15th July 2018, 10:02 AM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
BETTER WATCH OUT – A kid and his babysitter are on the receiving end of a home invasion in this Christmassy number, watched deliberately at the height of the recent hot weather because I’m basically a miserable kill-joy. Have to say, it actually felt nice to see some snowflakes and patches of ice on the screen with all this relentlessness going on… damn the sun and its incessant life-giving foulness! Go on, f*ck off! It always brings out the worst in people, like all this football shit. There, you’ll have noticed, if you’re still reading, that I’ve filled in half of this review with a massive spurt of irrelevance from the life of Teardrop. That’s because ‘Better Watch Out’ is a twisty one, so to say more about what goes on inside it would be to ruin it for those of you who’re saving it for an actual rainy day. My opinion? Good, maybe very good – dunno about ‘dangerous, deeply demented and blisteringly smart’ or ‘perversely unwholesome’ (so say the tag lines), but what you get is a well-put together, smoothly realised genre piece with nice aesthetics that manages a clever inversion of ‘Home Alone’ without seeming all that smug. Bit Netflixy, though.
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT – Another one I always seem to turn to at the heights of summer, SNDN is a welcome slice of mild sordidness that delivers its cheap thrills quick and nasty. It’s not all that gory or heavy or anything, there’s just this cynical mean-spiritedness running through it like some kind of Jimmy Saville joke implanted within a particularly foul stick of seaside rock. Basically, a kid ends up with some Christmas hating tendencies when he sees his parents get iced by a guy dressed as Santa – some cruel nuns in an orphanage break his spirit even further. By the time he reaches adulthood, he’s ready to wreak terrible revenge on all that tinselly bauble loving shit. A smart black comedy that I never tire of watching, and one of the earliest deconstructions / parodies of the slasher genre (possibly).
SHOCKING DARK – I have an unhealthy tolerance for Bruno Mattei flicks, and it warms my cockles whenever they make it over to blu-ray rather than their true destination i.e a landfill of some description. ‘Shocking Dark’ is an awful remake of ‘Aliens’ on pretty much the catering budget of the latter flick. In its second half, it semi-cleverly takes the ‘android infiltrator’ / Bishop aspect of ‘Aliens’ and uses it to riff on ‘Terminator’ – this imaginative opportunism doesn’t save ‘Shocking Dark’ from being a load of rubbish, though. Mattei has a talent for leeching dramatic scenes of any tension and treats us to some of the clunkiest, un-dynamic action sequences ever committed to celluloid. This makes for some good laughs, though these tend to fade out in the face of unremitting tedium. Is there any good stuff here, really? You know if you’re a Bruno Mattei fan or not. One hundred per cent kudos to Severin for producing this lovely silk purse of a product; restoring ‘Shocking Dark’ and putting it out is an act of supreme generosity, in a way.
SUPERNATURAL FORCES – AKA ‘Mind’s Eye’, from the director of ‘Almost Human’. Like the latter film, SF is going for an eighties vibe – note the synth score and the concern regarding prosthetics. Staying with this eighties thing, it’s pretty much a down-scale re-tread of ‘Scanners’ – tortured telepath captured by bad-guy scientist makes a bid for escape etc. Whereas ‘Scanners’ looked good and had, of course, the trademark glacial atmosphere of a Cronenberg flick, ‘Supernatural Forces’ seems a bit wooden and a little clunky. I remember really liking ‘Almost Human’, which was a slow-burn with a worthwhile payoff. ‘Supernatural Forces’ kind of drags its feet but then doesn’t go anywhere surprising. It does feature some nice gore in the form of two or three set pieces, but you’ll have to wait around for it. Apart from that, I just didn’t sync in with the atmosphere all that much, and came away thinking “nice try, but… why?” There are far worse films around, though.
SEQUENCE BREAK – Another Cronenberg-flavoured retro-stylized flick. This time, ‘Videodrome’ might be the key text. Shy computer dufus dates a fellow nerd, and their romance goes swimmingly until some weird stuff starts happening with a refurbished arcade machine. What exactly does this weird stuff entail? I genuinely couldn’t tell you, even if I watched ‘Sequence Break’ again with a better attention span. What I can say is, there are some flare-ups of surreal imagery from time to time and a guy with wild hair who seems to know a bit about what’s happening and says cryptic things about it all. ‘Sequence Break’ kept me interested and engaged, but it felt a bit slight in the end. I don’t know why – perhaps it needed to be a bit weirder and less ‘human’. Going back to Cronenberg, his films have so much impact not just because of the imagery, but because his characters and their worlds are so opaque and enigmatic. Even his takes on romance ie ‘The Fly’ and ‘Dead Ringers’, are full of a deep sense of alienation. ‘Sequence Break’ goes for freaky but is too straightforward and normal to pull it off. It’s not the leaden usual though and is definitely worth a watch.
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