Tag Archives: Horror

Drama, Horror, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#91 – Peat Cutters, The

Leave a comment

(1992, Ire, 91 min) Dir Fintan O’Driscoll. Cast Stephen Rea, Colm Meaney.

Bluff, bolshie Pat (Rea) and quiet, thoughtful Michael (Meaney) are peat cutters in the West of Ireland beginning another day’s shift in the bleak midwinter morning, the uniformity of the grey sky overhead mirrored by the open vastness of the bog around them. Their day is only just begun when Michael turns over a sod to find the leathered face of a long dead bog person within. As there’s nothing they can do with the body until they’re picked up at the end of their shift they leave it in the ground where they found it and go back to their work. Pat laughs off their find but Michael seems shaken by it and takes to speculating about it. Then he starts to talk about a figure, just on the horizon, that Pat can’t see and Pat can’t laugh that off. A spooky little number that gives away little and uses its location, which is like a blasted void or like limbo, to its fullest with director O’Driscoll – who is best known in the theatre – showing a knack for image making alongside his expected strengths with the actors. It’s refreshing to see both leads playing against type too, apparently as a result of a last-minute switch the week before shoot started.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Comedy, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#86 – Ed, Fred and Life Among the Undead

Leave a comment

(2008, US, 98 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Justin Long, Tyler Labine.

A product of the post-Shaun of the Dead zombie comedy boom that brought us the likes of Zombieland and Life After Beth. Ed and Fred are a pair of housemates in Everywhereville, USA. Their lives were going nowhere prior to the zombie apocalypse and now that it’s happened, it looks like their chances of escaping this cycle are gone for good. So far, so Shaun. The difference here is that, like Dawn of the Dead and their zombies flocking to the mall, these zombies also retain some of their prior brain functions. But what does this mean for Ed and Fred? It means that the zombified relatives of both their families, as the film progresses, accumulate around their house since, presumably, they are the last surviving members of both. So Ed and Fred become progressively more and more unhinged, a situation probably not helped by the massive stash of ‘Tibetan Grass’ that they have managed to rescue from the collapse of society. At some point they’re going to have to kick the weed and do something about their situation… It’s a cheap movie but more because of the story it’s telling – which is essentially a one set play – than because they’ve constrained themselves and the invention on display in how it’s shot more than makes up for those constraints. The title also belies the fact that the film is more emotional than you would presume, dealing as it does with growing up, leaving cycles of dependency and saying goodbye to people you love though still, it has to be said, getting in enough adolescent stoner humour and dick jokes to sweeten the pill.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#82 – House of Midnight, The

Leave a comment

(1987, It, 100 min) Dir Mario Andreotti. Cast Paula Pitt, Robert Englund, Romeo Romero.

One film in and already Mario Andreotti needed a comeback but thankfully for him The House of Midnight was it. Young Alison (then muse/now wife Pitt) is somehow convinced into moving into what has to be the shadiest piece of real estate in Rome by what must be the palest, creepiest agent in the biz. Maybe it was young blonde neighbour Al (Romero) and his habit of wandering shirtless into the hall that did it? We’ll never know. So she moves in and everything and everyone there is, as expected, super weird. But it’s okay – Al will protect her. But is he what he seems? Spoiler alert: no, he’s not. Mr Black Harkness on the top floor (a slippery, snakey Englund) wants her young body for something something devil satan and if it means murdering everyone she knows to the accompaniment of Iron Maiden then by gum that just what he’s going to do. The man’s got a bee in his bonnet! It’s not hard to see why this worked commercially for Andeotti – he pretty much stole the story from better and already proven films, he got his attractive female lead to take her clothes off as much as she could and he staged a half dozen inventive and gratuitous murder scenes that would have done Argento proud. Not a perfect film but one that’s definitely worth it’s weight in pure disgusting fun.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema, Science Fiction, Western

#81 – Demon Streets 2099

Leave a comment

(1985, It, 98 min) Dir Mario Andreotti. Cast John Saxon, Romeo Romero, Paula Pitt.

