SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN - French businessman Boris is the descendent of Count Zaroff, a man who liked to hunt women in the grounds of his estate; his servant tries to persuade Boris to reactivate the family tradition (in other words, would you trust your butler if he was played by Howard Vernon?) 'Seven Women For Satan' might actually be close to the very essence of Eurohorror. The constant clash of blunt, cheesy aspects, elegant, refined aspects, moments that seem eerie, moments that seem crass, nudity, boredom, bafflement, style, artlessness and a tonal range that runs from tranquil lakeside scenes through to screwdriver-to-vag, all of these leave you in no doubt you're watching something from the mid-seventies featuring a big castle and bad dubbing or subtitles. Of course there's a slightly haunting la la la soundtrack that seems to segue from breathy jazziness to echoey psychedelia. If it inhabited a sane world it'd play like a neo-gothic take on 'The Most Dangerous Game', but it's more interested in breaking out into random topless dancing and living statues. Good.
WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY 2 - Has this fledgling franchise taken a long hard look at itself and decided to reform as an A24-esque exploration of trauma and grief done in oblique arthouse style? Has it f*ck, but that might've been fun as well. It has the audacity to be trashy and brainless in these slightly too careful times, and in that regard I see 'Blood And Honey' as sharing ground with the 'Terrifier' series; their in-yer-face blood-and-guts crassness feels worthy of applause somehow. As much as I enjoy the abstraction that certain films are pushing towards right now, I also dig the complete opposite - what bores me is the sensible middle. Well, there's not much that is sensible about WTP2, put it that way. Not that it has no issues at all. Behind the window dressing of its exuberant idiocy is a standard slasher narrative that doesn't really do much, leaving Pooh with little to say after it's rolled out the basics. More of a problem, maybe, is the lack of any sustained tension or suspense - it just rolls from one dumb scene to the next. But that dumbness, when it works, shines! I mean, mass slaughter at a fetish rave in what appears to be a hyperreal dreamland version of a small town in the vicinity of Shropshire, come on. There are so many other idiosyncrasies and bizarrenesses, like the Pooh characters now reimagined as slightly Cenobite-like beings from the local genetics lab, and the whole Christopher Robins backstory involving hypnotic regression and a reckoning with the past (ha ha, trauma, grief, you were there all along! But WTP2 toys with that stuff as if it's taking the piss). If it plays like a half-baked joke that's a bit in love with itself, another strength is the tone, pitched somewhere between plastic seriousness and barely supressed hilarity; one liners, like pooh sticks under the bridge with severed limbs, turn up to remind you of exactly where you are. What fails as drama sometimes dazzles as giddy trash that revels in its own pageantry of weird detail - Simon Callow as a sinister B movie janitor, QED.
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