POMO

You spend five minutes watching a guy shaving and getting more and more nicks with the razor, drawing lots of blood. This is accompanied by some nice blues and you don’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Typically darkly humorous, caustically cynical Martin Scorsese. Personally, I prefer David Lynch’s similar but more oppressive The Amputee.

A scientist conducts experiments on humans in a dark swamp and the protagonist’s husband turns into an alligator. The Alligator People is not shit. It has solid production values and it makes a pleasing attempt to bolster the characters with a subtle psychological depiction. Paradoxically, however, it is comical in the most suspenseful and dramatic moments. And it’s got “B-movie” written all over it.

Does a parent have the right to execute their child’s murderer? This is a topic for extensive discussion and a subject for a serious film (see Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring). The problem here is that director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham didn’t want to make a serious film. Instead, they mix sexual humiliation and shocking violence with happy hippie music and the comical performances of half-witted small-town cops. And though they interestingly demolish the stylistic clichés of films of the flower-child era, they drown their work in the mire of cheap provocation with their amateurish filmmaking.

Wes Craven’s answer to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But a class weaker. Its desert setting may be equally unsettling and the strange synth music gives it a proper veneer of creepiness, but the family of cannibals are just a bunch of shabby buffoons and don’t embody Chainsaw’s cautionary and relatively believable naturalism. We see them carelessly during the day, at night and in situations when they’re just ridiculous self-parodies. The scenes around their hovel and their mother wearing an Indian headdress are reminiscent of Winnetou. That said, the first third of the film is pretty bad-ass in terms of its atmosphere and cruelty!

Look out! This time it’s not a cheap B-movie, but an ambitious international co-production with crowd scenes, helicopters and lots of machine-gun fire! And it even has a surprising ending that underscores the idea of the film! The screenplay is fine: there’s always something happening, the setting in which the main characters move constantly changes and the violence – which, by the way, is boorishly brutal and mostly perpetrated against women – is boldly sadistic. But that’s where the praise ends. Umberto Lenzi is an ultra B-movie director, and you can feel it in the absence of fear and atmosphere, in the directing of the actors and in the terribly haphazard logic (you shoot the creatures with a machine gun and nothing happens, but when you slam their fingers in the door, they scream like they're giving birth). And the latex masks are ridiculous.

A hyper-B-movie clone of Psycho about a guy whose mother punished him as a child by burning him with the flame on a gas stove and who, after her death, copes with his trauma by burning innocent girls. Don’t Go in the House is impotent in terms of its directing, writing and acting, as well as perverse, repulsive and endlessly BORING. If the then neophyte Oliver Wood (Die Hard 2, Face/Off) hadn’t been behind the camera, this film would have been unwatchable.

One party with a lot of young acting “stars” in attendance – these are the only two premises of this minimally entertaining teenage fluff about absolutely nothing.

A routine action flick with minimal action and without a shred of style or creative touch. Would-be sophisticated characters, would-be cool humor, zero suspense. And a bad guy who seems to still be lying in bed with Diane Lane. In what way did the makers of this film want to appeal to viewers?

A routine action flick with minimal action and without a shred of style or creative touch. Would-be sophisticated characters, would-be cool humor, zero suspense. And a bad guy who seems to still be lying in bed with Diane Lane. In what way did the makers of this film want to appeal to viewers?

An inconsistent classic. Boris Karloff is great and the individual scenes are brilliantly shot, but they are somehow mechanically, uninterestingly patched together into a single bland whole whose cardinal handicap is the absence of music. Besides the emotional charge of the film, music would have definitely increased the compactness of its ungainly editing. The sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, is a major step forward in every respect.