THE UNTAMED – Interesting post-genre weirdness that segues indie relationship drama into tentacular sex-beast territory. Confused? Just watch the movie. If you’re into ‘Possession’, a fairly explicit reference point here, you might lap it up. ‘The Untamed’, which follows Ruth in her attempts to deal with her oppressive partnership with brutal Angel and her attraction for free spirit Simone, doesn’t have the unreal vibe of Zulawski’s eighties classic, but it does have a phallic squid being eager to worm its way into human orifices. Come on, that’s pretty good going. If only more contemporary arthouse cinema was like this. Recommended.
THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK – First viewing for me – I really liked it. An Italian psychological thriller from the seventies, it’s obviously derived from Polanski – ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Repulsion’, although interestingly it predates ‘The Tenant’. It stars Mimsy Farmer as an industrial chemist who gets increasingly lost in her own aura of unreality, here made up of hazy childhood memories of her mother (the titular ‘lady in black’) shagging a bad man. Also, there’s a local satanic conspiracy afoot that doesn’t quite seem to be only in her head, but we can’t really tell as TPOTLIB is such a shimmering mirage of a film that it might as well be a rendering of a dream. The narrative might not be all that original, but Francesco Barelli’s visual stylistics and atmospheric sense are so persuasive that you forget all the other references. A great, and superior, companion piece to the likes of ‘All The Colours Of The Dark’, TPOTLIB is a wonderful depiction of suspended reality and is kind of the Giallo stepping beyond itself.
DEVIL’S DOMAIN – About a bulimic teen with shit parents; to make matters worse, she suffers abuse at the hands of a bunch of homophobic WASP high school fascists who humiliate her after she makes a pass at a friend. The devil is available for a Faustian revenge pact in this instance. This could’ve played out as some kind of magical-realist indie drama, but, for better or worse, it’s actually just a trashed out wallow in human misery parenthesized by dumb-ass DTV horror aesthetics. It’s as close to true ‘exploitation’ as movies get these days – the ‘issue angle’ is a convenient springboard for leering shots of someone puking in a toilet bowl, whereas the gay characters are even more weakly portrayed than in mainstream cinema. This in itself makes room for a truly hate-packed first thirty minutes, with seething prom-queen types covertly filming the protagonist wanking and tossing off lines like “I really hope she kills herself when we post this online”. Eventually DD gives itself over to standard genre stylistics, but even so it’s full of craziness, like the bit where our heroine daydreams about an ex-friend menstruating in public. There’s also a reasonable load of gore, delivered by a trio of drooling mongs who randomly crop up whenever the director decides it’s time for another implement-based death scene. Recommended to those who lust after weird, ambiguous shit.
SCHIZO – I think this is probably my fave Pete Walker movie. ‘Frightmare’ might be objectively better, but ‘Schizo’ really captures the curdled, grimy Englishness that runs through all the director’s films. It starts with a haggard guy in Northern UK who takes the train down to London to look for someone from his past; flashbacks show a little girl witnessing the brutal sex-slaying of her mother at the hands of her lover back in the sixties. What follows is a game of cat and mouse sprinkled with a couple of murders and set-pieces ripped off from Gialli movies from around the time – the scene in which a psychic foretells doom is a threadbare version of the one from ‘Deep Red’, except it’s set in an estate community centre where cups of tea are 4p. A bit overlong and sags after an hour or so, but this doesn’t dispel its seedy magnetism. Anyone watching ‘Schizo’ for reasons of clinical accuracy should probably consult a medical dictionary, though. With Stephanie Beacham.
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