Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  A FIELD IN ENGLAND - After raised expectations based the director's other offerings, it actually took me a while to get into this - I found the mixture of dark comedy and weird intensity a bit grating at first. I don't know why, because a similar approach was used in 'Sightseers' and arguably the others, too. But happily, by the end, Wheately had won me over, because there is just a very real sense of the strange and the arcane about it, especially during some of the latter sequences - the black sun / orb, the slo-mo creepy guy emerging from the tent with umbilical rope attachment, a psychedelic video effects passage. And I liked the drizzly, monochrome English Civil War setting. So, definitely a winner, a genuinely creepy evocation of occult England which I feel I should check out again soon.
FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY - Strange how Nazis have recently become a horror stock-in-trade, although they tend to used in a way that denotes standard horror bad shit, rather than something a lot more suspect / creepy in an 'Ilsa' vein. Again, with this one, the whole Nazi thing is a gloss to provide a convenient locale. It's good, though. I watched it in an odd mood a couple of weeks ago and it definitely had an impact. In fact, some of the scenes inside the Frankenstein 'bunker' / lab / labyrinth had a really claustrophobic, nightmarish feel to them, for me at the time at least. There's been quite a lot of hype about it, so I'm sure you'll all have heard about the steampunk zombie cyborgs, which are quite impressive, as is the slightly jokey 'first found footage in history of the moving image' angle (although I'm probably in a minority thinking that). It's quite visceral and violent, and, despite shadowy black humour here and there, the tone is pretty bleak and raw. I liked.
HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY - I always feel this one never gets the praise or the attention it deserves. I like it more than 'The Beyond' or ZFE. It never fails to draw me into a slightly dreamy state, more so than any of the other zombie flicks he made - there's just something about the blood spurting tombstones, the camera sweep through Freudstein's lair with all the dismembered carcasses, the senselessness of scenes like the one involving the decapitated dummy in the shop window - but more than these, the recurring Fulci signatures of eye close ups, field reversals, odd juxtapositions - that give it a genuinely trance inducing atmosphere from start to finish. It may even prove to be my favourite of its director's works - but then again, this is coming from someone who rates 'Conquest' and 'The Back Cat' and 'Cat in the Brain' much more highly than his more venerated 'classics'. |