Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH - I always forget how much I love this film. It's surely up there with 'Messiah Of Evil' in the low-key but atmospherically threatening seventies low budget stakes. Like MOE it has a really insidious, faintly trippy quality and in places oozes a kind of doom laden malevolence in telling its tale of a post-psyche ward lady and her beatnik friends starting over in a desolate town, only to face mental collapse or supernatural onslaught (you be the judge, interpretations are open). For me, it has almost everything I ever look for in a movie - dreamlike detachment, weird electronic score, that strange semi abstract but intimate feel of seventies cinema. The performances are sometimes quite striking, too - the hippy runaway chick who inveigles her way into the crew's new house and who's maybe also a vampiric ghost (? or something, LSCJTD doesn't particularly pander to expectations of clarity or even sense really) totally gives me the creeps. There's just something about her leering face and the look in her eyes which is subtly wrong. I think maybe I've reviewed this before, but what the hell - LSJTD is fully deserving of your attention and I can't recommend it enough.
MACABRE - I feel pretty positively about 'Macabre'. I can understand how many might find it a bit 'meh', because, outside of a few 'highlights', almost nothing happens for most of its run time. Actually that's not true at all, what 'happens' is a simmering non-romance running one way between a blind tuba restorer and another traumatised post-psyche ward lady. That could be rubbish, or really (?good?) in a different kind of film, but it's neither because 'Macabre' is just such an odd flick. I don't know why, but it made me think of a hack-job Polanski - maybe the claustrophobic atmosphere of paranoia and isolation which pervades the over-decorated apartment where said tuba guy and psyche lady hang out. There's something suffocating about the whole scene here. The slick cocktail sax funk soundtrack, which was surely originally intended to score 'tasteful' softcore, only adds to the air of stifling sickness. On top of this we have a complete absolute arsehole of a nasty little girl, who, in a scene of epic bad taste, drowns her kid brother between shots of her mother moonlighting in shag mode with lover-on-the-side and who will go on to play vicious mind games with post-sanatorium mom. And then the necrophilious aspect, ear lobes in soup, the totally ridiculous last shot. Yeah, maybe not quite to everyone's taste, but overall quite a 'heady' concoction... |