What else have I been watching? WAKE WOOD (2011) - an Irish film from the new Hammer Productions, this has a nicely concise and atmospheric opening and evolves into a nice human-scale, heart-rending horror film - a variation on The Monkeys Paw as a couple (Patrick Daley & Eva Birthistle) lose their daughter (Ella Connolly) to a vicious dog attack on her birthday and take up the offer of a small town to use an old pagan folk ritual to resurrect her - for three days only. But something goes wrong. This has some really nice pagan/folk magic imagery and details (a great abacus scene and I love the details like the resurrected being bound to the town - and what happens when you try to violate that rule) as well as a great rural English, rainy dreary atmosphere. Also nice - the brutal, physical reality of the ritual (which requires another dead body). Theres also an excellent soundtrack by Michael Convertino. The movie becomes, perhaps, not as subtle as it could have been, relying on standard evil child imagery and a twist/twist ending but still, its a good watch. TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE (1990) - Havent watched this since I saw it on the big screen and its pretty much as I remember. The framing story (Deborah Harry as a suburban witch being told stories by a little boy, Scheherazade-style, to distract her from cooking him, Hansel & Gretel-style) does a good job of setting up the same comic-book horror tone as CREEPSHOW without the calculated visual aesthetics of that film. But any anthology is judged by its stories. Here, the initial tale, an adaption of Arthur Conan Doyles, Lot No. 249, is the best - adding EC level gore/revenge to the originals revived mummy scenario (Steve Buscemi - who by evidence here should have joined Jeffrey Combs in playing weedy Lovecraft protagonists at this stage of his career - is great in his creepy young scholar role - I hate Zuni aesthetics should be my new put-down!) which features some nice, Egyptian embalming details to heighten the horror (watch Buscemi fist a mummy!), some classy disorientating shadow work, a DAWN OF THE DEAD clip on TV, a nice image of a mummy batting away thrown flowers and all-around 80s horror goofiness. The mummy may be the slightest bit rubbery (and this movie reminds me that the biggest oversight in mummy stories is the inability of the protagonist to follow big, muddy, shuffling footprints) but the film has the courage (if dubious story-sense) to disassemble its mummy-on-screen! I liked it. The Cat From Hell, a Stephen King story, is very CREEPSHOW, with color-tinted flashbacks and goofy imagery like a prop cat clamped to someones face - but still fun if taken with the right attitude for a story where a hit-man (David Johansen) is hired by a wealthy man (William Hickey) to eliminate a bad-omen black cat. Goofy fun. Lovers Vow is an updating of a Lafcadio Hearn story better adapted in KWAIDAN (1965) and following one of the basic folkloric horror formulas of the supernatural figure that forces an oath that eventually gets broken. Too long by half, it has some nice gargoyle imagery, though. TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE was never a very good TV show (sorry) but it had a certain sensibility that worked occasionally and this film does a reasonable job capturing that.
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 18:28:50 +0000
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