1st December 2012, 07:01 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
SPIDER LABYRINTH - No, don't get yr hopes up, this hasn't just been released on emerald plated blu-ray. I watched the same unofficial J-subbed version many others have. It's a great film though, very different in tone to its late eighties Italo-horror brethren, which, beyond Soavi and a rapidly fading Argento, mostly comprised of barren trash... instead, this overcomes the usual problem of stiltedness to build suspense and tension in a classic way, culminating in a real sense of paranoia and dread. This is 'Spider Labyrinth's strongest hand. A vicious witchy murderer and stop-motion spider-baby mutation also number amongst the good points. Like everyone else, I wish this was out on some kind of real DVD.
RAMPAGE - Another film from Uwe Boll which I insist is pretty good. It isn't as grimly mesmerising as 'Stoic', but manages to deliver a hard hitting account of mass murder in an anonymous American town. Like 'Stoic', it kind of wavers in its approach to its subject matter - unlike 'Stoic', it comes down more obviously on the side of exploitation / entertainment rather than serious exploration. Brendan Fletcher plays an angry young man who decides to vent his wounded but monolithic narcissism in order to become a tabloid headline (at the risk of sounding utterly crass, he reminded me of Robert Webb trying to do Breivik). The 'twist' in the set-up is unrealistic and ho-hum, not that this affects the movie much.
RE-WIND - Hisayasu Sato is one of my favourite filmmakers. This is one of his movies from the late eighties, and features many of its director's hallmarks such as voyeurism, fetishism and multi-media alienation. It also references 'Peeping Tom' explicitly. A snuff tape showing the death-rape of a young woman is circulating throughout the porn underground of a Japanese city, and a killer is using an adapated video camera as a muder weapon. A self proclaimed 'crime hunter' is on the case, for reasons close to her heart. This is all about texture, endless cool renderings of high rise blocks, grey concrete, sleazy neon milieux and video monitors flickering to an industrial soundtrack. "Only in Japan", as one of the characters says before shagging along to said snuff tape. Sato should be regarded as a sort of post-Cronenberg Franco in some ways.
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