KILLER PARTY – Eighties set sorority / frat-house horror always makes me feel a bit gooey inside, but I have to say that ‘Killer Party’ left me cold. I don’t know what it was, exactly… just the sense of an interminable and ponderous build with too many false scares and too much dithering over who gets their ass whacked with the gamma beta phi-carved paddle (or something, you get the picture). In the last few minutes it goes from disposable froth to a big kill with an overly intense possession-victim at the centre, a tonal glitch that I wouldn’t mind had the rest of the film not tried so hard to persuade me of how boring it was. A shame, for ‘Killer Party’ ticks many worthy boxes pour moi, as evinced by the presence of a stupid number of false starts, all the garish eightiesness, actually likeable characters and a theme tune that sounds like it was done by Bananarama on Mogadon. Ah well, can’t have it all.
PHANTOM OF THE MALL – I remember seeing an ad for it on the back of an issue of ‘The Dark Side’ (or was it ‘Fear’? Maybe it was ‘Fear’) and thinking “I bet that’s shit.” Fast forward to the distant future, where time travelling Frankie is shocked to find his forty something self not only still watching this kind of gunk (he was thinking it might have all gone Fellini and ‘Starlight Express’ way before now), but actually pleased and slightly grateful to have had the chance to see, for the first time in HD, ‘The Phantom Of The Mall’. Young Frankie to Old Frankie, was it worth the thirty year wait? Well, I like the gimmick, which transplants the lineaments of the G Leroux ‘classic’ into a slasher scenario set in a rubbish eighties mall – I think I like the slightly crass bravado at play there, though they missed a trick in not actually turning it into a musical. Apart from that, it’s the season for nostalgia. I enjoyed it more than the little guy would, put it that way. But as is sometimes the case with these boutique labels (and I’m not knocking them or their efforts), I kind of wish I could be satisfied with the scratched-up DVD I might once have found going for a quid on the sticky shelves of CEX.
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