Another week off, and I'm faced with the stark choice of either doing something with my social life and being creative, or on the other hand binging on a massive pile of DVDs. Hmm, wonder which way it'll go.
HIDE AND SEEK - Good ghost / or is it? film with Robert De Niro as a psychologist trying to deal with his wife's recent suicide. Things get murky when his daughter meets her new imaginary / or is it? playmate. Well made mainstream horror that tangles with the usual haunting-type tropes, but manages to sustain a fair level of suspense and deliver a few genuinely creepy moments. It does however lose it slightly in the last twenty or thirty minutes or so with the big reveal being a little underwhelming (and just not very plausible, not that I'm big on straight realism), and too easily dispensed with. Still, I enjoyed it for the most part.
LITAN - This would be a kind of standard horror flick... if it played in the cinemas and on the screens of a twisted world designed by Thomas Ligotti and Andrej Zuwalski. As it's from our own somewhat blander universe, it seems pretty messed up. A plot weaves in and out of narrative coherence and has something to do with a man and a woman running around gothic hospitals, caves and derelict factories whilst pursued by a cynical cop (called Bollek?) and a health inspector who seems to be involved with experimental contact with the dead. All the while cryptic symbols abound, masked figures cavort, strange encounters happen, people act bizarrely, and blue laser effect entities dart around in underground pools. It's French, but it looks like it's set in my mind's eye version of a supernatural East European slum. A real find - the director has done loads of films little seen, it seems, outside France or festivals. Recommended, but I think it's only really available 'on the grey market', haven't checked out YTube.
CHERRY 2000 - Cool eighties sci-fi satire with Melanie Griffith as a future gun-for-hire type who helps a heartbroken yuppie search the desert badlands for a replacement love droid. I like eighties imaginings of the future, despite them inevitably looking, well, quite eighties. Maybe the eighties was the future we never quite got back from. Food for thought. Anyway, I like Melanie Griffith and I love her voice, and 'Cherry 2000' gets the thumbs up from Frankie.
THEATRE OF FEAR - I was quite prepared to loath and dismiss this Poundland offering, but 'Theatre Of Fear' turned out to be quite an odd little film. It's about a circus troupe who collectively are quite into murder. What marks TOF out is its approach - glumly British (well, it's Welsh but I'm not about to get into socio-political disputes at this point) and subdued, despite obvious stabs at black humour. A lot of Brit horror still has one foot in dour social realism, and actually I really like that - stuff like 'F', 'Dead Creatures', 'Eden Lake', 'Mum And Dad' all feature that tension between bleak greyness and more grotesque elements. Here, the filmmakers seem more interested in following the ups and downs of the murderous entertainer's daily lives and relationships rather than going for an obvious heroes, villains, suspense, pay-off kind of route. This gives it the weirdly soap operatic quality noted by one reviewer (possibly the only other reviewer, I can well imagine this to have debuted in £land). In the end I really quite liked it. Check it out if it's still around for a pound - it may seem a bit grating at first and there isn't all that much grand guignol on show, but 'Theatre Of Fear' strikes me as way more interesting and off beat than the average direct to DVD pick up.
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