Trailer Review: Infini

Because everyone loved Doom so much.
Because everyone's forgotten this happened once already, and we called it Doom.

At the tail-end of a too-long chapter in film history, 'round about the time when all the carefully delineated subgenres spiral downward into chaos and self-parody, comes Infini. Infini will either deliver us from The Era of Re (as in -boot, -make, -hash) or it will dig us deeper into this cinematic rut I call Early 21st Century Grit.

That's not to suggest there weren't some truly great and/or gritty "res" in the past 15 years. I'm just saying the res have run their course. They've done their job, and now it's time for them to retire and give way to a new re, the resurgence. I'm talking old-school, back-to-basics genre film. I'm talking everything from story to effects to mise-en-scene. I'm talking Wrong Turn and It Follows and The Guest, three contemporary movies that take an old aesthetic and make it new again.

We crave decent horror and we don't even know it. We're spoon fed gore and jump scares and we're told we want more, and we nod yes, more please. And so the feeding continues only now with a funnel jammed in our mouths. Into that cakehole is crammed every trope and cliche, every archetype and stereotype, every thing we've seen before.

And now here's one more. Maybe. I don't know. My love for genre film makes me naive and hopeful for the future, even though a lot of contemporary horror sucks balls. Also, I'm one of the few people who like Doom so I don't really care if someone has forced it to breed with the plot of Aliens, creating this blasphemy. All I care is that Infini doesn't fall victim to its era, that it doesn't pander or insult or offend because it misunderstands its own genre.