SHEPHERD – An angsty guy relocates to a remote island to be a shepherd. Moving forward, we see he’s on the run from something in his past; sinister Kate Dickie often pops up to remind him of this very fact as she stares long and hard with her milky dead eye. ‘Shepherd’ is heavy on atmosphere but a little clumsy in places. Photography and sound design are often pristine, and yet emphasis – crucial in any attempt to play it spectral and subtle – is sometimes fumbled, with obvious builds and cues that are too on-the-nose. It’s also hard to avoid feeling that ‘Shepherd’ is falling back on narrative cliches when we hear the character ask “What’s going on? Am I dead?” yet again, or when a few weird scenes give way to more standard ‘avenging ghost’ type stuff. The makers had obviously seem and partly ingested ‘The Lighthouse’. Now, that’s an odd movie, peerlessly strange, and it casts its shadow over this lesser product. But ‘Shepherd’ is strong visually, some of the imagery is nice, and there’s plenty to intrigue, such as an unrecognisable Greta Scacchi. Aside from those aspects that I found flawed, I enjoyed it overall and would say it’s worth a watch.
THE BLACK ROOM – Somewhere up in the Hollywood hills, a brother and sister keep a shadowy room where people come to play… you really wish someone would set the world straight about ‘The Black Room’, a sorely neglected early eighties horror that seems to have slipped by along the way. At its heart is quite a serious meditation on fantasy and the damage it can cause if its place in a relationship isn’t understood, but the trappings are those of a post-Cronenberg vampire movie. Its murky atmosphere is matched by few other films from around the time, and the layers of stylisation, from the photography to the spacey score, create a feeling of bad-dream detachment unequalled by, say, the more exaggerated artifice of something like the following year’s ‘The Hunger.’ Somebody out there… but I’m guessing there’s a reason it hasn’t been given ‘the treatment’, as it would make such an obvious choice for so many of today’s labels, boutique or not.
ICED – Another bad slasher. They seemed to get worse as the eighties progressed – this one’s from ’89, so it’s going for broke in terms of badness (if nothing else). The ‘action’ happens at a ski resort where people have gathered to talk AT LENGTH and maybe commemorate their dead friend, who of course doesn’t turn out to be the slasher, not that they liked him much anyway. Why is it worth seeing? Well, it’s majestically bad, and drips with the juicy ‘offness’ of only the ripest fruit. Long stretches in which characters as stiff as boards ‘relate’ are interrupted by weird angles and apparently pointless stabs at atmospheric lighting – that long moose shadow, why? But then it’s equally pointless to even ask the question about a film where someone in a kitchen starts working out with a barbell mid-sentence. The examples of that kind of thing are as endless as the log cabin interiors, and really do create the impression that ‘Iced’ is the eighties slasher equivalent of a dull Magritte painting in the background of a ‘Habitat’ advert. Where do you go with that? Ultimately, you either submit to the film’s incessant surge of plastic unreality or you turn it off. Most slasher enthusiasts will do the latter, but not until they realise that the anaemic kills are crammed into the last twenty minutes or so left after the film’s ‘anthemic build’. Stalwart fans of the weird will be happy just to scratch their heads.
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