Is there no other way to describe a situation in which two parties disagree than as being a 'Hatfield-McCoy' thing? In his review of George A. Romero's 'Survival of the Dead' Scott Tobias says:
Crockett and his ragtag crew find themselves in the middle of a clan war between two Irish patriarchs with different ideas about how to stave off the zombie apocalypse. Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) insists on plugging every dead and infected person with a head shot to ensure he doesn't join the ranks of the undead. His Bible-thumping counterpart Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) believes in the possibility of redemption, so he experiments with keeping the undead in chains, waiting for a cure while trying to wean them off their flesh-gnawing tendencies.
There's a lesson to be learned from this Hatfield-McCoy feud...
There's a lesson to be learned from this Hatfield-McCoy feud...
Nothing wrong with that. There are two people, they disagree, therefore we have ourselves a 'Hatfield-McCoy' situation. Right?
However, Tobias is not the only critic to make this reference. It also appears in the reviews (for 'Survivial of the Dead') by Slant, Reeling News, The Examiner, SF Gate, The Seattle Times, The Collider, Yahoo, Hollywood News, Shock Till You Drop, The Boston Herald, RottenTomatoes, Amazon, Today on MSNBC, and Roger Ebert, as well as, I assume, others in the blogosphere.
The Hatfield-McCoy reference is used over and over and over. Doesn't this tendency seem to drain the very life from movie reviews? Will reviews become nothing more than a living dead collection of convenient turns of phrase which have been resurrected from the cemetery of archived write-ups of yore, to be set free and stagger about on the internet, wall-eyed and moaning, seeking only to devour the brains (sorry...minds) of their readers?
Alas! The Hatfield-McCoy reference... Is this to be the 'Wilhelm Scream' of references for critics whenever there is a disagreement in a movie they are reviewing? I hope not. I just don't like it. Not one bit. And, if you like it then you and me have ourselves a Hatfield-McCoy thing going on.
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