It’s the future – a post-apocalyptic wasteland which here means the deserts of Spain. There are demons – yes, demons – here too. You can tell which are the demons too because handily they tend to be well dressed in suits and ties where the rest of the population are togged out in rags and dirt. Oh yeah and they’re in the habit of flying everywhere on big ol’ black leathery bat wings. Once that’s out of the way in the info dump that begins the film, this is pretty much a Western. Saxon is Preacher White, a drifter who has ridden into the town of Pestilence with a pair of phaser rifles and a mission in mind. The first film from Paolo Androetti’s son Mario who displays here the same colourful eye for a shot as his father and the same way with a bucket of hot gore too, as well he should considering that he apprenticed with his father for the ten years or more preceding this – I mean the guy pretty much grew up on sets between the model of a desiccated corpse and a hamper full of maggots. Unfortunately he also shares his fathers variable quality control – this is a mostly indifferent flick that flopped massively but his next film, The House of Midnight, set up his subsequent career nice enough.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#78 – Sol Diablo (Sun Devil)

Leave a comment

(1982, Mex, 91 min) Dir Ramon Vélez. Cast Anthony Quinn, Gabriel Jurado, Katy Fernandez.

An apartment building in the centre of Mexico City in the middle of the night. Young Jorge (Jurado) wakes and from his bedroom window is the only person to see the new tenant arrive. This is Hector (Quinn), a suave older gentleman with a suitcase full of trinkets to captivate the children and a million stories to tell to the adults but who always seems to change the subject when the conversation turns personal. He’s so charming though that nobody seems to notice and this includes Isabella, Jorge’s mother (Fernandez, in what would turn out tragically to be her last role), who seems very taken with this grey-haired gentleman. Jorge thinks that he can see through the old man’s charm and takes to spying on him, trying to find out what he’s really up to. While doing this he sees Hector standing over the dying Poe in apartment 9a, his hands pressed to the old man’s temples, and realises what’s going on – he’s stealing the life force from the other residents. “He’s a Sun Devil!” he tells his mother as she prepares to go out for the night with him, “He’s stealing the life from us all to feed the sun inside him!” Of course she thinks he objects to him because of the memory of his late father and turns on him angrily: “Jorge!” she says, “There is no such thing! How can you make something like that up?” How can Jorge convince her? Will she be the next victim? An atmospheric production with a pretty shocking conclusion.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#77 – Gynaecologist

Leave a comment

(2008, Jap, 72 min) Dir Hiroya Hino. Cast Mitsuo Ibaraki, Yukie Inoue.

In the horror genre examples of sexism and of female empowerment rub shoulder so frequently and so vigorously it surprises me that the whole genre isn’t constantly engulfed in the resultant wildfire. There are plenty of examples of both but there are some of the former that go so far as to have no parallel among the more progressive end. This is one such film. I’m not going to go into detail as to the plot and so on as it’s beside the point – the film exists for no reason other than the examination scenes. Despite the fact that Japan’s censorship prevents any depiction of the area relevant to the film they still try their best – there is pixelling, there are POV shots from the anatomical perspective and there are shots that are so close to the matter at hand that they are abstracted into uncomfortable fields of pink. The fact that there is nothing actually graphic works in the maker’s favour though, with bloodied instruments and removed matter in conjunction with the patient’s pained face suggesting unfathomable grotesquery in the viewer’s mind. My recommendation: avoid unless you like brain damage. Postscript: the horror genre, like any other, relies on people to vote with their money and their interest and though two sequels followed this the series has now thankfully met its end.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema

#74 – Severed Tongue

Leave a comment

(1991, HK, 105 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Maxy Feng, Annabelle de Long.

