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Old 21st August 2022, 01:44 PM
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Frankie Teardrop Frankie Teardrop is offline
Cultist on the Rampage
 
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Leeds, UK
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RUBBER – A murderous tyre can explode people’s heads through the power of telekinesis. If that sounds like a recipe for some kind of Charles Band-produced horror comedy knock-off, a swift glance at director Quentin Dupieux‘s resume should be enough to convince you that an arch exercise in cinematic deconstruction is more likely on the cards. That’s entirely the case. ‘Rubber’ doesn’t just dally with the fourth wall, it practically pisses against it – a good portion of the film is about its ‘audience’, who look on at all the tyre horror-action through binoculars from their desert vantage point (until most of them are stiffed by a poisoned chicken). The potential for cringe-inducing posturing is circumvented by the eeriness of the location, some genuine laughs / gore and an overall atmosphere of weirdness. I hadn’t seen it since it came out in 2011, and it was a relief to find that I still really liked it.

DECODER – An anomaly, and an interesting one, in that it hails the Berlin post punk / industrial scene of the late seventies / early eighties – not your typical cinematic underground, although I guess a close parallel would be the American No Wave stuff (Beth B, Nick Zed etc) that was happening around the time. Some slacker / music dude (played by Einsturzende Neubauten’s F M Einheit) discovers that a local fast-food joint is feeding its customers piped music full of subliminal messages; meanwhile, his gf hangs out with some toads and goes to work in a peepshow. ‘Decoder’ plays with a lot of the ideas that were in the air back then – the power of covert media conditioning to induce social control etc – and in fact the film is honoured by a cameo from the godfather of all that stuff, William Burroughs, whilst none other than Genesis P Orridge pops up as a sort-of guerrilla priest. Visually it’s very nice, with hazy drifts of gelled lighting versus the hard angles of the post-war greyscape. ‘Decoder’ really works on the level of this kind of ambience alone, but I wish it had stayed there because it flounders a bit when it retreats from abstraction and tries to tie its themes and images to a conventional plotline about urban insurrection. Still, interesting. Worth checking out if you like gritty zero budget 16mm arthouse dystopian sci-fi satire, or if you still wear a black trench coat, listen to TG and carry around a battered copy of ‘Nova Express’ even though you’re in your forties, Frankie (ulp).

VOICES FROM BEYOND – Another one of Fulci’s final few, VFB is a twisted whodunnit narrated by the (ghost? Corpse?) of a murder victim who has reached out from beyond the grave to enlist his daughter as a detective. It’s full of typical Fulci signatures – an overload of diffusion and a camera that always makes its presence felt, not to mention a bit of gore, mean-spirited nudity and maggoty action (we’re treated to lingering close-ups of the main character as he putrefies in his grave.) For me, watching it for the first time yesterday whilst on my fourth can of Stella, it had a little bit of a drag factor maybe and the plot seemed quite labyrinthine at points, but these are only quibbles; the essentially quite weird atmosphere of a bona fide Fulci flick was there in every frame (an example that stuck in my mind – naked woman screaming as she crouches beside a big cartoon hen toy. There, you’re just not going to get that in many other places). I really liked it. Again, not one from his glory years, but die-hards and fans of odd Euro horror will easily get something from this.
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