DARK NATURE – I stumbled upon this when I was searching online for the Scottish semi-giallo with the same name. ‘Dark Nature’, the one I saw, is a contemporary indie about a therapeutic wilderness trail for trauma survivors. Things go off the rails when it turns out that the forest they’re in offers plenty of trauma of its own. I really liked this one. The aesthetics are fairly plain but nonetheless capture something of the essence of woodland menace, a vibe that drew me in well before ‘Dark Nature’ morphed into a creature feature with ‘The Descent’ on its mind. All the cave stuff is pretty strong, and there’s a nicely icky monster with stuff about healing and toxic relationships that’s way less ‘cringe’ than it sounds. It’s not perfect, there are a few fumbles and it could’ve been a bit more graphic, but it’s well worth a shot if you happen to notice it.
FEAR CITY – New York’s strippers are in crisis after a man with a few martial arts moves and a sharp object decides he doesn’t like them very much – stony faced strip agency guy Tom Berenger grapples with his inner demons and tries to optimise bookings. ‘Fear City’ is a step down compared with ‘Ms 45’, ‘Driller Killer’ etc and is a bit of a mess really, little more than a meat and potatoes thriller decked out in sleazy glad rags (quite scanty ones, obviously). But it’s still an Abel Ferrara film. Melanie Griffith is magnetic as always, David Johanssen sings ‘New York Doll’, the whole neon vista of NYC at night pulls you in and pins you to the gutter – a gutter overflowing with slick artifice, for this is mainstream exploitation with way more of a Canon vibe than any of his other stuff.
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