MOVIEJOURNAL 2017 (PART EIGHT)

[smogo]

What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.

Index
** Arachnid
* L'Arcano Incantatore: Una Fola Esoteerica delle Nostre Campagne (The Arcane Sorcerer: An Esoteric Fable from Our Countryside) [aka Mysterious Encounter]
*** Better Watch Out [aka Safe Neighborhood]
** Bloodbeat
**** Brawl in Cell Block 99
*** Cat People
*** Charlie's Family [aka The Manson Family]
*** The Death of Stalin
** The Devil Rides Out [aka The Devil's Bride]
*** Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki
**** Faust: Love of the Damned
** Gut
*** The Handmaiden: Extended Edition
** Kat (Cat)
*** Killing Ground
** Klip (Clip)
*** Love Exposure
*** Made in Serbia
*** Midnight Offerings
** The Monster Squad
*** Muzan-E: AV Actress Snuff Film Exists! [aka Celluloid Nightmares]
* New Red Room: The Broken Dolls [aka Red Room 2]
** Prey
*** Private Parts
** P2
* The Purge
** Red Room: The Forbidden King Game
** La Región Salvaje (The Wild Land) [aka The Untamed]
* The Room
** Savage Harvest
*** Sleepwalkers
*** Suburban Gothic
*** Suffer Little Children
*** The Transfiguration
** Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness
**** The Uncanny
** VHS Forever?: Psychotronic People
** La Visione del Sabba (The Vision of the Sabbath) [aka The Witches' Sabbath]
*** The Wicker Man
*** The Wraith
*** Zivot i Smrt Porno Bande (The Life and Death of a Porno Gang)
* Zombie Cats from Mars

All reviews


THE DEATH OF STALIN (France/UK/Belgium 2017 / Armando Iannucci)
***
It's a shame when Stalin dies, because at that early point in this film he's arguably its funniest character. Adrian McLoughlin plays him as a Cockney wide-boy, virtually an Alan Sugar impersonation, but then this is a film in which 1950s Soviet Communist party ministers say things like, "Fucking hell, I'm knackered". That's delivered by Paul Whitehouse as Anastas Mikoyan, while Steve Buscemi, playing future premier Nikita Khruschchev, takes a slightly different approach, reimagining him as a Noo Yoik gangster, whereas Jason Isaacs portrays the Red Army's field marshal as a hard-as-nails, no-nonsense northern English brute. In short, the character work here is superb. As for the narrative, the film tells two stories about the era. Firstly, a story about how a dictatorship can end up so addicted to propaganda that it foolishly maintains a state of denial about any negative developments. Then, once Stalin is dead, we get a more conventional sitcom about machinations at the top of government, with Jeffrey Tambor's Georgy Malenkov the ludicrous and incompetent new leader who's being manipulated by the cleverer schemers below him. It's a funny history lesson about a country where absolutely nobody was safe from its rulers' terrible wrath.

THE MONSTER SQUAD (USA 1987 / Fred Dekker)
**
I guess I've come to this film 30 years too late, but even if I had watched it when I was 12 I suspect I'd still seen through it as little more than a rehash of The Goonies for mini horror fans. Still, kids need movies too, but this one is so full of clichés that it quickly becomes tiresome: there's an annoying little sister, a scary old neighbour who turns out to be nice, boys perving at an older girl undressing across the way, bullies, bicycles and all the rest of it. Basically, if you've seen this year's It, it's worth going back to The Monster Squad just to see what it was aping. The plot concerns a treehouse club of horror-obsessed boys who have to take action when Dracula - assisted by a werewolf, a mummy and a creature from a black lagoon (but not by Frankenstein's monster, who sides with the kids) - pitches up in their small American town, hoping to find the maguffin that can destroy the world (or be used by the good guys to save it). I hate a bland Dracula (or in certain 80s films, a bland late-night TV host who models himself on Dracula), and this movie has one of the worst, played by a nobody in a cast surprisingly lacking in recognisable faces. On the other hand, Stan Winston and Tom Woodruff's special effects are top-notch, and easily the best thing here.

MUZAN-E: AV ACTRESS SNUFF FILM EXISTS! [aka Celluloid Nightmares] (Japan 1999 / Daisuke Yamanouchi)
***
Presented as a VHS rental documentary about a topic too hot for TV, we meet reporter Kazuyo Fujimori who tells us about Tokyo porn star Mai Tsurumi. Mai starred in eight very specialist videos (menstruation and rape stuff, since you ask) before going missing, and rumour has it that a tape of her murder was later sent to the production company that employed her. When Kazuyo says that this is too hot for TV, she's not kidding: we see some fairly long clips from Mai's films, in all their explicit, bloody detail. I can't imagine there are too many people who want to wank to a woman being pinned down and forced to eat her own tampon, but there you have it. Later, of course, Kazuyo obtains a copy of the snuff movie and we get to watch Mai being tortured and killed, after which the journo makes the dubious Evil Dead Trap decision to drive out to the scene of the crime for further investigation. This, you'll have gathered, is a particularly nasty shocker. The central murder scene has laughable gore effects, but the build-up is haunting, as Kazuyo's soft voice reads out the killer's words in voiceover over silent footage of Mai being stripped and beaten. There's also a clever twist, and some particularly sickening sound effects.

BETTER WATCH OUT [aka Safe Neighborhood] (Australia/USA 2016 / Chris Peckover)
***
Although this movie is more focused on the brutality than the sexual politics of it, toxic, entitled masculinity is a topical and interesting motive for a horror movie villain. And that comes from an unexpected source here, but unfortunately said villain isn't particularly convincing or frightening, and that's where the film falls short. It's especially frustrating because the plot development is impeccable. Beginning with two 12 year-old boys discussing whether one of them will get off with his 17 year-old babysitter that evening, the unnerving delivery of a pizza they haven't ordered is the first omen that it's going to be a violent night. So far, so home invasion by numbers, but an unexpected turn of events launches us into, theoretically, a very dark place. However, I'm not sure that film is the best medium for this story. Or at least not a glossy, suburbia-set movie with wholesome all-American characters. No, this is an idea that would work best on the page, or otherwise requires a big serving of Eden Lake-style grit to pull off properly, with an antagonist who's truly threatening. Put it this way: this is a film where we're told that a character's head has exploded, but we don't get to see it for ourselves.

