Frankie Teardrop | 12th September 2012 01:13 AM | FATHER'S DAY - Gross out fun from Troma. I normally hate comedy horror, particularly when it's broad - that's why I (mostly) hate Troma. In this case I admit I did actually catch myself supressing the distant twinges of comedic enjoyment on a couple of occasions, and I just quite liked the attempts at 80s patiche and the weirdness of the last reel. Actually, pretty much all the gore (including the dad-rape scenes) was quite grim and filmed for the most part with a straight face. Often find myself amused by the kind of shit that gets passed at '18' these days (the harsh treatment of middle aged men here includes explicit cock ripping).
FEAST 2 - I liked this more than the quite good but imo over rated initial entry. Comedy horror again, but this one at least features a pervasively cynical tone and strives to tip its bad taste gags over into genuinely mean spirited territory at points. Not that that should be a recommendation necessarily.
THE SEVENTH CONTINENT - In direct contrast to the two previous, some mind mashingly serious alienation. An Austrian family withdraws from a bourgeois life of carefully observed but meaningless rituals, then sets about dismantling itself with the same joyless precision as it lived. At points, fragmented interactions with objects replace characters and the latter give way to a flux of body parts and material processes - but humanity in the throes of despair is never far away. Somehow all of this is summed up by a sequence showing suicide orchestrated to a MeatLoaf video. The car-wash scenes are also luminescent, arcane almost, like entering a cosmic void in the midst of abject banality. I think this was Haneke's first theatrical release, and imo it's one of his most interesting. |