What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Now edited and corrected.

[Frankie Teardrop]

Originally Posted by Demoncrat

Woodchipper Massacre (1988, Jon McBride)

SOV. 3 kids are left in the care of their rather strict aunt. A nasty accident's consequences spiral wildly out of control. The sanest film I watched that night
The actors are all wooden, most of the action is off camera and the denoument was ... typical of the genre



Devil Fetus (1983, Liu Hung Chuen)

HK horror. Highly recommended is this one. If it's logic you're after though ...
A simple impulse purchase ends in the apocalypse. Top tier madness. Which leads to ....



Blood Beat (1983, Fabrice - Ange Zaphiratos)

You know when you watch something and think "this guy has seen some Bava methinks!!". Maybe it's just me???
Or out of the frying pan, into the mire ...
A family gathering should be welcoming ... shouldn't it?
See for yourselves .... I dare you

'Blood Beat' is amazing. As is 'Devil Fetus', for that matter.

[Frankie Teardrop]

As we head into the foul depths of the seasonal recess, part one of a pre-xmas splurge -

THE NEST – I always wondered about this one whenever I clocked the VHS case during my late-eighties trips to the local Video Library. Now I have my answers. Notable for elegantly shoehorning the dynamics of a smalltown melodrama about property development into splattery bug horror; also in its favour are its rad, bad scientist and the gloopy Thing-esque mutant bug-human hybrid totem entity at the end. Light but schlocky, it is what it is. Whaddya want? If Fellini did a film about killer roaches you could watch that instead.

HIGHWAY TO HELL – A trip across the desert of some parallel underworld, featuring a satanic highway cop, bikers, encounters with the devil and some other stuff. I enjoyed it because I found it hard to place – somewhere between horror, black comedy and fantasy, left-field for the early nineties but not avant or anything, at its heart a romance. Are those ‘zombies’ in floppy wigs at the rubbish dump meant to resemble Andy Warhol? The ever-expanding list of questions we need answers to NOW.

SWALLOW – Pica. I learned about it back in the day, when I worked with people with mental health issues. The person at the centre of ‘Swallow’ has a bad case of it. Chilly and distant, ‘Swallow’ feels a little like Cronenberg with the schlocky marrow sucked out, a psychosomatic take-down of familial oppression and control dynamics. I liked it, but its psychological landscape is a little on the neat side, especially when it all boils up to something that smacks too much of a conventional resolution. I thought it might be more twisted… but f*ck it, here’s xmas around the corner, who needs bad vibes?

DON’T BREATHE 2 – That blind ex-marine guy from the first one is back, this time alongside a kidnap victim he’s raised as his own. Some nefarious types have contrived to bust into his house (again), and a similar scenario to part one unfolds… until it takes a clumsily telegraphed turn into slightly hysterical territory which I won’t spoil, but which elevates a very standard B-movie into something more nastily hilarious. Along the way are the expected bits of gore and ill-will. Quite good, but if you’re going to charitably donate this xmas, make sure it’s not to any shifty-looking medics…

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

As we head into the foul depths of the seasonal recess, part one of a pre-xmas splurge -

THE NEST – I always wondered about this one whenever I clocked the VHS case during my late-eighties trips to the local Video Library. Now I have my answers. Notable for elegantly shoehorning the dynamics of a smalltown melodrama about property development into splattery bug horror; also in its favour are its rad, bad scientist and the gloopy Thing-esque mutant bug-human hybrid totem entity at the end. Light but schlocky, it is what it is. Whaddya want? If Fellini did a film about killer roaches you could watch that instead.

I saw this fairly recently (Might have been two years ago come to think) and really enjoyed it.

Much better than the Fellini remake i thought.

[Demoncrat]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

'Blood Beat' is amazing. As is 'Devil Fetus', for that matter.

Tonal similarities betwixt the two made the demon sit up and take notice somewhat

[MrBarlow]

Tomorrow Never Dies.

I know I went through the Bond movies last year but I think at Christmas time there should be one or two Bond films watched.

Pierce makes his second mark as the British government agent along with Chinese agent Michelle Yeoh, both targeting media mogul Jonathan Pryce, who uses his brain and network news as his weapon plus a stealth boat to create World War III almost. From the start right up to the end, the plot gets better and better, the acting between M and the Navy General is always a laugh to watch.

