POMO

Though it’s a technically amateurish knock-off of the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), House of 1000 Corpses is entertaining and made with love (that is, love for filth, violence, blood and sadism). With it’s humorous tone, this nihilistic redneck rampage is sufficiently light-hearted to not be branded as perversely deviant or in any way taken seriously and thus “horrify” the viewer.

The right mood is set in the opening credits interspersed with each character’s coolest lines. Slavery, racial arrogance and humiliation, the sexual revelry of the privileged, injustice, and rebellion in the name of freedom. With juicy dialogue and a variety of characters and their relationship machinations, Blacksnake! is an entertaining and not entirely stupid B-movie that gets to the point and has a cruel streak, but it doesn't sugar-coat the bad things in society and it celebrates the good things. In fact, Blacksnake! pleasantly surprised me even with its normal story and emotional level, even though I expected nothing more from it than to satisfy my desire for a guilty pleasure. The coastal locations and the Victorian mansion of the irresistible, sadistic lady Anouska Hempel are nice. We should have had this here instead of Angelika!

The dilapidated titular asylum, a group of sexy teens and Dr. Phibes in an ultra-B-movie rubber mask, who spends the day cutting up the kids in cunningly gory ways (with a drill, angle grinder, wire cutters, acid and so on). All interspersed with watching old black-and-white movies on TV. A cheap synth soundtrack, recitation of unbelievable dialogue by non-actors, one WTF scene after another. Doom Asylum is a guilty pleasure for the most hardened viewer. The hellish experience of watching it doesn’t give off even a whiff of filmmaking standards or anything else to suggest that its creators knew how to make movies.

Alice Lowe, an otherwise very busy actress, wrote down and filmed her anxieties and anger, maybe to calm herself down. This pseudo-psychological drama is about a wacky, middle-aged pregnant widow who lets the voice of her unborn child push her into murdering everyone who doesn’t perfectly suit her. Prevenge is a cold-blooded film with no creative vision of any value and no clarification of the main character’s motivation. It doesn’t work either as a cynical black comedy or as an allegory of society’s twisted values (selfishness, unaccountability).

The Premonition starts out as an interesting thriller in which the loss/abduction of a child is dealt with not only in the traditional way through a detective and the police, but also through the mother’s psyche at the level of her connection with her daughter. The mother is actually the girl’s foster mother and the feeling of “maternal inadequacy” weighs on her all the more in competition with the girl’s biological mother. The deranged biological mother, who wants to steal her daughter from her foster parents, is the driving force of the thriller’s well-made first half. However, the second half, when her friend (who is a reclusive weirdo suffering from the impossibility of having children) takes up the baton, brings us to a resolution of the whole situation that is so simplistic and naïve that the potential of the parapsychology motif is cut off at the knees.

How is it that some Hammer flicks are better than the weaker ones when they have the same production values (sets, costumes, music, etc.) and every time it’s rather more an aesthetic and nostalgic experience than a terrifying horror movie? The difference is in the characters and the actors who play them, as well as in the screenplay and directing, which sets up and coordinates all aspects of the story in a dramaturgically functional whole. Everything works as it should in this Hammer production directed by Don Sharp. Though it’s not a scary horror movie, you feel the quiet fear of the local residents troubled by darkness, respect the aristocratic lead vampire, experience the helplessness of the main characters and rely on the local “Van Helsing” to help them. Even though he’s a drunk, he is the most human, most determined and least fearful of all the characters.

May the Devil Take You offer perfect makeup, gore and demonic growling in the style of Evil Dead. Unfortunately, however, it is wrapped up in a family curse (what else?), which is fun to explore for the first half-hour at most. It rather deals only with strife between adolescents and their biological and step-parents and, mainly, the screenwriter assigns to them dialogue and behaviour as if he doesn’t like them himself. In the well-made demonic scenes, you’ll even wonder if the filmmaker himself wasn’t possessed by the devil. And then it all falls apart when it’s dipped in the boring and hysterically irritating relationship sauce.

The Silencing is a decent thriller set in the bleak mountainous environment of Indian territory. Girls murdered by being hunted like wild game, an ambitious female sheriff and the honest guardian of the reservation whose daughter disappeared years ago... The film is suspenseful enough, but the plot adheres to a classic genre formula with only minor embellishments. Wind River remains unrivalled in these woods.

This nourishing Belgian gore-fest is set in an Eastern European hospital, to which a woman comes for breast-reduction surgery, accompanied by her boyfriend, who resembles a younger Josh Brolin. Yummy is comical, sometimes dumb, occasionally funny and properly bloody entertainment with a brisk rhythm. The characters are average, but that’s offset by the level of zombie material and brutality. For a directorial debut, Yummy is a well-made, exuberant movie.

This has nothing at all in common with the original. The concept of a trip to a post-apocalyptic zombie metropolis and the dark filters promise a lot, and the characters and actors are fine, but it collapses under the weight of the exceedingly digital and unrealistically accelerated actions scenes, which look like something out of a video game, and the illogical nonsense and ultra-sentimental soap-operatic ending, which definitively knocks the rating down to two stars because of the feelings of embarrassment that it induces. They should have stayed on the ship and worked with that setting, which offered space for another portion of the ideas on which Train to Busan was based.