Tough critic?

I think I'm slightly tougher on horror films because (a) I love the great ones (more than I love great action films or thrillers) and (b) a lot of horror films are lazy and cynical. For me, a good example is Wolf Creek, which starts brilliantly and has all the makings of a terrific, nail-bitingly intense movie, but then slides into the old cliches of people acting really stupidly, magically healing themselves, and the film-makers gasping for imagination. I've never liked the argument of 'It's a genre film, it has genre conceits to which it must conform' - which seems like an excuse for bad writing and recycling other people's ideas. The original Hills Have Eyes is fantastic, in my opinion, because when it's nasty it's savage, but it has a playfulness with the morality of the characters, which is delightful and surprising.

As horror films tend to get remade more than any other genre, I'm more critical of those. Admittedly, I'm not sure I would have ever liked Rob Zombie's Halloween. I tried to watch it fairly, and it seems more like a stand alone film than other remakes, but it's still as weak as vegetarian's piss. At least he didn't just rehash the original, he attempted to inject some originality into it.