THE HOLE

Teenager Dane moves with his younger brother Lucas and their mother Susan to a new house in the suburbs. At first, the boy feels out of place, missing his old life in Brooklyn, but he quickly meets Julie, his neighbor, and immediately develops a crush on her. However, the daily routine is abruptly broken when Lucas discovers a hatch locked with numerous padlocks in the basement of the house; he and his brother open it but find nothing, just a seemingly bottomless hole. But that very night, strange and unsettling things begin to happen: between ghostly little girls and dolls coming to life, a supernatural force seems to have emerged from the hole! There was a time, not so long ago, the often-celebrated 1980s, when so many horror films were produced that they ended up being adapted for very different audiences. Between splatter films and psychological horrors, there were also productions aimed at a younger audience, real kids; light horror that contained no scenes of real violence, nudity, or blood, but relied on easy chills, special effects, and a few harmless scares. These films featured the same kids who were their target audience and bore titles like "The Gate" and "Monster Squad." However, one of the most famous examples of this genre, and a small masterpiece of genre cinema, is "Gremlins" by Joe Dante, the same director who signs this "The Hole 3D," which reeks of revival from a mile away. But let's make some distinctions. "Gremlins" was not only a good horror movie for kids but also a film with perfect pacing, an impeccable narrative structure, and capable of creating a mythology that influenced subsequent productions. "The Gate" and similar films, on the other hand, were simply fun b-movies with the right character chemistry that made them particularly appealing to teenage audiences and are probably considered cult classics today only by that generation that had the chance to discover them at the right age. "The Hole 3D" undeniably belongs more to this second category, aiming today at those adolescent or even younger viewers for whom the adrenaline of fear comes from elements potentially closer to them, such as creepy toys, deceased playmates, and less-than-ideal parental figures. Dante plays with childhood fears but does so with the awareness of addressing a school-aged audience, always keeping the brakes on anything that might genuinely frighten and too often giving in to calming irony. Ultimately, what Dante has defined as "a horror for families" resembles those little books from the "Goosebumps" series that were popular among teenagers a decade (or slightly more) ago. Chills so "small" they end up being more than harmless. Dante thus crafts a product that fails to convince, or rather, fails to convince everyone. The plot has a lot of déjà vu precisely due to the mechanics of the adolescent and pre-adolescent genre (the crush on the neighbor, missing the city followed by immediate adaptation to the suburbs, the squabbles between younger and older siblings, the protagonist's awkward moments, and so on) and doesn't seem to have a strong enough idea at its core to justify a feature-length film. In short, "The Hole 3D" is the story of a hole that materializes the worst fears, a pretext to showcase a clichéd moral that goes something like "to overcome your fears, you must face them." To achieve this, individual devices are used that, when taken out of context, are even effective for the staging that recalls the aforementioned 1980s films. I am referring in particular to the scene where a malevolent puppet resembling a puppetmaster-like jester engages in a fierce fight with little Lucas. Even the first appearance of the ghostly girl (which very much, perhaps unintentionally, resembles Melissa Graps from "Kill, Baby... Kill!") is quite good, but the problem always lies there: viewed as a whole, the film is really not much, banal and too childish. As the title suggests, Joe Dante's new film uses modern digital stereoscopic technology but doesn't exploit it at all, and that 3D now mandatory for many productions is a tiny gimmick to show only a couple of scenes where objects push towards the viewer, really too little to justify the increased ticket price. The cast includes young and very young actors such as Chris Massoglia ("Cirque du Freak"), Haley Bennet ("Marley & Me"), and Nathan Gamble ("The Mist"), accompanied by the adult Teri Polo ("Meet the Parents"). In short, "The Hole 3D," while not a bad film, fails to convince entirely but is probably mostly a matter of target audience; I am convinced that this film will be a hit among a 12-16-year-old audience who will jump in their seats at the sudden appearance of the living puppet, laugh at the frequent squabbles between the protagonist brothers, and fall in love with Haley Bennet's pretty face. Adult audience, you have been warned!