SEPTIC MAN – I approached this with hesitation, having read some on-line reviews which had kind of put me off. Well, in this instance it's a case of don't believe the (negative) hype, because 'Septic Man' is one of the most original and freaky horror flicks I've seen in quite a while, and I do seriously recommend it. It opens in nowheresville US. A non-specific infection is destroying the town – various illnesses are cited, but no-one really knows what's going on. Flashes of news footage show locals going zombie and being dispatched by SWAT teams in true and tested fashion. Anyway, all of this is just a backdrop, and hardly features in the bulk of the film, which is about a sewer operative (?) who is persuaded by some kind of shadowy executive to investigate and resolve the cause of the outbreak. So sewer guy heads down there and ends up trapped. He meets a dim witted but kindly serial killer (!?) and a rather more vicious dude called 'Lord Auch', who has filed teeth, rat like mannerisms and a chainsaw. The film is really about the changing dynamics between these three, which develop in parallel with an infection sewer guy has contracted. Again, I really liked it. I wasn't sure how things would pan out after the first 25 minutes – after an opening which seemed to promise a whole lot of technicolour shitting and puking, 'Septic Man' shifted gear and settled into some slightly dull build up, and I was fearing the worst just as it blossomed into ever intensifying oddness from around the mid section onwards. There's a reasonable amount of gore, and the pustulent make up fx work on sewer guy is satisfyingly icky. But my abiding memory of it, and the main reason I like it, is just that it's so off beam. It's not a film for those who demand reasonable explanations for all the horror stuff, and in truth there could be something in the opinion of those who've written it off as disjointed and nonsensical. I think though that the same people were maybe a bit resentful that something so left field wasn't given the broad kind of Troma treatment the material seemingly cries out for, whereas I was way more into the fact that, beyond an undercurrent of black humour, all of this is taken seriously, right up to the tragic denouement where the sewer worker pretty much embraces his new identity as a monstrous turd-man. Go and see it if you like messed up indie horror with room for originality as well as rancidness.
WRONG TURN 5 – As I've mentioned before, I don't like horror sequels all that much. Having said that, along with the 'Final Destination' series, I have a soft spot for the spawn of 'Wrong Turn'. They consistently deliver in their trashy direct-to-video kind of way, and so thwarted expectations rarely come into it. This one delves further into the cannibalistic clan's back story, and pretty much sets up the first film chronologically. It's set in a town which is celebrating a 'Burning Man' type festival, and features the obligatory van load of kids who find they have to join forces with the law in order to stave off the menace posed by the ugly trio, who are here joined by Pinhead himself (nice to see he's still getting gigs). On one level it's perfunctory tat which doesn't really do anything apart from regurgitate what's already out there. On another level, it's a pretty good time. I had fun with it, anyway. It gets to the bottom line (i.e the gore) quite quickly, probably the most important consideration for a film like this, because, speaking personally, any messing about and it'd be straight out of my laptop and into the trash. Actually, beyond the exploitation elements, there are one or two moments of interesting stylisation, the most striking being the graphic evisceration of one of the 'heroes' to the strains of The Moonlight Sonata cheesed up with soft rock guitar. That kind of thing sticks in the memory. The rest of it can't hope to scale those heights, but who cares? It moves swiftly, doesn't waste time serving up the grue, and then of course there's the ever watchable Mr Bradley to dignify and enliven the proceedings.
THE JAIL: THE WOMAN'S HELL – As a self confessed Bruno Mattei fan, of course I had to score a copy of this when I heard it'd come out on Intervision. It's from Mattei's last purple patch before his demise, a time when he made a load of dirt cheap shot on video exploitation films in the Philippines. Those ones issued by Intervision have been reliably crazy, featuring the horrible plastic look of bad video production and oodles of shit dubbing, awful dialogue, sleaze and gore. The stand outs for me have been 'Mondo Cannibal' and 'Island of the Living Dead', films so screwed they really have to be seen to be believed. 'The Jail' isn't quite up there with them, but it isn't far off. It is what it sounds like – a WIP movie, in this case updated for an era that frankly doesn't care much for that kind of stuff anymore. It throws in all the staples of that disreputable genre – forced nudity, opportunistic same sex in a rapey context, sadism, evil prison camp director, an escape bid, tables turned etc. The first half of the movie concerns the prison experience of three women, none of whom have been furnished with any kind of meaningful back story which might get in the way of them being the subject of various predictable degradations. I found this bit of the movie to be a bit dull to be honest, and was expecting it to be a little more full on without particularly wanting it to be. There were some potentially nasty scenes (the one with the snake, for example), but nothing all that boundary pushing, just the usual cliches ground out to greater or lesser effect. Things picked up after the escape from the prison, when the film veered more towards 'The Most Dangerous Game' type territory and gave some good gore, some of which was quite vicious and sexualised. Throughout all of it, I was hoping for the disturbed unreality of 'Mondo...' or 'Island...' to shine through, but it didn't, quite. Those films were made strange by their warped technical aspects, and, whilst the dubbing, backing music, cinematography of 'The Jail' are all lame enough to be mirth inducing, they just don't have the delirious quality of some of the other films by Mattei from this time, which leads me to believe that he was consciously exaggerating and twisting aspects of that other stuff. Anti-aesthetics aside, 'The Jail' is sickly low rent trash which will satisfy many unwholesome cravings, at least a bit.
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