SAINT – ‘Amsterdamned’ director Dick Maas hits back with this splattery seasonal horror comedy, which is kind of a culturally specific take on the ‘evil Santa’ trope. St Nicholas, patron saint of children, is celebrated on the 6th of December in Holland, so it’s a surprise to see him trashing Amsterdam on his white steed and setting fire to paediatric wards; apparently, it’s all connected with lunar cycles and cover-ups involving the Vatican (and probably The Hague). ‘Sint’, which somehow also plays a bit like a raucous riff on John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, is quite good fun overall, but it didn’t hook me. I don’t have a massive aversion to what I would call ‘mid-period CGI’, but sometimes it has a cheap smoothness about it that grates if it’s in the wrong place, and maybe ‘Sint’ seemed to slide a little out of focus in the bits between the mayhem. Nevertheless, it was amusing to observe Holland’s laid-back attitude to dildo-based humour in the classroom.
ALISON’S BIRTHDAY – Thanks to the Demoncrat and their recent review for reminding me that this one is doing the rounds. It’s an early eighties Australian offering that opens with a Ouija board séance, then delves into occult birth rights and covens. Alison is asked to ‘come back home’ for her birthday by her sinister aunt... guess what? On the one hand AB is pulled down by stock characters and a conventional storyline, but it rises above all that with passages of quiet eeriness and a skewed, dreamy late-seventies atmosphere; the scene where Alison discovers a mini-Stonehenge reminded me of the sequence in ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ when the camera pans across the stones and crags, making them loom with a creepy watchfulness as the electronic soundtrack throbs away. Other nice moments include the appearance of a shimmering entity at a torch-lit ceremony, and a graveyard chase made wonky by bursts of electro-punk. Torpid in places and stiff in others, but definitely worth catching for the weird vibes, right up until that total downer of an ending.
NOBODY SLEEPS IN THE WOODS TONIGHT – Some internet and social media-addicted young people have been sent to a behavioural modification camp in the middle of a massive Polish forest. Too much fresh air and a lack of Facebook are the least of their worries when a duo of pustulant ogres decide to ravage everything in sight. It took me a while to warm to it, but after a slow start NSITWT lays on a good dose of splattery mayhem; if that doesn’t float your boat, there’s something interesting going on in the way it melds straight-ahead slasher tropes with nods to less obvious sources such as fairy tales and weird fiction (‘The Colour Out Of Space’, at a pinch.) It looks good in that slightly hyperreal, modern way and the off-beam soundtrack simultaneously intrigues and irritates. In the end it didn’t take me anywhere new, but it was enjoyable enough.
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