Rock wrote:

I don’t know if I was necessarily thinking De Palma, but Midnight is especially good when it comes to blocking and compositions that take full advantage of the aspect ratio.

I saw a lot of Dressed to Kill in that one specifically.

Dreadful regional horror film from New Orleans. Makes terrible use of its swampy bayou locations. Even worse use of full body denim ensembles. Lots of shots of watersnakes and unibrows.



Midly (very midly) charming nudist colony monster movie. Mostly boobs and butts though. The monster is just an ugly middle aged man stumbling around and waving his arms as if looking for a grope.


 

Jinnistan wrote:

Amatuerish movies can either be charming or irritating, depending on your disposition.  This one, directed by one of the few women filmmakers in erotic horror, Roberta Findlay, is worth considering on that front.  The cheapness is adequetely campy, the moustaches are duly fermented, and overall it's more fun than it is drudgery.  Good stuff, except maybe for the ill-advised Puerto Rican stereotypes.  But, hey, 1985, right?

7/10




This is unquestionably a better example of a solid zero-budget horror film that makes the most of its mother-of-invention imagination.  It helps that using dream logic as your default, it does wonders for excusing things like continuity errors, spatial distortions and other technical limitations.  But more importantly, this film makes the most, conceptually, out of its dream-reality constructs, and it's abundantly clear throughout the film that the film is made by smart, creative and very clever young filmmakers.  This, which is basically barely above student film standards, should be regarded next to the Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez peers of the time.  Indefatigably interesting.

8.5/10
 

I love both of these

Not to mention, a soft love for Dark August.

Eloy de la Iglesia










Going from Mexico to Spain, these three films consist of Iglesia's early 70s horror output.  The first two are wholly faithful to the giallo aesthetic, with vibrant colors, slow and calculated zoom and tracking compositions, attractive actors and imitation-Morricone scores.  And like giallos generally, they are less traditional horror films than Hitchcockian thrillers with slasher elements and V8 blood. 

Cannibal Man has no cannibalism (all of these films have multiple titles from different countries), but makes the constant allusion with our killer (Vicente Parra) working in a slaughterhouse.  Due to an unfortunate series of circumstances, he finds himself responsible for a number of murders and an increasing burden to cover them up, ie dumping remains into the slaughterhouse vats.  All the while, he's unsuspectingly being spied by a neighbor (unmentioned but obviously gay) whose motives are uncertain.

No One Heard the Scream is similarly also a succession of unfortunate circumstances, almost a comedy of errors, ever-increasing complications that find Vincente Parra (again) bonding with his beautiful neighbor (Carmen Savilla) in sympathetic complicity.  Cannibal is the better straight horror film of the two, but Scream has the more canny script, with even more complicated motives and agendas and twists, both of our attractive leads playing their cards close to the chest for most of the film.

Murder in a Blue World is easily the most interesting of the three films, but the slasher element is somewhat sidelined.  It's a bald-faced rip-off of Clockwork Orange (even blatantly citing both that film and Kubrick by name right off the bat) which has a near-future, fascistic society decor'd in moddish designs and colors where a band of young hoodlums (red motorcycle helmets replacing the black bowlers) rampage the denizens.  We see a similar Ludavico treatment, administered by Robert Wagner lookalike Chris Mitchum.  Where the film diverges from Clockwork is the addition of a mysterious nurse with her own nocturnal peccidilloes, played (again, with a wink) by Sue Lyons, who's also helpfully seen reading the Nabokov book just in case.  This film also makes the fascistic nature of its society more explicit than Clockwork, with a Reichsadler eagle being the ubiquitous national emblem, and making more explicit the homosexual implications which Kubrick only explored in a couple of humorous allusions.  (The fascist/homoerotic connection may prove offensive to some, depending on one's sense of humor.)

It's noteable that these films managed to skirt the Spanish Franco regime's censors, although the Franco regime was in its final stage, finally ending in 1975.  Blue World is especially significant being produced in a late-fascist country.  After Franco's death, Iglesia would forgo horror and concentrate on more openly politically and sexually charged films for the remainder of his career.  Many of his fans may very well see these as among his more minor work, but I have yet to explore his oeuvre further.

All: 7.5/10
 

There might be a couple of  films left on my itinerary, but I think I'm going to spend the month's last few days indulging in some old familiar favorites, or films I haven't seen in some time. 

I do have to say something about this new film Five Nights at Freddy's which may look like cheesy fun from the outside.  It seems to be about one of those old Chucky Cheese/ShowBiz Pizza animatronic restaurant/arcades where, I guess, the animatronics have gone awry.  My interest is dampened because this also happened to be the scenario of one of this season's episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, called "Risk E. Rat's Pizza and Amusement Center".  Now I understand that Five Nights is a decade-old video game (that I've never seen), so they probably have the prerogative here, but I'm just guessing that this Blumhouse production will not be able to be nearly as deliriously enjoyable as the final minute and a half of the Sunny show.  I'm going to wager.  But good for the Gang for beating the punch.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

There might be a couple of  films left on my itinerary, but I think I'm going to spend the month's last few days indulging in some old familiar favorites, or films I haven't seen in some time. 

I do have to say something about this new film Five Nights at Freddy's which may look like cheesy fun from the outside.  It seems to be about one of those old Chucky Cheese/ShowBiz Pizza animatronic restaurant/arcades where, I guess, the animatronics have gone awry.  My interest is dampened because this also happened to be the scenario of one of this season's episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, called "Risk E. Rat's Pizza and Amusement Center".  Now I understand that Five Nights is a decade-old video game (that I've never seen), so they probably have the prerogative here, but I'm just guessing that this Blumhouse production will not be able to be nearly as deliriously enjoyable as the final minute and a half of the Sunny show.  I'm going to wager.  But good for the Gang for beating the punch.
 

Disappointed to learn that this is directed by Emma Tammi. I really liked The Wind when I saw it at TIFF a few years ago. This does not look like a worthy follow up.

Rock wrote:

I did manage to make a few great discoveries (The Shout)

I hope that was the Jerzy Skolimowski film, a favorite of mine.

I love The Shout. I was surprised when I came upon it on one of my video renting tirades, where I was only renting shit I'd never even remotely heard of, that it was so under the radar. Usually the things I loved during that period, I mostly understood why they didn't have much of an audience. Not that one though. Nice job of Criterion for pulling it out of obscurity.

Leave it to Mexicans to make a film about singing cowboys, horny space vampire women, and a batch of abducted "men" monsters made out of paper mache let loose on the countryside. It's not great, but it's a nice diversion that's equal parts amateurish stupidity, and mildly inspired weird moments.