TONIGHT SHE COMES – Rewatch. An indie with attitude that embraces the absurd and would probably quite like you to embrace IT. I’m OK with that, but by the sounds of things not all that many reviewers from around the time felt the same way. TSC is basically a backwoods satanic horror parody populated by irritating gen Yers, occult hicks and a naked woman covered in blood. It goes for excess in more ways than one; from the outset there are scenes that play too long, jokes that just die, interactions that baffle, all very deliberate attempts, I think, to channel badfilm vibes. It’s sometimes amusing but more often a little arch. If you’re more into other kinds of excess, there’s also lots of blood, some mashed heads and bits of groovy ickiness such as ritual used tampon swallowing. Beyond the self-conscious posturing and the splat are some nice aesthetics and a few genuinely eerie images – a wide shot of the distant, blood-doused ‘she’ poised at the edge of a lake felt a little Rollinesque for example, and in other places there’s a sort of shadowy, doomy early eighties look that kind of cuts through some of the tongue-in-cheek. The minimal electro score was nice too, despite being an obvious choice for anyone wishing to signpost the eighties. I liked it. Not everyone’s cuppa but at least there’s a vision.
SATAN’S CHILDREN – You’ve got something to say and you’re not afraid of taking on the hefty perennials of religion, sexuality and the evolution of the self – in another time and place you might’ve been Carl Jung, but in seventies Florida, with a poundland budget and a shit camera, you were ‘Satan’s Children’. Many have pointed out, not least AGFA, that it has the feeling of a public information film about the dangers of Charles Manson, which I’m into, I always like stuff about how dark and ungroovy the sixties and seventies actually were. Any ‘information’ ‘Satan’s Children’ has to impart is stifled by its oddness and incomprehensibility, which is also fine and exactly what I expected. Basically, a teenage waif suffers abuse from his awful family, molestation when he hits the streets, and finally abduction by a satanic cult with some very shaky internal dynamics. It’s equal parts boredom, bewilderment and grubbiness in that perfectly calibrated seventies fleapit kind of way. There’s a satan shrine with echoey whispering sound effects and a filmic style that shifts between static and expressionistic (pretty lights and long, lingering close-ups of still faces, but don’t expect Carl Dreyer to burst in and save the day). The way the music plays for a full minute over the freeze frame at the end after the credits have rolled seems very authentically grindhouse.
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