THE SOUND OF VIOLENCE – An experimental musician with powers of unusual synaesthesia gets into brutality in a big way when the sounds of it fuel her visions and give her weird compositions a certain edge… well, there is definite intrigue in the concept! Boneheaded, audacious and nasty, TSOV looks and feels like a true latter day exploitation flick for its better part, but unfortunately it does lose something along the way. A slight bagginess of tone creeps in and it doesn’t quite go for the jugular in the way I wanted. Petty gripes maybe, I just wanted it to do more of what it does, and its handful of crazed set pieces, no doubt its raison d’etre, are uniquely satisfying when they arrive – who could argue with the scene in which a harp is rigged to perform as an instrument of torture at an exhibition? Argento couldn’t top the idea (although he’d probably film it better). Worth checking out, and a re-watch from me at some point.
IN A GLASS CAGE – Agusti Villaronga’s journey into the dark night of the soul, and not something that you would describe as anything other than ‘a grim watch’. It’s a treatise on the mechanics of abusive relationships that centres on a former Nazi experimenter, now confined to an iron lung following a suicide attempt, who makes a pact with his intense new support worker. IAGC takes on some dark themes and shows us a few hard-to-watch images, but then strangely wraps all this awfulness in such heightened visual confectionery that you wonder whether it’s really more interested in capturing the exquisite sight of a lush scarlet cape fluttering down a darkened stairwell (for example) than the profound dissection it otherwise seems to want to undertake. But, a spiritual emetic in the vein of ‘Salo’, and, well, ‘harrowing’.
THE BORROWER – John McNaughton’s a director who’s never quite got his due. This is a stark switch away from the grind of ‘Henry’, and almost seems a little unlikely at first, being ostensibly agreeable nineties schlock about an alien sentenced to life on earth as punishment for undisclosed extra-terrestrial transgressions. Alien guy is not very friendly, and his schtick involves him decapitating his victims so that he can ‘wear’ their heads as his own. ‘The Borrower’ rises above the clunkiness of its period of genre filmmaking by demonstrating a sharpness of wit and some wry social commentary, plus there is a kind of lean, sparse feel to it, and an eccentricity. There’s also a few dabs of prosthetics and gore here and there, not too many, but what it shows is pleasing nonetheless and hooks into my era-specific nostalgia. Overlooked and available for rediscovery courtesy of the newish blu-ray.
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