THE BABY – This used to be on TV all the time when I was a kid. I remember always feeling a bit apprehensive about watching it, because it really used to creep me out. Still does, pretty much. ‘The Baby’ tells of a social worker who is concerned about this guy who’s essentially been kidnapped by his own family and forced to live as an infant. He’s an adult, but his identity has been diaper based for the last twenty odd years. Getting him away from the vicious harridans who surround him would be a good idea, but does our seemingly well-meaning county official have even more awful designs of her own? One of those seventies flicks that seems poised between TV movie and psychedelic grime-fest. It’s not very explicit, but the concept itself is unsettling. I like how ‘baby’s voice is (badly) post-dubbed… although this seems a bit muted on the Severin Blu ray I watched. Maybe my imagination, films like this certainly take on an afterglow when you see them at an impressionable age. Still a bleak, bleak sickie after all these years, and very much recommended.
THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN – Shaw Bros rip-off of the mid seventies Kong revival. I’d watch this over the 1976 King Kong remake any day. It’s just a riot from start to finish. I mean, where do you start? Every second scene sees a bad miniature being trashed by a man in a gorilla mask, or finds room for a shitly done back projection. The latter is an endearing device employed a bit too often by TMPM, starkly revealed in all its ill thought-through cheapness by the wonders of HD. I think the hook for me is the hysterical tone… it’s there throughout, even during the less busy ‘jungle’ scenes, but bursts into life when we reach civilisation. TMPM may have lead characters and so forth, but equal weight is given to anonymous crowds running and screaming in the shadow of the towering monster. Who, of course, is never very far from being just a dude in a monkey costume on a badly designed set. One thing that gives me a bit of faith in ploughing through all this stuff is, it’s strange, you can make an objectively shit movie but in some unfathomable way it’s genuinely amazing.
TROLL 2 – Speaking of which, ‘Troll 2’ is considered the holy grail of bad movies by a lot of people, but it’s fair to say it’s actually nowhere near the true bottom of the barrel. It ends up with the ‘lovably awful’ tag slapped on it by those who can’t be bothered to work out why it’s so special. I could accuse myself of the same, because ‘Troll 2’ is pretty special, but I can’t figure it out. It is a very weird film, actually. I was trying to explain its attractions to a friend the other day, and I really found myself floundering… “OK, it’s like a fairy tale, deliberately like a fairy tale, only they get it wrong because then they try to make it seem like they’re making a comedy, but really you’re not sure what the intentions are so maybe it’s not deliberately anything, because… well, it’s directed by Claudio Fragasso so etc etc…” Personally, I just let it wash over me in a haze of kids pissing on the dinner table, awful troll masks, back room sermons where meat is reviled and ridiculous popcorn based sex scenes. There’s the perfect balance of possible knowingness and really obvious dumbness about it to make it always a mystery somehow.
BODY PUZZLE – A late sort-of giallo by Lamberto Bava. It’s about a killer who’s trying to retain the memory of his dead lover by murdering organ recipients for their body parts; a cop gets romantically involved with a woman at the centre of the mystery. ‘Body Puzzle’ feels pretty slickly done. Despite the corny characterisations and bad lines, it has more in common with early nineties American thrillers than late Italo horror, aesthetically anyway. There are some bizarro touches that mark it out as being in more gonzo territory, however – the killer always murdering to classical music, the weirdness of the central concept (which the film doesn’t really live up to), the progressively idiotic twists, set-pieces like the teacher being murdered in front of a classroom of kids who sit around laughing… it all adds up to propel ‘Body Puzzle’ away from the police procedural it sometimes threatens to resemble. In the end, enjoyable nineties schlock.
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