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Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  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. |
I'm glad you mentioned that
Schizo sags in the middle, i was thinking as i was reading your words 'Oh Frankie, it's just too long for such high praise' but you mention this so you redeem yourself. It's certainly gloomy and terribly Grittish, using Jack Watson as a red herring throughout.
It's not my favourite Pete Walker film by any stretch of the imagination. That honour goes to
Frightmare,
The Flesh and Blood Show and
Man of Violence, but like so much, no, all of Walkers work is a must have for any serious collector.
This
Devil's Domain thing? Is it on dvd or bollocks like Prime?