Savage Street Vigilante by Simon Mallette St-Pierre

Prince - Trust

The Invisible Man

James Whale's The Invisible Man is a delinquent's delight, a film completely disinterested in anything other than the chaos perpetrated by a mad man who cannot be seen. Played by Claude Rains, Dr. Jack Griffin has toiled in secret, discovering a way to make his body disappear. This boon thanks, in part, to an Indian drug with uncommonly powerful bleaching abilities. These experiments have rendered him permanently transparent, with an antidote for this affliction just beyond the good doctor's scientific grasp. Although griffin's stuffier former colleagues talk up the psychosis associated with the miracle drug that forms the basis of his studies, there's ample evidence here that simply being beyond any conventional sense of redress have allowed this man to completely unravel. 

Whether wrapped in gauze or animating a pair of stolen trousers, Griffin can be heard ranting and raving like a lunatic. Rains' voice is a thundering, ever-present instrument that squats over the soundtrack and overenunciates every syllable available to it. His booming sentences register as a series of jabs and swipes; a tongue that clatters like a machinegun aimed at anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing space with him. What makes Griffin's mania even more entertaining though is the overt cloddishness of his victims: the citizens of the town he terrorises are slow-witted and screeching; the police who attempt to trap him are similarly clumsy and doltish. These dragnets offer absolutely zero amusement when measured against an amoral spectre who is perfectly happy to crater the heads of choking policeman. Even Griffin's contemporaries pale in comparison. So-called equals, such as William Harrigan's Dr. Kemp, can do nothing but tremble at the ungodly terror that is able to breeze in and out of their homes. 

The Specials - Ghost Town (Extended Version)

Hookjaw by John McCrea

Caribou - Honey

Arachnophobia

Not satisfied with the alien malevolence implied by the sneering confidence of your average house spider, director Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia, written by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick, imposes a hierarchical, hive-based structure upon these creepy crawlies. For, you see, somewhere in Venezuela, deep in the core of a table-top mountain, there exists a tree that is home to dozens of species of undiscovered butterfly and a generalissimo spider that can pump out its own, subordinate colony. Setting aside the kind of farcical war on drugs-era alarm that a South American import could, slowly and methodically, infiltrate small town America, Arachnophobia is still unusually strict about how it separates its villain, in this instance a terrifyingly fertile prehistoric spider, and its many rosy-cheeked victims. The spiderling scions sent out from the collapsing barn of Jeff Daniels' newly rehoused GP are not only pure, prowling evil but seem to be laser-target at the elderly. 

These adventurous and resoundingly unsympathetic arthropods knit themselves into an older lady's lamp, or they trample their way into the abundant snacks of an aging mortician, then lie in wait to deliver their deadly venom. The elimination of the more doddery inhabitants of this picturesque, Californian village coincides with the arrival of Daniels' Dr. Jennings and, perhaps more crucially, his snubbing by a mummified practitioner who had promised this San Francisco import the inheritance of his medical beat. This would seem to be a persistent source of comedic exasperation for Jennings, but this doesn't quit pan out. Although a Doctor Death label is briefly proposed by his cagier neighbours, it fades into the background once secondary characters like the late Julian Sands' softly spoken entomologist or John Goodman's bug exterminator begin gobbling up everybody's attention. Although handsomely photographed by Mikael Salomon, Arachnophobia is a touch too genteel to really dazzle. Like many of its Amblin stablemates, the film is a high concept in desperate need of the neurotic mania that a director like Steven Spielberg (or Joe Dante) is able to, effortlessly, access. 

Bert Jansch - Needle of Death

The Monster by Mizmaru Kawahara

MF DOOM - ?

