HALLOWEEN HORROR BINGE ROUNDUP #4
9/10/21
HAPPY HELL NIGHT – A mess of non sequiturs, cliches and the awfulness that only stillborn nineties horror can provide, ‘Happy Hell Night’ is fast becoming one of my favourite rubbish late slashers. It’s just bafflingly entertaining, even on my third go with it. An evil priest / Freddy K surrogate with an impressively gaunt face delivers nonsense one liners as college kids party and try to solve the mystery of what happened on ‘hell night’ all those years ago… inspired tripe.
MACABRE – Lamberto Bava, who would offer the ultimate in wham-bam horror a few years later in the form of ‘Demons’, is on subdued form with this simmering tale of obsessive love from beyond the grave. In some ways uneventful between its first and final reels, and clearly grasping for Hitchcockian suspense, ‘Macabre’ succeeds because of its strained, off-key atmosphere, the casual malice of its little psychopath, and the final flight into gonzo supernaturalism. Weird and absorbing.
10/10/21
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET – With a stature that’s hard to deny, I don’t think ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’ is looking for any converts these days. I suppose repeated viewings over the years have deadened my eyes to it a little, although when I see it now I’m more taken with the quieter bits, the low-key dreamy wanderings, the menace and melancholy of the suburbs in the shadow of the razor glove. I guess it goes back to ‘Halloween’; even before ‘Scream’, Craven was into his quotes. Always nice to see John Saxon doing his thing.
SHOCK WAVES – I don’t revisit this spooky underwater nazi zombie flick nearly as often as I should. It’s always somehow quite pleasing to see ‘names’, including in this case John Carradine, Peter Cushing and Brooke Adams, caught beneath the grain of a 16mm production, but he real star of ‘Shock Waves’ is its ambience. It’s there in the long shadows of its ruined hotel, in the shots of zombies prowling scummy, derelict swimming pools, and above all in the wailing, groaning synth score.
11/10/21
THROUGH THE FIRE – The mystery surrounding an ancient pendant gives rise to a very eighties mix of dull chases and bad special effects. Although its recent emergence after decades of obscurity is not likely set the indie-horror world alight, there were a few things about ‘Through The Fire’ that hooked me in, mostly the graininess, the aura of moderate incompetence, the occasional awful attempts to emulate the sort of fx that might be seen in eg ‘Poltergeist’ or some other big budget studio affair. A bit slight, but in the end I quite liked.
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