Tobe Hooper’s efforts to keep making us jump are boringly predictable. (l to r) Aiysha Hart, wife Razane Jammal and husband Khalid Laithĭjinn is an exercise in tedium. Here the plotting is utterly by the numbers – the couple moving into the sinister new home the wife with emotional troubles who hasn’t even moved into the house before she has started seeing things (which are predictably then dismissed as imaginings by her husband) the overly friendly/seductive neighbour the building situated over ancient evil that is reaching out for expiation even the random victims interspersed throughout to keep the action going. Whatever the case, as soon as it starts, Djinn, despite the nobility of its stepping across the cultural divide, sinks down into the same morass of indifferent hackwork that has beset the last two decades of Hooper’s career.ĭespite drawing from Islamic mythology and casting Middle Eastern actors, Hooper does no more than rely on hackneyed cliches from the Western ghost story. I am unable to ascertain if Tobe Hooper was a director brought in by Image Nation as a hired gun or whether Djinn was a project he took to them. The film then sporadically trailed out into release through 2013-4, although is still awaiting a US dvd release date in 2015. It was reported that this was due to the Emirati royal family regarding the idea of a horror film as subversive but Image Nation issued a statement denying this. It was originally shot in 2011 but ended up being delayed in release for over two years. That said, Djinn was subject to a number of problems. Where most other US-made films seem unable to create Arabic characters that are not cliches of fundamentalist extremists and/or terrorists, this seems a challenging attempt to step outside of cultural conventions and a willing embrace of the idea of creating a different horror film.
Khalid Laith moves into the new apartment It is cast entirely with Arabic actors, shot in the Emirates and draws from Islamic mythology, while the dialogue vies between English and Arabic. The film has been entirely financed by the United Arab Emirates production company Image Nation, formerly Imagenation Abu Dhabai. If nothing else, Djinn shows Hooper willing to try something very different. One is long past hoping that Hooper will get it together – although his remake of Toolbox Murders (2003) did offer some glimmerings. (It was sad that this would be his last film before his death in 2017). However, everything that Hooper has made from 1990 onwards, which has included I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990), Spontaneous Combustion (1990), Night Terrors (1993), The Mangler (1995), The Apartment Complex (1999), Crocodile (2000) and Mortuary (2005), has felt like talentless amateurism, works made by somebody who had lost their mojo and/or no longer seemed to care.Īfter a silence of eight years, Tobe Hooper returned with Djinn.
#DJINN 2013 TV#
This propelled Hooper onto a Hollywood path and he turned out some strong genre entries for a number of years – the Stephen King tv mini-series Salem’s Lot (1979), a fairly good slasher film The Funhouse (1981), the fine Steven Spielberg-produced ghost story Poltergeist (1982), the hugely entertaining alien vampires film Lifeforce (1985) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), a sequel that pushed the original into realms of outrageously funny black comedy. Tobe Hooper once had the enormous hit of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), a landmark film that redefined the horror genre for that decade. The saddest genre example might be Tobe Hooper whose downward career spiral has been a very sad one to sit back and watch. Gene Roddenberry was one of these, although the most egregious example in genre material might be George Lucas, while you can start tossing anything that Tim Burton has made since the 2000s into the same arena. There are some directors/writers/artists whose career consists of one hit early on and the rest of their career a long slide downwards either trying to repeat that high or else endlessly copying it without ever understanding why the original connected with audiences.
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