Frankie's pre-xmas round-up - the third and final chapter... here comes Santa to give you all your prezzies in one tidy review;
MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE – Pioneering eco-slasher, which for some reason I’ve always had a bit of a soft-spot for ever since I saw it on one of those crappy public domain-type “five for a pound… on one disc” jobs ten or fifteen years ago. Wouldn’t say I’ve revisited it that often since, but Vinegar Syndrome have come along to put everyone’s mind at rest with a definitive restoration. Who’d have thought in the early days of digital media that stuff like this would get such a deluxe boutique refurbishment? Maybe I’m naïve, but it’s so weird. I’m not complaining though, obviously. MVM is what it is, an arguably tongue-in-cheek daylit horror which has unaccountably chosen its would-be slasher in the form of a very clean looking Stig-of-the-dump type who seems keen to impose his wrath on campers and business guys who are spoiling a beauty spot. Not much ‘proper horror’ in the end maybe, and the killer arouses sympathy more than fearful awe, but the film is as much quirky as it’s questionably competent, although there’s a misplaced clever-cleverness to it that grates a bit. Weird shit from yesteryear.
FOES – Quite a find for me, an odd and genuinely eerie film about a UFO encounter on a bleak and windswept beach. Rather than take the ‘Close Encounters’ route and let the cosmic good vibes roll, ‘Foes’ allows us to peek at an altogether more sinister version of what it might be like to meet an extra-terrestrial intelligence in drug-addled seventies California. We follow some coastal types as they check out what’s going down with all these weird objects in the sky – a sparse, oddly empty-feeling narrative unfolds (I watched the director’s cut, the theatrical release is longer but padded out with ‘plot-enhancement’ via lots of scenes in a military complex). The special effects are great – I’m not really talking about the flying saucer, more the light-based visuals, they’re very simple but suggest something really eerie and maybe a bit hellish. A quiet, threadbare but affecting little movie.
GEMINI – From Shinya Tsukamoto, so you might expect a blizzard of harsh camera moves and cyborgs gone-wrong; ‘Gemini’, however, is several steps beyond ‘Tetsuo’ and much of his early stuff. It’s actually quite sedate, at first at least. A small-town doctor is adored by his patients, but his world falls apart when his folks die under mysterious circumstances and a doppelganger inserts itself into his life. ‘Gemini’ is really very nice to look at and uses an overload of Bava-esque lighting to push even some of its more innocuous moments towards a kind of delirium, minus the director’s hyperkinetic tendency (which I sometimes find a bit wearying looking back on it these days, to be honest). It’s never very clear whether it’s all a kind of psycho-dramatic externalisation of the lead character’s internal conflict, more of a thriller-type plot, or even something more supernatural, but in that respect ‘Gemini’ plays well on its enigma. A pungent exercise in atmosphere – fans of the director should like it.
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