THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE – Leave it to shoestring director Rene Cardona Jr to take on one of the world’s most impenetrable misteries (sic); what startling conclusions does he present before us here? I don’t know really, but one- and three-quarter hours of toe-curling dullness might be his attempt to warn us off ever visiting this Fortean hotspot. I’d happily watch ‘The Bermuda Triangle’ instead of venturing across the Atlantic in search of the unknown, because, although it is overlong and boring in too many places, the only really annoying thing about it is that it’s actually full of genuinely good stuff. Like – a murderous doll that eats flesh and drinks blood – a random attack of green birds that all end up with their throats cut – bursts of seventies psychedelic visuals and sounds – that doll again. Yes, the unfortunate thing about ‘The Bermuda Triangle’ is that it reminds us of how often ultimately fairly shitty seventies movies contained much better versions of themselves. The good bits might mitigate your clock-watching, but siphoned off, rejigged and concentrated, they’d make for one hell of a freaky supernatural giallo set on a boat. By the way, further points deducted for animal cruelty during the underwater sequences.
MEATBALL MACHINE – I was definitely a fan of that wave of ultragory Japanese splatter flicks from fifteen years or so back – ‘The Machine Girl’, ‘Tokyo Gore Police’ and so on. What happened to them? They got a bit silly maybe, and the interest died away. ‘Meatball Machine’ is from before that tendency started parodying itself. It’s shot on cheapshit video and, with its desolate industrial mise-en-scene, looks proper skanky. The plot is something about alien parasites who use human hosts so that they can fight and eat one another – this involves heavy prosthetics and endless shots of bodily mutation and thrashing tendrils. It’s clearly influenced by, but has none of the style of, ‘Tetsuo’. Its focus on the physical gets tedious, but the derelict atmosphere remains captivating. If you like gore, well, there’s gore (although perhaps not quite as much as is in some of the other entries in this body horror oriented Japanese splatter wave). I saw it on DVD over ten years ago and couldn’t remember it, but this time enjoyed the scummy aesthetic more than anything. You’ll already know whether ‘Meatball Machine’ will find a place in your cinematic kitchen or not.
THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS – A not-quite John Doe ends up in the clutches of Jeff Combes after he’s institutionalised following an apparent occult homicide… things get a little tangled after that point. As much as I enjoy films that warp reality to excess, I found that ‘The Attic Expeditions’ tried my staying power a little, perhaps because said excessive warping of reality wasn’t, in the end, all that excessive. I was willing it to turn into ‘Brain Dead’ by way of ‘Lost Highway’, but its confusing pile-up of subplots failed to yield anything other than a few moments of ultimately fairly typical noughties style ‘trippy’ imagery and Jeff C on rather restrained form. Being the sucker that I am, I could kind of get with it from a nostalgic point of view as being a certain kind of film common to its era. Not something to approach with stratospherically raised hopes, although to be fair it was a labour of love by the sounds of it, and it does also offer a misplaced Seth Green’s seeming attempt to channel Jeff Goldblum.
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