The Invasion

Even without the knowledge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel's original cut of The Invasion was deemed too dull by producer Joel Silver (then taken back to the drawing board by new writers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as reshoot director James McTeigue), the finished product betrays an obvious feeling of bifurcation. Once a rolling start is packed away to be returned to later, introductory scenes are icy and tinged with misanthropy, as if preparing to detail a microscopic invasion using the syntax of a self-satisfied political thriller. Despite the dryness of the acronyms firing around, Nicole Kidman's prescription dispensing psychiatrist is shot to be luminous; cinematographer Rainer Klausmann arranging the frame around the light and heat rolling off this star. In the non-harried pieces of the film that can (presumably) be attributable to Hirschbiegel, Kidman betrays the blonde, Hitchcockian glamour of a Tippi Hedren or a Kim Novak. Later, when the film has defaulted to a checkpoint sprint with dozens of drone people hanging off a speeding sedan, Kidman is green and frazzled. Sunken deeply into a diet of Mountain Dew and pearlescent poppers as she struggles to stay awake. The Invasion then is trapped between these two clashing wavelengths: one frequency tuned to the buttoned-up description of a planet plunging into somnambulism. The other a much trashier take on human paranoia that allows Kidman's Dr. Carol to subject neighbourhood children to alarming head trauma or mow down advancing supermarket employees while her perspective slips in and out of focus. Neither element feels entertaining enough to really stake a claim on this film though. Instead, the two incompatible tones work against each other, undermining this strangely pod positive piece. 

VIQ - I See

Electronic Visions - Forest Language

Amityville II: The Possession

Director Damiano Damiani's Amityville II: The Possession doesn't sit around. As soon as the Montelli family move into the film's fateful Dutch Colonial residence, the evil spirits within begin their campaign of terror, slamming doors and daubing lurid graffiti all over bedroom walls. Burt Young, as this family's father, is something of a stumbling block for these apparitions though. Rather than twig to the supernatural happenings in his new household, Young's Anthony instead batters at his youngest children, lashing them with his belt and snarling cruel invective at his screaming, defeated wife. Before long his oldest son, played by Jack Magner, is possessed by a leering entity but it's clear that this family was already shaking itself apart long before demons intervened. Anthony is a tyrannical presence, using his heft and unrepentant manner to dominant his cowed family. In that sense Magner's Sonny is positioned as something of a corrective influence in the household, at least initially. His mother and sisters seem to recognise that Sonny is the only one of them who will be able to summon up the physical strength to put this horrid little man in his place. Although Damiani's film builds its latter half around a fairly entertaining exorcism and James Olson's guilt-ridden priest, it's the first portion of Amityville II that leaves the strongest impression: the strange sympathy, or adulation, that Rutanya Alda's Dolores and Diane Franklin's Trish have for Sonny. Both mother and daughter consider him in ways that are, very obviously, completely unstuck from typical, familial affections. 

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

The Bride of Frankenstein by Mizmaru Kawahara

Lucy in Disguise - Digital Campfire

Exhuma

Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun's Exhuma begins with a spiteful, intrafamilial haunting. An elder ancestor, whose agitated spirit apparently loathes the place where it has been laid to rest, exerts a cross-continental hold on its descendants. This bony grip afflicts the children of Kim Jae-cheol's Park Ji-yong, smothering out their young lives just as they are struggling into the world. And so this wealthy, Korean American real estate developer gathers a team in South Korea - including Oldboy's Choi Min-ski as a feng shui expert and a strikingly composed shaman played by Kim Go-eun - to excavate a remote gravesite, overlooking the North, in the hopes that this will appease the jealous spirit. Told on bitter grounds that teem with supernatural pests, Exhuma strikes an unusual note when describing its ghosts. Jang's film is less interested in the interpersonal strife of this autophagic family than expected, leaving damning tales of abuse or neglect unspoken. Instead, Exhuma prefers to examine the kind of rotten bastard that would smother its descendants in their cots on a much broader canvas, one that encompasses the destruction of Korea as a unified country and this great-grandparent's collaboration with the insidious, colonial designs of a foreign power. Jang's film is told in a series of ceremonies, each given power and meaning by those practising these many, clashing rituals. Unlike, say, The Wailing, in Exhuma we are always in the company of experts, all of whom are desperately trying to make sense of a haunting that seems unending, or perhaps more accurately, unquenchable. 

MF DOOM - Red and Gold

The Wolf Man by Mizmaru Kawahara