SHUTTER ISLAND - Scorsese's take on identity dislocation played out within the claustrophobic confines of a fifties psych ward. It didn't set me on fire, but I liked it. In fact I'm having difficulty thinking of much to say about it, so I'll move on to...
TEXAS CHAINSAW - ... which did nothing for me whatsoever. You'd think that in these times, when the likes of 'Maniac' and 'Evil Dead' seem to signpost an era of multiplex-friendly brutality, the producers of this item might've pushed the boat out a little to deliver something that at least tried to live up to the original in some way. But no, this follow up is so linear and bland it could've been made in the nineties. The only promise seemed contained within sporadic moments of gore - it's been a long time since I thought of a movie in those terms. Total rubbish.
VIGILANTE - Great exploitation flick from Bill Lustig that rips off 'Death Wish' to superior effect. The theme could be a Daily Mail reader's wet dream - the decent family guy's right to excessive violence when the 'system' lets him down - but there's more to 'Vigilante' than that, and in fact the film has more of a hopeless tone than a righteous or victorious one. It's not entirely resolved in some aspects, but it hurtles along at such a pace that you overlook the holes in its narrative and, if you're like me, choose instead to immerse yourself in the Carpenter -goes - metal soundtrack, the icy, grime-ridden vision of early eighties NYC and commanding performances by the likes of the always brilliant Fred Williamson.
PATRICK STILL LIVES - Early eighties Italian sleaze that has less to do with the original than it does with random nudity and bonkers genitally fixated violence. Well known for its infamous impalement scene, the film is basically a series of exploitation tableaus revolving around comatose Patrick and his extraction of revenge from a bunch of unlikeable guests at a health spa (run by a doctor who does psychic experiments on coma victims... OK). Although a bit languid at first, the film is so cheerfully sordid that it bypasses the boredom threshold and delivers multiple non-PC highs ie. green lit coma sufferers writhing in ecstasy etc.
FEMMINE CARNIVORE - I don't know anything about this weird Spanish flick from the seventies, but I'd say it deserves an audience and a proper release. It's a strange pop-psychedelic meditation on gender roles (erm, maybe... or a feminist satire / satirical attack on feminism? I'm confusing myself now) and plays half art-house, half exploitation movie. It's set in a female only psychiatric clinic where the patients really are in a Society for Cutting Up Men (yes, there are multiple Val Solanas references). It's not very graphic, although there are a couple of HG Lewis butcher shop gore scenes and a page three bra burning celebration (again, the latter leaves me unable to decide which side of the line it's on). But it's filmed in a weird, dislocated way which is really effective and features loads of fish-eye and the kind of "faces in a blurred mirror" effects you see in Franco movies. Really interesting if baffling lost Euro-weirdness.
THE SPY WHO CAME - Yet more mind boggling oddness. This cheap sexploitation flick from the sixties has a vice cop coerced into a plot to... well, I didn't quite get it, but it involved a sheikh, blackmail and seduction via conditioned Pavlovian bimbos. It stars Louis Waldon who was part of the Factory set which is appropriate because everything here is so wooden it could've been set up by Andy himself. But the weird mix of spy yarn pulp, weird sex (with mannequins), mind control experiments and the theme of socio-political power put me more in mind of William Burroughs in a strange way. The film has great music, which lurches from fleapit burlesque to psychedelic musique concrete, and some surprisingly powerful imagery (the crazed sex zombies chasing their dominatrix oppressor through the woods at the end). The final image is of the cop guy scratching his head, which was kind of what I was doing throughout the movie (in a good way).
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