16th June 2018, 11:46 AM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
PROXY – Lots of sick twists and sicker characters take this thriller into darker-then-average-waters. A woman, recovering after losing her child in an apparently random attack, frequents a support group where she meets a fellow sufferer who might not be all she seems… to say more would reveal too much, because the film’s left turns are pretty audacious and mostly untelegraphed, slightly OTT ending aside. ‘Proxy’ has a strange atmosphere and feels languid and kind of dreamy despite all these twisty moments; the characters, well portrayed, seem distant and strange, and there’s always a sense of threat in the air. Absorbing, sometimes riveting, and highly recommended.
WHILE SHE WAS OUT – Wacky horror-thriller with Kim Basinger as an abused wife who takes evasive action in the form of an Xmas eve trip to the shopping mall – she ends up being hounded to a deserted construction site by some juve gangsters who come on like they were formulated in an early nineties B-flick. Pretty usual so far, but… then it just starts getting weird. Not ‘Holy Mountain’ type weird, just head-scratch weird. And I don’t know how much was down to the filmmaker trying to do stuff, or whether it was all intended as a normal action thriller that ended up not really making sense. Things evolve to the point where Kim is wandering around in some woods, gorily snuffing her would be captors with a series of implements taken from her omnipresent red tool-kit. In a long soliloquy at the end, gang leader who did not heretofore seem massively literary launches into a poetic disquisition about how he and Kim are kindred-spirit murderers. Along the way are odd non-sequiturs such as the scene where someone, mid-chase, decides to get drunk and blast some Joy Division at full volume in a forest clearing to commemorate their dead friend. Eh? Mmm, ‘a strange film’, as I’ve said many times before in many other reviews. I would also add that it’s totally enjoyable hokum and recommend it on that basis.
DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER – Talking of strange… Joe D’Amato shows us that he had more up his sleeve than a sick necro melodrama and a bunch of porn flicks. DSOAM is a haunting Euro-gothic, clearly harkening back to Bava, in which victim-of-incest Ewa Aulin rises from the dead via some E A Poe-type contrivance to go vengeance-seeking. Klaus Kinski wanders in and out mid-section, but doesn’t do much besides prove he can re-animate corpses to no great effect. True to J D’A form, it feels cheaply put together, rushed and a bit sordid… but this is countered by a certain level of artistry, which is there in the cinematography and the ‘visual feel’ of the thing. The film floats gauzily past, throwing out arresting images high-atmosphere moments, such as the one where ghost-lady stalks a cemetery, her preserved beauty alternating with shots of manky corpse decrepitude. It doesn’t make much sense, but with this kind of territory that shouldn’t be unexpected. The other thing that plagues a lot of seventies Euro stuff and seems starker these days is a preponderance of boring, saggy bits, which here are not entirely absent but are kept to a relative minimum. A thumbs up from Frankie, shame Aristide didn’t make more of this kind of thing.
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