DEATH BY INVITATION – Another of those strange, woozy seventies grindhouse flicks you often hear me rattle on about. Whether you find ‘Death By Invitation’ fascinating or boring depends on which side your bread’s buttered on when it comes to these kind of films (like ‘Warlock Moon’ or the way superior ‘Let’s Scare Jennifer To Death’) in which nothing much happens, but there’s just a real sense of strangeness. In this one, the descendent of a 16th cent witch takes revenge on the lineage of her persecutors. Maybe the director was trying to make a feminist statement, but it’s hard to say as things get pretty confusing very quickly, and it’s another one of those which blurs the line between experimental and incompetent, particularly with respect to some of the camera work and editing. If you like shoestring weirdness, you’ll dig this though.
MANIAC COP 2 – The newish release from Blue Underground looks very nice. ‘Maniac Cop 2’ picks up where the first one left off, and refigures Cordell as an undead avenger. It has that slick late eighties / early nineties vibe, and I really like the constant ‘city at night’ feel, New York streets decked out in neon etc. Briskly paced and violent, it moves like a well oiled exploitation engine and definitely manages to entertain. It doesn’t capture the sleazy darkness of ‘Maniac’, but why should it? It’s a very different kind of film. Good.
IN FEAR – I was intrigued by this slightly strange Brit-horror, in which a couple sets out for a music festival only to find themselves lost in the countryside. They’re stalked by a masked figure, and eventually run into (literally) an odd hitchhiker. ‘In Fear’ does quite a lot with very little, and manages to build a really ominous atmosphere on the basis of what is essentially forty minutes of faffing about. It rolls along in a subtly dream-like manner, and I guess it’ll split viewers a bit depending on how keen they are on having everything resolved, because ‘In Fear’ does kind of raise more questions than it answers. I like that, though, and I think it adds to the whole ‘low-key nightmare’ aspect of the film. I’d definitely recommend this to fans of the Ben Wheately stable of horror, it’s maybe not as accomplished, but it has that kind of vibe.
THE BROOD – I’ve seen this countless times before, but I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed it. It’s one of David Cronenberg’s most affecting films, because the focus is as much personal as conceptual (it’s well known that Cronenberg was going through a messy divorce at the time this was made, and here he’s pretty much ventilating). It’s slow moving and talky, but it packs more of an emotional punch than a lot of his other stuff, and in places it remains deeply sad – the most disturbing and forlorn character in ‘The Brood’ is the little girl Candice, a withdrawn waif who shivers in the wasteland wrought by her estranged parent’s mind games and the avant-garde but not very humane psychiatry of Dr Raglan. Even though the horror aspects seem a bit muted these days, the ideas at play have the characteristic chilly edge of the director’s vision and will always be unique – controversial fetus licking aside, in what other movie from 1979 or any other year would we find characters like the transference addict who asks everyone he meets to be his daddy? Samantha Egger is utterly chilling as the mother with the external womb – I find her face and the way she uses expression really disturbing to this day. Totally recommended, as if you didn’t know.
BAD DREAMS – Eighties horror romp set in a psych clinic, where the survivor of a seventies mind-wash cult wakes from a coma after a Jonestownesque mass suicide bid. She has visions of the hideously burned cult leader who has returned to bring her over to his side of things, but who at least doesn’t wisecrack as much as Freddy K. One of those video staples I never caught first time around, I found ‘Bad Dreams’ moderately diverting and ultimately pretty so-so. There’s a bit of gore, not much originality and the period charm isn’t in massive evidence. Kudos to Scream Factory for continuing to put this kind of detritus out, though.
DEEP END – This is brilliant. It’s a tale of youthful obsession from the fag-end of swinging London, where a school kid starts a new job at a derelict municipal baths only to find himself spellbound by the aloof charm of a young Jane Asher. His fixation builds to a soundtrack laid on by Can and winds its way to a dark conclusion in an empty swimming pool which could’ve been scripted by J G Ballard doing ‘Play For Today’. I really like ‘Deep End’. There’s a flighty nouvelle vague insouciance in the telling and the camera, but it’s caked in seediness and filth – everything about the bathhouse seems sullied and stained, up to and including Diana Dors as a creepy sexual predator. Truer to the craven corners of the psyche than the lame forced linearity of today, ‘Deep End’ resonates way beyond period anomaly – see it NOW.
OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN – Thanks to Dem for inspiring me to get hold of this man vs rat movie, which I really enjoyed. It’s very quirky and blackly comic, and does what it can with a pretty thin premise. Peter Weller stars as the financial hotshot whose life unravels at the mercy of the rodent in his house. The film starts out looking like a corporate satire, and on one level ‘Of Unknown Origin’ is a kind of twisted take on the popular eighties theme of big business psychopathy, but its latter half is more content just to follow Weller as he cracks up and trashes his apartment. It has a nice, cool look and its refrigerator environs seem a bit Cronenbergian (or maybe it’s a Canadian thing). The horror aspect of it doesn’t really work, and to be honest it would probably take real genius to make us feel fear at the prospect of a single rat gnawing a bit of skirting board, but ‘Of Unknown Origin’, which is really about obsession, won me over just by daring to run with its main plot idea in the first place, and by being off kilter and eccentric
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