21st September 2012, 11:04 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
Deprived of internet and video access over last week due to ridiculous new flat situation. A visit to friends yielded the following:
THE UGLY: Quite good, heavily stylised, slightly overlooked serial killer psychodrama from New Zealand. Twisted murderer guy spills his emotional load to shrink in imaginary-looking psyche ward (where one of the evil attendants has 'hard' or something equally dickish tatooed across his naked stomach). Some supernatural stuff gets thrown in, and whenever psychopath man looks in a mirror, his reflection is inexplicably scarred and, yes, ugly. None of this is dignified by an explanation, which is fine by me. But for all its minor weirdness and heavy handed colour scheme, the film works best when it flashes back to the killer's childhood and deals in a fairly straight, unadorned way with the trauma of bullying and the violence of emotional neglect.
THE LOVED ONES: A good sort-of inversion of 'Carrie' and the whole 'family as ultimate evil' school of horror. An incestuous-seeming father-daughter duo abduct a wounded high-school heart throb type and stage an alternative prom to the one daughter's too dysfunctional to get in on. Despite shrill elements like a pitfull of lobotomised zombie-suitors, 'The Loved Ones' never seems comedic or forced, and somehow seems quite coolly rendered. Something grabbed me about the lighting and cinematography... I don't know why, but it seemed in a subtle way quite neo-noirish or even Lynchian (not that the film was that weird) to me.
NIGHTBEAST: Surely Mr Dohler's finest hour. Actually I'm no expert at all, but this'll do me. No-one would conceive of making a film this way these days, not even a complete dick with a camcorder. That's no disrespect to Dan Dohler, who was a dedicated consumer as well as maker of genre cinema. In fact, tribute should be paid, both to the wonkiness of DD's personal vision, and to the time and place this was made, which I naively like to think was pre-focus group commodity straitjacket linearisation death or some impossible something. Anyway, this has an ape-reptile alien in a silver jumpsuit, HG Lewis throwaway gore, almost real-time verite sequences, lasers, sub-plots unrelated to bigger picture, an awful, awful sex scene and wicked minimal synth music. Totally recommended, this is, in microcosm, the VHS utopia that somehow never really was (apart from when it was this).
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What films have you seen recently? 
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