THE BROKEN MIRROR – I often read reviews that describe films as ‘painterly’, but watching ‘The Broken Mirror’ often really does feel like a bit like being trapped inside the work of an old master. It’s a heavy film, as lush as it is static, full of Bergmanesque agony in its portrayal of a pregnant art restorer buckling under the strain of her awful relationships with mother and spouse. Along with the new child, something else is gestating away in the background – an atmosphere of surreal threat, embodied by a man who stares from the high window of the house opposite and appears to be the source of several poison pen letters. Then there is the avian mystery that lurks beneath a painting in a strange gallery, an obsession that swallows up the protagonist and begins her inevitable slide into madness. ‘The Broken Mirror’ cannot possibly be viewed with anything other than the most furrowed of brows, and its elegant looks tease a sense of depthless mystery; some will flock to it, others will moan about watching paint dry.
CALAMITY OF SNAKES – It’s difficult to know where to start with this tornado of trash. I’d seen it before on one of those mangled, crappy ‘fifty shit horror films’ compilations, so I should’ve known what I was in for. Let me just get this out of the way – I’d feel like a dick evangelising about a movie that relies on so much animal violence. Snakes are killed, thousands of them, brutally, in the name of schlocky entertainment. But if you can find room for that in your moral holiday, the hysteria will hit you like a drug. Disco bloodbaths, flying pythons, choreographed flame throwing and a snake hunter who makes an entrance by emerging from a box full of writhing serpents with one of them dangling from his mouth as if it makes him look dead hard, are just the tip of the iceberg of this cautionary fable of real estate gone wrong. The two or three excruciating minutes when a mongoose minces a bunch of adders in a filthy warehouse to a new wave electro soundtrack will make you feel like you’ve drifted into someone’s bad dream. Very special, despite all the ugh. Hypocrite that I am.
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