CAT PEOPLE (USA 1982 / Paul Schrader)
***
This influential remake (I spotted things that have been homaged by The Fly, Maniac and The Neon Demon) does a decent job of updating the coy, sexless 1942 film for the hedonistic 1980s. Arguably it goes too far, with the gratuitously pervy premise that the titular cat people can only fuck each other, even if related; shagging a human causes them to turn into a killer panther. Clearly it was written that way to allow for maximum sex and violence, with special makeup designer Tom Burman (My Bloody Valentine, Halloween III, The Beast Within) providing gore and, of course, a transformation sequence or two. It's easy to forget these days just how frequently actresses were required to get naked for the flimsiest of reasons, and here Lynn Lowry, Annette O'Toole and Tessa Richarde all go topless, while Natassia Kinski can, famously, hardly keep her clothes on. There's also Malcolm McDowell and John Heard's arses, if that's your thing. The screenplay improves on the original by making reluctant feline Irena the focus - the heroic Oliver is her love interest, not vice versa - and adding a new villain in the form of Irena's pushy brother, who's fully embraced his catty side. The pacing's a bit baggy, but as early 80s horror goes, this is unusually classy.

THE TRANSFIGURATION (USA 2016 / Michael O'Shea)
***
New York youngsters Milo & Sophie make a really cute couple, and it's sad that they've got so many issues. Sophie self-harms, both by cutting her arms and letting herself be used by local boys as a sex object; Milo, on the other hand, is withdrawn and untalkative. And also, he thinks he's a vampire, he's morbidly obsessed with vampire lore, and he kills people and drinks their blood like a vampire... but we don't know whether he really is a vampire or not. Before you can say, "That's a bit like that film Martin", Milo's telling Sophie that Martin is his favourite movie (nice swerve, The Transfiguration!), and indeed this does have a similar, slightly woozy, slightly gritty style that doesn't shy away from showing bloodshed, but keeps itself firmly rooted in realism. And for a change, Milo isn't some skinny, pale, gothy white guy, but a regular black kid, short and with a bit of puppy fat and bumfluff that makes him look even younger than his age. Meanwhile, Chloe Levine is adorable as Sophie, and I hope she gets more starring roles in the future. Ultimately this is a quiet, unshowy mood piece with few traditionally "exciting" moments, no great revelations or a big climax or anything, just a believable portrayal of an uneasy young romance, with fangs (...or not).

GUT (USA 2012 / Elias)
**
I have Canadian murderer Luka Magnotta's video of him dismembering a victim's body sitting on my hard drive, but haven't yet steeled myself to watch it. According to this cautionary tale, I probably never should, or I'll start hallucinating gory and violent images at home, and I'll end up... well, actually the ending is where this film finally falls apart, so maybe it's not a cautionary tale worth paying heed to after all. Old friends and colleagues Tom & Dan are coming to the end of their relationship, thanks to Tom's boring family commitments, and this is only exacerbated when carefree bachelor Tom, still a fan of horror movies, shows Dan a real snuff movie. Rewind a bit, because in the first shot of Gut we saw Dan apparently killing someone, and I've no idea what we're supposed to think about that at this point. This works best when it's a study of a disintegrating friendship, or when it's getting spicy thanks to Dan's ever-horny wife or Tom's attraction to a waitress. It's much less good at depicting the men's psychological breakdowns, and while this is obviously low-budget, it really looks cheap when we get more and more static-camera shots of not very good actors trying to convey their pain. I think there's supposed to be a big twist, but it's badly fumbled.

EVIL DEAD TRAP 2: HIDEKI (Japan 1992 / Izô Hashimoto)
***
You never really know where you are with Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki, and the confusion begins with that title, because while this isn't a sequel to Evil Dead Trap, it does similarly include a female TV presenter, real death caught on camera and a weird character named Hideki, though otherwise it's a completely different beast. What I do know is that it's about Aki, a lonely cinema projectionist whose only friend is celebrity turned reporter Eimi, who's having an affair with married man Kurahashi, but who is keen to share Kurahashi with Aki because she thinks that Aki needs a good shag to bring her out of her shell. Meanwhile, women are being brutally killed in an industrial part of town, and we keep seeing Aki drenched in blood and wielding a blade at the murder scenes. We never actually see her attack anyone, but then this is a film where it's often unclear how we've got to the current scene from the previous one. Of course, it all ends in a violent, bloody mess, but I couldn't tell you why. Still, I'm entertained by the idea that Japan Home Video saw Izô Hashimoto's notorious Lucky Sky Diamond, and decided that he'd be the best person to write and direct the sequel to their earlier hit movie. It's incomprehensible, but in a freaky way that I can get behind.

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (USA 2017 / S Craig Zahler)
****
Judging by this and Bone Tomahawk, writer-director S Craig Zahler really enjoys an aggressively unusual approach to story structure. In the opening 15 minutes of Brawl in Cell Block 99, we're shown that our hero, Bradley, has a likeable way with words but an underlying anger, though he only ever takes it out on inanimate objects, plus he's very strong: he's capable of wrecking a car with his bare hands. Then for most of the following hour, we're shown over and over again that he has a likeable way with words, an underlying anger, avoids trouble, and is very strong. Only then is the plot finally allowed to shift up a gear and enter its long-overdue second act, in a film that you could say has a Jason Takes Manhattan-like attitude to reaching its titular location. In short, Bradley is a reluctant drug-runner who gets caught and incarcerated, but in order to save his kidnapped wife he must quickly get transferred to the toughest part of the prison, and to do that he needs to be incredibly fucking violent. It may have a carefully measured pace, but it's always watchable - Vince Vaughn (looking just like Derek Mears) is compellingly intense throughout - and when the violence comes, it hits hard, thanks in part to some welcome gore effects. Riki-Oh has a new rival.

