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Old 18th October 2020, 03:36 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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THE LONG ISLAND CANNIBAL MASSACRE – I always think of Nathan Schiff as one of the microbudget pioneers, in the sense that there’s a whole substratum of horror made by fans rather than by full-on cineastes, underground provocateurs or people looking for a break. Whether that view holds up or not, there’s a very strong sense that Schiff’s films, if not the first of their kind, are at least unique. They practically define the ‘back yard epic’, for that’s almost literally what they are. TLICM is probably the strongest of his first three films. It starts with a guy who sets out to uncover the mystery of a corpse he finds on a beach, and ends up as an ode to another man’s tainted relationship with his father, an actual monster with a head not unlike a huge green rubber turd. Along the way we see lots of delicious 8mm sunsets and windswept wasteland, all of which sets the picturesque scene for some pretty icky gore. Performances are wooden to the point where they seem deliberately comedic; I don’t think they’re intended to come across that way, although one slightly off-putting aspect of TLICM is the sense that you’re seeing someone’s mates hanging out and having a laugh. A couple of other things take me out of TLICM a little, like the omnipresent, screechy library music; again, you could call it charm. But there are some absolutely wonderful sequences, like the one where the main psycho has a conversation with a bagful of remains that starts crying ‘tears of blood’, or the whole left turn into twisted psychodrama with its chainsaw-facilitated conclusion, not to mention the startling image at the end, when the father’s brood gets to chow down. Who in their right minds saw that coming?
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