OUT OF THE DARK – A sinister clown is murdering sex line workers in this semi-slasher from the late eighties. What could be more golden than the combination of sleaze and evil clowns? But OOTD isn’t really interested in going full tilt about all that stuff, being a DTV-style DePalma facsimile with a come-on that feels more playfully tongue-in-cheek than squalid. Well, I’m a sucker for hazy neon, the city at night, choral synths, and Bud Cort and Devine – all present and correct. A nice time capsule that I always enjoy digging up and peering at.
FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE – The last of the ‘classic’ sequels and the nadir of their descent into silliness. We hop around between dream worlds and witness Freddy on a broomstick, murdering people via computer game (it plays even more ridiculously than it reads.) As with Part 5, the tonal wobbles of the series are amplified in that we get a lot of splatter panto mixed in with genuinely disturbing moments concerning Freddy’s traumatic genesis. An onslaught of special effects will entice anyone (ie me) who enjoys gawping at contrivances like Freddy’s Lovecraftian skull-faced ghost eel bosses from ‘the spirit world beyond dreams’, but as a whole its shattered reality is twice as baffling as ‘Videodrome’ whilst being half as smart at best. From the director of ‘Tank Girl’ and ‘Band of Gold’!
SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS – Floridan exploitation from the early seventies about two guys on the run. They’re hiding out in a down-at-heel part of town, and their ‘gimmick’, which they hope will help them sidestep the law, is that one of them is posing as the other’s aunt. SAMDDT mixes nebulous homoerotic relationship drama with post-‘Psycho’ edginess (though there’s less of the latter than you’d think). There’s maybe a pre-John Waters humour to it all, a sort-of glee in trashy camp, and blurts of cheapo psychedelic op fx whenever occasion demands a murder sequence (maybe to obscure the lack of $ for much onscreen gore), but it’s at its most affecting when the two are sat around bickering and squabbling in scenes of low key domestic strife. This film has a groovy attitude; I loved the bit when a pounced-upon hippie pauses to carefully pick up their bong before fleeing.
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