THE DENTIST – More vintage Yuzna (if that exists as a concept). This one has Corbin Bernsen giving a great turn as a rampaging dentist who has looked beneath the veneer of his polished existence and found only filth and rot (quite amusing when he’s vocal about this). There’s enough of a whiff of nitrous about ‘The Dentist’s stagey unreality to suggest that maybe Yuzna aspired to something Lynch-like, and occasionally the Dentist, although baggy and not well paced, does extract a bit of real oddness from its hazy black comedy. Enjoyed.
FROSTBITER: WRATH OF THE WENDIGO – It being a grainy regional ‘Evil Dead’ rip-off from the early nineties starring Ron Asheton of The Stooges, I think it unlikely that I would have to search high and low to find something good to say about ‘Frostbiter: Wrath Of The Wendigo’. On the other hand, it’s just too kooky, and I don’t like comedy horror that’s overly kooky. ‘Evil Dead’ wasn’t kooky, it was just f*cked. If they’d held back on the kook and just gone with snowy wilderness and bad prosthetics, well then, I’d be charmed, wouldn’t I? I still am, but only a bit.
FREEWAY – Reese Witherspoon is a foulmouthed hick whose ‘can do / f*ck you’ attitude is basically meant to seem quite charming; Kiefer Sutherland is, well, just a nasty c*nt in a car. On a freeway. When Reese hitches out of town, ‘Freeway’ mutates into a strange odyssey loosely based on ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The presence of those players should indicate to you that it’s a relatively mainstream affair, and it’s true that ‘Freeway’ demonstrates sufficient restraint in dealing with decidedly creepy subject matter. But it has a really grubby, dark edge, the kind that was alive in nineties cinema, even in stuff like Tarantino, just that kind of cynicism bordering on nihilism. I didn’t catch it at the time, but here it is on blu ray from VS, and I highly recommend.
THE WEREWOLF VS VAMPIRE WOMAN – I often find Paul Naschy a bit hit and miss, but TWVVW really works for me. Give me a black-veiled vampire gliding in slow motion down misty corridors and I’m hooked (I don’t even really like vampires, by the way); TWVVW is full of such seventies pop psych high-goth imagery, plus oodles of the kind of badly written Euro horror dialogue that is by turns boneheaded and poetic. Of course, Naschy is playing his trademark tragic nobleman, who’s a helluva nice guy till he turns and rips yer throat out (he seems to have cultivated a fondness for blood spattered breasts here, too). Perfectly crepuscular silliness. I can’t believe it, as I’m writing this someone in the street outside is playing the theme tune to ‘One Foot In The Grave’ at high volume on a ghetto blaster for the third time in a row! Leeds is way weirder than Paul Naschy.
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