Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT – This is one of those ‘made for TV’ feature length horror hack jobs done by Fulci and Lenzi at the end of the eighties. I thought they were all pretty good, the Fulci ones in particular. ‘House of Clocks’ is a bit of a late Fulci fave for many, but I actually prefer ‘Sweet House of Horros’ because it’s just bonkers. Anyway, ‘House of Witchcraft’ is an Umberto Lenzi contribution to the series, and you’ll know what to expect if you’re familiar with the dying embers of the Italian trash heyday – competent technics despite a real air of cheapness, awful acting and logic defying plotlines which lead nowhere, apart from to garish set pieces which quickly become the only reason to push through to the last reel. ‘House of Witchcraft’ doesn’t score too badly on the yawn factor – despite fairly minimal set up (guy goes to country house with sinister wife, there’s a witch going around killing people, but it might all just be a dream) it still wanders sleepily all over the place, but manages to sustain itself with really awful, ripe dialogue, over the top incidents and just a general air of silliness sprinkled with bits of gore, so I thought it was pretty entertaining dumb fun for the most part.
PET SEMATARY – One of the better thought-of S King adaptions. I think I saw it once ages ago on TV, but really only had the dimmest memories of it. I thought parts of it worked, parts of it didn’t. It’s pretty disturbing in concept, and some of this darkness comes through the flat sheen of standard eighties genre film competence, but, for me, a few aspects held it back, mostly the ones that played up the more generic horror – Victor Pascow’s ghost, which really grated, and a couple of the visuals. The pacing seemed to flag a bit at times as well. But in other areas, it really hit home – once Gage came out of the ground, the whole thing felt genuinely morbid and unsettling.
HELL’S GROUND – A Pakistani horror film from the mid-noughties co-funded by Mondo Macabro. I really liked it – part of the fun and the interest is seeing genre staples filtered through a more complex culture (the clash between late capitalist ‘Americanised’ elements, post-colonial hangover and very different traditions is constantly played on). More than that, it’s just a bit weird – it piles on a load of genre clichés and they stick together in clumsy, not very sensible but interesting ways. There are Fulci-esque zombies in it one minute, but the next sees us in back woods slasher / Texas Chainsaw territory. The ‘slasher’ in question is quite interesting in that s(he) rocks a burka and wields a mace. Although obviously low in budget and cheap looking, it manages to get past this by looking quite stylised once we’re in the woods at night, with that eighties-look back lighting permeating just about everywhere. It’s messy and disjointed, but my only criticism really is that it could’ve been even more so… but maybe that would’ve ended up feeling contrived. Anyway, ‘Hell’s Ground’ – I thought it was very good, there are some great soundtrack moments courtesy of Stephen Thrower, and there’s plenty of gratuitous horror and gore, so I’ll let that be my recommendation.
THE LAST HORROR FILM – Caroline Munro and Joe Spinell reunite after ‘Maniac’ for another dose of stalk and slash. Spinell plays a loser with delusions of Hollywood stardom, so he pops over to Cannes to try to get Caroline to star in his imaginary masterpiece. Various human obstacles get bumped off along the way. Whereas ‘Maniac’ is probably darkly brilliant, ‘The Last Horror Film’ is ludicrous toss – but still a film I could get to love with time. It really doesn’t come together at all as a coherent work – but considering a lot of the stuff I watch, that’s not a criticism. So we get stabs at comedy, a strangely sleazy atmosphere, really loud eightiesness, bits of splatter, out of sync arthouse moments (such as Spinell doing a striptease! Um…), but above all, whatever ‘The Last Horror Film’ does wrong, Joe Spinell puts enough in for it to be right on some level, and his performance, as always, is just mesmerising. No-one does whiny, embittered loner like him. He’s enough of a reason to watch ‘The Last Horror Film’, but there’s also plenty of juice along the way depending on your love of shithouse cinema.
TORTURE CHAMBER – Dante Tomaselli’s latest is about a silent kid with a burned face on a revenge spree. His gang of similarly burned kids kidnap the adults who’ve wronged them and torture them in a ruined tower. Pretty intense without being overly graphic, it does a good job of drawing out a dreamy, dislocated atmosphere, although maybe its only flaw is that it can’t quite sustain the weirdness factor, probably due to audience acclimatisation early on. There’s also a strange stiltedness to a lot of Tomaselli’s stuff which I never quite know is intentional or not – ie. “where’ve they gone?” “they’ve gone to the sinister abandoned tower.” (or something like that). Whatever, fans of Tomaselli and freaky indie horror should put this on their hitlist.
BEYOND THE DOOR – Really quite dug this. I was expecting a schlocky ‘Exorcist’ rip – which it is, but it’s so much more! Quite how much more depends on the value you place on watching a man being accosted in the street by evil hippie musicians who just basically play their instruments at him in a sinister fashion, through their noses… pretty much the pinnacle of anything I’ve seen in the last year. I jest, but only slightly. If you don’t dig that kind of weirdness, there’s still plenty of green vom going around and some nicely warped imagery eg. anything with malevolent toys and dolls is OK by me. Very definitely a recommend, a possible high point of seventies Italian trash.
THE DEAD DON’T TALK – Wow, if ‘Beyond The Door’ is bad but delicious pulp surrealism, ‘The Dead Don’t Talk’ is a cosmic joke. I’ve never seen a film which reminded me more of an acid trip – I don’t mean visually, just in the sense of an intrinsic total lop-sidedness and complete disconnectedness / everything-connectedness. If you don’t get me, it’s because I’m talking bollocks, BUT, crucially, nowhere near the bollocks poking through this ragged leg-hole of outer cinema. Basically, it’s about.. well, I think it’s about a house, a ghostly apparition with an annoying never ending laugh, and some kind of teaching assistant who… I can’t even remember. It does just about make narrative sense, but you’ll be more caught up in trying to derive meaning from multiple shots of stairwells and distant people moving about the edges of wonkily shot rooms (and that freaky spectre with the bad hysterics). I really can’t say whether it was intended as some kind of before its time avant-garde pulp horror deconstruction, or whether it was meant as a straight flick that just came out as a mad, mangled mess, but I completely take my hat off to whoever was responsible. It’s on that Turkish schlock double bill with the ‘Mrs Wardh’ remake, but totally trashes the latter for sheer bizarreness IMO, and that’s saying something.
RED ROOM 2 – Some horrid J-depravity to round things off. There are harsher flicks than ‘Red Room 2’ in the annals of twisted Japanese sleaze (including some of director Daisuke Yamanouchi’s own ouvre), but it’s still a pretty curdled experience. Those familiar with the ‘Red Room’ scenario will see things unroll in a similar fashion here – four contestants play a card game on a minimal set. The winner of each round gets to subject the others to vicious acts of torture (one featuring a pretty repulsive moment of foetal extraction in this case). Well, you’ll know whether you’ll be into RR2 or not – I like this kind of thing, I don’t particularly see the need to defend these films although others may feel they’re problematic but equally, in this instance and as noted above, RR2 is pretty much on the twisted filth-lite side of things, and as such manages to be more entertaining than transgressive, for better or worse. Anyway, it’s always the more bonkers moments of films like this that get me, rather than the full-on degeneration – here, it’s the rather whimsical, sentimental ending, whereupon the survivor decides he loves the film’s vanquished robot assassin and decides to spend his winnings on having her refurbished |