DEADBEAT AT DAWN - Jim VanBebber's first feature. He directs and stars as 'Goose', a young hood who wants to quit the gangs for a better life with his occultist gf. Needless to say, it doesn't end happily. I liked the 'authentic' 70s fleapit exploitation look, pre-'Grindhouse' phenomena by decades, although can't tell whether this was intentional or the result of bad resources. It's quite good, but it doesn't have the fanboy hard hit of flicks like 'Combat Shock', a film it shares slight tonal aspects with. But, despite trawling an endless array of bleak neighbourhoods and down and out scenes, this is more of a shoestring action thriller. There are some great tableaus, like the one with Goose's tweaked out dad.
CYCLOPS - Set incongruously in ancient Rome, with a bad CGI cyclops. It's somehow fairly entertaining, but not enough to justify watching it considering how shit it is. There's a bit of gore, some stuff about a slave revolt and slimy Patrician types. But would I watch it again? Only if it were hovering above my house like a rubbish UFO.
WRONG TURN - I watched 'Wrong Turn' again after some recent posts mentioned this series. I quite liked, although it's standard in many ways. There's a 'Hills Have Eyes' type set up that hardly needs exploring. Some nice violence / mutant degenerates. For some reason I was surprised to find it was made as far back as 2003, then surprised that I thought this was 'far back' in the first place (my life is exactly this exciting)
WIND CHILL - A good film. Frustratingly, not quite as good as the one I thought was coming after the opening act. The chilly atmosphere and the paranoid tension between the two initially unlikeable leads seemed to portend something genuinely creepy. And it was, sort of, but there were too many flaws, too many easy resolutions, and it dragged in places. The ghostly stuff was done pretty well, but didn't quite gel with the build up. Still thought it was a brave move to set at least forty minutes in a car with only edgy dialogue to sustain, and the whole was well shot with, to use one of my stock phrases, 'a genuinely oppressive atmosphere'. So yeah, nice try.
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