ASYLUM – The last time I watched any of those old Amicus anthology movies must have been literally decades ago, back when they were fixtures on UK TV in the eighties and nineties. I guess they, along with Hammer and creaky Universal-era type stuff, were all part of my nascent horror geekdom, so it’s interesting to me that these days I have virtually no optical media belonging to that side of the genre. The scratchy second hand dvd that I got the other day in a moment of ‘why not’ still beat hands down any black and white TV memories (most of which were half buried under swathes of static). As for the film itself, it all came flooding back – the ‘EC meets Pan’ vibe of those crawling paper-wrapped limbs, the weird golem-like mannequin in his glowing suit, the strangeness of the Lom segment with its runaway action man, all topped by Geoff Bayldon’s epic mad laughter at the end there. Quite enjoyable.
THE JAR – Well, this a strange one. I think I’ve seen it before, perhaps even reviewed it on here, can’t quite remember, which is odd in itself considering the film is off-kilter enough to lodge within the memory banks. A man ends up in possession of a mysterious jar after nearly running over a guy who seems to be in the film just so that he can 1) leave said jar in the protagonist’s apartment, then mysteriously disappear only to 2) reappear fleetingly in the corner of a mirror much later in the film in what is admittedly a fairly haunting and perplexing moment. ‘The Jar’ is full of said moments. It's pretty much a landslide of them; they don’t really connect up or make sense, just hover like a cloud of flies around the central thread concerning a lukewarm ‘will they / won’t they’ romance between main man and his neighbour. It’s one of those films where the viewer has given up asking themselves “is this bit a dream?” because, well, the above. They’re more likely to ask “is this bit shot really badly because it’s a student film with high art pretensions, or because it’s just bad? Or both?” Its artiness merges with potential incompetence, but it’s full of subtext and symbols, though what’s behind them, besides a rubbish blue-glowing troll puppet in a jar, is less than clear. A less fx-heavy ‘Beyond Dreams Door’ springs to mind as a partial comparison, and I would like to see this given a restoration and makeover as the only available format seems to be VHS, but it would make a sensible inclusion on one of those VS or Arrow seventies / eighties regional horror focussed boxsets.
WITCH STORY – AKA ‘Superstition 2’. It pleases me that the well of twilight-era (late eighties / early nineties) Italian horror never seems to quite run dry. I don’t know why I like that stuff so much; all the highs were in the history books well before then. Still, there’s something about seeing the Filmirage logo that leaves me dewy eyed. ‘Witch Story’ is not a Filmirage flick I don’t think, but it bears a similar mark – Floridan locales and a soundtrack that veers between bad soft metal and plinky synthesizer ‘sinister’ cues. The usual college kids turn up at the usual abandoned house with the usual back story and etc. There’s a ghostly little girl with a white ball (again) and a few fairly grisly stabbings. Interesting that they made the connection with the original ‘Superstition’, that high-octane early eighties American regional horror which, beyond a vaguely similar set-up, doesn’t have much of a relationship with ‘Witch Story’ from a production point of view (might be wrong, I’m not a historian). Anyway, ‘Witch Story’ should satisfy any cravings you might have for the likes of ‘Witchery’ or ‘Ghosthouse’, being a typical entry with a few enlivening moments.
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