Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  TORSO – I’m not massively big on gialli, but I’ve always liked ‘Torso’. It’s a very moody film – balaclava’d figures looming in the mist and eyeless dolls probably represent it more than the sunny Etruscan squares and rococo décor. The shadowy vibe is augmented by bits of gore and sleaze; forget the lame reveal and the dubious backstory, ‘Torso’ remains a pungent trawl through swampy menace, and is really quite suspenseful in places. From Sergio Martino, with Suzy Kendall.
SEIZURE – Oliver Stone’s first feature. Lovers of ‘Wall Street’ etc etc will possibly end up scratching their heads, but I really enjoyed it. It that kind of Euro-nuanced cryptic post-Hippie vibe to it, all woozy fish-eye visuals and oblique connections, something you got a lot of in films from around the time that were essentially quite grindhouse but had one foot in the ‘art’ camp. It’s about an author whose weekend gathering is gatecrashed by a trio of creeps, including Herve Villechaize. All of the assembled are required to participate in games leading to inevitable death. Mary Woronov plays another of her sassy characters, but Martine Beswick rules as The Queen of Evil. Excellent stuff, really.
THE RENTAL – A good film, but it’s really an attempt to do a ‘grown up’ slasher. Two couples rent an isolated house for bit of weekend r&r – but who’s that watching them? A nice, subtle build up, full of foreboding and the sense of relationships derailing, gives way to a slightly flat post-‘Saw’ era type resolution. But enjoyable and quite absorbing for the most part, definitely worth a watch.
DON’T PANIC – From the maker of ‘Cemetery of Terror’. It’s not as satisfyingly grotesque as that film, being a more overt kind of ‘Nightmare on Elms Street’ cash in, but it’s certainly very charming. After a birthday Ouija board session, a college stude has nightmarish visions… some ghastly person from the other side is going about doing some murders. It rolls along in its predictable way, sprinkling just enough horror stuff to keep the audience from getting too impatient with ‘the relationships angle’ (which actually here is done in an entertainingly convoluted manner by way of a long-running metaphor involving three balloons sailing into the sky and a wilting rose). Then you get the whole eighties dubbed horror aesthetic, which is probably the main draw for people like me these days. Say what you will of it, but in the end I don’t believe it’s possible to dislike a film whose title song is an electro-synth ditty composed and sung by the lead performer.
BLOOD HOOK – My heart sinks a little whenever I see the ‘Troma’ banner – I have to remind myself that, in with all the dross they’ve put out, are some inspired oddities and a few stone-cold classics. No-one would call ‘Blood Hook’ a stone-cold classic, but for my money it’s certainly an inspired oddity. A bunch of eighties college kids come to a backwater town after an inheritance; during a fishing tournament, some slashings go down. That could be all there is to it, but ‘Blood Hook’ boasts a plethora of quirky characters and weird events. The killer’s mode of execution, death by fishing tackle, is strange enough, but then there’s the incredibly contrived explanation for their murderous frenzy, which, of all things under the sun, takes in the chirruping of cicadas and the devil’s tritone. That sets the (off-) beat to the whole film, which walks a queasy tightrope between snarky humour and eeriness. It could so easily be written off as another misfiring eighties horror-comedy, but it’s so much interesting, and better. Some of the gags fall flat, but some of them really work. It helps that much of the acting that isn’t deliberately weird is quite good, not that this film is intended to be a hugely resonant character study. It’s at its best in moments which feel absurd but strangely atmospheric, enough to stop the laughter in your throat. And ultimately, does it not take a certain genius to set a slasher movie in the world of angling? |