SPLINTER – Flab free indie monster movie delivers action, splatter and a siege-with-a-Thing. 'Splinter' features a conceptually interesting creature made up of random body parts and malevolent iron filings, although it revs itself up as a hostage drama before any of the weird shit goes down. A very good example of kind of latter day B movie you wish they all were – taut, chiselled and hard boiled. Don't waste my time with your lame exposition, just put some terrified people in a room, get 'em horny, then kill 'em all. Groovy.
THE PSYCHIC KILLER – Twisted momma's boy takes psychic revenge on the quivering no-marks who fitted him up for murder. Macho detective and sensitive psych-doc look desperately for meaning amidst the madness, but find only Kirlian photographs and Neville Brand's hand in a mincer. Meanwhile, a sleazy nurse teases a dying man then gets burned up in a shower whilst a medic goes oedipal . Highly reliable drive-in era relic which always makes for an enjoyable revisit. My old Vipco disc looked weirdly OK.
CHASING SLEEP – Jeff Daniels is a man with problems – his wife's gone missing, he hasn't slept in days and everything just seems a bit weird. Weird in a kind of 'The D Lynch guide to imagery' sense, which means we get slowly evolving close ups of ominous looking holes and glimpses of groaning, sweating pips which seem to sign “plumbing, but still nightmarish, and dead, dead meaningful”. All the while he's scrambling around, necking handfuls of pills as he tries to figure out the mystery of it all. 'Chasing Sleep' is a fairly diverting thriller, although I liked it less than when I first saw it a few years ago. It can't quite reconcile its surrealistic leanings with a meat and potatoes plot, and it undercuts itself atmospherically by involving too many characters – most of its power comes from the claustrophobia of Daniels being stuck home alone. Still good though, and deserves a wider audience – so see it.
THE FOURTH MAN – Another thriller with loads of overstylised imagery, 'The Fourth Man' comes from Paul Verhoeven and was made before he went to Hollywood. It's about a misanthropic writer who does a kind of 'Trojan seduction' on a book club secretary when he realises that a guy he was glancingly infatuated with on a train is in fact her boyfriend. He later learns that book clubber might be a twisted 'black widow' type. Verhoeven has said that he made 'The Fourth Man' to take the piss out of 'art house' critics in Holland who rejected the realism of his earlier films – certainly, the imagery seems laid on with a trowel, deliberately cryptic rather than dream like, and again this grates a litte alongside the Hitchcockian narrative. But it's an alluring and intoxicating film, occasionally a bit irritating when you pause to consider Verhoeven's inherent smugness, but hey, that's the way it is with that guy, the anti-Haneke.
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