[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

THE LORELY’S GRASP – A great flick from the director of ‘The Blind Dead’ series. It’s about a security guard who’s hired to protect a German girl’s school against a murderer with scaly hands and a connection to local legend. It blends myth, exploitation and straight horror, but is a strange film in some ways as its gory killings, prevalent from the outset, do give way to something more like a gothic romance (then back again). If that’s not enough, a scientist shows us via seventies special fx how a severed human hand can regress to its reptilian evolutionary predecessor, then gets his face messed up with acid. Euro horror high point for sure.

I totally agree, Frankie.

LEATHERFACE – Seemed to attract a lot of negativity from fans and critics. I really liked it though, what’s the problem? TCM, sacred cow, so what. On the other hand, the filmmakers have ‘disappointed’ everyone since ‘Inside’, which surely shouldn’t be taken as the yardstick to measure a filmography by. No, I liked it. It’s fast paced, trashy, violent – you don’t have to wait long before some bad taste moment or other flashes up onscreen, whether that be coyly rendered necrosex or free flowing gore. Does it succeed in getting to grips with the genesis of Leatherface? Well, we’re talking about a made-up entity who was never very well drawn in the first place so who knows, but dramatically, not really, but who cares? It’s just not that kid of film. It does get really disjointed in its latter half, but to me it seemed to be trying to capture something quite EC-comics like, which I appreciated. And it avoids falling into the same trap as the putrid ‘Halloween’ remake, which was so po-faced in its attempts to humanise. Go on, give it chance, it’s better than people say

You've completely sold this one to me. Everyone else has seemingly slated it for it's characterisation of Leatherface, a character that was never well drawn in the first place, just as you say. As for TCM being a sacred cow. Aren't sacred cows usually slaughtered? The other TCM films following the original film are complete bollocks that ruin any sacred values the first one held.

Great work, Frankie.