Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  New Year, new Frankie! Only kidding, I'm still watching the same old shit I've been going on about for the last ten years. Speaking of which...
TRAPPED ALIVE – Early nineties (or late eighties, can’t remember) horror flick that’s set in a cave where a bunch of cons are holding someone’s kidnapped daughter. Sheer terror (not really) ensues when people start dying and a dark back story unravels. In some ways ho-hum, ‘Trapped Alive’ still hits the right buttons for me as it features a deformed semi-slasher / monster, inane performances and a little gore. There’s also something a bit herky-jerky about it that I can’t put my finger on, probably just not very well made.
THE BRAIN – More early nineties / late eighties dreck, this time from Canada, where ever-creepy David Gale is a nefarious TV psychiatrist up to a bit of mind control. Then there’s this, erm Brain that’s kind of behind everything. Good bad era-typical prosthetics and rubber monster stuff is here, though there’s possibly not quite enough of it for my liking. Again, it all has a quite stilted and non-smooth feeling to it, which is actually nice to behold from the vantage of these super-slick times.
SECTA SINIESTRA – Mmm, an odd Spanish flick from the early eighties which concerns itself with a satanic birth and the antics of a bunch of cultists who, you sense, might do better in a very weird sit-com than a supposed horror film. The main strength here is a kind of silliness. It’s played straight, but the horror is undermined by the constant tone of overblown melodrama, betraying the director’s background. The feeling of hysterical soap opera is quite interesting in combination with the genre tropes the makers chuck in - with a surfeit of Bava-lite lighting and rubber bat attacks so blatantly fake they’re on the brink of winky po-mo deconstruction, it’s a baffling affair to say the least. Entertaining, though.
PARASITE – Here’s another odd one. I used to see it around in video shops in the early eighties, when I was too young to ‘get it’, but impressionable enough to be intrigued. I never managed to see it through all the intervening years of my being into horror, so when the blu ray came out recently I waited on tenterhooks to find out what 35 years of wondering ‘what might have been’ amounted to. The short answer to that is – a slow moving flick with some people wandering around some garages, with a parasite, but not much of one. However... it has a certain cheap, bleak atmosphere that resonates a little, and a nice burst-face moment near the finish. I dunno, it's not very good but I was sort of absorbed in a way, though again it might just be nostalgia for eighties street looks amidst the rubble, nuke fear heavy in the background. Sometimes it feels like those times might be coming back. Anyway, a happy ending for Demi Moore at least, ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ was just around the corner.
SPOOKIES – Ha ha, what messed up schlock is this? Another one that passed me by till now, more because I avoided it for fear that it might be total rubbish. Well, it is in a way, but pretty joyous rubbish at that. It seems to be a strange splice of two flicks, one of which is about a guy in a castle waxing lyrical Poe-style about his long-dead true love (and trying to reanimate her), the other involving a small crowd of the usual types who get stranded in old houses in films like this and end up being offed by a bunch of freaks for entertainment purposes. There’s a bit of off-putting faffing about, but then there always is (“hey which passageway shall we explore next? Is that yet another room with nothing in it over there? If we walk towards it slowly, we can get a couple of minutes of non-suspense out of it”). The real draw is the steady onslaught of monster prosthetics, which in some cases are quite imaginative (the spider woman transformation, for example). Aside from that, there’s all the randomness and woodenness that you might want from a film that does not really care about dramatic catharsis, points well made or even basic narrative logic. A triumph of trash that would make a good companion piece to something like ‘Neon Maniacs’. |