BAD CANDY – There aren’t many Easter horror films, are there? There are probably loads, but none of them sprung to mind t’other week, so with Halloween I guess being the seasonal default for horror fans I went with one from the pile that didn’t get a viewing last Oct. ‘Bad Candy’ is a portmanteau job with numerous interconnected stories a la the superior ‘Trick r Treat’ (still the best Halloween anthology to my and probably everyone’s mind). It centres on an alt.horror type radio show whose DJ happens to be ex-Gremlins guy Zach Galligan, on hand to provide threads and a bit of continuity before everything gets a little baggy. There are some nice skits, including a crazy woodland hunt which involves people with jack o’lanterns on their heads being stalked by a massive vampire, and there’s an overload of nice seasonal imagery to match quite a strong visual tone overall. It didn’t quite mesh and, by the time the final storyline tried to pull it all together, things felt a little tagged-on and free of much tension. OK though, a decent enough watch.
SOMETHING IN THE DIRT – I still regard Benson and Moorheads‘s first three features as their best so far. ‘Synchronic’ I thought was OK, you couldn’t say it wasn’t solid, but it lacked the weird verve of ‘The Endless’. Here we have two guys, one of whom has blood on his shirt during their first encounter, who team up to explore supernatural stuff going on in their apartment building. A crystal floats mid-air, the web is consulted, and before long B&M, to quote MES, “uncover secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions.” It's about connections, labyrinthine conspiracies, wheels within wheels, a deep dive that starts to feel sketchily contrived, or maybe just like a more manicured youtube video about people into weird stuff. Then it does a u-turn and mutates into a pseudo-documentary about its own making. Going meta might’ve been the final nail in its coffin – it certainly wants us to know how self-reflexive it is, it’s always giving us the nod - but this works in a way because it narrows things down and introduces a gradually dawning sense of there being a drama behind the scenes. The crux of all that becomes as slippery and elusive as the grand conspiracy the pair seem to be searching for, but it’s more interesting because of the hint of murder in the background. That’s my theory, and it is just a theory, right? I’m no David Ike. But it might be all it takes to stop SITD being essentially a movie about having an internet connection and too much time on your hands.
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