TITANE – From the maker of ‘Raw’, Julia Ducournau. ‘Titane’ isn’t playing anyone’s game except its own, and I imagine it’ll baffle many. It starts out as an arguable art-slasher movie with this odd, quite blunt JG Ballard-type imagery, then shifts gear and transforms into a relationships drama about righting the wrongs of severed attachments. Unexpected, but that’s not to say the film is aesthetically inconsistent – beneath the sheen of the camerawork there’s this constant grinding physicality that unifies on a tonal level, and a countervailing surreality that comes and goes. Few reviews have mentioned that it’s actually quite funny; a blackly comic undercurrent sets out its stall early on when the lead character basically murders someone by trashing their face with a chair and then finds she’s so knackered that she has to take a quick sit down in it (one of the legs is still implanted in the guy’s eye socket)! Well, I laughed. ‘Titane’ is a demanding film that probably rewards a couple of viewings over just one. Recommended, but don’t expect a standard genre flick or even a re-run of ‘Raw’.
SPECIES 2 – The ‘Species’ series seems interesting now, because in horror these days you don’t really ever see the same kind of collision between a relatively big budget (at least for the first two) and an out-and-out B-movie trash approach (all of ‘em). I thought they were pretty enjoyable then and probably even more so now. ‘Species 2’ simply picks up where the original left off and doles out more of the same, which includes some tasty body morphing special fx and gore. Immaculately disposable cinema and basically a posh direct-to-video flick if ever there was one, but fun, which is obviously the point. The 88 disc looks very good.
TOXIC ZOMBIES – Potheads get sprayed by The Man’s crop-duster and turn into etc. A very low budget offering from the late seventies which makes up in creaky charm for any lack of (insert basic cinematic value of your choice here). It plays like a poor relation of “I Drink Your Blood” – the themes of marginal groups rubbing up against square society, and of poisoning as the mode of zombie production, are similar. ‘Toxic Zombies’, unlike IDYB, is no trash classic, but if you fancy ninety minutes of stumbling around in the woods with a bit of red paint here and there you can check out a nice looking transfer on YT. Shoddy but not dire, with a couple of cheap thrills and a slightly ‘off’ atmosphere. I liked it, but it’s my kind of thing.
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