RAWHEAD REX – I love 'Rawhead Rex'! It's a bit rubbish, though! In fact, it's awful. That's the brutal truth. To get into this adaption thing again, it really doesn't make any sense to compare Barker's short story to this woeful cast-off. I have a loathe-love relationship with Barker's prose at times – this goes back to 'The Books Of Blood'. I can find him awe-inspiring, or I can get dismissive, possibly out of jealousy, but sometimes out of frustration. 'Rawhead Rex' (the story) isn't one of Barker's more out-there numbers, but it does have the virtue of being straightforward enough to make for relatively easy visual translation. In principal. In reality, when the 'translators' (G Pavlou et al) speak the visual language of an Inspector Morse episode crossed with a shite rock video, perhaps something is lost. Or gained! Because that's what you get, a kind of late eighties / early nineties Brit-TV feel coupled with dismal visuals which, in collusion with often dire acting and a really horrible, inappropriate overblown orchestral score, make for quite a pungent brew, if one which Clive might not exactly have imbibed himself. For the uninitiated, it's about a pre-christian deity who rises from the earth in rural Ireland in order to lay waste to the countryside. Only the power of Danu herself can stop this guy! Some of the more subversive aspects of CB's story are left in the shadows and not fully drawn out, but we do get odd lurches into semi-transgression (piss-on-a-priest bit is there). Rawhead himself looks pretty sorrowful, a wolf-gorilla troll doll refugee from some kind of gypsy-metal video. It drags in places, but it's ripe enough to do it for me. Again, it's all about a specific feeling, one you don't get every day (because they got it so, so wrong). Never really got a definitive DVD / BD release, but the prices on Amazon are generally shocking.
NECROPOLIS - Pretty wretched bit of dreck which I have developed an unhealthy affection for, having sat through it three times over the years (which is three times too many for any reasonable human being). Sometimes I think I see things in these films that don't really exist – maybe bad should just be bad. But 'Necropolis', sloppily tacked together as it is, somehow for me has this elusive, off-hand quality to it which makes it seem elliptical when it should just be clunky. I guess that's because things happen in it which are all a bit out of sync, and sometimes just aren't explained. What's it about? A 17th century witch who is reincarnated as an eighties NYC biker-goth. When we meet her 'back in the day' she's wearing lycra and doing bombastic disco moves! Fast forward to the eighties and she's a leathered up crop haired punkette who goes around intimidating the owners of magic shops with her psychic powers. She has an entourage of icky zombie cultists who aren't in it much, and seems to make jizz leak out of people's heads when she snuffs them. A New York priest, also reincarnated from way back when, is on her case, and so is an uptight British reporter. It has that shitty, grotty New York eighties thing so beloved of myself because, well, it's not like I had to live there at the time, period synth music, and just that whole sketchy wonkiness. T Kinkaid's name crops up in the credits, and it does have something of a tinge of 'Breeders' to it. Christ, I actually wrote that last sentence. What's happening to me? How can anyone compare anything to 'Breeders' and mean it? Seriously, something's wrong!
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