LUTHER THE GEEK – From Carlton Albright, who also made the cock-eyed horror gem 'The Children' – c'mon Vinegar Syndrome, how about it? Anyway, 'Luther' is a kind of late eighties slasher I guess, and in its favour you can say that they got the bad guy right – the freak in question is a paroled con whose mind was warped by a childhood carnival incident involving a Richard Hell lookalike doing some hardcore geekery to a hen. OK, sounds a bit samey, but he clucks like a chicken and looks like a weird cross between Francis Dolarhyde, Johnny Rotten and a pissed off Hugh Laurie! Very good. Once out of the slammer, he gets right on it and bites out the throat of a granny at the local supermarket after offering her an egg... quite a surreal moment, but the film is peppered with them, not least the insane 'duelling cockerels' climax which needs to be seen to be believed. There's a bit of padding, but it's also quite pacey. Really worth getting, especially if you've only ever seen the rubbish Troma DVD.
THE THING – The remake. I seem to remember loads of people dissing this for daring to defile their memory of the classic Carpenter version with nasty CGI. I don't really care about that sort of thing. This 'Thing' falls short of the 1982 one because it can't quite match the balefully paranoid vibes sent out by the latter, but, for what it is, it's pretty good. Of note, those CGI mutations, well, they kind of do it for me. They're pretty loathsome and give you what you want if you're up for some gross biomorphic flesh warping. It's well put together and is visually quite lush, even if it doesn't particularly go anywhere with its source material. Mary Winstead is good in the lead role, and seems generally nicer to be around than craggy Kurt Russell.
EMBODIMENT OF EVIL – Contemporary Coffin Joe film which seems keen to cash in on prevailing horror trends of its day (namely, torture porn and that bit in the mid to late noughties when everything seemed to get really gory). Here, CJ has been released from prison and is on the lookout for a female receptacle for his mighty, god defying sperm (or, he wants a kid). He's spewing his usual cod-Nietzschean bollox about how beyond good and evil he is, which is entertaining, I think the genre needs more examples of this kind of this kind of half baked bar room philosophising. Though it would get a bit boring unless accompanied by a load of gore and exploitation, which happily is the case here. There's lots of nudity, bloodshed and bad taste on show, including show stoppers like a vaginal excavation by rat. More than this, the film is just simply ludicrous for the most part, and I lost count of the 'huh?' moments, like the one where an entire roomful of cops beats up a single female lawyer for doing something fairly minor. Needless to say, there is no attempt at even a semblance of internal logic here, which explains why CJ, despite being a raving misogynist who is physically unattractive, is constantly surrounded by a crowd of dewy eyed minxes, and in fact it all comes off as a particularly deranged Nuts reader's fantasy. It's done with a slight nod and a wink, for better or worse, and feels like it should be more badly made than it is. Jose Marins has made some genuinely creepy, effective and psychedelic movies in his time, and this one doesn't really capture him at full tilt, but is worth catching for its excesses and general idiocy.
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