most of the cliches involved with Zombie films have been discarded and replaced with a real look into the human mind and its attempt to preserve sanity amid chaos.  Think of ‘28 days’, but multiply the suspense and loneliness by ten, and divide the hope by twenty.  Naturally, there is not much dialogue in the first half of the film, but this is replaced by a Bob Marley track which Smith repeatedly plays for himself in a desperate attempt to keep his candle burning, or as he puts it; ‘To light up the dark’.

That’s all I’m saying, apart from a sincere statement that this could possibly be my new favourite film of all time.  Yes, I’m building it up and feeding the hype, because this time it’s deserved.  (Okay, okay, I’ll admit maybe that perhaps the zombies were a little reminiscent of ‘The Mummy’ CGI abominations, but it’s a very weak critiscism indeed.)  Go on the legend: 9/10.