HELL'S TRAP - Two warring guys decide the best way to prove who's dominant is to go into the woods and slay a bear! I was relieved when said 'bear' turned out to be a post-'Nam mask-wearing psycho with a Freddie Kruger glove and an AK. 'Hell's Trap' is, if you hadn't guessed, a melange of well-worn genre tropes and incorporates bits of backwoods horror, slasher and eighties-style action into its not particularly mind-expanding repertoire. It's fun while it lasts and pacey enough, but you might've been hoping for something as out of kilter as the director's 'Vacation Of Terror 2'.
TRASH HUMPERS - Harmony Korine strokes the foul underbelly of America's Midwest once again in 'Trash Humpers', in which a trio of old people / younger people in masks (it's impossible to know which) wander from scene to scene breaking things and occasionally doing murders. That's kind of a sideline though, their favourite activity is clearly f*cking garbage and other inanimate objects. The medium here is as grotty as the message, shit-smeared VHS that really does recall the feeling of that sticky unmarked video you should've left alone on the back seat of the bus. In two minds about whether you could call it 'horror', but it's one of my favourite weirdo films from the last twenty years.
CRIMSON PEAK - Del Toro brings his lush sensibility to this sweeping Victorian Gothic, in which Mia Wasikowsa is seduced by English gent Tom Hiddleston whilst Jessica Chastain looks stern and shifty in the background. Can it be that I only saw it for the first time yesterday? Visually it's as breath taking as expected, overcrowded with ornament as it piles on melodrama laden with incest, hauntings and even, here and there, a bit of slasher. The towering monument at the centre of the film really is its own character, a tumbledown monstrosity that breathes the same air as The Overlook Hotel or Hill House.
RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD - I think this might be one of those Godfrey Ho-style cut and shut jobs, for how else can I explain the leaps between small town undead murder mystery involving zombies and a derelict prison, and a subplot where a child deconstructs a CD player and reconstitutes it as a deadly laser weapon? Also, the Three Stooges keep cropping up. As tonally screwy as it sounds, but its take on the undead is weirdly evocative, full of shadowy Fulci-isms and vast abandoned buildings. Feels like 'Dead And Buried' recast as breezy nonsense, with a kid with a laser.
 |