MADE IN SERBIA (Serbia 2005 / Mladen Đorđević)
***
Filmmaker Mladen Đorđević, having become intrigued by his homeland's tiny and amateurish porn industry, sets out to make his own porno, although clearly that's just an artificial goal that he conjured up to give his documentary about local pornographer Slobodan Stankovic some structure. Actually, it's even more questionable than that, because I'm suspicious that he just wanted to use his new connections to get a blow-job (possibly more, but that's all we see) off an actress he fancies. Over a fairly baggy hour and forty minutes, we meet Stankovic and some of his regular performers (and their friends and families), though it can get confusing at times as to whether we're watching Đorđević's documentary, scenes that are supposed to be reconstructions of actual events, or footage from Stankovic's grotty little films. The clear highlight is a tragic/comic section in which Stankovic tries to shoot some scenes with a middle-aged husband and wife at their very modest and unglamorous home. The look on the husband's face as he's replaced by a different performer who can actually sustain an erection is golden, while the whole sequence highlights the grim absurdity of real sex being choreographed by an unappealing man with a camcorder.

P2 (Canada 2006 / Franck Khalfoun)
**
This may sound uncharacteristic coming from a big fan of exploitation horror, but there's something about this particular woman-in-peril movie that I found slightly too unpleasant. It's a film that rightly criticises a man for near-enough sexually assaulting a colleague at the office Christmas party, and yet ensures that the victim spends most of the running time with her impressive cleavage on display. Said damsel-in-distress is Angela, who finds herself trapped in an underground car park on Christmas Eve, and to make matters worse she's attacked while trying to find a way out. When she regains consciousness, she's been stripped out of her red power dress, down to the low-cut white slip that she was wearing beneath, she's chained to a table, and she's being invited to a shoddy dinner for two that she wants no part of. 100 minutes is a tad too long for what is essentially a single location two-hander, and the endless cat-and-mouse gets repetitive very quickly. Also, Angela's kidnapper is a little too outrageously mental to really believe in. But what P2 does have going for it is a scene about halfway through in which someone's repeatedly struck by a car, splattering them in an awesomely brutal and gory fashion. That bit's really good.

PREY (South Africa/UK 2006 / Darrell James Roodt)
**
This feline take on Cujo suffers from unimaginative plot development, with a script that seems to think that merely putting three characters in a desperate situation is enough. And so, Amy and her stepchildren Jessica & David (who are carbon copies of Lex & Tim from Jurassic Park) are on safari in a 4x4, but their guide - who has the car keys - gets eaten by lions and leaves them stuck in the savannah. (Oddly, the reason the guide was outside the car was to accompany David while he went to take an al fresco dump, yet the boy never manages to relieve himself and, indeed, the subject of toilet needs never comes up again even though they're trapped in the car for days.) Meanwhile the kids' dad, civil engineer Tom, flails around, trying to enlist help to find his family. At one point he flips out and resolves to search every inch of Africa, which seems excessive, but in the end there's no need because that's the exact point when the ranger who's with him suddenly hears Amy calling for help, which is convenient and saves Tom a lot of effort. The tension between Amy and stroppy Jessica is just about the best thing here: as basic as everything else, but convincing and heartfelt. But that's not what anyone's watching the movie for.

RED ROOM: THE FORBIDDEN KING GAME (Japan 1999 / Daisuke Yamanouchi)
**
A married couple and two younger people have voluntarily entered some sort of dubious gameshow in which they take turns to dare one contender to do something nasty to another. The last player to drop out wins 10 million yen, so you're not going to get very far by demanding two of your rivals to french kiss, as happens in the first challenge. Of course, as this no-budget, shot-on-video effort goes on, the dares get increasingly violent and perverse, though several of them suggest that the competitors have simply watched the first Guinea Pig tape and lifted ideas directly from that. Towards the end, as the lengthy sexual assaults mount up, it becomes quite hard to watch; if it wasn't for Japan's aversion to genital close-ups this would veer into hardcore violent porn territory, though I'm not sure that the softcore violent porn we're left with is much more acceptable. There's a moment where it looks like one character's unnecessary cruelty is going to come back and bite him on the - well - bite him on the dick, and that at least gives the movie some semblance of moral justice. But any artistic merit is hard to find. Still, I do admire horror films that try their best to be extreme, even if this one feels largely like it's trying too hard.

KLIP (Clip) (Serbia 2012 / Maja Miloš)
**
Jasna is a Belgrade teenager who's starting to get into sex and drugs and heavy drinking (and dancing half-naked around her bedroom, and all the rest of it), while attempting to block out the fact that her dad is bedbound with cancer. A slightly older boy, Ðole, has caught the attention of her and her friends, and Jasna gets to start seeing him, and she videos pretty much everything on her phone. So you might expect a cautionary tale involving her sexy selfies, her cocaine use or even her overly speedy consent to anal. But no, that's not where this goes at all. Sure, there's some nasty violence along the way, because - what a surprise - Ðole isn't a particularly nice guy. But this is just a slice of life; a portrait of a teenage girl. A girl gone wild, or just a regular teen? - the film doesn't presume to judge. Ultimately, there's no real story here... and that's quite dull. Klip is most notable for featuring some Nymph()maniac-style trickery that makes it appear that we're seeing 14 year-old actress Isidora Simijonovic in all her cock-gobbling, pussy-shaving, explicitly-penetrated glory. And while I'm sure Simijonovic was treated perfectly well, the end result is still "quasi" images that I'm sure could be considered illegal. Probably time to give my hard drive a good scrub....

SLEEPWALKERS (USA 1992 / Mick Garris)
***
Solid mid-budget US horror from the time when digital morphing FX were all the rage. Which means that, had I seen this at the time (and this is probably the reason I didn't), I'd have been fuming that it only takes a second or two for a human to transform into a monster, instead of it filling several gruesome minutes of screen time. But I'm more forgiving of that now, especially when the movie is as entertaining as this. It's about a beautiful mother and her teenage son Charles, new arrivals in a rural town, who are not only secretly incestuous, but the titular supernatural creatures. It's never explained exactly what "sleepwalkers" are, but their feline facial features (when not in human form) suggests were-cats, yet they're either terrified of or allergic to regular domestic cats. Also, they can make themselves and their cars disappear, but they're less good at ensuring that mirrors don't reveal their true nature. They're very flawed, in short. The movie's tone is similarly strange, generally serious but deploying humour to stop things getting too dark, which means that a scene in which Charles attacks his girlfriend in the woods - with all its undertones of date rape - comes across as oddly jaunty. Some good gore and a nice lightness of touch complete the agreeable package.

