[Demoncrat]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

SMILE – The corrective to a contagious laugh, this ‘smile’, which doesn’t look very friendly at all by the way, is passed from person to person when one witnesses the suicide of the other. An A&E psych doc with a traumatic past tries to get to the bottom of it. As many others have noted, it leans heavily on J-horror tropes and the vibe of all those jump-scare driven post-‘Insidious’ spookers from ten years back, but it’s well put together and worth a punt.

MANIAC DRIVER – A self-proclaimed giallo homage, but you can forget about black gloves and mysteries, this is basically just a dude in a taxi who goes around philosophising about how bleak life is. I admit, life is pretty bleak if you’re one of his passengers as you’ll probably end up with your boobs out plus or minus being decapitated by a garage door (!), so it’s not all a delicate paean to Travis Bickle. In fact there’s lots of filtered lighting and some obvious nods to ‘Strip Nude For Your Killer and the sleazier end of that stuff so yeah, ‘giallo’, why not. Creeped out, scuzzy and, despite the short run time, hypnotically languid. I liked it, maybe not as much as ‘Gun Woman’.

NIGHTMARE AT NOON – I’m such a ‘Nightmare At Noon’ nerd, I have the original cheapshit UK DVD (which looked really good if I remember), the Scream Factory Blu ray and now this new Arrow version, very rare I double dip. I must say that the Arrow video looks the best of the lot. As for the movie, I’m slightly less hot on it these days but it still inspires the odd quiver; I think any movie that crams Bo Hopkins, George Kennedy and Brion James inside the same desert town as Wings f*cking Hauser deserves some kind of medal. For the unanointed, it’s a bone-headed retread of ‘The Crazies’ (or maybe ‘Mutant’) decked out with western references and just loads of stupidity. Trashy fun, and one of two Mastorakis movies I really rate.

Hush now child, NAN is a small delight and we all know it. Yes it clunks severely, as does Edge Of Terror (anal Demon ), but rather that than Ferngully 4 or whatever.