Review of Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006) by Esteban G — 28 Dec 2011

I saw this documentary on cable last night and found it very interesting and informative (at least informative for people like me who are not familiar with slasher films and how they began). The documentary goes through the history of slasher films, how they began, how they peaked (where the genre saturated the market) to the downfall.

The documentary also mentions the criticism these films get from the critics (showing a clip of a very young Roger Ebert-my favorite critic), it deals with the impact these films might have on the viewers (raises questions such as does a slasher film desensitize the audience towards violence), and it also has some insightful interviews with some of the famous and not so famous directors of these movies, such as John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Rob Zombie, interviews with some of the actors of these films (mentioning how many famous actors now begun working in this genre such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and so on).

This documentary does not leave out many films of the genre and shows lots of clips from the different movies and discusses their creation, the problems they had distibuting the films and so on. Overall I found the documentary very informative even thoug I am not a fan of the genre.