CARNIVAL OF BLOOD – Sketchily assembled and pretty much ad-libbed in places, ‘Carnival of Blood’ treats us to the sweat and the grime of Coney Island, where sausage-fingered women bitch at hunchbacks and a mysterious killer is etc etc. Mumbled conversations and twilit wanderings aplenty, but then you have the sheer craziness of the killer’s purple tinted psycho-dramatic regression in the final reel, plus other oddities such as a teddy bear full of offal and just the whole creepy atmosphere of fairgrounds at the fag-end of hippy. Knackered old drive-in fodder delivers the flea-bitten goods… if you really want them…
PHOBE: THE XENOPHOBIC EXPERIMENTS – When all the other kids in the neighbourhood went off to Hollywood to make ‘Predator’, the one who stayed behind kept on running around their backyard with a camcorder and came up with this. A delight of cruddy late-nineties computer graphics and massively underwhelmed ‘performances’, P:TXE’s homegrown charms are painful and heart-warming at the same time, the true measure of cult goodness IMO.
THE HALFWAY HOUSE – Boasts the mild sleaze of a semi-WIP film, a papier mache Lovecraftian tentacle beast in the cellar, a small statuette of the Virgin Mary wielded in the manner of a dildo, and Mary Woronov as a dark priestess… how could it fail to be total classic? Slightly disappointingly it comes across as merely amiable trash, and Mary (both of them) is really the best thing about it, but enjoyable nonetheless and worth a look if you don’t have to resort to expensive imports.
DEAD HOUSE – I’ve overstepped my budget on this new flat I’m renting, hence less costly splashouts and more viewing of obscure drivel on Prime. Well, obviously there’s some total rubbish on there but the fun of it is in stumbling on a ‘find’, which brings me to ‘Dead House’. It’s a nasty, grimy Italian (/British?) horror flick which merges the grot of a brutal home invasion with pretty gory zombie action; the ludicrous monster they throw in is just the icing on the cake. It’s as silly and nonsensical as it sounds, but an underlying nastiness prevents it from being too much of a good laugh – which makes it more interesting in my eyes. Definitely worth a punt if you’re browsing Prime and happen to be in the mood for some grim zombie sleaze.
SHADOW IN THE CLOUD – Chloe Moretz hitches a ride aboard a WW2 fighter plane and finds that its crew of sexist yahoos is the least of her worries – yep, that’s a real-life gremlin perched on that there fuselage. ‘Shadow In The Cloud’ is a lot of fun, popcorn riddled with metaphors but more bothered about ridiculous plane-wing acrobatics; I actually wanted it to bring out more of the weird fairy-tale tone that occasionally surfaces, but it’s amusing and entertaining enough as it is.
THE CLOVEHITCH KILLER – Smalltown boy is worried that his pa might be the local serial killer – cue investigative fumblings and, stashed beneath the floorboards, boxes full of dadporn. ‘The Clovehitch Killer’ is measured and subdued in its approach, and what it does really well is capture the strange, still atmosphere of little suburbs full of neat lawns, bungalows and religion. It perhaps slips up a little when it veers away from claustrophobic atmospherics for the sake of some on-the nose dramatics; but I do recommend it, it’s compelling enough to work as a more serious, downbeat answer to “The Summer of 84”.
 |