MY HEART CAN'T BEAT UNLESS YOU TELL IT TO - This latter-day indie takes a definite post-'Martin' approach to vampirism. A brother and sister lure locals back to their rundown house in the suburbs, where they kill to feed their sickly sib's blood addiction. Grotty and dowdy in a lovely-to-look-at sort of way, its academy ratio boxes us in and makes us feel the claustrophobia of a dysfunctional family in a dead-end town. I loved it, and what I loved most was the absence of melodrama; you can argue the toss either way about 'elevated horror', but for me there was something a little magical about its bleak Bloody Mary of meditative calm and muffled slaughter vibes.
HALLOWEEN 6 :THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS - Fed up with butchering babysitters, Mike tries his hand at fatherhood. Actually, there's a pretty good noughts / twenty tens gross-out comedy in there if they'd waited, but we're still in the nineties with contractual obligations to meet, so... Donald Pleasance looks old. Tommy Doyle is now a creepy guy with a telescope-and-curtains fixation, though proves himself a bit of a hero when he's left holding the baby, a stalker with a heart of gold if you like. A 180 degree turn away from the metaphysical horror of the original, but in a way so what? There's enough mid-nineties slickness with blue lightning flashes and candlelight to hook me in, plus a quantity of gore and no small amount of babble about druids.
INFESTED - I'm all for a bit more 'animals and insects attack' stuff these days. Maybe not the animals so much after all the shit shark films we've ended up with, but count me in for spiders. Even though I don't fear spiders, I could be persuaded after seeing 'Infested', they definitely get them right. It's all in the movement, the scuttle that ends in a vicious bite. 'Infested' happens in a French tower block, where the residents get by and get along or don't, and we know this because we spend quite a while with them as people rather than as spider bait. This slow burn may have human drama on its mind, but after a while we're back to the seventies with masses of swarming arachnids and screaming in the corridors. I liked it, maybe not as much as the many currently heaping praise online.
 |