VOICE OVER - Indie Britflick from the early eighties has unnerving subject matter and a grim atmosphere. Bizarre broadcaster Fats pedals anachronistic regency-period melodrama to jeering audiences. After a brilliant scene where he's humiliated by two punks he finds an injured, mute woman (one of the aforementioned punks, or at least the same actress) in an alley and appoints himself her guardian / keeper / oppressor etc. We follow their bleak non-relationship until he stabs her to death with scissors! The film swims in a fog of desolation... images of lonely streets at night, abandoned warehouses, down at heel nightlife feature heavily and project that dour vibe I always associate with media from turn of the decade Thatcher's Britain. There are some excellent sequences - Fats' overdriven tape blowout coda for one.
THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN - Otherwise known as 'Snapshot'. An odd little film which I found quite difficult to place - it plays like a weird hybrid of arty angularity, clunky B-movie and soap operatic almost-TV movie, and certainly won't please those wanting to find out what actually did happen 'the day after Halloween'. Mousy ex-hairdresser turns model and is harrassed by her vaguely menacing ice-cream man ex. Nothing much happens until the sleaze-lite climax, but I kept going with it, mainly for the appearances of disgruntled ex's 'Mr Whippy' van, which has a tendency to stalk accompanied by really florid 70s soundtrack music. I ended up quite liking it, but felt it needed to play on its eccentricity more. A few stabbings and some sexualised violence would have also helped.
HANNA - I enjoyed this tale of a genetically engineered teenage assassin, particularly because it avoided an obvious action-oriented approach and went more for an identity-quest type thing peppered with lightly surreal touches in places. Good performances from the likes of Blanchett etc, and Hanna herself was fairly endearing for a nascent psychopath. Maybe there was something a little slight about it, and I really wanted the irritating British family to be murdered in slow motion, but overall I thought it was good.
PANDORUM - Sci-fi horror set on a Noah's ark type spaceship. There are mutant cannibals and many scenes of people running up and down corridors trying to work out what's going on. I was reminded of my experience with 'Eden Log', a far superior headf*ck which had a lot more stylish weirdness going for it, but which too had a biblical spaceship thing happening. Well, I kind of liked it but I found myself drifting in a confused sort of way at points, perhaps because I was drunk and bored of watching films by the time I got round to it.
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