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Old 26th July 2018, 08:02 PM
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Frankie Teardrop Frankie Teardrop is offline
Cultist on the Rampage
 
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Leeds, UK
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ALICE, SWEET ALICE – Or ‘Communion’, whichever title floats your boat. Nice to finally see a more-than-watchable version of this – kudos for getting there, 88. And the flick itself remains a firm favourite, its slightly curdled quality undiminished by the HD refurb. I always forget, piranha-faced weirdo Alice grew up to be unstable club witch in ‘Liquid Sky’… here, she’s equally psychopathic as a disgruntled, priest-fixated ex-twin in post-‘Don’t Look Now’ raingear who always seems to be around when people gets moidered. ASA has a creepy undercurrent expressed by various sickly manifestations of church, state and family but somehow best exemplified by big fat opera-listening paedo guy downstairs, a real ‘seventies character’ if ever there was one. Other than that, it’s a fine, downbeat, Hitchcockian ride down the bleak avenues of the soul with self-consciously (I would’ve thought) giallo-esque trimmings.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE – Great L Ramsay take on a hit man's disintegration / possible redemption as he navigates a very ‘Taxi Driver’-esque narrative landscape in search of little girl kidnapped by awful sex freaks. A conspiracy hovers in the background, sort of. But it’s not really about narrative so much, more images, textures, atmospheres, all of which tend towards the weighty and ill-fated… this is firmly in ‘trip through the psyche’ territory, you won’t get the action flick you might’ve been landed with if Jason Statham had been in it, and a good job too… Ramsay is about eerie ellipsis rather than explosions and male angst. Although there is a lot of pain here. Interesting to see her dice with the cringe… that ‘Charlene’ moment, did it work? But otherwise, a frosty trawl along a downward spiral, heartwarming last shot aside. Oh, and J Phoenix is really good in it. Highly recommended.

UNSANE – Forget that old eighties chestnut ‘Shot On Video’, the real hep cats are doing it with their mobiles. This is Steven Soderbergh’s supposedly shot-on-iphone thriller about a psych-hold that goes horribly wrong when Claire Foy is duped into locked-ward fearapy courtesy of her stalker. I liked it – it has a strange quality to it that reminded me of post-‘Psycho’ seventies grindhouse flicks, just that really basic, churning, artificially intense kind of feel… I’m not explaining that very well, but ‘Unsane’ does manage to be pretty impactful in places despite or because of its sparse aesthetics. It runs through a B movie tick list with hyped-up economy and a kind of ruthlessness that left me feeling that it could almost have been intended as a bit of a manifesto. Good, definitely worth checking out.

MOM AND DAD – Can’t resist a bit of N Cage, now firmly embedded in his ‘pay-cheque years’. Here, he gives another slight Cage-parody type performance as an embittered dad whose idea of midlife crisis is to hole up in his cellar, listen to ‘Reagan Youth’ (good choice btw dude) and trash his billiard table. I guess it comes to us all eventually. I should point out that the film itself is about a ‘Crazies’ style outbreak that’s making parents turn vicious on their offspring, a sort of ‘Who Can Kill A Child’ in reverse. Once upon a time this might’ve been a subversive idea, but these days, in a Asda-bound shelf filler with Nick Cage in it… nah. ‘Mom and Dad’ is really quite entertaining, smart and well put together though, so what can I say other than that I enjoyed it and that it held my attention – worth a stab.
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