Hunched over a COVID-infected mince pie with only the most dubious looking of carrots for company, I bring you Frankie's pre-xmas round-up part 2...
WHODUNIT? – New to me this one, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. As the title suggests, it’s a murder mystery (rejigged as a slasher, since it hails from the early eighties) set on an island where a bunch of fairly obnoxious wannabes have gathered to make a film. Whoever is offing them is using the utterly bizarre gimmick of foreshadowing their deaths by way of a new wave song (its lyrics specify the mode of demise)! Top marks for weird invention, and for facilitating the contrived means by which a transistor conveniently appears at the right deathly moment. I also appreciated the fact that there are no likeable characters; this film has more non-stop spitfire venom than Andy Milligan at his most bitter and twisted. What an eccentric little relic.
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2 – Thought I’d better throw in something at least a little bit seasonal. SNDN is one of my fave slashers, and I do appreciate that SNDN2 has saved me the task of watching it again this year, because the first half of its run-time is taken up with condensed footage from the original movie – I would say we’re back in Bruno Mattei territory with that one, but even he wouldn’t have stooped to such a level of cheapness. The rest of it tells the perfunctory tale of brother-of-crazed-murderer-turns-to-murder-himself, but the delivery is fairly mind-boggling, with a central performance that begins as a basically standard depiction of a killer in jail and ends as an absolutely bizarre rendition of a man walking around shooting everyone and in sight whilst wiggling his eyebrows and going “hur hur hur… naughty”… endlessly. Totally trashy and pretty fun if you can dodge that feeling of being ever so slightly cheated.
REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRLS – Saucy French horror from the eighties, but don’t expect any languorous poete maudit schtick a la Jean Rollin, ROTLDG has its feet firmly on / in the graveyard soil… sort of. Actually, it is pretty wacky, managing to shoehorn a plot about small-time industrial intrigue in a French village (!) into a storyline about the zombification of the dead via industrial waste. Along the way are bits of convenient nudity and snatches of repulsive gore… Severin (purveyors of this blu-ray) clearly have a bit of a thing about vag-impalement, see ‘Patrick Viva Ancora’, another recent one of theirs). Ages since I last saw it, still quite a baffling little morsel, even / especially ‘that ending’.
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