BLOOD GAMES – A threadbare early nineties gender battle in which a female baseball team is attacked by a bunch of rednecks; the factions are united by shaky lines and shoddy deliveries. This one’s politics are a bit scattered to say the least, as the camera positively ogles the girls in their little uniforms (and, later in the showers, without them) whilst the narrative tries to make a point about how they’re objectified by the guys from the backwoods. There are a couple of nasty rape scenes to pave the way for a crowd-pleasing comeuppance, but nothing particularly explicit. A few little touches here and there break with the sameness, even if they amount to bits of slow motion and the occasional arty silhouette-based shot. It’s been a long time since films like this were made.
WHITE FIRE – OK, I’m slightly surprised to admit that I’d never even heard of this before, although it seems to have been something of a holy grail for fans of mental films for quite a while. Really glad I took the plunge, because ‘White Fire’s’ crazy levels are pretty much in the red all the way through. It’s about… well, what can I say, it’s basically about a plot to steal a killer diamond called ‘white fire’ (or perhaps “white fire, white fire”, as every character in this film seems to say at least three dozen times each at various points for no discernible reason), but in the end that’s fairly peripheral in what turns out to be a labyrinth of confusion and hilarity. Fred Williamson sits in the eye of this cyclone; Robert Ginty, on the other hand, is blown along by a gale of random incest, moustachio flapping in the wind. It’s surprisingly gory. It’s not quite as half-cut as something like ‘Samurai Cop’, but it’s heading towards the same place at an alarming rate.
VEROTIKA – Too much horror business? I don’t know about that, but there’s certainly plenty of it going on here in G Danzig’s directorial debut, a portmanteau anthology based on comics of his that I know nothing about. ‘Verotika’ seems to have been widely and broadly trashed, but what were people expecting? ‘Misfits; The Musical’? This is weird, scuzzy and quite gratuitously gory in places. It’s not very tonally consistent – the ‘Sin City does Bava’ kitsch of the surreal first two episodes gives way, with a crunch, to the genuinely morbid final segment. But it is interesting and imaginative in its crude microbudget take on Eurohorror tropes.
NIGHTBREED – You can see the epic fantasy in ‘Nightbreed’, and by that I mean it’s always struck me as the kind of film that probably needed another couple of hours, or, had it been made these days, a small Netflix-type series, to move around in fully. That’s not really the kind of thing I go for, but ‘Nightbreed’ does more than OK in this latest version. Cronenberg intrigues with his lizardine turn, but it’s the glimpses of Barker’s imagination, which here takes on Boschian proportions in places, that make you glad some of it left the page. I always think of ‘Cabal’ as the bridge between ‘The Books Of Blood’ and his later big novels, and ‘Nightbreed’ is suffused with a grandeur that steps outside of the confines which made something like ‘A Hellbound Heart’ so much more captivating as a film.
DARK CORNERS – Takes place in a split reality where a woman deals with a difficult pregnancy, only to find that in her dreams (or maybe it’s the other way around) she has to face being a goth in a nightmare slum. ‘Dark Corners’ is like someone’s idea of ungory torture porn rejigged to seem vaguely Lynchian. It’s not very good, but its cockeyedness manages to absorb. Quite how Thora Birch found herself stranded here is anyone’s guess, it’s a far cry from ‘Ghost World’, but again, her always arresting presence is another aspect that makes it all seem perhaps more interesting than it genuinely is. Recommended for lovers of shoestring noughties indie horror.
BEYOND DARKNESS – Well, anyone who reads my reviews knows that I find late-era Italian exploitation irresistible, and that’s certainly the case here. By Claudio Fragasso, no less… if you don’t get your hopes up for another ‘Troll 2’, you may be in for a treat. Then again, maybe not, but if you like the sounds of a rip-off of any other generic haunted house movie made with such inept artifice that it has all the stilted unreality of a bad waxwork exhibit, then step this way. It throws in the obvious at every turn, but the random imagery of big swan ‘rockers’ and eye-shaped slits in the walls that let in light from the realm on ‘the other side’ make it seem wonky. Lots of reviews have dissed it as being boring. I don’t see that. If you want a good, well-made ‘normal’ film that entertains you’ll find your patience tried, but if you want an experience that leaves you uncertain as to whether to laugh or frown (or switch off ), you’ll get what you deserve.
KOKO DI, KOKO DA – A very good film in which a grieving couple on a camping trip relive the same event time after time – the ‘event’ in question seems to be something to do with a symbolic ‘letting go’ of their dead daughter, but could equally be seen as a hostile encounter with three weird figures in a forest. Some parts of this are beautiful, like the sequence where the woman journeys to remote cabin to view a fable-like re-enactment of her mourning delivered as a kind of shadow play. It stops just short of being great, maybe there’s something just a bit too repetitive or lacking in bite about it somehow, but as it stands it’s very much worth a look. Recommended.
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