Had a good time with a DePalma double bill - BLOW OUT and BODY DOUBLE, both of which were twisty and stylised enough to hold my attention. Liked the John Lithgow character in the first one and was intrigued by the whole 'fake serial killer' subplot. Quite a charged ending as well. Watching BODY DOUBLE again was taken with the Holly Johnson cameo and was surprised when the Jack Klugman bit only lasted a couple of seconds (in the ten years since I last saw it my memory must have engineered an entire subplot based on him... had an unhealthy Quincy fixation at one point, unfortunately).
On to FUNHOUSE. Found I really enjoyed it after being quite dismissive of it in the past. This time I really got into the garish grotesque of the funfair scenario, which made up atmospherically for the slight lack of full on brutality (which maybe I felt a little short changed by last time). Those mutant cows really gave me the creeps, too. Discovered a wicked and slightly off kilter art house thriller type flick in the form of RED LIGHTS (thanks to Slippery Jack for mentioning this one). Mesmerising and intense, it charts mild mannered insurance guy's transition from booze addled mid-life crisis to harsh dealings with a sinister prison escapee. It's all about atmosphere, anticipation and dread... I've never been so gripped by an unbroken 15 minute sequence of a man making telephone calls as I was when the protagonist had to ring round a load of places to find out what'd happened to his wife. I don't know why, but I kept questioning whether everything that happened was or wasn't in the main character's head... there's only one overt 'fake reality / wake up from dream' moment, but the whole film has a subtly hazy / detached quality to it, as if it's all the desperate fantasy of a man at the end of his tether. Really liked it, highly recommended.
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