BLOODBEAT (USA/France 1982 / Fabrice A Zaphiratos)
**
There's an intense 13-minute freakout sequence halfway through this otherwise moribund supernatural slasher that, along with a similar but slightly less eye-popping 7-minute finalé, assures its cult favourite status. But 20 minutes of madness isn't enough when the other 65 are badly acted, technically poor and very boring. Chief among the bad actors is one Helen Benton, starring in her only credit (unsurprisingly) as a buttoned-up painter who welcomes her two grown-up children and her son's new girlfriend, Sarah, into her countryside home for the Christmas holidays. Immediately there's an uneasy psychic connection between her and Sarah, but the best you can say about the film's first half is that it's got that slightly off vibe of other 10-a-penny early 80s slashers. However: that midway freakout - wow! While Sarah - apparently possessed by an ancient samurai(!) - writhes around on her bed in an ambiguous state, people are stabbed by an unseen, sword-wielding killer, rooms and bodies glow in psychedelic colours, and her boyfriend is attacked by an onslaught of brand-name products flying from the kitchen cupboards. The ending is scored by Carl Orff's "O Fortuna". I mean, it's rubbish, but you'll want to watch it, and then immediately rewatch it.

ZIVOT I SMRT PORNO BANDE (The Life and Death of a Porno Gang) (Serbia 2009 / Mladen Đorđević)
***
No doubt inspired by Mladen Đorđević's porn documentary Made in Serbia , his horror-drama is about a filmmaker at the turn of the millennium who, when his (amazing-looking) zombie-themed porno doesn't take off, decides to take his cast on the road, to stage a series of live sex cabarets in a tour of conservative farming villages. When that goes about as well as you'd expect, the penniless gang take up a strange old pervert's suggestion to start making snuff movies instead, with volunteer victims who want to leave good money for their poverty-stricken families, much as in Johnny Depp's movie The Brave. Beginning as a mockumentary, at some point this shifts seamlessly into a more obviously fictional milieu, thanks to the continued use of handheld cameras. I'd never really understood until now how the following year's A Serbian Film is the sociopolitical polemic its director claims it is, but the same message is much more explicit here, showing how a decade's worth of Yugoslav civil wars, which Serbia lost - and the horrific footage from them that circulated domestically - created a nation utterly desensitised to atrocity and nihilism. But for all the gory, depressing violence on display, this story is one of hope... sort of.

THE WRAITH (USA/Canada 1986 / Mike Marvin)
***
This corny teen car chase action movie owes a huge debt to Aussie carsploitation flicks, with its desert setting and gurning, gibbering punks as bad guys (my absolute least favourite movie archetypes). In fact, other than the accents, the main things that mark this out as an American film are the facts that 100mph is heralded as an outrageously fast speed, and that every other male cast member could pass for Michael J Fox's slightly less good-looking brother. It also stars Sherilyn Fenn, then 21 and unrecognisably innocent looking, with no hint of the smouldering sexiness she'd become known for. She plays Keri, the reluctant moll to bouffanted twat Parker, who leads a criminal gang of petrolheads and who murdered Keri's true love. Seemingly from outer space arrives a new superhero - Charlie Sheen by day, biker-masked force of nature from Strip Nude for Your Killer / Nail Gun Massacre / Daft Punk by night - who's the only person able to drive Parker's associates off the road and has the end game of saving Keri from Parker's advances. Clint Howard plays the only sympathetic gang member, Randy Quaid is the town's sheriff, and there's a cheeseball rock soundtrack featuring Bonnie Tyler, Billy Idol and Robert Palmer. Eighties by numbers.

LOVE EXPOSURE (Japan 2008 / Sion Sono)
***
With its ludicrous four-hour running time and multiple protagonists, this is more of a soap opera than a movie. But it grabs you early with a remarkable hour-long pre-title sequence in which the teenage son of a Catholic priest is goaded into sinning, which he masters by using ninjitsu acrobatics to take numerous surreptitious up-skirt photos, soundtracked to a seemingly unending loop of Ravel's "Bolero". He stops that after meeting the girl of his dreams, but because he's dressed as a woman for a bet at the time, she falls in love with "her" instead of him. Meanwhile, one of his victims, in league with a rival religious cult, is plotting her elaborate revenge.... This is something that could only have come out of Japan, the original source of martial arts and panty shots, with the Christianity sideline adding an unexpected twist. The story could easily end after about 140 wild minutes, but there are still 100 to go. And the remainder is a real change of pace, encompassing abduction, brainwashing, terrorism and mental illness. It's a bit of a downer after all the comedy, and a bit of a drag stretching it out to this length with what feels like a less enjoyable second feature. Ultimately exhausting, but the frequent use of Beethoven's 7th is rousing.

THE PURGE (USA/France 2013 / James DeMonaco)
*
Quite a good idea is squandered on a below-par home invasion storyline. By 2022, America's crime epidemic has been solved thanks to a legal killing spree free-for-all that takes place for 12 hours every year: Purge Night. Many people take part in the spree, many others lock themselves indoors and hope to avoid any trouble. Unfortunately this movie focuses on one of the most unsympathetic families possible, from the latter group. They're a well-off, middle-class white clan who live in a "nice", probably gated neighbourhood, and have made their money selling high-tech, but as it turns out, substandard home security systems off the back of Purge Night. Their young son, who doesn't appreciate how violent things get outside, makes the mistake of letting an injured, homeless black man in to take shelter, which makes the family the target of the entitled, preppy and no doubt racist arseholes who were hunting him. Basically, almost no one comes out of this looking good, which makes it hard to care about the outcome. James DeMonaco's direction and Nathan Whitehead's score are unremarkable and uninspired, and the casting of 22 year-old Adelaide Kane as a uniform-wearing schoolgirl is just odd.

CHARLIE'S FAMILY [aka The Manson Family] (USA 2003 / Jim VanBebber)
***
It's so rare to find a film that purports to come from an older era that actually looks and feels the part (remember that run of grindhouse pastiches where a few artificial, digital film scratches were expected to be enough to transport us back to the 70s?). In Jim vanBebber's freeform Charles Manson docudrama thing, supposed footage of his "family" of followers, interviews with them and, most convincingly, a few scenes with two old journos who've received a videotape in the post, are totally believable. That said, I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to be watching half the time: presumably a combination of home movies, real interviews and dramatic reconstruction, though why the "actual" cultists would be playing themselves in the reconstructions doesn't make any sense. Still, this isn't meant to be particularly coherent, I don't think, instead being an evocation of what you might call Mansonmania. Certain images recall moments from Roberta Findlay's movie Slaughter and no doubt other similar Mansonsploitation flicks, which is enough to make you think that this is the real deal, the thing that those films were copying, even though this came much later. 15 years in the making, in many ways this is a mess, but I really dig its vibe, maaaaan.

