CATHY'S CURSE – I was made up when I heard Severin were going to be putting this one out on Blu-ray, having only ever seen cheapshit sub VHS-level transfers in the past. Watching it 'as it was intended' proved a slightly more coherent experience than I was anticipating, as my memories were of a real head scratcher of a movie. It's more subtle than that, although it is pretty weird. Basically part of the 'Exorcist' rip-off wave that dominated seventies horror cinema, it tells the tale of a young girl possessed by the spirit of her dead aunt via a creepy doll. I can't put my finger on what's so alluring about it, but it does have quite a strange, disjointed atmosphere caused in part by slightly 'off' performances, wonky editing choices and a few shots and scenes which have something of a 'huh?' factor about them. Maybe not for all tastes, and some may find that it drags a little, but I really recommend this to lovers of grindhouse era oddities.
THE HUNGER – Imagine how much guts it'd take these days to begin a movie with a performance of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead'? Not a problem for Tony Scott, whose grasp of bombast never falters throughout his eighties vampire epic, 'The Hunger'. I'm quite a big fan of the kind of movie, typically a certain type of eighties horror flick, which seems perpetually on the brink of morphing into a high concept rock video. 'The Hunger' is a good example of this tendency, although these days I do find my patience running thin with it. Plus points, beyond unselfconsciously dumb-seeming arty pretension, are mostly to do with the presence of D Bowie, C Deneuve and S Sarandon, who are all very interesting to watch. But it does tend to float along without much 'happening' until the end, when it suddenly goes all 'genre'. I do like it, but I get a bit bored.
THE OTHER HELL – I can never resist a good Bruno Mattei flick. But wait on, that doesn't even make sense, there ARE no good Bruno Mattei flicks! I do like them though, he was always so shameless about being nonsensical, and that's certainly the case here. I've seen 'The Other Hell' umpteen times, and I can never figure out the attraction. It's not overly graphic or exploitative, and it's certainly not an exercise in Italian stylistics. Maybe, like 'Cathy's Curse' above, it just has this pervasive low key sense of strangeness made up of slightly baffling production and narrative choices. It's set in a nun's convent, where some murders have been happening. A groovy young priest is drafted in to investigate, and he has no time for all the talk of devilry and possession and whatnot popular among the sisters. By the time you get to the weird explanation for it all, your eyes will probably have glazed over. But not before you ponder the film's languid, dreamy texture, its enigmatic ossuaries and stock shots of owls in flight which should just look silly and cheap, but instead seem somehow rich and atmospheric. Talking of cheap, 'The Other Hell' shares its soundtrack with 'Beyond The Darkness' – those guys sure knew how to economise. A threadbare yet hypnotic experience, you will probably already know whether this is your cup of tea or not.
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