THE KILLING KIND - Curtis Harrington, director of the wonderful 'Night Tide', still always seems unjustly overlooked. This is his contribution to the post-'Psycho' subgenre about tormented young men who kill under a clunky psychosexual pretext. It pairs Ann Sothern with John Savage as respective overbearing mother and ex-con son; Savage is full of vengeful striving, having just finished two years in the pen for an ambiguously framed beach assault, and turns up at mum's creepy boarding house to plan some comeuppance. The shadowy atmosphere and procession of quirky characters reminded me of Paul Bartel's 'Private Parts', which was made around the same time and shares a level of peephole ambience and dark humour. Both films vibe with the sense of hazy dread common, in my mind, to many California-set horror films of the seventies and early eighties. 'The Killing Kind' dips in and out of melodrama, but the accent is on the oddball menace exuded by the main characters. Sothern and Savage are excellent, Savage in particular radiating a sullen intensity that made me think of a young Clint Eastwood by way of Jim Morrison, but also John Amplas further down the line in 'Martin'; Luana Anders is also great as the psychotic librarian next door, and one of the film's missteps is that we just don't see enough of her (interestingly, the same character appeared in 'The Attic', played by the magnificent Carrie Snodgress. What a small world). 'The Killing Kind' is a great, slightly under sung seventies psychothriller that's well worth your time.
CANNIBAL GIRLS - An early seventies Canadian horror by a young Ivan Reitman, whose Ghostbusting days were a glimmer on the horizon when this was made. It's about an isolated town in a snowy wilderness whose big secret is three cannibal girls and their Svengali; a goofy hippie couple get drawn in and struggle to avoid the menu. 'Cannibal Girls' is quite an odd one. Just tonally, there's a total clash between its attempts at 'horror comedy' - bickering hippies, the little EC-esque nods, shambling 'Igor'-like assistant etc - and the sort of bleak but trippy feel common to a few grindhouse films of the era, the ones with a fondness for fisheye lenses and droney soundtracks. More than that, and in complete contradiction, the film's atmospheric baseline seems to be a wintry melancholy that gets really dour and fills my mind with windswept scenes and the sound of a lone recorder reciting something vaguely 'Greensleeves' -like. Well, I did mention it was Canadian. None of it mixes or works particularly effectively in concert, but in a way that makes it all the more interesting, a jarring mishmash bedecked with HG Lewis style gore. I had fun with it.
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