THE GAME – I was quite amused when they put out a Bill Rebane box-set, it’s not the most intuitive move in this day and age. But I’ve always had a real soft spot for ‘The Game’, which I never thought I’d get to watch in HD. Anyone familiar with Rebane will not be surprised to find that this regional production, in which a small group of dodgy millionaires get their sadistic shits and giggles from challenging some hard-up types to spend a night in a ‘haunted house’ without going mad or running away, looks very cheap and is moderately incomprehensible throughout. Rebane’s indisputable talent for curing insomnia is not in evidence, as the off-kilter vibe and steady accumulation of random incident manages to alleviate boredom. This is very much a personal opinion; I can only recommend 'The Game' to other masochists, but it’s one of his better films.
WINTERBEAST – Staying with regional horror done on a shoestring, here’s another one I never thought would make it over to the posh side of home-based media. We truly are living in a weird golden age of blu ray, even as its star slowly fades. Anyway, ‘Winterbeast’, it’s totally crackers. The stamp of rank amateurism is all over it, for good more than bad – just point the camera, focus and hit ‘record’, it’s bound to pick something up, that ‘something’ being in this case the best worst Harryhausan cast-offs this side of ‘Equinox’. The human characters (largely made up of incompetent park rangers) are only slightly less tangibly artificial than the stop-motion monsters ie the performances are very much ‘super-8’ compatible, but you probably already suspected as much. And I doubt you’ll care. ‘Winterbeast’ is peppered with odd moments and delicious bits of ‘stylisation’, and features such unassailable eccentricities as a character who looks like he’s wearing a slightly warped and ill-fitting Timothy Leary mask, then slips on an actual mask and does a mad little dance with some corpses to a scratchy old record. There’s also a random dildo bit, which… well, I didn’t get it. I could go on. A true indie labour of love, exactly the kind we’re all supposed to fawn over and get sentimental about, albeit this time for very good reasons. For god’s sake, make sure you see ‘Winterbeast’.
DAY OF THE ANIMALS – Animals attack, such was their wont back in the mid to late seventies. This time, some broadly middle-class Americans are off up into the hills on a nature trail, only to find a bunch of horrible focking brutes are going badass just cos the humes spilled some toxic radiation over the sun’s rays or something etc etc Lesley Nielson is around, and he’s an absolute cock. Everyone else is fifty shades of irritating. Well, usually I quite like this sort of thing, but I found my patience running a little dry. The build up seemed a bit too well behaved, although I always get a strange kick out of that flat kind of TV movie aesthetic you used to see in budget mainstream horror from around the time, the kind with parping easy listening on the soundtrack, and it’s worth sticking around to witness Nielson ‘going native’ when it all kicks off. A choice for that rainy day when you can’t find your copy of ‘Wild Beasts’.
FATAL EXAM – As much as I enjoy zero budget indie horror from the seventies, eighties, nineties (see ‘The Game’ and ‘Winterbeast’), ‘Fatal Exam’ was a bit of a hike. Many reviews have mentioned the slightly inordinate running time… yes, unfortunately it is a bit of a problem, as for a good amount of said running time jack all happens. Now, I am very easily sold on the charm of stiff acting, badly composed shots, weird incongruity and the lovely look of old cheap celluloid swimming in grain. But all these become incidentals in the absence of further novelty. ‘Fatal Exam’ has a heard-it-all-before storyline which follows the usual clean cut studes when they go to a house with a dark past and try to figure out whether there’s some psychic investigation they can do into a murder. It only really comes to life in a couple of scenes, one involving a stop-motion (again) demon right at the end. If only the rest of it hadn’t all been about kids in jeans swigging beer. Not sure what grade I’d give ‘Fatal Exam’, but it certainly isn’t graduating from my college.
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