SINNER'S BLOOD - A strange film, quite badly made but punctuated by moments of eerie power. It plays half in Southern Gothic mode, with two orphaned sisters landing in a household of pervs, half in ineffectual biker movie mode, with a gang of cyclists who don't wreak all that much havoc beyond whacking a preacher with a chain and getting down to some orgiastic histrionics. Characters are introduced, look pivotal for a few minutes, then promptly disappear. The framing and the filming seem disjointed and bizarre. But then there are genuinely strong, disturbing sequences and images - like the scene where one of the sisters recalls her dead mother whilst a woman seduces her, only for said woman's infantilised brother to barge in and attempt to rape her. Or the climactic, post 'Easy Rider' acid trip. Quite a heady concoction, maybe not as far-out or as exploitative as I would've hoped, but definitely worth some attention and interest.
THE BOYS NEXT DOOR - Essential eighties treatise on latter day violence from the director of 'Suburbia'. Two young hicks take leave from their nowhere trajectory and head for LA. Their alienation from their pre-scripted lives passes from bafflement to violence as their festering rage breaks out and rampages through the neon wilderness of the big city at night. 'The Boys Next Door' is quite interesting, because it presents the two boys' anger as being class-based and real, but the violence they indulge in is more or less an extension of the commodity system, an entertainment born out of the suffering of those they consider 'other' to themselves, present on every TV screen and around every street corner. In their own way, they're living the American Dream. Intense, oh-so-eighties and not entirely straightforward but highly recommended.
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