I come back to the colors again because they are dazzling - Neon reds, acid greens, powder blue lab coats and hot pink go-go miniskirts on well lit sets that are spotless. Like a Jess Franco movie the film is better than it looks, resembling an ultra tacky 1970's low rent exploitation thriller filmed by Claude Monet. There is an intoxicating, arty sense of self awareness to how the movie was made, which celebrates it's low-budget roots without ever talking down to it's audience, nor the lead actor's hairpiece. Plus the same carpenter, who got a lot of work in this one with a series of identical looking boxes that various things are locked up in. It's just that kind of movie, and made with a twisted sense of humor that is just one knowing wink short of being a parody: It's the horror movie as kitsch, not quite on the sarcastic level of ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN or CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, but made from the same sort of day-glo patterned cloth. Which is all part of the routine for the community of characters, like people from a Simpson's episode. Everyday people happen upon them and are unable to cope with their "alternative lifestyle", which just happens to include things like sadistic torture, dismemberment of shapely blonds, and locking girls up in coffins with snakes. It shares many of BODC's basic traits: Wacky eccentrics living in a Mission style castle/mansion in the middle of the southwestern California nowheres keep girls chained up in the basement & conducting perverse experiments on them, have a horrible secret, a twisted mutant caretaker and chauffeur, and great taste in color schemes. The only movie it even remotely reminds me of is Al Adamson's BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, which (along with CASTLE OF BLOOD: Check "Blackwood Castle" for more info) this may very well be a sly homage to. This was made on less than his sunglasses budget for an entire year and is a movie with no formula, no precedent and nothing quite like it. And you could actually find movies made by people who were thinking for themselves rather than row upon row of generic, unimaginative crap made for enough money to feed all the starving kids in the world even without Bono's guidance. Putting it on my top ten list of Video Finds of the Year, courtesy of a gloriously goofy over-sized overstuffed clamshell cased VHS only release by Screen Gems from the days when video stores were cool.
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