(1981)
Dir - Jeffrey Bloom
Overall: WOOF
Emerging in the year of cut-and-paste slashers and an overall bombardment of ready-for-VHS horror cheapies with fetching cover art, gore, and a relatively outrageous gimmick to stand out amongst the heard, Blood Beach is alarmingly even more plodding than most of its kind. Marianna Hill from Messiah of Evil fame as well as Burt Young and, (of course), John Saxton playing police detectives seems like it would be a hoot on paper as does the premise of an actual beach that randomly swallows people, but the resulting Jaws/Tremors precursor/police procedural hybrid is catastrophically dull in its comatose pacing and lack of virtually any suspense or action. The usual sluggish faux-pas of way too many scenes of people talking about what might be happening instead of showing things happening is first and foremost on the list of issues here, but writer/director Jeffry Bloom fleshes things out further with utterly pointless moves like cutting to a guy making and eating a sandwich and a terrible bar band for a few seconds each. Ominous music plays over only a handful of scenes that are often shot so blurry and poorly lit that it is not even decipherable what we are looking at, but of course, these ultimately just get in the way of the character's ability to stand and/or sit around talking to each other some more.
(1986)
Dir - Susan Shadburne
Overall: MEH
The only full-length directorial effort from Will Vinton's wife and collaborator Susan Shadburne, Shadow Play has an engaging, melodramatic performance from Dee Walace, but is otherwise a droning, awkard bit of quasi-supernatural fluff. Filmed in Shadburne's native Portland, the details in the story are straight-forward in some respects yet aloof in others as Wallace's troubled writer is putting on a play with local amateurs for some reason; a play that serves as a poetic processing of her own traumatic dealings with her fiance's apparent suicide seven years earlier. Fleshing out the rest of the characters are a frustrated, cuckold brother, a grieving mother, a strange, chipper woman who seems utterly pointless, and Twin Peak's one-armed man Al Strobel playing a spiritual medium. Full of romantically melancholic music, some windy/soft-focus/picturesque visuals, and a gradual sense of unhinged mania suffered by Wallace's protagonist, the plot unfortunately runs around in circles with the cliched, "it's all in your mind" motif played out along some quirky moments between characters who are pleasantly interacting with each other until Wallace breaks down in tears again and runs away. IT all lacks intensity due to the clunky build-up and may even seem downright predictable for those that can stay with the proceedings enough to pay attention, but it has some ethereal charm here or there for what it is worth.
(1989)
Dir - William Lustig
Overall: MEH
Director William Lustig continues his M.O. of exploring violent, unhinged individuals and the police officers trying to catch them with Relentless, which kicked off a direct-to-video franchise following Leo Rossi as detective Sam Dietz. Scripted by filmmaker Phil Alden Robinson under the original title of "Sunset Slayer", it goes through the usual police procedural maneuvers with Rossi, Robert Loggia, and a crop of other character actors doing their best macho, wise guy posturing with genuinely humorous results. Meg Foster is also in it because why would she not be? As the deranged, phone book serial killer Arthur "Buck" Taylor, Judd Nelson is likewise on point, though his backstory and motivation may be a bit under-cooked for some tastes. Plot wise, it leans into the "good cop who doesn't play by the rules" cliche in
a way that might cause more chuckles from the audience than intrigue,
plus there are a handful of convenient narrative holes to get
from point A to point B that could either be seen as faults or just necessary parts of the formula. The performances largely carry the predictable framework through though and nearly a decade into his directorial career with such adjacent material, Lustig knows how to stage some memorable kills as well as how to keep up an agreeable pace.
No comments:
Post a Comment