CENSOR – The real horror in ‘Censor’ is early eighties UK, reconfigured here as a Sov-Bloc nightmare of whispering corridors and smoke-filled committee rooms. The film worked more for me on this level, with its images of a hallucinogenically dreary Thatcher’s Britain, than it did with its blurry mystery plotline; nor was I quite sure how to take ‘Censor’ when it shifted gear into ‘swept away by the madness of a fractured psyche’ mode, as signalled by a lol gore moment involving spearing via trophy, then a full-on lapse into Bava lighting. But there’s a lot going on in this beguiling debut, and I can’t wait to see more from the director. Pleased to note that Nathan Barley’s still in the biz.
DELIRIUM – A traumatised guy’s going around murdering folks; a bald guy in sinister shades is the leader of a back-room cabal. Two seventies movie cops do what seventies movie cops do. I must admit that I owe ‘Delirium’ a second viewing as I was completely plastered when I saw it the other day; a case of “yee-ha, got the whole week off and a box of blu-rays just in through my door.” Never seem to learn that that’s a bad idea if you want to watch a film that sucks AND remember that it sucks. Anyway, ‘Delirium’, I get the impression that I twiddled my thumbs a little when those seventies movie cops hogged the screen with their incessant talk, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt for now.
THE AMERICAN SCREAM – Ooh, where do I even begin? If I had to watch only one movie this year, it would be ‘The American Scream’. It’s just one of those. It’s probably a Frankie-specific thing, so don’t hit me with your “but it’s just a shit David Lynch rip-off” protestations. ‘David Lynch’, as always, is the lazy person’s go-to weird film comparator, but it’s apt in this case as 1) AS is a LITTLE like ‘Twin Peaks’ and 2) you’ll feel your mind went to sleep whilst you were watching and dreamed something your eyes could not possibly have seen. ‘The American Scream’ is essentially a pile-up of the strange non-sequitur events that follow when a cheesy US family go on vacation to a snowy boondocks town – out-in-the-sticks slasher tropes are involved, but so is the madness of a dancehall scene in which people just basically bump into each other in slow motion for ten minutes. Entertained? I was reborn!
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