THE NIGHT OF DEATH - It seems odd that nursing homes are rarely seen in horror films when, if you think about it, they're overflowing with morbid potential. Though maybe that's why - after all, who really wants to look humanity in the face? French horror movies were also pretty thin on the ground in the early eighties, making elderly care-themed 'The Night Of Death' something of a novelty. Martine takes up a post in a home run by the slightly Thatcher-esque Helene, unaware that it's all a front for a secret society of cannibals. Blackly comedic, though I think I remember a lighter touch from when I saw it all those years ago - maybe I'm getting old. If the laughs stick in your throat, it's because they're underpinned by a superbly chilly, eerie atmosphere, exemplified as much by scenes where Helene laments alone at the piano as by shots of twilit corridors filling with creeping elders. One thing I'd forgotten was the surprisingly offal-heavy H G Lewis-flavoured sacrifices, real Pan Horror material, and I loved the way they engineered an entire little subplot just so they could end on that utter downer. A satisfyingly macabre death rattle of a movie that makes for a kind of defiantly unsexy answer to 'The Substance'.
THE SISTER OF URSULA - Swinging Dagmar and spiky Ursula are sisters on vacation in a coastal town plagued by a sex murderer with a massive wooden dildo. No prizes for guessing that, first and foremost, 'The Sister Of Ursula' is brimming with sleaze from all angles - I know it was the seventies, but whipping your clothes in front of your sib as if that's what people actually do when they're holidaying in Torquay... On the other hand, the raunch is the least interesting thing about it. A strange, semi-abstract tone lingers throughout thanks to scenes where existentially tormented Ursula has philosophical conversations with weird bits of sculpture in the corners of shadowed ruins, or where arty shots dominate throwaway encounters and let in an air of indefinable oddness. Maybe the secret's in the sax - it goes for 'slinky' when the bedroom action starts to simmer, but through some quirk of the recording process ends up sounding gratingly weird, bordering on rancid. If none of that grabs you, you might be mildly entertained by the tangled subplot about drug smuggling and hotels. This sun dappled sizzler fascinated me with its casual bizarreness.
BLOOD TRACKS - Semi-legendary bad 'slasher' from the minds of Mats Helge Olsson and Derek Ford. Never heard? Ford was a seventies Brit porn guy who at one point squeezed out the utterly beguiling 'The Urge To Kill', a film in desperate need of restoration so the world can gawk at it in disbelief. Maybe some of that craziness seeped through into 'Blood Tracks'. It takes the fateful combo of metal and horror and lands it in the mountains of Sweden, where a 'Hills Have Eyes' clan of frostbitten cannibals look on as their abandoned factory lair is requisitioned by spandex rockers for the sake of a music video. The snowy surrounds and awful eighties glitz look pretty ace as it trundles along doling out epic one liners and agonising non-performances - this is not an actorly movie. There's some grot and salaciousness and the intrinsic majesty of an industrial ruin, all things that shore up the badfilm fascination and shield a little bit from the grim truth that it needed more horror and a better pace.
 |