LOVE LIES BLEEDING - Kristen Stewart is a washed-up gym proprietor going nowhere in a deadbeat little burg when muscle-woman Anna Baryshnikov strolls in, pumps iron and sets her heart a-flutter. What should be the start of a good thing gets tangled with gory death, treachery and an alarming tendency towards body horror. LLB is the second feature from 'St Maud' director Rose Glass, and as much as I enjoyed her debut, I'd say this one blows it out of the water. LLB is garish neo-noir perfection, as queasy as the sea sick tones of Throbbing Gristle's 'Hamburger Lady' (which keeps cropping up on the soundtrack), and pulls off a fusion of twisty Coen Bros murder intrigue with macabre nuances that are deft and strange enough to push the film through into a parallel zone of its own - I wasn't expecting THAT ending exactly, but y'know, why not? highly recommended and I'll be surprised if this doesn't end up my year's best.
TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS - This Freddie Francis anthology might not be Peak Amicus or whatever, but look at what it has in store for the prospective fan - Suzie Kendall, Kim Novak (!), Donald Pleasance in full-on Pleasance mode as a shifty psychiatrist, and a really weird supernatural tree being who goes 'Evil Dead' on poor Joan Collins. The preposterousness hooked me ('Uncle Albert', with its 'living portrait' and haunted penny farthing, feels almost like a Two Ronnies sketch that's come down with a temperature and gone a bit delirious), and it's seasoned with that magical but murky seventies Britness plus a bit of light sleaze and grue. Took me back as well, must've been a good thirty odd years since mini-Frankie saw this on TV.
FRANKENSTEIN '80 - There's just something about the merger of classic horror tropes and Eurosleaze. It's there in oddballs such as 'Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks', 'Lady Frankenstein' and of course in Franco's uber-zany 'Erotic Rites of Frankenstein'. Whilst I had seen 'Frankenstein '80' before, we're going way back and probably into an anesthetising pall of booze, enough to make it seem like unknown territory. Let's just say that, in getting through this film, I could've done with some of yesteryear's White Lightning. Bereft brother searches for the mad surgeon who scuppered his sister's heart transplant; said mad surgeon has a side line in reanimation and has stitched together a rapey murderer named Mosaic. 'Frankenstein '80' has the threadbare charm of a production that lays on crash zooms for emphasis, but all that wears thin and we're left trying to wring cheap laughs from a pile-up of bad dialogue and stiff acting. Mosaic beats a sexy butcher lady to death with a stupidly massive bone - that's as good as it gets, and it might've been alright if there'd been more of that stuff.
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