THE LIVING DEAD GIRL – It's been a while since I watched any Jean Rollin. Finding myself again in the realms of 'The Living Dead Girl' was like waking, only to find that I was still in some weirdly pungent dream. TLDG is probably one of his lesser numbers in some ways, but it still swirls with that heady, gauzy atmosphere that settles like an impenetrable fog on the most barren of plotlines. This is about a dead girl who is accidentally reanimated by that great seventies / eighties stock-in-trade, a chemical leak, thence becomes the Living Dead Girl. Being a Jean Rollin film, when she was alive she had an obsessive friendship with another girl, who runs to her rescue after her return from the grave. The living dead girl needs a steady supply of victims to sustain her unhealthy half-life, so girlfriend becomes procurer of flesh and blood. The horror of the living dead girl's condition gives rise to much heartfelt philosophical hand wringing between scenes of nudity/shagging, American tourism in rural France, and blood letting, and TLDG is probably Rollin's goriest movie, or one of them – perhaps by this point he was feeling the need to compete in a genre which was going through a very commercial renaissance of gore. However, the whole thing is so screamingly Rollin, with its morbid eroticism and anguished poetics, that it couldn't be further removed from the latest slasher clone of the day. Although, beneath the look and feel of a Rollin film, you can sense the texture of someone's caravan holiday on the outskirts of Toulouse in 1982, so it is still very much of its time in other ways, which I don't despise. Recommended, and also quite an accessible starting point for Rollin.
KNUCKLEBONES – Checked this out on the basis of Dem's review – I liked it. It's the sort of movie I always hope to stumble upon but for some reason, these days, these kind of titles seem to pass me by a bit. It's in essence an eighties throwback, with some young American adults being menaced by a slasher in an abandoned factory. This time, the bad dude doing the killing is some kind of National Socialist demon, as signposted the slightly odd backstory about nazi garment depots in Texas. 'Knucklebones' doesn't exactly keep a straight face, but it's not played for laughs particularly, either. The demon throws in a few Freddy-ish wisecracks, but there's also some grim gore e.g some guy being chainsawed up the arse. Also, I always appreciate a movie which introduces characters for the sole purpose of having them graphically killed within five minutes of them hitting the screen. Stylistically, 'Knucklebones' looks pretty nice considering its presumably shoestring origins, and manages to make good on its eighties aspirations by being generous with prosthetics and its rubber faced monster. Worth a watch for sure.
THE WINDMILL MASSACRE – A minibus full of tourists with shady pasts breaks down near a windmill in the countryside around Amsterdam. A demonic figure enters the proceedings as past sins are revisited. 'The Windmill Massacre' certainly has its plus points. I really liked some of the ideas – the whole tourist / minibus thing, the Amsterdam setting, this business with windmills – definitely not enough of those in contemporary horror. Also, that guy from Hollyoaks doesn't get enough genre roles, so this should be a pivotal moment for his CV. Stylistically, TWM struck me as being a bit strange. It reminded me of nineties horror – I don't know why, maybe there was something about the way it seemed both slick and flat at the same time, with a kind of obviously telegraphed approach to the material. Either way, despite some good moments of gore and the atmospherics following from the set up, there was a real sense of it flagging at points, with too much standing around and / or action without intrigue. A bit more momentum and some better sustained tension would've raised it a level. Still, worth having a look.
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