More pre-christmas non-christmassy shit
THE LAUGHING DEAD – From SP Somtow, author of such early nineties horror fic fare as ‘Vampire Junction’. Here, his sights are set on Aztec rituals, a burned-out priest searching for his lost love and her arsehole of a son, and various other little plot points and side-shifts that seemed to flicker past in the haze. The main course, surely, is the craziness – when it arrives, it arrives in style. By this point, the film has morphed from a blackly comic but slightly taxing travelogue into a splatter-fixated surrealist’s version of ‘Temple of Doom’, complete with a monster dinosaur battle; I recommend it to you thusly.
RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS – Ruggero Deodato – we already know about his grim side. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. ‘The House on the Edge of the Park’. But are you aware that he also has a slightly silly side? Well, maybe, maybe not, but on the basis of ROA, I’m tempted to hazard that he does. Christopher Connolly goes to an island and it all has to do with scientists in jeopardy, punks on bikes, the lost city of Atlantis and a big plastic dome that closes across the sky. An Italian action sci-fi rip-off in the mode of high fever, I did have to stop once or twice to ask myself “Good grief Frankie, what IS this film about?†Might have been the booze, might have to re-watch, but a recommend until proven otherwise.
MONSTER – A first timer for me, having avoided it countless times on late night TV back in the nineties (I think). Blimey, I’d been missing out. A truly shabby piece of seventies British gnarliness, it has Joan Collins in terrified thrall to her offspring, a baby who is quite frankly a bit of bastard. Any sprog equipped with enough psychopathic wherewithal to murder Ralph Bates by full-on hanging with a big noose is quite irredeemable in my eyes. There’s a lot of that kind of thing in ‘Monster’, a briskly-paced jaw dropper pungent enough to subdue even likes of Donald Pleasance, who here seems as baffled as anyone. It all has to do with ex-stripper Joan having been cursed by an angry dwarf! Find of the year.
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