M3GAN – I’m sure you all know what it’s about. I saw it, I liked it. I didn’t love it, but I thought it was enjoyable enough, even slightly moving at points, and to be fair there aren’t many places you can take sub-‘Child’s Play’ rip-offs these days without getting deep, which this doesn’t. At first I thought it might, with conveniently topical AI supposedly poised to give us all a good hammering and thus perhaps prompting a host of meditative Alex Garland style reflections, but this goes more for the emotional side of things, being an orphan story at heart. But it doesn’t really plumb any depths on that level either, stretching only as far as hamfisted metaphors (a hole in someone’s fence is used to comment on a central character’s lack of mature boundaries), but again, aside from the carnage, there is a mawkishness about it that works as quite an effective hook. There you go, it’s basically slick, well-oiled mainstream cheese about a killer robot, happy to serve up popcorn thrills with a slightly dead-eyed smirk. In other words, I was entertained.
GHOST IN THE MACHINE – More techno-horror, this time from back when t’internet was crossing over from the jealous clutches of hippie tech goblins and it was all supposedly quite exciting for anyone who suddenly wanted novelty porn at the touch of a button. I just remember feeling profoundly resentful when I had to use email for the first time. Anyway, GITM is a bit overlooked these days and would probably get a proper AI-generated kicking if it ever came anywhere near to a legit boutique release, but it sets out to do what exploitation films are meant to – “sod the moral and social consequences of this new technology, what would happen if the ghost of a serial killer got inside the world wide web and made everything look like Evil Tron?” I wish the film WAS whole heartedly that instead of just sort-of. But sometimes ‘sort-of’ is ‘good enough’; there’s the 2oth century movie cyber imagination’s clunky visuals, a few splattery moments, “gosh was that the past oh shit oh god I’m getting old will I die please give me some more booze” type nostalgia for us olds, and, of course, general nineties horror values. It’s OK. It reminded me a bit of ‘Brainscan’. The German Blu ray looks sehr gut imo.
BURIED ALIVE – A reform school, improbable outpourings of swarming ants, wonky-angled hallucinations of the least convenient variety, really stupid devices that contrive to plunge people into cellars, John Carradine moaning in the night, Donald Pleasance in a bad wig… in the beginning it seemed to have all the ingredients of a killer bad film. Halfway through something happened and it became a slightly rote exercise in trying to find out about a slasher’s dull plot; people are bricked up and there is a black cat wandering around, but in all honesty EA Poe would NOT give a toss about this dreck. The good points still stand, but it needed at least a couple more of them. Robert Vaughn looks absolutely delighted to be included; Pleasance witters and Carradine’s only in it for the moaning and to stick his hand out from behind some bricks. The director’s ‘Edge Of Sanity’ was another nearly man that needed its nice style and weirdness amping up and rescuing from the plod.
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