MONSTER DOG – Well, it's a Claudio Fragasso movie, so make of that what you will. In some ways, 'Monster Dog' is a thing of real bizarreness – it centres on Alice Cooper (who for a good half of the runtime looks like someone's dad), a familial werewolf curse, and a town full of runaway dogs which kill people now and then. Alice is back on his home turf to re-shoot a rock video with some pals who all suffer from an extreme case of Euro-woodenness (I'm talking about the acting). His enthusiasm takes a dive when he finds out that he might be the son of a wolf-man, but, being a seasoned pro, he does the video thing and changes into his stage gear, which at least gives him an excuse to run around looking like a middle aged Alice Cooper impersonator for the rest of the film. A posse of dudes who look like they might be in a sort-of Spag Western turn up and do some shooting until the tragic end. 'Monster Dog' has all the ingredients necessary for essential late Italian trash badness, but it doesn't quite ripen into the classic bilge it might've been. There's a little too much lag in places, and the exploitative aspects aren't mined fully. Nevertheless, being a Fragasso film, it wears its lameness on its sleeve and delivers plenty of threadbare charm.
ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH – Been a long time since I last touched base with this Bruno Mattei baddie – I was worried I might be bored, as I'd pegged ZCF as a bit of a yawner. I really liked it, actually. Whereas Fulci furnished his rip-offs with an atmosphere that was his and only his, ZCF has no real style or vibe, apart from that belonging to late seventies / early eighties cut throat Italian exploitation. Actually, being a Bruno Mattei film, it has an additional layer of nonsensicality, which as always borders on the unintentionally surreal. It's a movie of set pieces and moments – between these, downtime, made up of jungle trecking, bickering conversation and stock footage of wildlife (hardly necessary to pad out a film over ninety minutes long). Some of the 'pivotal' sequences are eerily effective – the bit in the native village has a strange air about it, reaching into Mondo territory with its shots of tribal gatherings and people picking maggots out of corpses to eat. Really lurid, leering stuff, and all the more brazen when you consider the film's wraparound narrative about third world exploitation. But ZCF has no coherent ideology, it's pure pulp, pretty much summed up by the scene where one of the SWAT team guys goes into the basement of a house riddled with zombies and does what anyone would do, puts on a tutu and starts dancing around.
HALLOWEEN 3 – No MM in sight, but IMO easily the best of the Halloween sequels. OK, we could have endless debates about that, but let's not. It's such a great film though, I almost prefer it to the original in some ways. You could stick it in the dictionary as the definition of “Eighties Horror”. Just the mood, the way it's shot, the atmosphere. So ironic that it feels quintessentially Carpenterian when the latter didn't direct. His stamp is all over it though, from the bass heavy synth growl to Cundy's compositions. I always feel there's a really downer vibe to it, a suffocating sense of time collapsing, something dark on the horizon... well, that was the eighties for you. In fairness, it's also the film, with its bizarre conspiracy to bring about mass child sacrifice via deadly Halloween masks when the clock strikes midnight on the big day. 'Halloween 3', along with being oppressively dour and humourless and bleak, is also incredibly mean spirited – that bit where the kid's head implodes under the mask as snakes and bugs do their work still disturbs me to this day, as does the scene where that retailer fiddles with the device on one of the masks and gets her face blown open by an unholy laser blast. Creepy. A film I return to endlessly.
 |