HERE BEFORE – Andrea Riseborough plays a woman, struggling with the aftermath of her daughter’s death, who finds that her little new neighbour knows one or two things she wouldn’t expect. There’s a sense in which ‘Here Before’ plays with its viewer at first, appearing by turns a drama about grief, a psychological thriller, and a ghost story. The way it finally lays its cards on the table is a little disappointing, but until then it’s a mesmerising and haunting work, heavy with an oblique atmosphere that made me wonder what Lynne Ramsay re-doing ‘Don’t Look Now’ on an Irish housing estate would play like. Flawed at the end there maybe, but otherwise highly recommended.
TWELVE HOUR SHIFT – Black comedy set in a hospital where organ donation doubles as a nice little side hustle. Angela Bettis is great as the perma-scowling nurse Mandy, whose kidney-harvesting schemes are upskittled by the antics of dopey psychopath Regina, an equally great Chloe Farnworth. There’s a sardonic edge to it all that prevents too much silliness creeping in, even if I was expecting someone to do a comedy basic and slip up on an errant liver or something… that never happens, but I didn’t feel short changed, ’12 Hour Shift’ is a good laugh and worth a watch.
CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS – Before the rightly feted ‘Deathdream’, Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby teamed up for CSPWDT, one of my all-time grindhouse faves. It’s about a theatre troupe who travel to an island to mess around in a graveyard, only to find that their mock-rituals bite them on the collective arse in the form of the risen dead. It’s talky, but I love all the snide rat-a-tat-tat, with Ormsby in fine fettle as a particularly foul thesp whose ego spells downfall for all present. The zombie bits are just stellar even now, soundtracked by crazed electronic bleating and full of lingeringly photographed ghoul make-up that looks very EC. But the bit the stays with me the most is the mid-section, where they disinter and humiliate the corpse known as Orville. It’s actually fairly uncomfortable, and there’s an air, perhaps present through the rest of the film too, of the counterculture looking itself in the mirror as it slowly falls apart.
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