FACELESS – Awful Parisian nightclubs in the late nineteen eighties, Bridget Lahai getting stabby with a syringe and someone else’s eye, Anton Diffring moaning about The French, some brute finishing a chainsaw decap with a morbid kiss… none of these snapshots captures the wonky essence of ‘Faceless’, which manages to be badly off-centre whilst seeming, for Franco, somehow quite digestible. Mainstream? Franco? Frankie, are you sure you’ve got it right? The theme song, done by a terrible George Michael impersonator, gives evidence for both sides of the argument. “Destination nowhere…” Exactly. I always enjoy revisiting this piece of cockeyed tat, and the newish Severin blu ray looks very nice.
THE DRONE – Said drone is the favoured tool of a serial killer who, struck by lightning, undergoes a B movie mandated transference of souls and ends up with a shiny new body to hover around in. I bet loads of people fantasise about being drones and remote-controlled aeroplanes, they just don’t let on about it. ‘The Drone’ is quite odd in some ways, one which seems to qualify its relentless and impossible-not-to-acknowledge-silliness with a tone of equally incessant deadpan. Personally, I thought it was hilarious, but I kept wishing it’d just go for it. A few notches of bad taste short of ‘weird new anti-classic’ status, but as it is it’s worth a watch.
COLD SKIN – Xavier Gens was known for his French New Wave Of Pseudo-Transgressive Splatter offering ‘Frontiere(s)’, basically a ‘Hostel’-era take on the whole backwoods Nazi cannibal thing, a perennial problem near the Franco-Belgian border I’m led to believe. ‘Cold Skin’ is different, a relatively subdued take on otherness, isolation and madness set on an island whose inhabitants include two men and some worrying amphibians. I would say that it’s another one that nods towards old HPL, but apparently it’s an adaption of a novel by Albert Pinol. It does well with an atmosphere of craggy desolation, and it’s interesting that it predates some aspects of the more widely regarded ‘The Lighthouse’.
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