Tomorrow_Never_Dies.jpg

[Frankie Teardrop]

More pre-christmas non-christmassy shit

THE LAUGHING DEAD – From SP Somtow, author of such early nineties horror fic fare as ‘Vampire Junction’. Here, his sights are set on Aztec rituals, a burned-out priest searching for his lost love and her arsehole of a son, and various other little plot points and side-shifts that seemed to flicker past in the haze. The main course, surely, is the craziness – when it arrives, it arrives in style. By this point, the film has morphed from a blackly comic but slightly taxing travelogue into a splatter-fixated surrealist’s version of ‘Temple of Doom’, complete with a monster dinosaur battle; I recommend it to you thusly.

RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS – Ruggero Deodato – we already know about his grim side. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. ‘The House on the Edge of the Park’. But are you aware that he also has a slightly silly side? Well, maybe, maybe not, but on the basis of ROA, I’m tempted to hazard that he does. Christopher Connolly goes to an island and it all has to do with scientists in jeopardy, punks on bikes, the lost city of Atlantis and a big plastic dome that closes across the sky. An Italian action sci-fi rip-off in the mode of high fever, I did have to stop once or twice to ask myself “Good grief Frankie, what IS this film about?” Might have been the booze, might have to re-watch, but a recommend until proven otherwise.

MONSTER – A first timer for me, having avoided it countless times on late night TV back in the nineties (I think). Blimey, I’d been missing out. A truly shabby piece of seventies British gnarliness, it has Joan Collins in terrified thrall to her offspring, a baby who is quite frankly a bit of bastard. Any sprog equipped with enough psychopathic wherewithal to murder Ralph Bates by full-on hanging with a big noose is quite irredeemable in my eyes. There’s a lot of that kind of thing in ‘Monster’, a briskly-paced jaw dropper pungent enough to subdue even likes of Donald Pleasance, who here seems as baffled as anyone. It all has to do with ex-stripper Joan having been cursed by an angry dwarf! Find of the year.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Dream Demon (1988)

The virginal Gemma Redgrave suffers increasingly fraught and realistic nightmares as she fears consummating her impending marriage.

A bizarre oddity that rips off and really wants to be a British A Nightmare on Elm Street but ends up more like Freddy's Dead-The Final Nightmare.

The acting, from Redgrave in particular, is average at best. It's unfortunate but for me Gemma Redgrave doesn't have a voice that translates well to film. Be it this or her semi-frequent role in Doctor Who, she appears to be reading from cue cards at a distance. Yet in her twenty minute interview on the Arrow Blu-ray she comes across as warm, affectionate and wonderfully natural and a pleasure to watch.

The film itself is a bit nuts. The dream sequences are outlandish and often pretty gory such as Gemma punching right through the grooms head on her wedding day, but Timothy Spall as the main 'dream demon' is too daft to take seriously. Almost carrying on as if her were still in Ken Russell's Gothic from a couple of years earlier.If Robert Englund was Freddy Krueger then Spall is the equivalent of Funny Man. But it's still very watchable and certainly fast paced even if it's not at all scary.

What was kind of interesting was that in among the craziness there do appear to be metaphors for 1981's wedding of Charles and Diana throughout which seven years on seemed a bit weird.

I'd never seen Dream Demon before so didn't know what to expect, although i wasn't really expecting comedy horror. The film has enough about it for me to want to watch it again in that batshit crazy style of the afore mentioned Gothic. A film that i've truly come to adore over the years.

/ 5

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

MONSTER – A first timer for me, having avoided it countless times on late night TV back in the nineties (I think). Blimey, I’d been missing out. A truly shabby piece of seventies British gnarliness, it has Joan Collins in terrified thrall to her offspring, a baby who is quite frankly a bit of bastard. Any sprog equipped with enough psychopathic wherewithal to murder Ralph Bates by full-on hanging with a big noose is quite irredeemable in my eyes. There’s a lot of that kind of thing in ‘Monster’, a briskly-paced jaw dropper pungent enough to subdue even likes of Donald Pleasance, who here seems as baffled as anyone. It all has to do with ex-stripper Joan having been cursed by an angry dwarf! Find of the year.

Did you pick up the Network Blu, Frankie? It's a nice package with plentiful extras and booklet that i recommend if you haven't.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Southbound (2016)

Excellent anthology horror film in the vein of Trick r' Treat (2007) in which five different stories taking place in the American desert become interlinked with characters and situations bleeding into one another along the way.

As with all anthology films not every segment is 100% successful especially seeing as they are by five different directors so the tone does occasionally shift. The five tall tales themselves ranged from the okay - Siren - to the superb - The Accident - twenty minutes of unbelievably tense, knuckle whitening horror with a beautifully gory conclusion. In fact it was probably the best slice of new horror i've seen in as long as i can remember.

Definitely one to watch multiple times as i'm sure there was so much i missed or didn't register with me at the time especially in the first couple of stories.

½ / 5 (5/5 for The Accident)