THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
IT’S HEART-WARMING that streaming services have revived the practice — popular in the VHS era — of boosting a backlist film with the same title as a current theatrical release. Huan Vu’s The Color Out Of Space (on-screen title: Die Farbe ), which tackled H.P. Lovecraft’s story ten years before Richard Stanley did, is set in Germany rather than New England but is otherwise closer to the proto-psychedelic pulp novella. Its central conceit is that the film is in black and white, except for the title colour (purplish pink — almost exactly the hue Stanley uses) which spreads from an evil meteorite and surreally stains an isolated farm, mutating and maddening the inhabitants. If you want to binge-watch versions, you can also programme the generic The Curse (1987) and the creakily enjoyable Boris Karloff vehicle Die, Monster Die! (1965). The best something-nasty-in-the-greenhouse scare is in Die, Monster Die!, but Die Farbe boasts the most upsetting alien insect and believably out-of-their-depth farm folk.
More hostile alien lifeforms rampage in Stephen Cedars and Benji Kleiman’s lively, scurrilous horror comedy Snatchers — which is conceivably indebted to Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. High-school girl Sara (Mary Nepi) has sex with her tanned-but-clueless trophy boyfriend (Austin Fryberger) — who has unwisely messed with an Aztec fertility statue on a trip to Mexico — and wakes up hugely pregnant with a wicked gremlinscorpion-louse monster and its even nastier twin. Sara appeals for help to the ex-best friend (Gabrielle Elyse) she dumped to join a popular clique who are useless in a crisis, and the teen duo spend a busy evening running around after Sara’s malicious, murderous spawn, who cause an enormous amount of damage. Colourful, witty, insanely gruesome, and full of smart lines, it’s the combo Mean Girls-juno-it’s Alive-heathers-alien-critters platter you never realised you were waiting for.
Travis Stevens’ Girl On The Third Floor is a traditional spook story — with alarming apparitions and slow-burn chills — rooted in film-noir character study, as an amiable but not very nice guy cracks up while committing more and more crimes (including murder) to cover initial misdeeds. A disgraced financial whizz (Phil Brooks) gets his tools out and hands dirty restoring an old house as step one in his plan to turn a new leaf for the benefit of his pregnant wife (Trieste Kelly Dunn). That he cheats on her with a local sinister sexpot (Sarah Brooks) suggests his reformation is shallow, but he also foolishly ignores ominous signs of haunting before ghosts and women — and ghost women — punish him for entitled male scumbaggery. Brooks, who also goes by ‘CM Punk’, is excellent as the horrible but interesting protagonist, and you won’t easily forget the title girl’s face.
This month’s Bruce-willis-cashes-in-acheque-for-minimal-effort picture is Trauma Center . Generic tough cop Willis potters about Puerto Rico crime scenes while Nicky Whelan is chased around a hospital by corrupt cops who need to dig an incriminating bullet out of her leg. Yes, she gets to crawl through ducts. Two hulking thugs fail to murder a limping, sedated waitress for well over an hour. A blend of Die Hard (Willis was in that) and Halloween II (Whelan was in Rob Zombie’s remake of that), done on the cheap. Since this wrapped, director Matt Eskanderi and Willis have moved on to two more films (Survive The Night, Open Source) — almost certainly in their sleep.