The popular mashup movie style is just a continuation of the trend towards fan-fuelled, B-moviesque, exploitation-inspired material epitomised by Samuel L Jackson’s Snakes on a Plane bellyflop a few years back. The same tendency was also partly responsible for the likes of the rather fun Hobo with a Shotgun, starring Rutger Hauer, and the misfiring Nazis-in-space film Iron Sky. I suppose we also have Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to blame for reviving a genre that, almost entirely dependent on a preposterous premise for its creative energy, often tends to run out of gas half an hour in.
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, the first trailer for which has hit the web, arrives in the wake of the rather underwhelming Seth Grahame-Smith-scripted Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter earlier this year. The title tells you everything you need to know about the storyline: after escaping the evil crone who wanted to munch on their tender bones in the Brothers Grimm fairytale, the siblings have matured into badass exterminators of evil hags everywhere. Portrayed by Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner, they seem to have walked into the middle of a particularly bad episode of the A-Team set in medieval central Europe.
Gretel may once have been an innocent little cutie with a dangerous penchant for sweet-tasting fancies, but now she’s an awesome, bodacious warrior babe with a big gun. Her habits include headbutting annoying people who try to do non-awesome stuff such as talking and saying things like: “You gotta be kidding me” at opportune moments when all hell is about to break loose.
Hansel speaks only in action movie lingo: “Well that’s new”, he mutters as someone pulls out a giant piece of artillery – and you’d have to say he’s not wrong, given that the Gatling gun wasn’t invented until 1861 and the Grimms probably based their tale on a story with origins in the 14th century.
Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola, who made the generic but entertaining 2009 Nazi zombie horror Dead Snow, is in charge here, freewheeling furiously from a screenplay by DW Harper. The production design looks pretty nifty, though the witches appear to have been swiped directly from Henry Selick’s rather more interesting Coraline.
What’s a little surprising, a few years after people began to talk about mashup movies, is that the proposed film adaptation that got everyone excited about the genre in the first place – the one based on Grahame-Smith’s bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies novel – still doesn’t seem to be any closer to entering production after going through three directors in as many years. Whether that’s because Abraham Lincoln performed only reasonably well at the box office ($90m from a $60m budget is not disastrous) is anyone’s guess, but if one of these movies isn’t a sizeable hit in the near future don’t be surprised if the entire genre finds itself consigned to history as a weird early 21st-century blip on the cinematic landscape.
I’m not sure that would be such a terrible thing. While the mashup movie has in many ways reinvigorated the sort of pleasingly throwaway grindhousey tropes last popular in the mid-1980s, it is essentially based on the same corporate-fuelled mantra that gave us Transformers and Battleship. Take an established “brand” – here an iconic historical figure or a well-known fairytale – and try to revive it in a style that is popular with cinema audiences (in this case balls-to-the-wall, brainless action with a side order of supernatural intrigue). Give me genuinely original fantasy horror, such as Sam Raimi’s criminally underrated, brutally silly Drag Me to Hell, or (for the braver among us) Ben Wheatley’s bewildering, ultra-sadistic Kill List any day.
In the meantime, gird your loins for more celluloid fantasy silliness: perhaps a prequel to Joe Carnahan’s The Grey titled The Three Little Pigs: Wolf Killers, or the epic action adventure: Thumbelina: Tiny but Deadly. Anyone else got any bright ideas for Hollywood to swipe?
