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Old 19th March 2023, 01:53 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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SPOONFUL OF SUGAR – Weird childminder looks after a kid who seems a bit disturbed himself – why wouldn’t he be, with such awful parents – but makes the mistake of combining her job with a lot of flagrant LSD use. Her therapist is an ardent advocate of ‘microdosing’; I don’t know where they get the ‘micro’ from, I think a bit of ‘macro’ went on with this film. ‘Spoonful Of Sugar’ is a mess. It’s like they ransacked one of those nineties ‘Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ rip-offs, got rid of any bits that looked like they might belong in a sensible thriller, then filled the holes with random oddity and exploitative pot-shots, from crawling severed fingers to context-free self-harm. Everything seems tacked on, thrown together and aimless – I’ve seen more hallucinogenic veracity on Coronation Street (not even referring to the recent outbreak of trippyness, just the show as a whole). This stew of horror nonsense at least never bores, and works as a schlocky watch (which I find heartening in this day and age, when everything’s so manicured); if it’d pushed things even further and been a bit nastier, it might’ve ended up a modern day trashterpiece. It may or may not help the medicine go down, but if you fancy a spoonful of Shudder you could do a lot worse.

INITIATION (SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4) – I used to be lukewarm about Brian Yuzna but these days I’m slightly hotter. Not Mediterranean, maybe uh Morcecambe in summer, hot enough for me, anyway; don’t know what did it, maybe the wackery of ‘Faust’. ‘Initiation’ is Yuzna on solid form. A journalist hits back at sexist boss Reggie Bannister by investigating the occult – it all has to do with cockroaches, a couple of slimy Screaming Mad George fx, and creepy Clint Howard stalking around with his weird wizened-baby looks. There’s a crazy amount of pareidolia in this film, faces just pop out of nowhere all the time (don’t worry, I haven’t done much ‘microdosing’ myself since the late nineties.) What’s it all about, Yuzna? You can’t really ask that of nineties schlock, certainly not of schlock directed by Brian Yuzna, who always seems to have a thing about weird for weird’s sake. Anyone expecting anything to do with the original series should note that ‘Initiation’s relationship with the SNDN franchise appears only contractual, cemented by conspicuous christmas tree placement and, hilariously, the scene where two of them are shagging and creepy Clint walks in, switches on the TV and starts watching SNDN Part 3! I loved that. ‘So charming, the quaint nineties’, someone probably said on Tik-Tok. Yeah, good though. Cockroaches, squirmy fingers, faces, faaacccceeessss…
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