LA VISIONE DEL SABBA (The Vision of the Sabbath) [aka The Witches' Sabbath] (Italy/France 1988 / Marco Bellocchio)
**
Béatrice Dalle followed up her breakthrough film, Betty Blue, with this Italian-language (the French and American leads are all dubbed) supernatural drama in which she plays a not dissimilar character. She is Maddalena, a psychiatric patient who's facing an attempted murder charge for shooting a sexually aggressive huntsman, and who claims to be a four century-old witch. She also claims to (somehow) still be a virgin, but she has designs on her young married doctor, Davide, and hopes to change that. This is deliberately confusing at times, with dual timelines that switch between the present day and the 17th century, which is understandable if Maddalena's story is true, but the presence of Davide in some of the early modern era scenes - wearing his 20th century clothes - clouds whether they're supposed to be flashbacks, dream sequences or someone's fantasies; hers or his, it could be either. And, sadly, those moments of fantasy aren't as exciting as the director seems to think they are. One lengthy orgy scene halfway through the film actually manages to be quite dull, and that's because the modern-day sexual tension between Maddalena & Davide is much more interesting, thanks in no small part to Dalle's incredible screen presence.

FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (Spain 2000 / Brian Yuzna)
****
Sexed-up and super-violent superhero nonsense, set to a pounding metal soundtrack of Sepultura, Fear Factory and Soulfly. It's about the three-way relationship between a troubled psychiatrist; John, her new patient who's banged up for mass murder; and the mysterious man who turned John into a killer. Obviously, with the title being Faust, there's no need to explain how X led to Y, but the innovation here is that John actually gets to transform into a classic red, horned demon - with Wolverine-style blades on his hands - whenever he feels the need to slaughter someone. The movie is adapted from a graphic novel, and it looks as though there were few concessions to cinematic budgetary constraints: we rarely return to the same location twice, for example, and there's little holding back on the special effects despite the low $3m budget. It does contain a few quips that probably look better in speech bubbles than they do said out loud, but for the most part this adaptation works superbly. I wonder if Brian Yuzna intended it as his calling card to Hollywood after his splatter contemporary Sam Raimi got the Spider-Man gig. The storyline isn't amazing, but as usual Yuzna throws in enough energy, invention and gross-out images to make this a real thrill.

NEW RED ROOM: THE BROKEN DOLLS [aka Red Room 2] (Japan 2000 / Daisuke Yamanouchi)
*
A new set of four volunteers compete to the death for a big (but not that big) money prize in the second (and fortunately last) instalment of this unlikely game show, or whatever it's supposed to be. This time the contestants are: a teenage girl who's already won three times, and is so good at it that she's suspected at one point of being a robot; a man who's keeping his reason for playing a secret; a woman who belongs to a religious cult; and a man who just seems to be excited about all the raping he might get to do. I'm surprised there aren't more of these films, because they look like a piece of piss to make. Set dressing is minimal - sometimes there doesn't even seem to be a set at all - and all you really need is some actors willing to participate in some pretty disgusting set-ups, and someone who can throw together some shoddy and unconvincing special effects. Such little thought evidently goes into the direction of the scenes that director Daisuke Yamanouchi can probably knock one of these out in a day. Running about 20 minutes longer than the original, we get more dialogue and backstory this time, but that's all rubbish too, and winds up with possibly the cheesiest final line ever delivered, as the winner discovers the price of redemption.

SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN (UK 1983 / Alan Briggs)
***
An unpromising drama school production - that ended up with an actual home video release that attracted tabloid controversy - ends up as the perfect midnight movie headfuck, thanks to director Alan Briggs's blatant lack of interest in much except for the violent and psychedelic final 20 minutes. The rest of it is barely competent, from the camerawork, to the editing and sound recording, to the acting. Actually, the children are unnervingly naturalistic; it's the older actors who are all abysmal. Set in a south London children's home (presumably the drama school's own shabby townhouse premises), the arrival of a young mute girl with darkness in her eyes coincides with several residents having nasty "accidents", some of which we almost get to see... though the makers clearly couldn't figure out how to safely depict six kids nearly drowning, so we only get to hear about that incident second-hand. That said, there's a real sense of irresponsibility to parts of this home movie, and that's what makes the scenes of children running around with weapons, stabbing each other and themselves, hilarious and eye-popping. You also get a sequence with furniture flying around an office (my favourite thing!) and a final, strobe-lit showdown that you will never, ever see coming.

THE ROOM (USA 2003 / Tommy Wiseau)
*
Misogynistic (anti-)romantic drama directed, produced and written, apparently in crayon, by Tommy Wiseau, a man who looks like a heavily strung-out wrestler. To be fair, it's not at all badly made, albeit very televisual, but his presence in front of the camera, playing stressed banker Johnny, is what has made this such a cult hit, because his acting is truly atrocious. Okay, so English isn't Wiseau's first language, but his line delivery as the drama unfolds is so awkward that I started to feel nostalgic for the first act where all he seemed to do was repeatedly say "ha ha ha" and sigh-grunt his way through lengthy sex scenes with an actress 25 years his junior. That unlucky woman plays Lisa, Johnny's unfaithful, gold-digger fiancée who can't decide from one scene to the next if she loves him or not. The room of the title seems to be their living room, which is treated like the setting of a generic studio sitcom, complete with actors seemingly pausing for applause breaks whenever they step through the door. Another sitcom influence is Lisa's elderly mother, a stereotypical glamorous Californian multiple divorcée, but - "me underwears" anecdote aside - this is no comedy, just a dismal soap opera with amusingly terrible dialogue.

