THE NIGHT FLIER - I saw 'The Night Flier' mentioned in someone's post recently (thanks, Trebor), and realised I'd never actually watched it myself. It's a low budget Stephen King adaption which is never going to top 'The Shawshank Redemption' in the eyes of many, but then the eyes of many aren't always glued to hours of mid nineties direct to video bilge and lovin' it (or trying to). So I thought 'The Night Flier' was pretty good. It carries itself for the most part on the back of some flat but vaguely ominous nineties-type vibes and, more to the point, bitter and twisted Miguel Ferrer. Ferrer. He's such a weasel generally. Here, he's in great form as a misanthropic journalist on the tail of a vampiric airplane pilot (...) making house calls throughout rural North America and leaving carnage in his wake. Despite a cadet journo's attempts to break his wall of ice, Ferrer really is a bit of a t*at, and I thought it was actually quite a brave move on the part of the filmmakers to make him the protagonist - he's just awful to everyone he meets. A joy to behold. Besides this, 'The Night Flier', which was made in 1997 but feels about five years older, has some OK gore, lean pace, a high-concept vampire with a moderately groovy plane and a descent-into-lunacy kind of ending which wears its cynical sneer with pride. Slightly neglected these days, but definitely worth a look.
SHOCKER - Like everyone else, I prefer the grit of his seventies output to virtually anything he did afterwards, but 'Shocker' isn't one of Craven's worst. In fact, I rather enjoyed it. It helps that, after a while, it gets completely senseless. It actually feels like a scrambled rip-off of 'A Nightmare On Elm Street', complete with a wise-cracking undead serial killer... of course, I say 'feels like', but scrambled rip-off is exactly what it is. This time, the bad dude can 'transmit' himself via a wave of electricity from person to person, allowing him to take temporary possession of bodies for murderous ends. This quality enables him to become part of a series of TV broadcasts during the film's madcap finale, which really does jettison any sense of there being any kind of reality beyond late eighties inane video lunacy. Prior to then, there is much lop-sidedness to enjoy, including a possessed seven year old riding a dumpster truck going "f*ck you, I'm gonna kill ya" (or something). A midsection sag hinders but does not ruin proceedings. There are so many holes, so many lapses of logic, such an endless sky of narrative perplexity, but, if you're at all like me and just want to feel vaguely titillated by some bad eighties fx and scenes of people dying, will you care?
BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR - I seem to be hitting on Yuzna more and more these days. It's actually quite common for me to start and end a review saying something like "I think Brian Yuzna is a bit rubbish...etc...etc... so what I'm basically saying is, (insert title) is quite good, really". To be a little clearer, I guess I find him aesthetically a bit flat and pre-empt a fairly joyless experience, only to be won round (sometimes) by some interesting content or haywire quality. For example, I hold him responsible for a certifiable classic of shithouse cinema, 'Faust', and even that one with the cybernetic dog wasn't too much of a waste of time in the end. Anyway, 'Beyond Re-Animator', second sequel to the over-rated 'Re-Animator', is pretty good. It stays its course as a lukewarm but serviceable B-movie for the greater part of its run time, only to wrong-foot the viewer and crescendo to an apex of madness during its final thirty minutes. By 'madness', I actually mean slightly over the top comedy horror of course. What there is of it is enjoyable - flying torsos, exploding torsos, severed heads laughing dementedly, severed penis nuzzled by rat affectionately. Before all that stuff are occasionally inspired scenes such as the one where the prison warden has his ear bitten off, then inexplicably forces a female journalist to get down on all fours and bark like a dog. Why didn't he cry a bit and try to find a bandage like anyone else? The best thing about it is genre stalwart and firm fave of mine Jeff Combs, although he seems a little stiff here and lacking the patent Herb West sneering bravado that makes the first two duds worth sitting through. I could picture him in a bleak Dennis Nilsen biopic, but I suspect that probably wouldn't be Yuzna's thing.
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