![]() Linklater says his film is about 'the generation that would have been aborted but it just wasn't hip at the time', and defines slackers as 'spending their whole lives in their own heads, paralysed by the problem of making any difference'. It is capable of being funny, sad, exhilirating and inevitably causes you to reflect that the peculiars in front of the camera are probably no more dotty than those behind it, and that conventional society contains just as many insanities as are laid out before us by those who have so determinedly rejected it. But, on the whole, this is a fascinating example of apparently fly-on-the-wall film-making, made all the more intriguing when you discover it was all planned like a military exercise. Moreover, his final scene, which has a posse of slackers hurling the camera off a mountain-top, is pretty tiresome. And there are patches in Slacker when you want Linklater to move quickly on to the next eccentric. It is, I would warn, perfectly possible to be bored as absurd conspiracy theories are aired about JFK, UFOs, Elvis and Madonna. This is the essence of Slackerville and, though totally American, it sends its echoes much further afield. But Linklater, who was 29 when he made it, spent Dollars 23,000 before obtaining a distribution deal which blew up the original 16mm print into 35mm, remixed the sound-track, and then delivered the film to the campus circuit, where it ran so successfully that it has arrived here trumpeted as something special.Īnd so it is because it defines part of a whole generation so well. It's rather like a relay, in which one character passes the baton to another. His film, in contrast, takes every side turning it can. He appears in the opening scene, babbling almost dementedly at his silently gob-smacked cab-driver about the Wizard Of Oz and, in particular, the scene when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and doesn't know which way to go. Linklater, while appearing to do nothing as a director, actually organises the film rather well. I wouldn't accuse the homeless of being slackers but I thought of this while watching the film, which is easily the most original American independent debut of the year and by some way the most entertaining. 'Haven't you even got the guts to say 'fuck off'?', one of them said to me the other day. But if you ignore them, they sometimes get the better of you. Because if you get into conversation, you may never get away. ![]() You meet some, of course, on the streets of London and you are not quite sure whether to give them money or walk hastily by. At their worst, they are paranoid freaks. They are, at their best, creative malcontents. Slacker means, I am reliably informed, drop-outs from conventional society who are either unemployed or only do just enough work to feed themselves. There are no better examples of this than the 13 creepy comedy classics above.The characters in the film all live in Austin, Texas, which is not really in their favour but at least has a college of its own, a community which caters for it proudly and a decent climate. Sometimes the best kind of monster movies are the ones that do not take themselves all that seriously. Rent (or buy) The Cabin In The Woods on Amazon (opens in new tab). Why it’s a great funny monster movie: Now, if you are looking for something a little (or a lot) scarier than The Monster Squad and one that has, literally, every type of beastly horror antagonist you could ever imagine, look no further than The Cabin in the Woods - director Drew Goddard’s brilliantly subversive and unapologetically insane deconstruction of the ill-fated cabin-in-the-woods trope. (Image credit: Lionsgate) The Cabin In The Woods (2012)Ī sexually innocent woman (Kristen Connolly), a ditzy blonde (Anna Hutchinson), a brutish jock (Chris Hemsworth), a brainy student (Jesse Williams), and a stoned slacker (Fran Kranz) find their much-needed break from college interrupted by a family of killer zombies, but soon discover that nothing is truly as it seems. ![]()
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