ZOMBIE CATS FROM MARS (USA 2015 / Montetré)
*
You'd think I'd be all over a movie about killer cats (the premise is self-explanatory) that, it is revealed, have opposable thumbs and use them to operate hacksaws, pens and other human tools. But Zombie Cats from Mars suffers from such a wildly varying tone that, by the time it gets to that stage, it doesn't have any sort of impact. What's worse is that its most prominent aesthetic is exactly the sort of dreary, colourless, sleepy, no-budget, indie-soundtracked, 21st century suburban American filmmaking that I find stifling. Also - and perhaps this is the killer - it's never remotely as funny as it seems to think it is, most notably whenever the action cuts to a local news studio and we spend a pointless bit of time with the two presenters. Those scenes highlight the scattershot, almost sketch-like nature of the film's structure. Perhaps director "Montetré" (Monty Wayne Benton III) intended it this way, but there's no consistency across the various subplots, and when none of them are particularly compelling in the first place, it's hard to become gripped. Either Montetré was aiming for something anarchic (and falling short), or he just lacks the focus a director needs.

THE UNCANNY (Canada/UK 1977 / Denis Héroux)
****
Three tails (tales) of feline revenge. In the first, a thieving maid gets trapped in the larder by her employer's numerous pet cats. When she manages to escape, guess what happens! Next, an orphaned girl, with the help of her black moggy familiar, uses her late mother's black magic skills to wreak vengeance on her jealous older cousin. So far, so silly, but the most well-written, fiendish and funny story is saved for last, as Donald Pleasence plays the conniving husband of a horror scream queen. Once he's had her killed so that he can carry on with his younger mistress, the dead wife's pussy keeps turning up at the film studio, figuring out how to get rid of the new girl. Peter Cushing is very good in the simple, though arguably unnecessary wraparound playing the compiler of these stories, trying to convince his sceptical publisher to go with his latest book. This is one of the lightest, breeziest horror anthologies I've ever seen, but that's not a criticism because it all seems to pass in an instant. The first part provides the gore, the second has some cheesy visual effects, and the third is full of hammy acting and gothic parody. No segment outstays its welcome, plus there's a ton of really cute furry creatures purring and yowling all the way through. Mewtiful.

KAT (Cat) (Denmark 2001 / Martin Schmidt)
**
Law student Maria is reeling from failing her degree and her boyfriend losing interest in her, when her pet cat Athena becomes a conduit for the witchcraft-practising neighbours upstairs. Athena, a not especially attractive, elderly-looking siamese, somehow goes about committing a series of brutal double murders which, more's the pity, are depicted via confusing fast cuts, unclear closeups and a welcome smattering of gore. Later on she apparently takes the form of a panther to maraud around town, but aside from a set of puppet fangs, this panther is a disastrous example of terrible early CGI. Basically, this movie doesn't have the budget to match its ambition, and the poor quality digital video that was commonly used at the time really hasn't aged well: this is one crappy looking film. But lack of money can't take all the blame, because director Martin Schmidt's use of the camera is uninspiring too; it almost always feels as though he's plumped for the easiest, quickest medium shot available. Fortunately the two leads - Liv Corfixen who plays the whimpering Maria, and Charlotte Munck as her witchy flatmate - are good enough to keep you watching long past the point where it's clear that this is barely worth 85 minutes of your time.

LA REGIÓN SALVAJE (The Wild Land) [aka The Untamed] (Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/Norway/Switzerland 2016 / Amat Escalante)
**
A strange and enigmatic sexual drama that's quite difficult to get into at first, not offering any easy ways into its roster of (initially) confusingly connected characters. But they turn out to be married couple Alejandra & Fabián, Ale's brother Ángel, who's secretly having an affair with the outwardly homophobic Fabián, and Verónica, a lonely woman who's found an unusual lover in the woods courtesy of a middle-aged couple's bizarre discovery. The opening scenes are the most one-track minded I've seen since Cronenberg's Crash, with enthusiastic fucking, unenthusiastic fucking, masturbation and ecstasy dominating the screen. It calms down into more boringly buttoned-up drama after that, aside from the occasional woodland scene where we discover more about Verónica's relationship with a tentacled alien creature - obvious shades of Żuławski's Possession, which this could be considered an update of, homage to or uncredited copy. The most eye-popping scene, though, isn't one of alien shagging, but one of paired-up animals partaking in some kind of multi-species fuckfest. The film's message seems to be, "Some people fuck aliens - get over it", whereas a deeper exploration of what drives them to fuck aliens would've been more satisfying.

SAVAGE HARVEST (USA 1981 / Robert L Collins)
**
Possibly conceived as a spoiler for Roar, which had been over a decade in the making and on the cusp of release, Savage Harvest is also about a white American family in Kenya who are attacked in their home by lions. The major difference is that the animals here are very much the villains, rather than innocent pets who can be deadly to humans when their playtime gets too boisterous. Tom Skerritt stars as the mother's ex-husband, and the father of her children, who comes back into their lives at this crucial moment, but what that means is that the quiet bits between the lion attacks keep returning to this very ordinary and uninteresting domestic situation when, you'd think, everyone would be more concerned with the imminent danger. Perhaps the most effective scene is when the family are having a singalong around the piano (to not one but two Beatles songs - shocking in itself given the licensing expense involved!), only to be interrupted by one hard-looking beast dragging a servant's body into the room. In fact, all the scenes involving lions are pretty great; they may look safer for the cast and crew than those in the notoriously anarchic Roar, but having a proper director and animal wranglers in charge makes a big difference to how they look on screen.

L'ARCANO INCANTATORE: UNA FOLA ESOTEERICA DELLE NOSTRE CAMPAGNE (The Arcane Sorcerer: An Esoteric Fable from Our Countryside) [aka Mysterious Encounter] (Italy 1996 / Pupi Avati)
*
A film so forgettable that its premise had escaped me while I was still watching it. Fortunately, the Tom Cruise-looking hero, disgraced young priest Giacomo, delivers a recap half an hour from the end... it's almost as if they knew the viewer would be struggling to remember! So: Giacomo got a parishioner pregnant and forced her to have an abortion, and now he's been sent away to deal with a senior priest who, it's rumoured, has been dealing with the Devil, which may explain why he's being haunted by a mysterious presence in the night. If there are three things I don't particularly enjoy in a horror film, they are period settings, ghost stories and things happen to credulous religious people who immediately accept the supernatural explanation. This film is made up entirely of those three things, and I didn't like it. That's not to say it's entirely without merit though: there are a few minor moments of intrigue that director Pupi Avati shoots with his horror veteran's eye for spookiness, albeit mild spookiness in this case. To be honest, I've always found Avati's work (Zeder, The House with Laughing Windows) far too mild for my taste, and this film, which feels like Sunday evening TV drama, could hardly be more gentle.

