THREE ON A MEATHOOK – Back with the whole Oedipus-gone-mad thing of the post-‘Psycho’ era. I found it unexpectedly powerful in places, full of an eerie melancholy captured best when its Norman slumps around in a bar, looking sad to a soundtrack of tuneless wah-wah rock. Although it seems to promise gore (there’s a little bit), TOAM is more about egregious gaslighting and the end of the sixties. Some of it anticipates both TCM and ‘Frightmare’.
BEWARE: CHILDREN AT PLAY – On the one hand, static shots and lots of talk with a bunch of stiffs; on the other, maggoty wounds, THAT ending and the delirium only an unapologetically bad film can deliver. There’s an inordinate number of references to ‘Beowulf’ for a film this trashy. I liked it; would make an appropriate and only slightly less weird playmate for the likes of 1980’s ‘The Children’.
EYES OF FIRE – My second favourite of the year so far (current number one is ‘The American Scream’). A family, lorded over by bad preacher dad, hangs out in the woods of colonial America, where the supernatural manifests in trippy flourishes of eighties effects and optics. A genuinely hallucinogenic spook-out and very highly recommended.
NOTHING UNDERNEATH – Was maybe expecting / hoping for something a little trashier given its eighties Italo provenance and the presence of Pleasance, but ‘Nothing Underneath’ is a creditable stab at a sort-of De Palma-esque thriller and succeeds well enough through a combination of giallo trimmings and bad era-specific fashion moves.
EFFECTS – End-of-the-seventies oddity drifts along with the kind of woozy flow I associate with seventies art house flicks made by stoned film students. In both the snuff theme and the “hey, what’s reality anyway?” undercurrent, I would go so far as to say that it pre-dates ‘Videodrome’, although its roots are in Pittsburgh soil rather than Cronenbergian nightmare territory. Tom Savini is around, playing a bit of a joker; in fact, there’s quite a strong turn out of Romero regulars here. Interesting if not entirely satisfying.
LAST NIGHT IN SOHO – Good one, this; fashion student hits the smoke to find out what her dreams are made of (in her case, something unpleasant involving Terrance Stamp). I’m not massively into the director, although the quality of his work so far seems obvious; LNIS had me with its rampant stylisation, which just gets riper throughout. Not keen on those grey sixties spectres, but overall it worked.
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