HELL FEST – A guy in a mask is doing some slashing at a horror theme-park – some young adults are set up to triumph or die etc. Sorry, I don’t have the energy to put a more imaginative spin on things, it is exactly what it is. Perhaps unfairly, I want to compare it to Tobe Hooper’s ‘The Funhouse’, mostly because one of the striking things about that movie was the gaudy plethora of carnival grotesque on constant display – the same sort of thing is ‘Hell Fest’s best hand IMO. Unlike ‘The Funhouse, which wasn’t all that explicit but had a nicely perverse backstory and a general freakiness to it, ‘Hell Fest’ offers little else beyond its nice visuals. It’s undeniably well made and pacey enough to be diverting, but in the end it’s just the same stuff we’ve seen countless times before. As much as it’s pointless to knock formula when commenting on slasher movies, these days I prefer it if there’s something either outré, just different or even utterly utterly rubbish to get my head around, whereas ‘Hell Fest’, as smooth as it is, just seems to want to get as much mileage as it can out of a very vintage proposition, do an OK job then punch the clock. Worth checking out over a couple of beers, but I don’t think you’ll watch it twice – well I probably won’t, anyway..
THE SUPER – Saw this whilst I was rummaging around on Netflix. An apartment block is beset by grisly murders – a new guy starts there as a janitor and decides to investigate the sinister goings on. In between a promisingly brutal start and an impressively mean-spirited ending, janitor guy discovers what pretty much amounts to Val Kilmer being rubbish in a cellar for an hour or so. I have to congratulate Val for making me shriek with laughter at his performance, which is not so much ‘on the nose’ as beyond even facial regions yet to be discovered. Maybe I’m misremembering it a little, but his turn just seemed super-bad and misplaced in a film that generally makes do with being mediocre. Bit harsh perhaps, it did keep me watching; the whole is reasonably well made and comes with a bit of gore and atmosphere. Again, one viewing is probably all that is required, and even then in a state of mild inebriation.
THREE WOMEN – Robert Altman never really did a horror movie to the best of my knowledge, but three of his films, ‘That Cold Day in the Park’, ‘Images’ and ‘Three Women’, are weird, twisted psychodramas with a distinctly hazy feel to them, particularly those last two. ‘Three Women’ stars Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duvall as employees at some kind of health resort for the elderly – naïf Spacek is enamoured of bovine narcissist Duvall and follows her around until a crisis in their relationship leads Spacek to attempt suicide, after which she takes on a different, hard-assed persona, one that seems to mock Duvall by achieving and surpassing the latter’s ambition for dominance and superiority . ‘Three Woman’ is about the fluidity of identity and consciousness but is really not straightforwardly a ‘narrative film’ – it’s not tangibly surreal (although it sort of is at the end), but makes more sense as an uneasy, dream-like wash rather than a coherent series of events. The discordant score and the empty desert imagery, not to mention the constant presence of the odd, violent murals painted everywhere by the film’s enigmatic third woman, conjure a really dense, intoxicating atmosphere.
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