HORROR HIGH – Fun reimagining of Jekyll / Hyde in which a harassed nerd drinks the secret elixir he’s been working on in the high school chem lab and ends up connecting with his more homicidal side. The result – a little bit of mayhem and lots of the seventies-isms I find endlessly entertaining, such as trippy soundtrack music, flagrant bursts of slo-mo / weird lens effects and a smattering of badly done but vibrant gore. You’d be hard pressed to find a movie that looks more ‘1973’ than this enjoyable romp.
DOOR INTO SILENCE – One of Fulci’s final entries. John Savage is on the road, plagued by odd encounters with an enigmatic woman and the driver of a hearse who might’ve seen ‘Duel’ a few times too many. It’s fairly slight as swansongs go, and anyone going in with expectations of ‘The Beyond’ will come away feeling short-changed; although Lucio’s oddness is there to a degree in some of the shots, the editing, and moments of drifty, disconnected ambience, the lush aesthetic from many of his other movies is absent and, ironically for a film which is basically about one guy driving a car, at times it all feels quite pedestrian. Savage is a trooper with quite the resume, but I never thought I’d set eyes on him in a Fulci movie.
NOCTURNE – Blumhouse are always hit and miss, but ‘Nocturne’ is a strong offering. It’s a broadside against the perils of perfectionism in which the big dreams of a conservatoire student end in an even bigger Faustian f*ck up. Sydney Sweeney is very good as mousy but dead-eyed narcissist Julia, who seems to have taken a leaf out of Natalie Portman’s book, and in fact the look of the film as a whole is perhaps not dissimilar to Aranovsky’s ‘Black Swan’. This exemplary visual stylisation is one of ‘Nocturne’s strongest suits, and it brews an atmosphere that’s sometimes at odds with the more conventional storyline, which mingles the well-worn beats of the ‘underdog turning the tables’ narrative with supernatural froth. All the latter stuff may be standard, but ‘Nocturne’ makes the smart move of not overplaying its heavy handed genre tropes, allowing for a deeper sense of unease to surface following the arc of the main character’s slow self-destruction. The final image is cruel, expected, but weirdly ambiguous. Highly enjoyable and well worth a look.
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