Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  SILENT SCREAM – A bunch of college kids get stabbed in an old mansion by the sea. It’s a picturesque mood piece that goes more for a sense of windswept mystery than bloodbath excess – I was reminded of ‘Black Christmas’ in a way, that kind of pre-slasher feel together with a certain off-handedness of tone, the setting and the back-story both lending a semi-gothic accent. It’s maybe a little too drawn-out to be utterly engrossing, although there are plenty of long shadows and cobwebby corners for those who, like me, enjoy a certain kind of atmosphere. The whole thing shifts up a gear when Barbara Steele enters the stage. She’s just such a magnetic persona that her presence can’t help but transform the very nature of the film.
THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD – Yet more early eighties American college students, this time doing something in an old campus building, I forget what exactly. Everything’s closing down, there’s a vague ‘Assault On Precinct 13’ feeling in the air; that’s as far as the comparison goes, this is strictly by-the-numbers-slasher territory when all’s said and done. What marks it out is a kind of grotty feel. Its landscape is made up of deserted buildings of a concrete brutalist hue, and the 16mm production brings a gritty, slightly soiled texture to everything, amping up a rote exercise into something that seems a bit more atmospheric. There is a little bit of gore alongside your basic corridor-wandering.
WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS – Despite an interesting setting (late eighties US, at the height of the ‘heavy metal is satanic’ debacle), ‘We Summon The Darkness’ doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s a bit of gore here and there, a few nice curveballs and a satirical (but not very well elaborated) context that seems to want to deal with the horrors of the religious right, but the main flaws are around narrative clunkiness and an abiding sense of ‘it just wouldn’t happen that way’. I’m obviously no stranger to films where ‘pretty much all of this shit just absolutely would not happen in any way whatsoever’, but WSTD is well-made and aspires to present a cursory realism for its audience to sink into whilst the horrors unfold, so something a bit tighter and less ‘convenient’ was required. For those willing and able to overlook such drawbacks, WSTD may still hold a bit of entertainment value, so I say it’s worth checking out.
SCREAM FOR HELP – Speaking of unlikely stories… what the f*ck was Michael Winner on when he made this?! I might have to rewatch it sober just to be certain, but from what I recall, ‘Scream For Help’s’ utter bizarreness seems beyond doubt. And it all sounds so basic… a girl in a small town is convinced her step-father is scheming to off her mother, so she goes detective to find out what’s going on. The conventional plot is a Trojan Horse whose strange interior is as hard to define as it is to fathom, but in the end the weirdness is about tone – ‘Scream For Help’ is shrill, disjointed, and has the same cloying unreality as a couch made of marshmallow in a lounge overstuffed with foul trinkets and strange statues… come to think of it, that might even have been a scene in the film. There is a sudden and decisive shift in atmosphere as we head into the film’s latter phase, and the fact that the last half hour is nothing other than a straight, tense and well-oiled home invasion sequence reveals the first hour as a deliberately contrived exercise in bad-taste baroque… but why? A hugely enigmatic movie, please someone else out there watch it and give an opinion to prove I’m not going mad. |