What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Fright (1971)

Fright stars Susan George as a babysitter terrorized whilst looking after a child by the former husband of her employer now on the run from an institution. It's a film that can be described as genre straddling. It's partially a Gothic horror / old dark house film seeing as it's set in a secluded, wonderfully atmospheric old dark house even though it's a contemporary setting, it's certainly a home invasion film and definitely feels like a proto-slasher movie (SPOILER ALERT) even though the only person who actually dies is the madman himself.

It's probably Susan George's best role as the terrorized but gutsy heroine. There's enough about her performance to not simply scream and look terrified even though it appears this might be the case during the first half hour when she is joined by boyfriend Dennis Waterman at the house.

Ian Bannen proves a very good and delightfully complex madman. Firstly appearing to George as a concerned neighbour before his facade slips and his true identity is revealed. The rest of the cast is made up of seasoned character actors Honor Blackman, who is slightly annoying in her worried mother role until it's proved she has every right to be, John Gregson and George Cole. Cole and Waterman? Seriously!

Peter Collinson's direction is fine, he's often a director thought of as nothing out of the ordinary but he builds suspense and then maintains it with ease and the film has an air of creepy dread throughout. It's also the first baby sitter in peril movie, several years before John Carpenter took it to extremes with Halloween. It should also be noted the film has one or two sequences that would be frowned upon in mainstream cinema today.The US poster below shows the film as rated PG, however due to those sequences the Blu-ray is rated 18 by the BBFC.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

And Soon the Darkness (1970)

Despite the title this plays out in lovely warm sunshine throughout.The StudioCanal Blu-ray looks so pretty it's like looking out through a window into the rural French countryside in this classic British thriller about two young women (Pamela Franklin and Michelle Dotrice) on a cycling holiday in France, until one of them suddenly disappears.

There's a creeping sense of dread throughout Robert Fuest's film as the script from Brian Clemens and Terry Nation slowly unfolds. Characters, including Sandor Eles, cool as a cucumber riding his scooter, come and go and you are never sure about their motivations which adds nicely to the feeling of unease.

The film is certainly a forerunner of the later trend of holiday makers in peril movies with basically all foreigners depicted as either shifty or outright dangerous, although the idea that one tourist goes missing and the other becomes paranoid was first explored brilliantly in Terence Fisher's 1950's Paris set chiller So Long at the Fair.

Fuest doesn't rely on shocks for his horror, although there are one or two later on. It's a film that claws away at the viewers psyche, the neurotic actions on screen creating anxiety in those watching as the foreboding atmosphere builds in this thought provoking and gripping film. Never has broad daylight and quaint French ideals seemed so bloody creepy.

[MrBarlow]

House Of The WOlf Man. 2009.

Five people meet at a castle with the hopeful of receiving a large inheritance only for something to be prowling the castle. Nope you didn't read the title and date wrong, this is a homage to the old dark house movies from the 1940s, usual stuff happens, one dark gloomy house/castle, some old guy has snuffed it, people looking for money from the old geezer and a few twists to why they were invited
with some family secrets revealed and a monster or two going about in the shadows. I really wanted to enjoy this but everyone seems to be acting OTT, this is one movie where you are begging for everyone to die.

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[Frankie Teardrop]

LOVE LIES BLEEDING - Kristen Stewart is a washed-up gym proprietor going nowhere in a deadbeat little burg when muscle-woman Anna Baryshnikov strolls in, pumps iron and sets her heart a-flutter. What should be the start of a good thing gets tangled with gory death, treachery and an alarming tendency towards body horror. LLB is the second feature from 'St Maud' director Rose Glass, and as much as I enjoyed her debut, I'd say this one blows it out of the water. LLB is garish neo-noir perfection, as queasy as the sea sick tones of Throbbing Gristle's 'Hamburger Lady' (which keeps cropping up on the soundtrack), and pulls off a fusion of twisty Coen Bros murder intrigue with macabre nuances that are deft and strange enough to push the film through into a parallel zone of its own - I wasn't expecting THAT ending exactly, but y'know, why not? highly recommended and I'll be surprised if this doesn't end up my year's best.

TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS - This Freddie Francis anthology might not be Peak Amicus or whatever, but look at what it has in store for the prospective fan - Suzie Kendall, Kim Novak (!), Donald Pleasance in full-on Pleasance mode as a shifty psychiatrist, and a really weird supernatural tree being who goes 'Evil Dead' on poor Joan Collins. The preposterousness hooked me ('Uncle Albert', with its 'living portrait' and haunted penny farthing, feels almost like a Two Ronnies sketch that's come down with a temperature and gone a bit delirious), and it's seasoned with that magical but murky seventies Britness plus a bit of light sleaze and grue. Took me back as well, must've been a good thirty odd years since mini-Frankie saw this on TV.

FRANKENSTEIN '80 - There's just something about the merger of classic horror tropes and Eurosleaze. It's there in oddballs such as 'Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks', 'Lady Frankenstein' and of course in Franco's uber-zany 'Erotic Rites of Frankenstein'. Whilst I had seen 'Frankenstein '80' before, we're going way back and probably into an anesthetising pall of booze, enough to make it seem like unknown territory. Let's just say that, in getting through this film, I could've done with some of yesteryear's White Lightning. Bereft brother searches for the mad surgeon who scuppered his sister's heart transplant; said mad surgeon has a side line in reanimation and has stitched together a rapey murderer named Mosaic. 'Frankenstein '80' has the threadbare charm of a production that lays on crash zooms for emphasis, but all that wears thin and we're left trying to wring cheap laughs from a pile-up of bad dialogue and stiff acting. Mosaic beats a sexy butcher lady to death with a stupidly massive bone - that's as good as it gets, and it might've been alright if there'd been more of that stuff.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Chalet Girl (2011)

Kim (An excellent Felicity Jones) used to be a champion skater until her mother died in a car accident and she lost her nerve. Now stuck in a dead end job she gets the opportunity to work in Austria for four months as a chalet girl - someone who lives in and looks after expensive chalets for rich clients.

