WILD BEASTS – I always find ‘animals attack’ movies a bit lame, but this is nuts. You sense its wonkiness from the credits alone – silky saxophone lullaby over a depressing cityscape and toxic waste! Yum. It just gets worse from then on in. A zooful goes mental via PCP, and the ensuing rampage is infused with a very odd, leering attitude. “Mmm, that’s right,” murmurs the ‘hero’, licking his lips as he watches a load of rats being torched! Those rats, by the way, were real, and the fact that animals here are generally treated with the utmost disrespect shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Prosperi. As much as I quibble over that stuff, ‘Wild Beasts’ is such a stone cold classic of Italian trash cinema.
EMMANUEL AND THE LAST CANNIBALS – Speaking of which, EATC is almost there. This time, she’s off to the jungle to find out about a lost tribe… the specifics don’t really matter when it’s pretty much all about dull sex scenes. On the other hand, these are infested with kookiness and sometimes greatness by the music, which spans euphoric disco through shady, flange-bass sleaze to cockeyed Phillip Glass imitation. As with a lot of this kind of thing, it’s the pile up of eccentricities that elevates… the cheap but brutal gore, lush photography taped together with crappy edits, Donald O’Brien looking sweaty and evil… A keeper.
SILVER BULLET – I kind of have a soft spot for this fairly rubbish S King adaption. It really does teeter on the brink of being an out and out bad film, what with that turbo-charged wheelchair and an evil, eye-patch wearing cleric who looks like he’d be better off in a panto. Even with a simple set-up, it meanders all over the place in telling its tale of kid struggling against the odds to best a werewolf in (of course) smalltown American. This disjointedness, along with some woeful acting (Gary Busy is the least of this film’s problems) and a couple of wild fx moments / dream sequences, makes it worthwhile in my book.
DEERSKIN – Some middle-aged guy on his uppers develops a psychotic fixation on an awful deerskin jacket. It’s the kind which, with its short cut and tasselled fringe, gives me the creeps just to look at. Stranded in the sticks, guy meets a would-be editor and pretends to make a film about some kind of metaphorical ‘hunter’ quest to divest the local population of their own coats(!) It all goes to shit from there. ‘Deerskin’ is an example of arthouse cinema turning the screw. It adopts the attitude of detached but quirky metafiction, but then takes a left turn into surprising gore and nastiness. Violence aside, what stops its weird dissection of male mid-life crisis from being too cute is the atmosphere of washed-up isolation in a rural French backwater. I really liked it. The director has form in this territory; his film ‘Rubber’ was a cult hit ten years ago.
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