Blog Posts

After a brief absence (dja miss me?), here we go with The Wishlist, Part 2. This time around: The Reflecting Skin. This 1990 British film, directed by Philip Ridley, did get a DVD release in Japan in 2005, but has yet to show up on these shores, and more’s the pity.

The film takes place in the American Midwest in the 1950s, and has the supersaturated colours and creepy beauty one would associated with Terrence Malick, and, as with Malick, all sorts of nastiness lurks under the beauty. The protagonist...is eight-year-old Seth (Jeremy Cooper), whose overactive imagination invests his world with all sorts of horrors. He believes, for instance, that his neighbour, a woman going by the wonderful name of Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), is a vampire. He is understandably upset, then, when his brother (Viggo Mortensen, before he was Viggo Mortensen), recently returned from the armed forces, begins a relationship with her.

The Wishlist, Part 1. Wherein I pine over films that are overdue for a DVD re-release, or have yet to see the light in that format at all. Today’s subject: the 1980 sci-fi fiasco Saturn 3.

The film is a joy for a number of reasons. First, there’s the absurd plot: on a research base orbiting Saturn, passions flare as the idyll of the couple living there is disrupted by an unstable new arrival and his killer robot, who both wind up lusting after the woman on board. If the storyline were all that was ri...ible about the film, it might well be pretty entertaining on that count alone. Then there are the production values. The special effects appear to have been lifted from two completely different movies with utterly dissimilar budgets. At one moment, the audience is presented with 2001/Star Wars-style mile-long spaceships, complete with portentous fanfare on the soundtrack. At the next, the FX are suddenly far more reminiscent of a typical episode of Thunderbirds. Those shows looked pretty damn good for puppet adventures, but an audience catching big-budget SF pic within just a few months of Alien would be expecting a bit more consistency. But the film seems equally proud of all its effects, good or bad, and displays them like a doting parent.

A couple of months back, Shriek Show released its Evil Animals box set, presenting a triple feature treat for fans of 70's horror that has more than a touch of cheese to it. There are two theatrical flicks here, and one made-for-TV opus, and the titles should ring nostalgic bells for anyone who was a kid in that decade.

Two of the films – Grizzly and Day of the Animals – are the work of director William Girdler, and man whose output was never what one might actually call “good,” but was always...fast-paced and entertaining, even when it completely lost its mind (as did The Manitou with its killer-dwarf-and-laser-beams finale). Grizzly (the original “Jaws with Claws” well before The Edge) has the titular beast rampaging around a park, mutilating hikers. The plot follows that of Jaws to the letter, with the local head honcho refusing to shut the park down (need those tourist dollars, don’t you know). The bear is finally hunted by a trio of outsiders – rebellious but can-do ranger Christopher George (replacing Roy Scheider), Vietnam vet helicopter pilot Andrew Prine (standing in for Robert Shaw), and maverick wildlife expert Richard Jaeckel (instead of Richard Dreyfuss). The dialogue is riddled with Ed-Woodian gems, which keeps up interest in between the notably gruesome attack sequences. Of special note in this department is the scene where a little boy’s leg is ripped off. Hey now.