THE VAGRANT – Uptight yuppie Bill Paxton finds that his new house comes with an unwanted freebie. Who is the neighbourhood’s mysterious tramp, and why does he seem so portentous? ‘The Vagrant’ is by eighties fx maestro Chris Walas, who also did ‘The Fly 2’. There’s an element of gloop, a little, but it’s more in the lineage of those eighties absurdist black comedies about social mobility fears, where office types find their mundane worlds tested to the point of downfall – ‘After hours’, ‘Something Wild’ etc. Pretty good and definitely interesting and enjoyable but, as much as I’m nowhere near as brassic as ‘The Vagrant’, I doubt I’ll be upgrading.
THE SPECIAL – Indie horror about what appears to be the bj of a lifetime; the owners of the brothel where hapless Jerry gets his rocks off certainly think so, that’s why they call it The Special. But the facilitator of The Special resides within a small box with a hole in it next to an arrow and a message that reads ‘insert dick here’. I don’t think I’d be up for it, but if nothing else it’s an interesting spin on that old device, “the mystery of the locked container.” ‘The Special’ (the movie) contains an amount of, to use that fast-becoming hackneyed term, ‘body horror’, but mainly near the end; I wouldn’t call ‘The Special’ restrained necessarily, but it doesn’t really push either the sleaze or the slime. Microbudget stuff these days looks so slick and well made, and that’s definitely true here, although the other drawbacks of this kind of cinema creep in – a certain flatness perhaps, a slight obviousness of tone. But ‘The Special’ gets a lot of mileage out of its yucky central idea, and there’s enough flow, momentum and strangeness to make for an absorbing watch.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR – One from Franco’s glory days. There’s a seriousness of tone – even the zooms seem a little grave – about this tale of a woman’s attempts to break semi-incestuous ties with her obsessive father, now deceased. Forgoing some of the delirium of his more out-there stuff opens up a more affecting side; I’d never accuse Franco of being the sentimental type, but Emma Cohen’s performance as doomed jazz waif Ana carries a real air of melancholy. And that’s only one side of the mirror. On t’other, we get visits from dad in the form of spectral Howard Vernon at the end of a rope (he’s a reflection), and these interludes are dreamy and claustrophobic. Probably one of his best on a pseudo-objective ‘cinema’ type level, though I do prefer it when he just throws together something wonky and bizarre.
 |