HALLOWEEN HORROR BINGE ROUNDUP #7
17/10/21
THE MOON IN SCORPIO – A boat, some people, some corpses. Although all available reviews basically equate it to a barrel of shite rolling endlessly downhill towards utter nothingness, in some bizarre way ‘The Moon In Scorpio’ had me hooked. I’m kind of only saying that so I can slip in a crap pun about the killer’s weapon of choice (yep, a hook – well OK, it’s a harpoon – but then again, is it a knife? One of this film’s endless ambiguities / continuity errors). I thought that ‘The Moon In Scorpio’ was baffling, disjointed, tonally nonsensical, badly paced, a bit boring, couldn’t even really work out what was going on half the time despite it being the simplest of set-ups… and yeah, somehow I came out thinking I’d had quite an enjoyable experience. But I’m funny like that. Yep, I guess it did have me hooked after all.
THE VIDEO DEAD – This “EC meets Videodrome” comedy horror features a television set that spawns the living dead, who step straight from an onscreen NOTLD-esque monochrome graveyard into the kind of house where bad things always happen in straight-to-video eighties horror flicks. No-one involved was taking this seriously, not that I hold that against it; its incompetence is a bit mesmerising, scattershot pacing and random turns of event increasing the sense of unreality (it’s the kind of film where zombies can massacre an entire suburban street in the middle of the day and no-one seems that bothered). When the central character, a stoner kid, goes into the woods with a fatherly ‘zombie hunter’ type, a strange, almost fairy-tale quality sets in. Other than that, there’s some tasty gore, nice period zombie makeup, a couple of surprisingly mean-spirited moments (considering the tone is fairly light), and just that grainy, cheap eighties film look that always gets me.
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