ALISON'S BIRTHDAY - This late seventies Australian charmer plays loose with 'Rosemary's Baby' but definitely calls upon its own sun soaked sinistrality. Even if it can't escape the usual expectations - a stock-in-trade cult chants by torchlight in someone's garden and someone else's overenthusiastic boyfriend comes to the rescue - between these moments, when the film slows, it fills with an atmosphere of quiet dread. Fleeting instances of optically enhanced cheapo psychedelia and potentially quite creepy rock formations only quicken my pulse. Grainy, awkward, casts a shadow. That final image is nightmare fuel for sure.
MONSTER MAN - If you hate the strain of 'gross out' comedy that nearly wrecked the early noughts, you'll probably spend most of 'Monster Man' wishing Adam and Harley would just f?ck off and die. They're douchebag movie bros on a cross-country mission to gate crash someone's wedding, and they are nothing short of the filmic equivalent of nails slowly scraping down a blackboard... until they bleed and drop off. On the other 'hand', I somehow got a twinge of masochistic enjoyment watching a 'Road Trip' rip morph into a 'Wrong Turn' clone, so all not lost.
WHEN A STRANGER CALLS - Expect another slasher wannabe and you'll end up on the wrong foot. The stealthy poise of its early scenes, with Carol Kane as a babysitter plagued by sinister phone calls, suggests a Carpenter-style take on suburban menace, but it soon broadens out into a bleak cat-and-mouse between Charles Durning and psycho Tony Beckley. As much as I find Carol Kane an absolutely fascinating actor, I have to say that Beckley's terrifying performance steals the show. Riveting and grim.
DEATH MACHINE - Say what you like, but any movie with Brad Dourif has to basically be alright. Here, he's a homicidal goth scientist tech nerd genius in a leather trench coat and a massive perma-sulk, and he's designed a killer robot to mess with the normies. 'Death Machine' is a mid-nineties take on the 'several people trapped in an isolated location are one by one pursued and dispatched by a seemingly unstoppable menace' routine, a hardy genre perennial that sadly will never die. There's running around, a bit of screaming, explosions, a big robot, all done with a very era specific mise-en-scene redolent of a posh perfume advert directed by Richard Stanley. It's... basically alright. Extra points though for an early turn by Richard Brake, easily one of the most interesting faces in showbiz.
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