MIDSOMMMAR – Mmm, liked it more than ‘Hereditary’. Once again, a slow build, but this time all that portentousness isn’t blown on a climax full of ‘Insidious’ type thrills. Drippy co-dependent Florence Pugh looks for love inside a traditional rural community of significant anthropological interest. The film’s slowly swelling arc of shadowy weirdness brings us a bit of horrible gore and a pretty crazy group-mating ritual. I dunno, all this radical collectivism and hiding within the guts of bears could be either the essence of arcady or the nadir of fascism, depending how you butter your bread. Is it the anti-‘Wicker Man’, or just a bit like ‘The Wicker Man’? Like ABC’s Martin Fry, “If I knew, I would tell you.”
THE DEAD CENTRE – A man, seemingly back from death via suicide, turns up in a psyche ward. There’s stuff about bad, bad things going on inside him. Can an intrepid psychiatrist sort all this shit out before something vaguely Lovecraftian and formless but nightmarish happens? ‘The Dead Centre’ is quite atmospheric in places and occasionally does manage to capture something of the sense of dread it seems to want to evoke. I couldn’t help but think it played a bit flat sometimes, and that maybe the set-up was a little too conventional for a film of its ambition. But worth a watch for sure, and, in my case, a re-watch.
ANIARA – A space vessel escapes a gone-way-down-hill Earth and heads for a planet where a bunch of people can start again. Something happens, and it gets thrown off course – the occupants are faced with the nightmare of their existence in a cold, icy void. Plus, it’s all a bit like being in a shopping mall until people unravel and start holding ritual sex raves and the like. The source material here has a long and illustrious history in Swedish culture, but ‘Aniara’ feels kind of post-Wheatley’s ‘High Rise’. It’s no less thought provoking for addressing similar themes. Come, stare into the abyss, it’s shit in space.
TERROR TRAIN – Well, I love a good slasher of a certain vintage, and it’s been ages with this one. I mean, I think I’d only really seen it once before, and frankly could remember jack all about it save that it involved a train and, erm… terror? I was really absorbed for the first half hour or so, and the film has indubitable strong points in the form of great gothicy type images of the weirdly Victorian steam train billowing through landscapes of blue and black, and by extension a hard to place vibe of old-meets-new (for the time) horror tropes. Add to this the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, a plethora of era specific trends, and David Copperfield going around doing gimmicky stuff. On the downside, I’m too impatient these days to go through the inevitable drag without taking points off, and unfortunately ‘Terror Train’ fails to capitalise on the good stuff and ends up doing nothing for long stretches. Still, I’m sentimental and nostalgic enough to constantly go for this kind of thing… just remember to pack a good book if you decide to take this particular journey.
THE HOUSE OF MORTAL SIN – On the other hand, I always thought of THOMS as being one of the more tepid Walker movies, but, seeing it the other day, I was well into it. Dunno why, just that strong sense of the creepiness underlying seventies high-street Britain’s dowdy façade, all these dull, compressed lives breeding poison and despair. Also, I can sort of pick up more these days on ‘film-making sophistication’ if you like, just a sense of how well made or not a film is for a given era, and, like a lot of Walker’s stuff, it’s really slick and thought-out set alongside a lot of other low budget flicks from its milieu. A bad priest gets involved in blackmail and murder – although it sounds like a thriller, narratively and atmospherically it’s a horror film. All highly charged and worthy of its place alongside his other stuff.
CHILD’S PLAY – The remake. ‘Entertaining but a bit overrated’ is how I usually describe the original. This one is better, actually – there’s interesting stuff going on about social issues, I mean it’s not a lecture but it has some kind of political content, and, more to the point, even though Brad Dourif is one of my all-time fave actors broadly, in this case I preferred Hamill’s creepy manifestation of AI gone-wrong. There’s also a bit of gore to temper the slightly too feel-goody type vibe of gritty young uns getting together to stick it to The Man (here, Chucky is kind of the personification of enforced infantilization under consumer capitalism). Good, enjoyable etc.
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