THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE – How many remakes, sequels, prequels are there now? I lose count of these things. I think I preferred the one from 2003, I seem to recall it had quite a sickly atmosphere; as for the one that came out maybe ten or so years ago, the only thing I remember about it is that I got rid of the DVD straight after I watched it. This 2022 Netflix reboot is a bit shambolic really, although it didn’t go in for the kind of crude post-Trump commentary I thought it might. It strains for relevance in mapping out a derelict, ‘left behind’ South full of ghost towns and Leatherface memorabilia, but falters after it takes too much on – there are interesting nods to ideas about how traumatised people connect, glimpses of a high school shooting in the background, and the return of the Marilyn Burns character from the original (here doing a hard-bitten avenger turn a la Laurie Strode), but these end up seeming half-baked and disconnected. Things drag on a dramatic level, its aesthetic is just very ‘Netflix’, but the thing it gets wrong most of all is The Horror. It lays on a ton of graphic violence, but none of it is involving. When a film is very gory but makes gore boring, I just end up thinking “F*ck it”. Which is what I did here. So possibly worth a watch if you have no better offers, but don’t even think about comparisons to the original (and several sequels, prequels and remakes for that matter).
THE BOAT – One man on a boat against the elements – nothing new in that, but ‘The Boat’ gives the ‘solo at sea, trying not to drown’ thing a supernatural twist. I think so anyway… one of the beguiling things about ‘The Boat’ is that nothing is truly revealed beyond what’s evident; a lone guy struggling with maritime mishaps that pile up into something that looms a little too spookily to be accidental. Does this film concern a malevolent schooner or is it basically about a guy who’s shit at sailing? The question might matter more if ‘The Boat’ didn’t inject its minimal set-up with real tension, but if a filmmaker can make thirty minutes of a guy trying to escape a toilet somehow nail-biting, then they’ve already convinced me. May appear slight in the eyes of some, but I really rate ‘The Boat’ and recommend it to anyone desperately seeking something on Prime.
DEATH RANCH – Escaped con and co vs the KKK – cue some heavy splatter. The Klan are revealed to be cannibals, so it’s nice to see one of them being forced to eat their own (quite shitty-looking) entrails. A good film, recommended to those in search of some socially righteous brutality, if that works as a concept; as far as aesthetics go it’s a little bit too obviously hi-def cheap to convincingly imitate the seventies feel it seems to be trying for, but it definitely succeeds as nasty, minimalist modern day exploitation, and if you can get with that then you’ll enjoy hearing its one note over and over.
HER NAME WAS CHRISTA – From the acorn of unlikely romance cut off by sudden death grows the mighty oak of necrophilia. Lonely office guy is persuaded to invest in hookers by his caddish new chum and ends up falling for etc etc. We get to spend over an hour with two awkward souls as they ‘get to know each other’, and because we’re in the domain of microbudget horror, where all the non-horror stuff is let’s face it dealt with quite perfunctorily, I can’t say that this kissy build-up is the stuff of hugely resonant human drama. But if you fancy a crazy split-screen finale of yucky corpse-shagging, this might just be your Saturday night in.
FLESH CITY – Edgy types lose it in a Berlin nightclub and end up mutating after a run-in with a glowing man; a Max Headroom wannabe introduces some bands. Safe to say the director has seen lots of old Japanese cyberpunk, not to mention their share of vintage MTV. This sprawling mess is a bit herky-jerky for my tastes, but the adventurous and the patient should get a kick from sporadic good bits such as the transformation of the brutalist metropolis into a rhizomatic organosphere with lots of gristly, eye-gouging tentacles; if not, there’s always that psychotic Bradley Walsh lookalike who goes around beating the crap out of people – he should’ve been in it more.
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