THE HILLS HAVE EYES – It's cannibals versus the suburbs in Craven's dust bowl chiller from '77. A whitebread American family head out into the desert and, ending up stranded in a military testing zone, find themselves at the mercy of a clan of flesh eating thieves. THHE benefits from windswept locations and an eerie synthesiser score, both ramping up the atmosphere of pulsating menace as M Berryman et al set about picking off them thar city folk. THHE was clearly made in the shadow of TCM, a film which surpasses it on the level of raw horror and emotional savagery. In some ways though, THHE is a slightly more thoughtful meditation on the violence that lies at the heart of conventional society, a line which Craven takes up from his controversial debut more than TCM. I do prefer the go-for-the-jugular sleaze of 'Last House on the Left', and you can see that with THHE Craven was trying to court a wider audience. But the film's no less effective for that, and, whilst it maybe can't be considered top ranking seventies horror, it's within spitting distance.
SCALPS – A Fred Olen Ray film from before the time when everything he churned out was sub-Troma camp. Seriousness in horror does have its virtues, but doesn't automatically guarantee a good movie. 'Scalps' isn't very good, objectively speaking, but I like it. I won't spend much time on it here as I've reviewed it before in the last two or three years, but I did happen to watch the newish blu ray the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find that my memories of its stark, weird atmosphere were confirmed. On the downside, 'Scalps' offers shoddy construction, bad editing / acting and is arguably boring for a big part of its run time. However, it ties in with 'The Hills Have Eyes' in that it manages to generate quite a sinister tone just by dint of its eerie desert locations and discordant electronic soundtrack. On top of this, it has this freaky Indian demon guy with a horribly gnarled face running around doing the slashing, aided and abetted by odd supernatural visuals. Cheesy maybe, but with an underlying grimness. I was really spooked out by the first few minutes, too, with that lion-headed spirit waiting on the hillside. Funny how some flicks just get under your skin.
AMERICAN PSYCHO – Mary Harron's adaption of the Brett Easton Ellis novel has a lot going for it, but veracity to the source material probably isn't one. Not that the book was very filmable – it's power in one sense lay in something pretty abstract, in the clash between numbingly repetitive descriptions of consumer status goods and splashes of porno-violence. Thankfully, Harron manages to stay faithful to the satirical tone of the novel by taking it on as a chilly, alienated black comedy, and it's good that she did that because a genre approach wouldn't have worked and a full-on avant garde one probably wouldn't have even been made. C Bale is pretty good as Bateman, the plastic narcissist who likes to chop up hookers to the strains of Hewey Lewis and the News, and the film delivers an effective portrayal of the strange, dehumanised world of Yuppie America at the tail end of the eighties. We have yet to emerge from the shadows of that time – prophetically, there are at least two references to Donald Trump years before his political 'ascendency'. Anyway, soapboxing aside, you can't speak ill of a film which features three way shagging soundtracked by P Collins' 'Sussudio'.
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