CRAWLSPACE - Slight but enjoyable mid-eighties horror outing from the director of one of my favourites, 'Tourist Tap'. The main draw is Klaus Kinski as a landlord turned slasher with severe peeping tendencies, a Nazi past and a killer gadget obsession. He gives maximum creep by simply murmuring and creasing his face the right way, but it's a revelation seeing him on a skateboard.
BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER - This ex-Video Nasty has benefited from its boutique blu-ray era rehab and can these days be viewed as a thoughtful, well-made and disturbing inversion of 'Psycho'. Its standout aspect is absolutely Susan Tyrell's performance as terrifying Aunt Cheryl. What a face! I wonder whether the Tyrell connection inspired Julia Davis when she did 'Nighty Night', which also featured a ruthlessly efficient gaslighting maniac.
GHOST DANCE - Supernatural slasher about a museum curator on the tail of a murderous Native American spirit. Highly enjoyable, for the tone more than anything - the splattery aspects are nothing to write home about, but something's always rumbling away in the background, the same kind of shadowy early eighties eeriness that runs through overlooked classics such as 'The Dark Room' and 'Incubus'.
STRANGE DARLING - Another one that everyone's been talking about this year, 'Strange Darling' has made the fan community headlines by virtue of its zig-zagging 'post-Tarrantino' structure, blurts of ultraviolence and a mindset seen by some as a bit iffy in the wake of '#Me Too'. A hotel-room hook-up goes wrong and spirals into cross-county cat-and-mouse. I'll leave it to others to unpack the layers of potential controversy and just simply say that it didn't blow me away or anything but worked well enough as a fairly nasty thriller. Nice to see Barbara Hershey, didn't really get the whole "hey stop what you're doing this is in 35mm" thing.
AENIGMA - I love how Fulci can do a film in complete defiance of anything that might be taken as 'good cinema' and still make my head spin by zooming in on a snail crawling across a 'Smash Hits' poster. Totally weirdo, totally class. This is a typical mongrel exercise that throws in bits of 'Carrie', 'Patrick' and 'Phenomena'. Lots of silly bits, some lovely-to-behold high vaulted shadowy chambers, and inspired bouts of mania such as the sequence in which someone runs from room-to-room in a dorm where everyone's been decapitated.
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