MIDNIGHT OFFERINGS (USA 1981 / Rod Holcomb)
***
Styled a lot like Stockard Channing in Grease (great choice!), Melissa Sue Anderson is excellently evil in this made-for-TV witch flick. She plays high schooler Vivian, who's been using black magic to get whatever she wants. She's not all "me, me, me" though, also casting spells to help her quarterback boyfriend Dave's football career, even if it means conjuring up the deaths of those who stand in his way. But with the arrival of new girl Robin, who has psychic powers and a mutual attraction to Dave, has Vivian met her match? I was hoping not, because Vivian's really cool, whereas Robin & Dave make a really bland couple; Robin in particular is far too much of a goody-two-shoes to be interesting. But the film increasingly favours the new couple as it goes on. I think we're supposed to turn against Vivian after she gets a car out of her dad (by causing his boss to die, thereby enabling his promotion) and makes her mom smash a glass into her own hand. But every spell she casts, every cruel bit of ESP she uses, every time she gets a bird or her black cat to do her dirty work for her, it just made me love her even more. I'm guessing US network television in 1981 had rules about good ultimately overcoming evil, sadly. Vivian forever! Robin & Dave suck balls!

SUBURBAN GOTHIC (USA 2014 / Richard Bates Jr)
***
A lightweight but amiable knockabout comedy about jobless graduate Raymond, who has to move back to his parents' house, and the shitty, conservative town he grew up in, to find that his dad and the locals aren't exactly welcoming of a wisecracking metrosexual man who dresses "European". Meanwhile, his parents' landscapers find a dead girl's skeleton buried in the garden, unwittingly unleashing restless spirits that mostly take the form of black CGI smoke. But although this is where the film shifts into comedy-horror territory, the supernatural stuff is barely any more spooky than that in GhostBusters, the heightened reality and Raymond's unfailingly cheerful disposition ensuring that no amount of black & white 19th century flashbacks or screaming ghost children ever actually become scary. Whether that's intentional or not, I'm unclear. Fortunately the comedy is mostly well written, and the larger-than-life performances are all pretty great, particularly Matthew Gray Gubler as Raymond, Barbara Niven as his sexy and sympathetic mother, and Ray Wise as his disparaging dad Donald; the scene in which Donald is the world's worst exam invigilator is the highlight of the whole movie. You also get a John Waters cameo, and he's reliably funny.

PRIVATE PARTS (USA 1972 / Paul Bartel)
***
I believe Paul Bartel's debut feature gained a reputation as some sort of wild sex comedy for the midnight movie crowd (no doubt due to the director's jocular personality and his later, funnier work), but watching it in 2017, when we're more desensitised to kinkiness and more enlightened about sexual coercion, it's the disturbing psychological thriller he no doubt always meant it to be. It's like Peeping Tom but with an American post-hippie setting and a wicked sense of humour, as single girl Cheryl gets sucked into a silent flirtation with George, the perverted photographer in the hotel room next to hers. Cheryl is uncomfortably nonchalant about the fact that George keeps going into her room and leaving suggestive gifts, from erotic writing to négligée and blindfolds, but she's unaware that his room contains huge photos of Alice, a former hotel resident who's gone missing, and a weird, transparent inflatable doll. Meanwhile, Bartel ensures that the rest of the hotel is populated with other oddballs - every one either a suspect or a red herring in Alice's disappearance - from a closeted priest to Cheryl's overbearing aunt. The quirkiness keeps threatening to cancel out the seediness, and vice versa, but the overall effect is pleasingly uneasy.

TRUTH OR DARE?: A CRITICAL MADNESS (USA 1986 / Tim Ritter)
**
In this hypnotically bad, super-low budget horror flick, Mike, a man with a history of mental illness, is sent over the edge again when he catches his wife cheating on him. He ends up in a psychiatric hospital - the same caption appears on screen every single time we see the establishing shot of that hospital, including right before the end credits - before either escaping or being released (the dialogue is inconsistent) and going on a killing spree on the long journey to slaughter his missus. This is technically shoddy as shit, not helped by (I think) being transferred to video for the edit, despite having been shot on 16mm, meaning tracking lines and the occasional rogue frame from another scene keep cropping up. Almost every sequence goes on too long, not least the early scene where writer-director Tim Ritter really, really makes sure it's very much drummed into the viewer that Mike is upset by his discovery. But in spite of everything, I was kind of charmed by the story's sheer simplicity, as well as the large amounts of ambition and guerrilla filmmaking involved in attempting to make a road movie on the cheap. And with Mike's ludicrous collection of murder weapons, and a cheesy title song, it's clearly all quite tongue-in-cheek.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT [aka The Devil's Bride] (UK 1968 / Terence Fisher)
**
London, the present day. A duke, De Richleau, and his aristocratic friend Rex order the driver of their horse-drawn carriage to take them to their friend Simon's new mansion... it's this kind of thing that makes Hammer horror movies so relatable, am I right? Just kidding, it makes it really hard to care about anyone, though great casting of some really charismatic actors helps: Christopher Lee as De Richleau, Patrick Mower as Simon, Paul Eddington as Rex's brother, Charles Gray as the lead villain, and even the far less well-known female stars - Niké Arrighi and Sarah Lawson - are good too. Rex is even dubbed by legendary voiceover artist Patrick Allen. But it's interesting to think how it would be cast these days, because the plot - in which De Richleau stumbles into Simon's black magic coven and end up trying to save various friends and family from satanic apparitions - sounds like prime teen-horror fodder, à la Night of the Demons or Ghoulies. As it is, though, no amount of giant tarantulas, country lane car chases or goat-masked black masses can quite shake this film out of its staid, stately Englishness. Full marks, though, for James Bernard's classic, jangling theme tune.

