7th October 2012, 08:58 PM
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| Cult Addict Cult Labs Radio Contributor | | | |
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Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop HARSH LIGHT OF DAY - Combines revenge and vampire subgenres. I quite liked it without being particularly gripped. An author is left paralysed in the aftermath of a house invasion which sees his wife murdered by a trio of snuff movie making thugs (!). A contact from the 'occult underground' introduces him to a vampire who turns him for obvious revenge related narrative reasons. Despite the potential for ridiculousness the tone is sombre and melancholy, and works well.
I, ZOMBIE - Another film dealing with a transition from humanity to creaturedom, Andrew Parkinson's debut takes us on a journey to a lonely place, the place people go when something about them changes and removes them from life, their former selves and the people around them. In this case, zombie is just a metaphor for the slow burn shut down of physical or mental illness, and I was reminded of Cronenberg's 'The Fly' more than the usual flesh rippers. 'I, Zombie' manages to evoke an emotion quite alien to most horror - sadness, building to grief. This is in spite of the initial woodeness of the acting and set up, which quickly give way to a quite suffocating sense of existential malaise. Basically a movie which is ironically enough (given the living dead premise) about someone dying slowly, 'I, Zombie' deserves plenty of credit for its austere originality and depressing vision, although maybe the genre trappings end up being a bit confusing and almost arbitrary... in another life it would've been an arthouse drama about the isolation and misery of illness. Actually though, maybe that arbitrariness is what's good about it. Whatever, Andrew Parkinson is one of the great undersung talents of contemporary UK horror cinema and I really wish someone would release his 'Venus Drowning' on DVD just so I could see it. | I've wanted to see I ZOMBIE for ages after seeing Parkinson's DEAD CREATURES which I enjoyed in all it's bleakness. It gets compared to Mike Leigh's films and that's not a bad way of describing it, though the twitches and body jerks in this are more due to decay and cravings rather than the annoying improvised twitches that often pass as characterisation in Leigh's films.
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