THE TOXIC AVENGER – Completely skewers the sadism underlying the eighties (and beyond) fitness fetish, and for that reason ‘Toxic Avenger’, with its dizzying array of cruelties and humiliations, will always have a place in my heart. Watch a poor schlub melt into a superbeast, see airheads wank over pictures of human roadkill, revel in the slathering eruption of a corpulent habitus… ah well, you know the rest. Still a ‘classic’.
THE HAND – Michael Cain (who in this plays frankly a bit of a cock) suffers an unlikely motoring incident, loses a hand and then loses ‘it’. The hand doesn’t stay down for long. Oliver Stone should’ve done more in the genre, what with the likes of this and ‘Seizure’. ‘The Hand’ simmers away, staying more with Caine’s roiling angst and resentment than body horror, though when the latter crops up it’s enticingly dream-like and expressionistic. Very good, I thought.
UNDER THE SILVER LAKE – Dickhead slacker wanders LA, increasingly drawn by little signs and symbols that he perceives form part of a vast cobweb of conspiracy. Along the way he encounters an owl woman, some kind of Mephistophelian song writer, and erm some other stuff. It all gets very labyrinthine, but after a while its convolutions take a sharp left turn to nowhere. Was full of hope, having loved ‘It Follows’… but ‘Under The Silver Lake’ is, to be frank, a mess and although it pulled me in at points with its stoner sprawl and moments of gore, mostly it was just a bit of a turn-off. It might be worth seeing once for its sprinkling of weirdness , but any expectations the director might’ve had for a freewheeling voyage into the abstruse along the lines of ‘Inherent Vice’ seem a bit misplaced on the evidence.
LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM – I noticed this crop up a couple of times during the Labs Halloween countdown, so I decided to pay it a revisit (full of slight trepidation and vague memories of a rubbish looking DVD). Well it’s excellent really, Ken Russell being Ken Russell and just throwing stuff around and finding any excuse to slip in splurges of tormented nun imagery. Combined with the twee Brit village stuff, the presence of unscrupulous seductress Donahoe, Capaldi and Grant looking very awkward and proper, and some f*ck-off animatronics right there at the end, it’s quite a noxious little cocktail. Thumbs up, Ken.
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