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Old 14th September 2015, 07:07 AM
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Eaten Alive (Death Trap)

Neville Brand is a Hotel Keeper living out near the swamps with an enormous Crocodile. One night a hooker, thrown out of her cat house for refusing Robert Englund's demands for Anal sex, heads out to his hotel to spend the night. Brand wants 'none of that sort of thing' and promptly kills her with a rake and feeds her to the Croc. Pretty soon a young family turn up as does the hookers family and poor old Neville will likely need to kill again.

Death trap arrives on Blu-ray finally looking like it does, previous releases looked far to washed out and battered to really get across how the film should look. Hooper always intended a surreal, southern-gothic fairytale atmosphere to the film with a lurid, unreal colour scheme that makes the film look like pages from an E.C horror comic. The film is full of odd moments and characters, chiefly Brands character who seems to be perpetually wired from the coke that Englunds cowboy is supplying in exchange for use of his rooms. Maralyn Burns & William Finley play a couple who seem almost as outright weird. Burns character is a pill popping neurotic who wears a wig for no explicable reason and Finley seems to be tripping on something, constantly lapsing into weird moments where he believes he's lost his own eye and begins looking around the floor for it. The fact that he has a shotgun and shells lying around in the trunk next to the family luggage is somewhat worrying. Robert Englund is also terrific as the local ladies man buck, who seems to veer from playful man-child to ruthless, angry psychotic at the flip of a switch.

Death trap has some problems, mainly due to the chaotic nature of the production where Hooper ultimately walked off due to interference, certain moments don't work as well as they should. Dath Trap is an underrated film hower and deserves a reappraisal. The fact that a number of its harsher critics may have only seen the film in battered washed out prints probably factors in to this. Hopefully Arrows Blu-ray will change some minds.


Hard to be a god

On a distant planet, scientists from earth live among the medieval locals as gods thanks to their advanced knowledge, quietly they guide the locals to civilisation. However, its hard to be a god, especially when the locals are seen to be barbaric and difficult. One lord has begun a 'cultural revolution' after society threatened to enter a renaissance and the scientists are carefully shelterting and saving the intellectuals and artists the lord is having murderd. One scientist is seemingly 'going native' and has begun a relationship with a local woman, he struggles with trying to limit his interference with the locals culture and slowly things begin to unravel.

Hard to be a god will be a difficult film for some. Combined with the almost 3 hour running time Aleksey German delivers a film that has a style that may bewilder some of the audience. Every scene is densely layered, dialogue overlaps, in some scenes we enter mid way through. the camera seems to act as another camera, cast members seem aware of its presence and even look directly at it. Partly this is explained by the fact the scientists have cameras in built and we may be seeing through them, but combined with the theatricality of the performances and the strange movements of the camera it left me not quite knowing where I was in some scenes. The muddy, piss and shit caked sets that seem to perpetually rain look magnificently disgusting as do the unusual and grotesque characters the director fills the frame with. Overall though it worked for me as an immersive piece of cinema that given its subject matter on the difficulties of interfering with other cultures seems very relavant today. Certainly worth giving a chance to.
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