68 KILL (USA 2016 / Trent Haaga)
**
A violent black comedy about what happens when sweet and naive drainage engineer Chip goes along with his hooker girlfriend Liza's plan to rob $68,000 from her client's safe. The first problem is AnnaLynne McCord's over-the-top performance as Liza: comedy needs more than screeching, mugging, eye-rolling and an exaggerated accent. Fortunately, she plays less of a role in the second half of the film, where she's replaced by gorgeous witness Violet, in an irresistibly attractive portrayal by Alisha Boe. But the second, even bigger problem, is that a movie where every woman is a con artist, a sex-crazed whore, a bitch or, in Violet's case, a too-good-to-be-true angel doesn't feel particularly progressive; you know that this was made by men. What's especially shameful is the way that Chip is warned at the start that "sweet pussy clouds the mind", yet this backwards view is only reinforced, never subverted. Inevitably, that line is given to one of the film's two black men (the other is obsessed with anal sex). That's not to say these attitudes, and even the moral of the story shouldn't be put on screen. It's just that no one involved here has the comedic talent to attempt it in anything but the most clunky, lunk-headed, backfiring way.

THE WICKER MAN (USA/Germany/Canada 2016 / Neil LaBute)
***
The story, of course, remains chilling: a policeman is asked to visit an insular, pagan society to investigate a missing girl, but discovers too late that he's the victim in an elaborate trap. In this remake, Nicolas Cage takes the Edward Woodward role, but his character is called Edward Malus and the missing girl's surname is Woodward, and every mention of those names only reminds you of the brilliance of the original, which this can't hope to match. Gone are the cop's devout Christianity and his associated virginity, the archaic rituals and the wonky folk songs that make the 1973 film so frequently heart-stopping, and in their place come action scenes, dream sequences and a bee sting allergy. Cage, of course, inhabits the role in his own unique way, which in this case means talking as if his mouth is permanently bee-stung, all puckered and anus-like. But Woodward he is not, and with lesser acting, characterisation and photography, clearly this is inferior, but then it's being compared with one of the greatest films ever made. On its own merits this is enjoyable enough, but it's offensive to everyone involved in the original, to its fans, and above all to people who've never seen it, to imagine that anyone would prefer this glossy, unremarkable American product.

VHS FOREVER?: PSYCHOTRONIC PEOPLE (UK 2014 / Darren J Perry & Mark Williams)
**
The bulk of this shoddily thrown-together collection of talking heads fortunately isn't as bad as is threatened by its opening minutes, in which we watch - to absolutely no end - a man parking his car and walking to his front door, before comedian James Mullinger, sitting in an empty cinema, suddenly announces, "And so our story begins..." as if the beginning of his introduction has been unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor. But then it settles into itself, and we get 90 minutes of white British men, mostly in their 40s, talking about their love of old VHS horror artwork, memorable rentals and rare purchases, collectors' fairs and police raids - the latter issue being the main thing that sets this apart from similar American docs like Rewind This! and Why Horror?. Familiar faces include Kim Newman, David McGillivray, Norman J Warren and even Lloyd Kaufman, plus Caroline Munro, who's the only woman interviewed, though her revelation that filming Dracula AD 1972 made her fall in love with acting hardly seems relevant. Some odd captions and poor sound recording underline the amateurishness of the project, but if nothing else you get to see Kaufman forget Mary Whitehouse's name and call her "Mary Blowjob".

ARACHNID (Spain 2001 / Jack Sholder)
**
An alien in the form of an enormous spider lands in a Pacific island's jungle and kills the fighter pilot whose plane it clashed with. Arriving to find out what happened to him, his sister, accompanied by a group of heavily-armed scientists, get attacked first by alien ticks, before confronting the big boss monster itself. Perhaps it's the invisibility cloak used by the spider at the start, but with its jungle setting, firearms and slasher-like structure, Arachnid comes across as badly wanting to be Predator, but unfortunately I got more of a Rats: Night of Terror vibe from it. While the characters are all different enough from each other ("Native 1", "Native 2" and "Native 3" notwithstanding) to make for a watchable group, no one's actually interesting enough for it to matter whether they live or die. And coming from the director of the best Elm Street film (Freddy's Revenge), the lack of atmosphere and originality is disappointing. What the film does have going for it are quite decent gore and creature effects, including a transformation sequence - which is always a bonus in my book - courtesy of Steve Johnson and Arturo Balseiro, but they don't go nearly far enough in what could easily have been a fun, full-on splatterfest.

THE HANDMAIDEN: EXTENDED EDITION (South Korea 2016 / Park Chan-wook)
***
Appropriately enough for a story about scams, this film does a great job of tricking its audience. Because at first it appears to be about pickpocket-turned-maid Sook-hee, working with fake count Fujiwara to engineer it so that Sook-hee's employer, Hideko, will fall in love with Fujiwara and the criminals can steal and share her fortune. All this is straightforward enough, with occasional sequences of intense erotic tension; who knew that amateur dentistry could be so arousing?! But it's not until about 100 minutes into this nigh-on three hour epic that the intrigue really gets going. That's when everything we thought we knew about Hideko turns out to be wrong, the whole plot so far is flipped on its head, and earlier scenes are replayed from a different perspective. This perhaps goes on a little longer than necessary, really banging home the sleight of hand, but it is impressively clever nonetheless. It's long, it's slow in parts, but it's really beautifully crafted and performed, plus it goes to some quite pervy and/or sexy places, with a central sapphic love scene that gives Blue is the Warmest Colour a run for its money.

KILLING GROUND (Australia 2016 / Damien Power)
***
Being about a vacationing couple who set up camp beside some inland water and find themselves being pursued by murderous scrotes, this Australian horror-thriller inevitably invites comparisons with Eden Lake. The major difference here is that, instead of overly peer-pressured violent children, our hapless heroes are targeted by two bog-standard, smelly-looking ockers, and no particular reason is given for their especially nihilistic homicidal tendencies. The movie also arguably channels the Saw franchise early on, in the way that it becomes apparent that there's some timeline trickery going on, but the reveal is quite underwhelming and might even make you annoyed that it's being gratuitously clever-clever. Still, if you call all that the Ground, then things improve once the Killing begins, thanks to how brutal and mean-spirited the action becomes. That's not to say that no punches are pulled: a significant period of rape and torture is only alluded to rather than shown, which is the director's choice, and that's fine, though on the other hand we do get to see a baby being smashed into some rocks, so that's cool. But it never goes much beyond cheap thrills like that, resulting in a shocker that's watchable, though not exactly (ahem) groundbreaking.