ELLIOT – Come, witness a space-janitor’s psychedelic encounters with kabuki cyber-goths, Max Headroom-esque robo-masks and something that looks a bit eldritch and wormy. Leave any quaint hankerings after story and plot at home though, this is a freeform drift into fuzzed ‘n’ scuzzed VHS poetics, so blitzed out with lo-rent opticals that half the time it resembles a neon kaleidoscope. There’s a pleasing seventies-era ‘Dr Who’-ness about some of the weirdness on show; the makers clearly knew how to get mileage out of a box of pipe cleaners and a few empty yoghurt pots, although the aforementioned barrage of filters and general lo fidelity give all that stuff a positively Lovecraftian dimension (I should point out however that sometimes this also amounts to multi-coloured visuals of people wearing rice crispy boxes on their heads as they wander up and down corridors… again. And again). Final reflections - a sort of collision between ‘Begotten’ and ‘Red Dwarf’ wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Also, you are only allowed to watch this dancing around in body paint in a dark room at 3 AM.
BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN – Interesting ‘drive in’ era horror plunges us into satanic goings-on in a small desert town. It’s a strange affair, a film which wrongfoots the audience with a slightly wooden atmosphere before dissolving into a drifty, dreamy weirdness. There’s a starchiness to the single-set scenes in which the film’s protags, a wholesome lot stranded in the middle of nowhere, hang out in the sheriff’s office and try to get their heads around the occult siege that’s shut the community down. We get a dab of claustrophobia with this, but the sequences showing the Brotherhood and their creepy rituals take the film into far richer atmospheric territory, and it is here that we see a few of the kind of psychedelically tinged nightmare visuals that regional seventies horror cinema was often good for. ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ is an effective slow burn that seems to accumulate a grim sort of delirium. Kudos to Arrow for (what for me is) a first-time watch.
GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE – Mmm, I like this – not quite sure why, but I sense in it a subtle but infectious disconnect. It’s two orphans, a family mystery and a couple of murders, all very plain on paper… only, a few things just don’t add up. More than a few things really, enough to bring a frown to the casual viewer’s face as they begin to detect an uncanny seepage. Some examples of the latter tendency – the crazed chase sequence at the end, the weird use of DIY ballistics, the strange vibe of a hyperreal Californian fairy tale in the guise of bottom-of-the-barrel late eighties horror, the plethora of unanswered questions, like why on earth the character set up as a creepy rape-dude ends up as someone’s wholesome boyfriend… I could go on, but thankfully, I won’t. A slippery one, for sure.
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