IMMACULATE - Sydney Sweeney plays Cecelia, an American nun about to take her vows in an Italian convent. What she finds behind closed walls justifies the title in a pretty obvious way and pulls 'Omen'-ish tropes closer to body horror. I liked 'Immaculate'. It takes on the look and feel of a contemporary upmarket horror movie but delivers something decidedly more schlocky - in other words, it doesn't forget where it's coming from. Stylistically, we get the whole 'ecclesiastical gothic' thing, with shadowy ceremonies and catacombs beneath - I don't think I've seen so many candles in a nunnery since 'Dark Waters'. The gore and graphics range from nicely decorative to quite wince inducing, although none of it's overly laboured, if you'll excuse the pun. Probably the most striking aspect, apart from a basic silliness to the overall concept that would tickle Cannon, is Sweeney's performance, which charts her voyage from repressed non-entity to full on primal church-burner. I thought they'd cop out into sentiment at the end, but no. Well worth a shot.
PHANTOM OF DEATH - Or 'Off Balance', if you like - I don't, I think it's silly, but it's the title that's used for this new release from Cauldron. It's a late eighties film by Ruggero Deadato that last saw light of day via a DVD from Shameless back in the noughts (I think, that was the last time I saw it anyway). In it, Michael York plays a guy with a disease that causes accelerated aging; Donald Pleasance is the detective trying to get to the bottom of a series of murders. TPOD is quite interesting in that it mixes Giallo tropes with a vaguely Cronenberg-like conceit, though in this instance what we find is a relatively tame Deodato, letting loose here and there with the odd splashy stabbing and only occasionally slipping in the kind of posturing we're used to (the leering and genuinely disturbing image of the old man-child in his playground). For the most part it's measured and character-centred, enough to allow York to come to the fore with a performance that strains to capture the pathos of a Seth Brundle or John Hurt's Elephant Man, though it's an equal pleasure to watch Pleasance lose it in a scream-laden street scene.
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