MY DEAR KILLER – I had vague memories of the opening JCB decap, and of the more vicious circular saw murder later on, but nothing about ‘My Dear Killer’ seemed to have stuck from when I saw it in its ‘Shameless’ incarnation years ago. Watching it again on blu-ray, I was struck by the moody visuals and the latent claustrophobia, ironic for a film which makes good use of scope. ‘My Dear Killer’ suffers from an overly complex plotline that really does bog down the mid-section with numerous red-herrings and talky bits of exposition. But this labyrinthine narrative, which is also pretty mean-spirited in places, is enlivened by many arresting moments, literally in the case of the final scene, where the self-righteous detective guy goes around a drawing room and makes all the suspects stare at their reflections in a murdered child’s broken mirror! Agatha Christie this ain’t.
HELLRAISER: JUDGEMENT - I don’t know much about the ‘Hellraiser’ franchise, I kind of tuned out after the second sequel and I only bought this after reading Dem’s enthusiastic review from a while back. HJ turned out to be quite enjoyable, an impressive mingling of very standard DTV detective serial killer drama and a wholly unexpected strand of imagery that does actually aspire to a certain level of ‘Barkeresque’. Part exquisite grotesquery, part meat-and-potatoes, it’s a weird little feast for sure, but might whet your appetite if you like things that resemble cheap heavy metal videos from twenty years ago (I mean that as a compliment, it’s an underused aesthetic). In a way though, what tickled me most was all the cod-bureaucratic wrangling at the end between Pinhead and a representative from ‘The Other Side’. It just seemed a bit silly, not really the kind of ominousness I think the filmmakers might’ve been going for, but an interesting direction for the series to explore nonetheless. Actually, credit to those involved, the ultimate fate of Pinhead in this is pithy and slightly profound.
XTRO 3 – The original ‘Xtro’ is a bit of a high watermark of gonzo cinema for me, so it’s inevitable that its sequels must fall short in some way. ‘Xtro 3’ falls quite a distance in that regard, actually. Instead of a dream-distorted bad British soap-opera with spurts of body horror, we have a standard nineties DTV-type exercise wherein some military reprobates have been sent to an island serve as a feint for an internal cover-up operation (the ‘covered-up thing’ in question being an angry alien who’s been kicking off due to a Roswell-style drubbing he once received courtesy of high command.) It could all be quite so-so, and to an extent it is, but for those able to overlook a slight initial drag factor there’s actually plenty to entertain, from some nicely gooey special effects to bizarre bits like the one where a character gets stuck in a cocoon, only to be randomly menaced by said angry alien. Not ‘Xtro’, but quite a good laugh when all’s said and done.
THE CELLAR – Kevin Tenney gave most of us fond memories with films such as ‘Night Of The Demons’. ‘The Cellar’ is a monster movie with a backdrop that’s a couple of steps removed from that hoary eighties trope, ‘house built on a native American burial ground’, but is still generous enough to make room for another overused idea, ‘the kid who no-one believes because he keeps bollocking on about monsters in cellars’. As much as I wanted to enjoy ‘The Cellar’, I found I needed a lot of patience to get through it; something in the atmosphere wasn’t working. The appearance at the end of a charming monster didn’t quite make up for all the moments of drag and non-engagement. A bit of a wasted opportunity, although eighties die-hards will probably want it.
GRAVE SECRETS – Interesting to see a few ‘actors of arguable talent’ (Paul Le Mat, Renee Soutendijk, David Warner) slumming it in ‘Grave Secrets’, a film with a distinct direct-to-video-at-the-fag-end-of-the-eighties vibe. Le Mat is a fairly unrealistic university-based ghost hunter who sets out to unravel the mystery of Renee’s haunted B&B. The backstory that eventually emerges has a surprisingly grim tinge and gives occasion for a semi-transparent ghost effect to stumble around a room with menacing intent, so points on for all that. Elsewhere, there may not be much gore or horror jiggery-pokery, but there are computers with blocky graphics, along with other endearing period distractions. I enjoyed it, although I would have preferred that enjoyment to have come in the form of a two quid second hand dvd rather than an expensive boutique blu ray.
THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS – I remember this from ages ago. Now it’s back, lovingly refurbished on blu-ray, a film with an unbeatable pitch – it’s a giallo featuring a Humphrey Bogart impersonator! Nothing is actually made of this within the universe of the movie itself, where HB goes around investigating some ‘French Sex Murders’ as if he’s the most obvious plot device in the world. He’s not even in it very much, just dips in and out – all of which kind of sets the tone of ‘The French Sex Murders’, an exercise in continental randomness that couldn’t be made this side of the seventies. Psychedelic murders with filtered visuals, obligatory sleaze and a bit of gore in a brothel, and the ludicrous decapitation of a motorcyclist (which in turn spawns an equally ludicrous subplot involving the experiments of sinister pathologist Howard Vernon) all feature. Given the above, I was disappointed when the usual giallo-related drag factors (uninvolving procedural etc etc etc) blunted the wacky edges a little, but still, ‘The French Sex Murders’ is a charmingly nutty product of its time.
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