THE BLACK ROOM - If there's one seemingly lost early eighties horror flick I've always wanted to see make the jump to HD, it's 'The Black Room'. And here it is, on lovely blu ray at last. I've reviewed it before, maybe a couple of times actually, but it remains one of my fave examples of the kind of dour, vaguely trippy nihilism that flavoured the post-grindhouse era, before the genre started chasing cash after 'Evil Dead' by going for laughs. A man who feels trapped in his marriage rents a secret room where he can live out his adulterous fantasies; it's hosted by a pair of twisted sibs who need a steady supply of blood to quell the brother's anaemia. The film plays with a few semi-profound ideas - what happens when we partition ourselves off in relationships, what role does fantasy play in maintaining power and control - and floats these enticingly before botching them with throwaway developments and a lack of direction and patience. But the whole draw for me is atmospheric. Its ambience is striking - the candlelit room, the disembodied, droney soundtrack, passages that feel stark and enigmatic and full of looming unease, but then there's the California thing, windchimes in the hills. A scattered second half and clunky ending don't detract from a style that cloaks everything in shadow. There is a dark seam of mystery about this period of horror that, in the best stuff, seeps through and spreads like a stain. Threadbare, slipshod, but deeply mesmerising - a film I could watch endlessly.
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