While never in fear of achieving respectability Jackie Woo skirted the edges of the mainstream in the mid to late eighties and came within sniffing distance of a halfway decent budget and a recognisable cast. Something about this must have been antithetical for Woo as he followed his most conventional and popular film to date, Law Fist, with this, his most repellent feature. Cocky Triad Vin (Woo, as usual) has been sent by his boss to Indonesia to hash out a drugs deal but while there gets carried away with women and drink and ends up kidnapped by some kind of a jungle cult. He escapes but without both his tongue and penis – both having been graphically torn off/out – and makes his way back to Hong Kong only to be shunned by his former compatriots. Finding that he’s now somehow endowed with mystical powers (along with hallucinations of jungle men following him) he takes bloody revenge on his fellow Triads and do I mean bloody – one victim has his skin pulled off over the course of what seems like an eternity of tearing and screaming, one has his head popped like a zit, another his limbs wrenched from his body. According to the man himself in the 2006 documentary Jackie Woo: Bloody Vengeance, this film was catharsis after years of Triad interference but it didn’t seem to do his standing with them any harm – while only a moderate success at the box office it was so well received by the Triads they gave him an effective carte blanche for his next half-dozen features.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Comedy, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema, Science Fiction

#73 – Backspace

Leave a comment

(1987, HK, 96 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Phillip Ko, Rosamund Kwan.

By the standards of director Jackie Woo this is an unusually restrained techno-thriller but in saying that I have to warn potential viewers that this isn’t The Net or anything like that – it’s still a Jackie Woo film which means there are two beheadings, a disembowelling and one instance of a topless lady running around on fire. Aside from that it’s a model of restraint from the guy. Jimmy (played by Woo’s favourite actor – Woo himself) has just started working at DynoTime industries which boasts a fully automated office building, from the doors to the drinking fountains. Unfortunately for him, in a big slapstick moment involving an inappropriate use for a banana, he screws up big time on his first day and has to hide from his tyrannical boss under his desk. There he falls asleep and wakes up after hours to find the building in lock down with a very vigilant computer standing guard like HAL with whirling razor-sharp blades and before he knows it he’s fighting for his life. As if that wasn’t enough a gang of punk criminals are breaking in that same night, hence the aforementioned body count. Of course the film ends with Jimmy prevailing and being garlanded with Employee of the Year but the journey there is something else. Alternating between broad comedy, hard-core violence and misty-eyed sentimentality this is a classic Hong Kong kind of film.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Detective, Drama, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#70 – Dans le mur (In the Walls)

Leave a comment

(1990, Fr, 129 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Daniel Auteuil, Jean Rochefort, Emmanuelle Béart.

French thriller about famed neuroscientist Paul Mauchard (Auteuil) who has the unfortunate habit in his downtime of killing women and secreting their corpses in the space between the walls of his country house, all while his wife (Beart) and two children live there unknowing. Aging detective Fandeur (Rochefort), meanwhile, is trying to track down the missing Valerie Cassin who we have seen lured to Mauchard’s house and killed in the film’s extended opening. The two storylines play out side by side, converging and separating in nail-biting fashion as Fandeur picks up clues and finds the trail to his missing person, all the while not knowing that he’s on the trail of a serial killer. The whole thing is glacially paced and shot at the expected remove by Sacher, the camera coolly watching over the players without giving away a thing. This all means that when the expertly handled tension breaks out in the film’s latter half it will be an impossible watch for viewers without nerves of steel. An American remake has been mooted since the original was released but here’s hoping that if that comes to pass it’s not the slick, shallow interpretation that fans of the original have been dreading.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Childrens, Horror, Imaginary Canadian Cinema, Science Fiction

#68 – Octember

Leave a comment

(1992, Can, 90 min) Dir Ben Roy. Cast Bobby Rusk, E. Emmett Benn, Alison Shaker.

Young Alex finds himself trapped in the missing month of Octember, a twilight month that slipped between October and November many years ago and was never found again. Octember manifests itself as an empty world – the rest of its residents having gone straight to November – though he’s not the only one there. A host of lost souls are adrift with him in this phantom month, some there so long that they have become unhinged. His initial wanderings around his depopulated neighbourhood after waking in his empty house are eerie in the extreme with whole streets rendered very Marie Celeste, the evidence of people littering yards and kitchens and driveways but nobody is there. The perfect kind of kids movie – by virtue of its small-scale made for TV production it occupies the kinds of spaces familiar to children like the house and the street and so on which is perhaps why it’s left such an impression on those, like myself, who saw it at an impressionable age.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms