The final bloody leg;
TALK TO ME – Forget drugs, the latest party craze is seances that end in possession. Sometimes I’m glad I’m not young anymore. ‘Talk To Me’ is another genre movie that makes central the entanglement of supernatural horror with the emotional pain of its characters, setting the stage for a reckoning with grief and trauma. It’s an intuitively attractive angle, but I think a lot of the films that try to tackle it really stumble because pulling it off relies on getting the drama right. ‘Talk To Me’ understands this core problem and spends a lot of time establishing the reasons why we might care. It works; Sophie Wild gives an excellent performance as haunted Mia, and there is something fraught and uncertain about the people and relationships with which she surrounds herself that convinces you of the fragility of her world. This emotional precarity is backed up by horror that is brutal when it needs to be – directors Danny and Michael Philippou push all the buttons. I thought it was excellent.
NIGHT OF THE DEVILS – This seventies Euro horror offering is based on the same Tolstoy short story that begat Mario Bava’s ‘The Wurdulak’, part of his ‘Black Sabbath’ anthology. In it, a travelling salesman falls foul of a cursed family in the depths of a forest – we witness his tortured recollections as he lies in a sanitorium. Like a woodland predator, ‘Night Of The Devils’ moves slowly but always feels poised to strike. The film’s reserves of atmosphere and tension transport it to an unexpectedly violent conclusion, which is also very creeped-out, with all those pale, giggling undeads – in its final stages, the film summons a nightmarishness that feels like a natural flowering of the shadows that have been gathering throughout. It’s a movie I’ve only seen twice, once years ago. I wasn’t very impressed with it back then for some reason, but I definitely enjoyed it more this time.
NIGHT OF THE DEMON – James C Wasson’s masterpiece of confusion still baffles like no other. A backwoods trek to uncover the mystery of Bigfoot is the tattered fig leaf that utterly fails to obscure NOTD’s crazed pile-up of non-sequiturs, wonky edits, atrocious compositions, and Zen-like dialogue. You couldn’t even dream some of the scenes here; dick ripping be damned, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and it pales next to the bit where Sasquatch forces two knife-wielding girl guides to stab each other to death by pounding them together like rocks in some Neanderthal’s cave(!) All this ripe badness is countered by the more genuine eeriness coming from the desolate rural locations, whilst the fairly dismal backstory depresses more than it titillates. As if you didn’t know it by now, there simply aren’t many films like ‘Night Of The Demon’.
THE DEMON’S BABY – It’s Wong again, and this time he’s a slightly incompetent priest / sorcerer type who also seems a bit sarky – but I suppose anyone’s entitled to a little bit of belligerence when they’re up against a battalion of snaggle toothed uteruses in the habit of degloving people’s heads. ‘The Demon’s Baby’ does take a little getting into, with a first half dominated by period drama and stuff to do with someone’s vast array of pregnant wives. Anyone snoozing off might wake to find themselves in a different movie when all the skronky special effects hit around the midpoint, after which ‘The Demon’s Baby’ mutates into a wild cavalcade of grotty ‘The Thing’ cast-offs. Although it’s let down by too much talk and goofy HK ‘humour’, how could I not tip my hat to a film that sees fit to include a game of football played with a flying amniotic sac? There’s a strange kind of genius at work in all that.
Right, I'm off to lie down for a while. Happy Halloween, what's left of it.
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