Filmed on location in the Alps, Chalet Girl is a stunning advertisement for St. Anton and all the other beautiful alpine villages. However the film wouldn't work without it's hugely enjoyable, occasionally cheeky story line and fantastic cast including Tamsin Egerton, Bill Nighy, Bill Bailey, Brook Shields and Ed Westwick.

A film that will never change your world admittedly, yet Chalet Girl is an enjoyable romp with immensely likeable characters and humerous if not rip roaringly funny scenarios. The film is a very easy watch and one i revisit often. St Anton, a beautiful part of the Tirol, is somewhere i've holidayed (In the summer. I can't ski or snowboard to save my life...although i've never tried) and it looks gorgeous on Blu-ray.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Anyone watching any science fiction movies this Sci-Fi September?

Nine reviews posted already in here -

SCI-FI September!

[Frankie Teardrop]

TROUBLE EVERY DAY - This Claire Denis film came along around the time of all that French extreme stuff early in the noughts. It can probably count itself a fellow traveller on the strength of a few harsh scenes, even though, given the director, you wouldn't be wrong in expecting it to be screamingly auteurish in addition. It stars Vincent Gallo as a scientist, ostensibly on honeymoon in Paris, but actually on the tail of an ex-colleague who has developed and nurtured a strange virus. The same virus is making Beatrice Dalle shag, murder and eat random passers by whenever the mood takes her; it seems that Gallo might be afflicted, too. Gallo is quite interesting to watch and walks it like he's forever brewing a storm behind his wall of nervy distraction. This sullen mood seeps into and contaminates the rest of the film, which feels like a bleak take on l'amour, Cronenberg style. If that sounds a bit frosty, the soundtrack by the always great Tindersticks reaches beyond the elliptical arthouse chill to bring out a fuzzy melancholy. Excellent and maybe weirdly overlooked still.

ZODIAC - Few Killers have played the media like The Zodiac. All those cryptic proclamations and pages full of ciphers must've seemed like something from a movie in the first place. If mysterious true crime is always magnetic, David Fincher's 'Zodiac' shows there's a price to be paid by those who get wrapped up in that stuff. It's probably my favourite of his films to date - I like the way it uses the case not as the springboard for a semi-slasher style enterprise a la 'Se7en', nor even a procedural as such, but to frame a slow trawl through the damage inflicted by obsession. The three principal characters - cartoonist Jake Gyllenhal, journo Robert Downey JR and tec Mark Ruffalo - are laser-focussed on outwitting Zodiac and getting to the bottom of the case. But the case is bottomless, and rather than uniting in the manner of the heroes of a slightly unorthodox buddy cop thriller, all three men fall into despair and ruin, collateral victims of the forever unknown. Beyond all the talk (it's very dialogue-heavy), Fincher's stylistics conjure an air of descent and slowly simmering dread as the film arcs through the shifting seasons.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

ZODIAC - Few Killers have played the media like The Zodiac. All those cryptic proclamations and pages full of ciphers must've seemed like something from a movie in the first place. If mysterious true crime is always magnetic, David Fincher's 'Zodiac' shows there's a price to be paid by those who get wrapped up in that stuff. It's probably my favourite of his films to date - I like the way it uses the case not as the springboard for a semi-slasher style enterprise a la 'Se7en', nor even a procedural as such, but to frame a slow trawl through the damage inflicted by obsession. The three principal characters - cartoonist Jake Gyllenhal, journo Robert Downey JR and tec Mark Ruffalo - are laser-focussed on outwitting Zodiac and getting to the bottom of the case. But the case is bottomless, and rather than uniting in the manner of the heroes of a slightly unorthodox buddy cop thriller, all three men fall into despair and ruin, collateral victims of the forever unknown. Beyond all the talk (it's very dialogue-heavy), Fincher's stylistics conjure an air of descent and slowly simmering dread as the film arcs through the shifting seasons.

Does the directors cut add anything to the original cut of the film? I have the cinema version on dvd but not the other version.

[Frankie Teardrop]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Does the directors cut add anything to the original cut of the film? I have the cinema version on dvd but not the other version.

Ooh, not sure. I watched the old(ish) blu ray the other day, and as far as I'm aware it was the same version I'd seen before on DVD. Never seen it at the cinema. I think a 4K's coming out soon. I won't be getting it - it might be my fave Fincher, but in a way that's not saying much.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

Ooh, not sure. I watched the old(ish) blu ray the other day, and as far as I'm aware it was the same version I'd seen before on DVD. Never seen it at the cinema. I think a 4K's coming out soon. I won't be getting it - it might be my fave Fincher, but in a way that's not saying much.

To be honest i couldn't tell you a thing about it. I've watched the dvd once and i think i fell asleep and never returned to it. I would like to see it again but feel it should be in HD.

My favourite Fincher film is always going to be Se7en. Such an awesome cinema experience.