Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  A minor Halloween round-up;
NIGHTWISH – A ‘one that got away’ type film from the late eighties – I say that because it’s never been around that much, I mean I’d sort of heard of it before Unearthed put it out on Blu-ray recently, but I’d certainly never clapped eyes. Being from the late eighties, it has that stone-washed-jeans-under-desert-skies look to it, a kind of ad-style slickness even though it’s low budget. That dollar deficit betrays itself in some pleasantly rickety visual effects i.e badly animated ectoplasmic worms, but we also get some good, authentically gloopy stuff from KNB back in their heyday. There’s not really enough of that particular good stuff, but it is worth sitting around for because even the draggy bits are elevated by a certain hokeyness / weirdness – it’s not quite ‘Hellgate’ bizarre, but it is loaded with things going on that feel like they’ve accidentally walked in from other adjacent B-flicks and have decided to stick around to see if it works. It doesn’t, really, but there’s enjoyment to be had in the lop-sidedness of a constant clash between random bugs, cannibalism, finger-hacking and an unreasonable amount of wandering around endlessly with psychic giger-counters. It’s an alternate reality / dream-within-a-dream type set-up, somewhere between ‘Nightmare on Elm Street 3’, ‘Flatliners’ and ‘The Cell’ (though it predates the latter two), in which some dream researchers experiment on themselves to find out what consciousness is like at the moment of death (or something). I liked it.
DHOGS – A sort of meta-movie about some people in a cinema watching a flick about a man abducting a woman and tangling with a murderer before a kid starts messing around with a computer and controlling characters in the movie that he happens to be part of (I think). It’s definitely a comment on media consumption, societal power relationships and representations of violence, but beyond that I can’t tell you. Well made and interesting, but if you just want tits and ketchup I doubt you’ll be that happy.
MANHATTAN BABY – I dunno, I just really like this moronic, senseless film. It’s borderline genius, the way it’s so portentous and yet so flimsy – how did he get away with things like this? It’s really just a load of steals from bigger, better flicks like ‘Poltergeist’ rammed together with total narrative carelessness – “Oh, let’s have some lasers coming out of someone’s eyes in this bit, then maybe someone can get lost behind a mirror or something and come out later as if nothing’s happened” – but maximum cheap style. As always with Fulci, maybe it’s all about those obsessive little trademarks, those close ups of the eyes, the whole look of the thing, the ways the music works. And, of course, the pre-eminence of total f?ck-off bits like the mental stuffed bird attack. Light on gore but heavy on Fulci, and in my (massively zoomed in on) eyes, a success.
3 FROM HELL – Rob Zombie is back with his personal little gang of desperados (minus S Haig, for the most part) for another wallow in a butcher shop world of cool psychos versus fascist squares. It’s pretty entertaining, with some mean-spirited gore in places (though not that much), but it all feels a bit samey. Maybe I shouldn’t grouse, but I get the sense Zombie had another kind of film in mind. I do prefer him when he tries for much more visionary, pretentious stuff – ‘Lords of Salem’, for example, was flawed but on some levels excellent – and the only bit of that kind of playfulness here is a very effective snippet where Baby hallucinates the cat-man personification of her ‘lost innocence’ whilst in prison, a wonderful bit of inspired surrealism.
WOUNDS – Unexpectedly good Nathan Ballingrud adaption – I say that because I wasn’t convinced Ballingrud’s elegant prose and shadowy scenarios, with their pained relationships and sometimes off-page horrors, would translate all that well into Netflix terms. Well, I was wrong on that count – ‘Wounds’ builds a very convincingly ominous atmosphere that finally erupts into disturbing WTFery in its rendering of a New Orleans barkeep’s tangle with weird and inexplicable forces. I really don’t understand all the bad reviews on IMDB at all, this is very moody stuff and I found it quite compelling, I guess with Ballingrud you just need to know that a lot of the time it’s about estrangement and discordant undercurrents rather than people being stabbed by killer dolls, though there is still a bit of gloop in places, esp. cringy if you don’t like cockroaches. Worth a watch, and a read too definitely if you haven’t (it’s based on ‘The Visible Filth’.) |