{"id":1011,"date":"2008-10-20T20:52:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T00:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2008-10-20T20:52:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T00:52:00","slug":"them-2006-david-moreau-xavier-palud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/1011","title":{"rendered":"Them (2006, David Moreau &#038; Xavier Palud)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year, directors Dave &#038; Xave helmed the Jessica Alba remake of <em>The Eye<\/em>, so it&#8217;s only fitting that a few months later their own movie got a Hollywood remake starring Liv Tyler.  <em>The Strangers<\/em> also reportedly contains traces of <em>Funny Games<\/em>, a movie that remade itself, so it&#8217;s best to stay away from that whole mess.<\/p>\n<p><em>Bound by love&#8230; separated by chainlink fence<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/them1.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Producer Richard Grandpierre (<em>Brotherhood of the Wolf<\/em>) thinks he&#8217;s quite important, pastes his name all over the credits.  Movie spends a lot of time setting up that its loving French couple (who have just moved to rural Romania) love each other.  They are a teacher (Olivia Bonamy of <em>La Captive<\/em>) and a writer (Michael Cohen of Lelouch&#8217;s <em>Les Mis<\/em>) and they love each other.  They feed the dog.  They watch TV.  Then, a half-hour in, their car disappears and people come in the middle of the night terrorizing them in their house.  A couple of these &#8220;strangers&#8221; get hurt, possibly killed, but finally our loving couple is lost in the woods, led into the sewers, and wiped out by&#8230; children!  Twist, they are children!<\/p>\n<p><em>OMG they are children!<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/them3.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Everything is handheld shaky-cam, of course, to give us the proper sense of intimate urgency a la Blair Witch.  The dude is pretty ineffectual, hurting himself early on, but the girl is our pseudo-survivor character, all tough and good-looking under pressure.  Character\/story-wise I preferred American horror <em>The Descent<\/em>, which this occasionally reminded me of, but <em>Them<\/em> def. had me jumping in the dark.  Manages to sustain its suspense much better than most movies of this type, so even though nothing of interest is ever happening, it&#8217;s tense as all hell (and with good sound\/effects).  Guess that&#8217;s all you can ask.<\/p>\n<p><em>Soon as she started crawling through a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end and I saw the distance was out-of-focus, I knew this would happen.<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/them2.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Dario?  Mr. Argento?  Is anyone there?&#8221;<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/them4.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year, directors Dave &#038; Xave helmed the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye, so it&#8217;s only fitting that a few months later their own movie got a Hollywood remake starring Liv Tyler. The Strangers also reportedly contains traces of Funny Games, a movie that remade itself, so it&#8217;s best to stay away from that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[34,54,87,613],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-france","tag-horror","tag-romania","tag-shaky-cam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}