SYMPTOMS – Jose Larraz had an interesting career. Before he made slightly porny films about satanism a la 'Black Candles', he directed this exquisite gem which has to be the ultimate seventies horror sleeper. In it, moon faced Angela Pleasance gets a bit weird in an isolated mansion and Peter Vaughan hangs around being sinister. There's not much to it plot wise, and in fact not a great deal happens until the slightly overwrought climax, but 'Symptoms' is resplendently heavy on atmosphere. Visually, and just in terms of 'feeling', 'Symptoms' practically redefines 'Autumnal', being a film where every nuance and every pause is surrounded by a far-off but somehow menacing haze. I've seen it before on Youtube and I think I reviewed it at the time, but I didn't go mad for it until now, which I think is probably down to BFI doing such a great job on it. In the wrong frame of mind it could be boring, but I can only say that I watched it twice in a row (something I almost never do) and was transfixed each time. Surely up there with the best of seventies cinema full stop, 'Symptoms' is simply a must-see.
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS – Was nice to catch up with this bit of classic Carpenter once again. For the uninitiated, Sam Neil plays a private investigator tracking an elusive horror novelist whose fiction appears to be altering reality in a worryingly Lovecraftian manner. Yep, it's pretty ludicrous, but if there's room for Ken Loach then there should be room for garish, over heated pulp like this. There may not be much of a dramatic catharsis for the characters in this film, but the shortfall is more than made up for by some satisfyingly tentacular action and Carpenter's usual visual panache (though I thought there were a couple of nods to D Lynch here and there, but then I always say that). Nineties horror was a pretty shoddy affair, but here Carpenter, shining for the last time, showed them all how to do it.
INFERNO – Can't go wrong with 'Inferno', possibly Argento's greatest (yeah, sue me) and a head spinning journey into the possibilities of horror set free from narrative concern. Well, there is a story of course, but its sole purpose is to give some validity to this 'Three Mothers' hokum and to hold together a bunch of sequences and vignettes which are more about visuals, lighting and camera work than plot development. That's not to say that 'Inferno' is shallow, just that its depths are cryptic and associative rather than based around psychology, character etc. It's a spiderweb of ambiguous symbols and references that hints at something genuinely nightmarish lurking beyond the wooden acting and throwaway dialogue. Witness that killer montage of black gloved hands decapitating a row of paper figures, an unidentified woman hanging herself and a lizard eating a moth... what's going on there? Still so enigmatic after all these years, and it amazes me that a major studio put this out. These days, it wouldn't even get made.
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