THE HIDDEN – Maybe I’m being a bit OTT, but I’ve come to think of it as one of the best B movies of the eighties. It’s certainly a master class in punchy minimalism, lean and stripped down but as slick as an LA pool shark, and mean with it. Like ‘Dead Heat’, it’s a weirdly mismatched buddy cop movie, with ardent hardnose Michael Nouri paired with eerie Kyle MacLachlan in a quest to snuff a body-hopping alien that looks like a slug with spidery appendages. Frantic chase scenes and lots of shoot-outs ride a high tide of adrenalin driven along by gleeful psychopaths who blast out punk (and a fair amount of lame poodle rock). A few fluid brush strokes are all it takes for ‘The Hidden’s violent world to burst into life, and low budget genre filmmaking is thereby raised to the level of Japanese calligraphy.
SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED – I love any film that features a stuffed armadillo where it really shouldn’t be. But I’m being a bit hasty. After all, SOTM is a hard film to truly love, or even warm to. It’s bad - the acting’s as stiff as cardboard, the cinematography’s either disjointed or as flat as a pancake, there are prolonged stretches that appear quite pointless, and, without getting into spoiler territory (not that you could spoil this film really) even the monster-value turns out to be a con. You’ve seen that kind of ugliness countless times before, most recently, for example, if your pockets are deep enough, in plush blu ray box sets housing the extended corpuses of the likes of HG Lewis, Andy Milligan, Ray Dennis Steckler. Either you dig that bilge or not. Me, I’m still quite easily won over by a wonky composition and the look and feel of curdled film stock, and I always go on about how shit films of a certain vintage have their charms. ‘Shriek Of The Mutilated’ leaves me with highly conflicted feelings. On the one hand there’s the snooze factor of all that stiffness, but on the other there’s the delirious heights of that toaster murder, that foot-stuck-between-rocks-with-tromboning-fisheye-lens bit, and yes, that armadillo. What do you do? Lay back, submit, let go. It will all end soon enough. Or, switch it off and ask for your money back. The choice is yours. Vinegar Syndrome have done a lovely job.
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