LIGHTHOUSE – There weren’t many slasher movies made in the UK at the end of the nineties, but here, just to fill that niche, comes ‘Lighthouse’. Evacuees from a prison ship escape to a remote island where the only signs of life are a lighthouse and a serial killer (he was on the boat himself but escaped earlier). It’s an interesting concoction full of mist and eerie lighting, not to mention a bit of nice gore and some vivid set pieces that include a very ‘Argento’ toilet episode that made me laugh with its contrived stupidity. Also, I found it intriguing if slightly inexplicable that some of its mannerisms and photography brought to mind old Brit stuff from the forties and fifties. There are plenty of downsides – some of the acting sucks, dialogue rubbish, didn’t like the pacing. But the imagery and the atmosphere rise above all that and make it a compelling dead end.
DEAD DICKS – I can’t think of many things worse than wanting suicide, doing it, and then being reborn through a mouldy vagina-like growth on the wall of someone’s shitty bedroom. That’s the fate of Dick, half of the morbid brother-sister duo at the heart of Cronenberg-flavoured apartment horror ‘Dead Dicks’. Rebirthing involves replication rather than replacement, so his other preDickament is figuring out what to do with the huge pile of corpses left in the wake of his various attempts (delegating this task to sis works best for him because frankly Dick’s a bit of one himself). In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s a comedy of sorts, a partial play on the whole time loop / groundhog day subgenre, although being also a meditation on toxic relationships and co-dependency it keeps its arch tendencies in check with an approach that feels appropriately grim and claustrophobic. There’s a sharpness to the writing, a lively imagination that elevates it above many of the shoestring indies I see these days. A hearty recommend, and I’ll be interested to see what the directors do next.
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