Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  DOCTOR SLEEP – The Overlook gets a revisit in this Mike Flannagan adaption, which I guess nods as much to Kubrik as it does to King’s sequel. Ewan McGregor plays Danny, who has grown up to be a barfly but finds his special powers calling him to assist super-shiner Kyleigh Curran in her struggles with creepy Rose The Hat. I found ‘Doctor Sleep’ to be lengthy but engaging, immersive enough to lull me into being able to Overlook the fact that it feels (and aesthetically resembles) a big Netflix series squashed into one handy feature; also, although it contained some surprisingly dark scenes, I couldn’t detect the disturbing atmosphere of, say ‘Occulus’ or ‘Absentia’. But – a good film.
SIREN – A group of stag-do guys go off to find the last-chance strip-club of their dreams… but is it the strip-club of their nightmares? Maybe it’s not even a strip-club really, there’s an awful lot of occult stuff happening. I checked this out on Netflix at the end of a long Friday and basically wondered if I might just yawn and fall asleep, but ‘Siren’ is oddly nightmarish and surprisingly creative in its little horror tableaus, with wormy-haired medusas and soul-to-soul memory transplants via off-brand tequila or something like that. Hannah Fierman, the titular Siren, has wide, creepy eyes and runs around naked. Based on a segment of ‘VHS’ that I have no recollection of.
HITCH HIKE TO HELL – Post- Norman Bates type drives a truck and strangles (with a coat hanger – he delivers laundry!) young runaways who remind him of his errant sister. ‘Hitch Hike to Hell’ was made in the late seventies but feels at least five years older than that. It has the creaky, grainy charm of knackered drive-in reels about it, and all the threadbare limitations of that kind of filmmaking – off-beam performances, minimal staging, a feeling of vast cheapness. Also, as is the case with many of those films seen in the cold light of day, its bark is worse than its bite. But you could retort by saying that a lot of those obscure drive-in movies had a very definite atmosphere, and that’s true here. There are only three or four sets in it, each appearing one after the other in pretty rigid repetition, and it conjures a peculiar claustrophobia which is very much in keeping with its subject matter. Also, there are classically ‘off’ grindhouse touches, like sudden outpourings of surreal music on the soundtrack, and the obvious comedy of Norm when he fiddles with his glasses before doing a brutal assault. And despite all I’ve said, there’s something fairly well-made about it, it doesn’t lurch around or drag. I saw this maybe thirteen or so years ago and found it slight but haunting – that’s pretty much what I thought of it after watching the Arrow blu ray.
SURF 2 – Sunny Californ-i-a type dudes hang out and surf (2) whilst an embittered nerd seeks vengeance against the Beautiful People via his brand of toxic cola, which happens to induce zombie mutation. If you’ve got this far without screaming “this obviously resembles something from Troma’s reject bin and I should avoid it at all costs,” well, good luck to you. I actively despise a certain kind of broad, T&A fuelled eighties teen comedy – mostly because I tend to watch movies whilst playing a harpsichord, smoothing the creases in my velvet smoking jacket and trying to look like Vincent Price – and this is basically one of those, made badly and spliced with what I guess are supposed to be nods towards horror; “The feeling is bad, the feeling is bad,” as Eddie Grant once said. Even low-brow hopes for gore are scuppered by zombies who do absolutely feck all, leaving me with jack shit to hang onto apart from the look / feel of eighties ripeness, a sense of giddy incoherence and a handful of weird bits. Do I think that those latter three qualities are worth the price of admission? No. For fans of the excruciating only, although at least you could say that it predates a couple of films with similar themes and has a good soundtrack. |