1st January 2014, 10:13 AM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
As I sit here waiting for a cab to take me into work, I reflect on the few films I've seen over the last three weeks.
HOW TO SEDUCE A VIRGIN - The newish Mondo Macabro edition of this Jess Franco flick from his early seventies heyday. It's a great presentation and obviously worth getting if you're into Franco, which I generally am. As a film, I don't think it stands up to those ones which for me encapsulate what I'm looking for in Franco. It features some of his favourite Sadean themes about the transformation of innocence, but I prefer the delirium of things like 'Erotic Rites of Frankenstein' or the dreamy languor of 'Virgin Amongst the Living Dead'. It does give us some nice moments of bizarreness however ie. a dungeon full of 'living corpses' and Lina Romay's disturbing performance, and there's the usual suffocating erotic intensity.
URBAN FLESH - A really scuzzy shot-on-video offering from late nineties Canada. It's about an outfit of cannibals who seem loosely modelled on those degenerate gangs from seventies exploitation movies like 'Last House on The Left' or 'Candy Snatchers'. They're being followed by a cop with an hilarious moustache. There's quite a lot of "abattoir left overs" type gore, and the last twenty minutes are pretty intense. Maybe some will be put off by the camcorder aesthetic, but, call me naïve, I still think it's pretty punk rock that someone can just pick up some consumer grade electronics, throw in some animal entrails, be relatively mean spirited and nasty, and come up with something worth seeing. If these home grown devices can't divert away from 'Urban Flesh's meandering mid-section, there's always that cop's endlessly fascinating walrus-handlebar combo, and epic French-Canadian metal which sings the praises of depresso philosopher Schopenhauer.
THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE - I occasionally still watch this in the hope that it'll one day live up my former expectations of being something really great, but I usually come away dwelling on all the slightly overlong talky scenes and the bits I didn't like. That said, there are enough vivid moments and sequences for it to work for me - the bleak inner city tableau at the beginning; the desolate Lakes scenery; bursts of trippy electronics on the soundtrack; surprising and pretty gross gore for its time; genuine and unsettling atmosphere in places, and quite a nihilistic feel to it, too. It's just that, whereas shit acting, bad dubbing and awful characterisation can really work for trash like 'Pieces', they undermine and frustrate when there seems to be something genuinely powerful going on. It's just a matter of tone. But anyway, I know TLDAMM is well liked on this forum, and, despite its drawbacks, it's a worthwhile, interesting and probably historically important film.
THEATRE OF BLOOD - Absolutely the best of these four by a few miles, 'Theatre of Blood' is a seventies classic and features the always wonderful Vincent Price as a disgruntled actor bent on killing off his theatre critic opponents via hilariously Shakespearean means. It may be a black comedy at heart, but it's as cruel as it is witty and never flags or bores. For me, it has a feeling I'm always looking for in films from around this time, a feeling that's difficult to define but captures something about how I like to imagine early seventies England - a NEL book cover snapshot of grimy concrete and glass, but with something really weird about to happen. I haven't explained that very well. But, whatever, 'Theatre of Blood' is a joy and a must-see.
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) and was able to get a feel of these series now.
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