MUTILATIONS – Yesterday's real bargain basement stuff, especially from the seventies, eighties and nineties, tended to go two ways. Either you got really unabashed, punkish weirdness with no aspiration to conventional cinema – e.g 'Black Devil Doll From Hell', 'Alien Beasts' etc etc – or you got the kind of film made by, I guess, 'amateur professionals', the sort of people who didn't necessarily burn with outsider visions, but just wanted to do a good job to the best of their abilities. 'Mutilations' is in the latter category. It's the story of a college professor, his students, some cattle mutilations and some bad-ass aliens. You can probably tell already where it's going – professor and students head out into the wilds and before long they're trapped in a house by an unconvincing creature with a rubbish space craft. See, minimal resources, minimal story, it's kind of fitting. 'Mutilations' is awful. But it might be the kind of 'awful' that tickles your imagination. The performances, for a start: the level of actorly expression here is so deficient that everyone involved wouldn't seem out of place in some kind of specialist clinic. Wooden isn't the word. Blank isn't the word. I'm searching for the word, but it isn't coming. Already, 'Mutilations' is feeling like a whole world unto itself. The actual sci-fi horror aspects, the alien stuff, it's all pretty badly done, but it's the kind of 'analogue badness' that warms the cockles of today's movie geeks. I'm talking about rubbishly rendered stop motion claymation, lame but absolutely laboured over. Look, where else can you see a heavily mutilated plasticene cow flap about whilst everyone involved in the same scene suddenly becomes part of a really crude back-projection? Yes, they used back projection as a way of fitting in their obviously scaled down models, and it sucks, but it looks so strange. Will it take you out of the movie? I don't know if anyone can 'get inside' a movie like 'Mutilations'. In as much as a really well made, engaging film can become an immersive experience where you almost forget about real time, films like 'Mutilations' are the opposite, objects to be contemplated and beheld from the outside, films which have their own internal logic but which don't really ever let you 'in' because they seem too artificial – at every turn, the badness reminds you that you're watching a movie. 'Mutilations' might be badness personified, but it's at the very least endearing, and maybe for some (including me), really enjoyable. As with all films whose badness is so obvious that it has a distorting effect, you're never quite sure whether you've been had, whether it's all kind of deliberate, an attempt at camp. Is it ever OK for an old dude with a shotgun to yell “eat my biscuits, blood sucker” at a feeble plasticene alien before opening fire? Moments like that seem a bit too knowing, and make you question everything you've witnessed. After all, it's hard to truly like a bad film which is intended that way. But I'll defintely give 'Mutilations' the benefit of the doubt on that one.
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