FRIDAY THE 13TH (the remake) - For me, the highlights of the F13 series were the zany ones, but I suppose this remake is trying hard to harken back to the time before it all just turned to laughs. It was made when the genre was returning to a bleak mean-spiritedness - it's from 2009, year of torture porn and arguably the fag-end of all that French extreme stuff - so the pokerfaced gore approach makes sense. Shame then that director Nispel can't carry off the grim tone that elevated his 'Texas Chainsaw' remake. If the shadowy mood and woodland vibes convince for a spell, they have to contend with the opposition; characters are insipid, the plot too conventional, and, between the gore and sleaze, the whole thing just plods a little. It's never less than nice to look at in its 'visual horror tropes of the 2010s' kind of way, and the bottom line with the director's films, even the execrable 'The Asylum', is that they're stylistically quite immaculate, but this felt like a missed opportunity to play around with something more bracingly nasty.
SPECTRES - Back with the late eighties Italo. It amazes me that this stuff hasn't been mined dry yet, not that I'm complaining. And how could I complain about a film of its provenance starring Donald Pleasance? It seems that some consider 'Spectres' a bit of a bore, though. True enough, if all you're after is non-stop, then you might feel shortchanged by this wander through the catacombs and its dime store demonic ascent. What it has in spades is atmosphere, weird incidentals and higher-order stupidity, which are really all I'm after when it comes to this end of things. Allowing for that, there's plenty to ponder / marvel at - odd, out of place HR Gigerisms, a small plaster face extending a maggot tongue, weird silhouettes dancing on a wall in a very eighties-lit room, Donald Pleasance in a leather beret. You may find yourself recoiling at the notion of the latter but it's part of what moves me to give this one a big thumbs up.
MAYA - This is 'Spectres's companion piece on the recent Vinegar Syndrome double-disc release. It's by the same director, another horror film, this time set in Mexico, where a small town is beset by a Mayan curse. I quite liked the fact that for much of the time I couldn't really tell what was going on or where it was heading, lulled by the sultry vibes and my slight sense of perplexity at seeing Carlos Castaneda quoted in a late-era Italian trash horror flick. As is almost always the case with this kind of thing, far better to switch off the rationalising mind and just go with the strangeness, whether it comes in the form of an eel barfing ceremonial, tripped-out talk about the other side of mirrors, or pyramids aglow with late eighties optics. Something about the pace didn't quite connect with me, but this is still solid goof with plenty of oddball goodies.
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