4th November 2012, 07:07 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
RAT SCRATCH FEVER - I really like the films of Jeff Leroy, which tend to revel in the squalor of their poverty row abjection on 1/10th of the budget of the sloppiest Fred Olen Ray product. Beyond bad special FX and frequent gore and sleaze, they possess a genuine energy and imagination. 'Hell's Highway', 'Werewolf in a Woman's Prison', 'Witch's Sabbath' are all trashy delights IMO. 'Rat Scratch Fever' isn't quite top rankin' Leroy, but it hits home in all the right places, namely big rats with glowing eyes (is that a place? No!), bad modelwork, plentiful budget splatter and general mayhem as LA is destoyed by a wave of pissed off interstellar rodents. Well, I for one liked it.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - Was going for three quid in the local supermarket today, so, I thought, why not? I'd seen it two or three times over the years since it first came out, and to be honest had never thought much of it or taken it that seriously - hype can be unhelpful, perhaps especially on an unconscious level. I was surprised, even taken aback today at its intensity... I guess maybe I was connecting with it for the first time. The atmosphere of dread, conjured from very little, seemed pungent. Perhaps the moves were obvious and the content slight, but the effect was powerful and the sense of encroaching disorientation and 'something disturbing happening', aided no doubt by the then-fresh found footage technique, felt real and pervasive, more so outside of the obvious 'horror scenes'. Maybe it caught me at the right / wrong time today, but I came away from it feeling quite weirded out, which isn't something that happnes very often.
INBRED - Young offenders on a day trip to the 'wilds' of darkest Yorkshire are set upon by degenerate locals and dispatched via means which include extreme gore and reinforcement of regional stereotypes. I was a bit apprehensive in approaching this - I love (erm, sort of) 'Cradle of Fear', but thought this might play its humour a bit too broadly for my liking. Thankfully, the emphasis is, for the most part, on grim black comedy sadism until the final act, when the tone boils up into the far reaches of splat-stick... but by then, I was in it for the ride. There are some inventive and perverse set pieces despite an inevitable aura of Roysten Vasey... the latter element notwithstanding, overall I liked. I'll leave it to my horde of pet ferrets to repair the hole in my regional identity before I recommend it, though.
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