FLUX GOURMET – Leave it to Peter Strickland to make a semi avant-garde sort-of black comedy horror movie about the goings on within an artist’s residency. The UK Arts Council winners in this case are a performance collective who like to merge naked on-stage cuisine with synapse frying noise music. If you’ve ever felt a slight twinge of resentment that your broccoli smoothie hasn’t been served up to you by Merzbow, consider your dreams fulfilled. If not, take a trip anyway inside this institutional netherworld, where gastrointestinal issues run deep. Yet more evidence that Strickland is one of the UK’s most unique filmmakers.
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT! – SNDN is just such a strange sequence of films, each with its own brand of crazy. This one’s by Monte Hellman, of all people! Bill Moseley plays Ricky, now comatose after being shot at the end of part 2; Samantha Scully is blind psychic Laura, who reaches out to him in dreams. Hellman plays it like a sort of cross between Frankenstein and Halloween, with the plastic-domed Moseley lurching (a little comedically) across the country to Scully’s seasonal homecoming. There’s a bit of drag midsection, but Hellman drew me in with a murky atmosphere that at times also felt quite trancey and disconnected (I’m trying not to say ‘dreamlike’, but OK, dreamlike). This one gets quite a lot of stick for being boring, but I really like it.
THE DEVIL’S WEDDING NIGHT – I was a bit put off at first by the crummy sub-Hammer opening – I struggle with really dry period horror, particularly anything to do with vampires and Dracula. Oh me of little faith, for TDWN soon erupted into a flurry of gothic psychedelia, with lots of almost wordless passages full of dank crypt explorations, bizarre rituals and nudes in the mist. Didn’t the BBFC once love to obsess about blood spattered breasts being some kind of ‘trigger image’ for would-be sex murderers? They’d have had a collective heart attack with this one. Maybe it was obvious that the director of ‘Nude For Satan’ would at some point lay on the freakery, and I’m glad he did.
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