From the last couple of weeks:
SLAUGHTER HOTEL – Seventies Giallo with Klaus Molesterer as a brooding Euro-shrink at an exclusive mental health farm. Perhaps I should grow my hair, purse my lips inscrutably and buy a velvet smoking jacket, because the gig here looks much plusher than the bleak NHS PFI misfire where I work. Anyway, could Klaus be the dude who's going round murdering lush chicks between long stretches of fairly dull talk and occasional snatches of sleaze? You'll have to stay around to the end to find out. I remember trying to watch this in its badly truncated, horribly mis-framed UK version many years ago... think I lasted about ten minutes. The more recent version from Raro is certainly a revelation in AV, and a worthwhile watch overall really. However, like me, you might need to over-invest slightly in the moments of style, wackiness and gore to make up for the plod factor, and it may well be that I'm simply out of the habit of watching seventies Euro schtick recently, but 'Slaughter Hotel' did milk my dullness gland a bit. Credit where credit's due though – the craziness of the climax, when the mace-wielding killer ices an entire roomful of nurses crammed in a corner, takes some beating.
HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK – A revisit. Dunno why, but I can never really seem to get into HOTEOTP. Great set up and 'moments' – D Hess's slo-mo sccrreeeaaammmm at the end, the general doom-laden ambience, the class war undercurrent etc all do it for me, plus the inspired sense of it being a semi-roughie version of 'Abigail's Party' – if only M Leigh had stuck with his original vision. But something about it wears on me after all these years, and I find my mind wandering whenever I stick it on, which isn't all that often.
DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS – Was my opening Cult Labs salvo from early 2012, for those wondering when it was that I first began bashing the Frankie bible. Every now and again, I feel a need to dig this number out just to check that it's the masterpiece of madness I think it is – on this viewing, yep, still total f*cking idiocy. It's about a Father christmas killer in an eighties London populated only by UK porn regulars and 'Brushstrokes' extras. Really, there are too many instances of inspired lunacy to recount here, but you really should check it out if you feel your frontal lobes need to be wiped by some utter tripe that only makes sense in an off-limits part of the brain where some guy from 'The Bill' tries to take a topless photo of you dressed as Santa (then dies).
THE BABADOOK – Single mum struggles with her unlikeable son in the long aftermath of her husband's fatal accident. Things start to get weird around the kid, a sinister (or maybe just 'a bad') book appears, and mum starts to lose it. This is a very good film which draws much of its power from the two central performances, both of which involve a deftly handled transformative element. The problem for me was pretty much the whole supernatural aspect. It just didn't gel, and, unless I've misinterpreted and been a bit too literal, the way 'The Babodook' ends up laying its cards re issues of objectivity etc seems weak... I would've preferred more ambiguity, (and less attempts to visualise, for that matter). In short, maybe sticking with the dark psychodrama rather than contaminating with cheap genre cop outs might've been the way to go in my ideal world, but make no mistake 'The Babadook' is only a couple of steps short of excellence and I do recommend it.
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