SLEEPAWAY CAMP – I'm never quite sure how to take 'Sleepaway Camp', but the more I see it, the more I detect a strange magic at work. Or maybe I'm trying to convince myself I do. Sticking with the bare facts, 'Sleepway Camp' is pretty lame as a slasher movie but certainly has a few things going on which furrow the brow and lead to those inevitable questions we all ask ourselves at four in the morning – why the bizarre mother / aunt who claims she's a doctor? What is 'Sleepaway Camp's stance towards the casual molestation of minors – light hearted? Vengeful? How can someone be stabbed through a wall like that? These questions never end. 'Sleepaway Camp' is full of strange performances, off key moments, odd and uncomfortable undercurrents. It doesn't often feel like a truly weird movie – the direction, the pacing, the music are all a bit anodyne. But it's the kind of film you take a step back from once in a while and just go “...huh?” I wish that happened more often to me. Oh, and there's The Ending, which has cemented SC's place in history – it still gets me every time I see it. It's not the reveal, which tbh is a bit throwaway, but something about the intensity of the image itself, truly haunting.
THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL – The unbeatable Udo Kier is a stuck-up writer slumming it in the English countryside with an enigmatic Linda Hayden in this sleazy Brit-horror / thriller from the mid seventies. As with 'Sleepway Camp', it's a movie which has grown on me over the years. I never used to be into it so much, but, viewing Severin's recentish restoration the other day, I was quite taken with its eerie qualities and some of its stylistics. It's not quite good enough to sustain genuine tension – for that, a real grasp of character, dynamics, psychology is required, and frankly the unlikeable inhabitants of 'The House On Straw Hill' don't really offer much by way of audience attachment. But the atmosphere is good, and this follows mostly from the aesthetics, which are part neo-gothic, part tawdry English gloom, part Giallo-ish, or at least that kind of skewed Euro pop-weirdness that I always think equates with 'Giallo'. There are all sorts of strange little details, like control freak Udo's obsession with wearing rubber gloves during his more intimate moments, the odd prominence in some scenes of a stuffed hawk / kestrel, the lamp that always seems to flicker fitfully to highlight the gun displayed above it on the wall. Then there's the sleaze, which really brings home the dreary English grime although obviously seems tame now. Definitely at home in the same gutter you'd find Pete Walker, Alan Birkenshaw or Norman Warren bobbing about in ie recommended, particularly for those with a fondness for THOSH's greasy time and place.
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