29th September 2012, 06:19 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
THE INNOCENTS - Another film I can't believe it's taken me so long to get round to. Wow, what a disturbing experience. I was a bit put off at first by the early sixties recreation of period - a bit creaky, but probably only from the POV of my modernity fixation - but once we're heading towards the house, something happens and reality starts closing in on itself. Watching this film is like being slowly wrapped in an awful, mildewed veil. I don't know what it is, probably Freddie Francis' claustrophobic cinematography more than anything. There are a few really uncomfortable moments and a feeling of real bleakness overall, and I know I'll end up watching it again before dawn which is more than I can say for -
PIRANHA 2 - THE SPAWNING - although actually I enjoyed it, or bits of it, even though there was plenty of drag in places. But, basically, flying piranhas eat some holidaymakers and Lance Henrikson and Tricia O'Neil rescue the remainder. I liked the setting, some kind of weirdly arid post-disco Jamaican tourist resort with a hotel called 'Club Elysium', full of libidinous but ugly Americans. A few scenes worked well, like the one in the morgue, where a flying piranha bursts out of a corpse's chest cavity to feast on an attendant's throat, but really, in the absence of the arch approach of the original, it could've done with a whole lot more sleaze and gore, which is presumably what they were thinking when they they refurbished the 'franchise' a couple of years ago (to no great effect). The benefits of schadenfreude allow me a warm glow of smugness when I reflect that this was pompous twat JC's conspicuously inauspicious debut.
BLACK MAGIC RITES AND THE SECRET ORGIES OF THE 14TH CENTURY - aka 'The Reincarnation of Isabelle'. The first time I saw this I was plastered, and didn't take anything in. I'm glad I watched it straight today, because it's absolutely crackers. I don't know much about Renato Polselli, and of his other films I've only seen 'Delirium', but I really wonder where he was coming from. I think this was meant to be a pop-psychedelic Italo gothic piss take somehow years ahead but totally of its time, but I can't be sure. It could be a Doris Wishman style fantasia of edit madness and shitness. But I don't think so, it's too knowing. Some people gather in a castle to celebrate an engagement (or something, can't quite remember), but actually they are all reincarnations of those involved in some witch execution centuries earlier. I'm amazed that I can extract this much basic sense from the 'plot', because basically the film is a barrage of mashed up images and sequences of witchy nudity, lame gore, running around in corridors, weird rituals with guys in scarlet catsuits, bonkers three way forced sex with honky tonk / sped up chamber music accompaniment and portentous dialogue-delivering faces lit arbitrarily with swirling colours etc etc etc. This is perhaps how films are actually meant to be made, but somehow aren't.
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