THE REVEREND’S REVIEW

FT’s resident man of the cloth REVEREND PETER LAWS dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot! (www.theflicksthatchurchforgot.com)

Phenomena Dir Dario Argento, Italy 1985 Arrow Video, £24.99 (Blu-ray + CD limited edition) the night evelyn Came Out of the Grave Dir Emilio Miraglia, Italy 1971 Arrow Video, £14.99 (Blu-ray), £12.99 (DVD) the Red Queen Kills Seven times Dir Emilio Miraglia, Italy 1972 Arrow Video, £14.99 (Blu-ray), £12.99 (DVD) Crimson Dir Juan Fortuny, Spain 1976 Black House Films, £9.99 (DVD)

When it comes to the Brexit negotiations, there’s one demand that I insist on: we must retain the free movement of European horror movies. True, their presence on our shores may sometimes take the shelf space of homegrown titles, but if we let these films into our country, they can both enrich and enhance our culture with their bloody spurts, funky soundtracks and leathergloved killers.

Take, for example, Dario Argento’s Phenomena from 1985, in which Jennifer Connelly plays a teenage insect lover who strokes bees and summons telepathic flies while trying to escape a homicidal chimp with a razor. Also known as Creepers, the film’s a decapitation riot, with Donald Pleasence doing an amusing Scottish accent as a paraplegic entomologist. Plus, there’s one of the most bizarrely placed music cues you’ll ever see in a movie. An important character sadly dies and is taken off in an ambulance: Argento scores this touching scene by loudly playing ‘Locomotive’ by Motorhead. At first you’re like… huh? And then you’re like… wow! Arrow’s new release of the film is packed with extras and alternative versions, as well as a CD copy of the score.

Next up: two 1970s giallos from Emilio Miraglia. In The Night Evelyn Came Out of

the Grave, a kinky aristocrat loses his wife so tries to move on by luring women to his castle. He marries again, but then people start dying horribly. Has Evelyn returned for vengeance? It’s a nice little horror movie, but I actually preferred The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. The film opens like an Italian horror version of Disney’s

Frozen. Two little sisters struggle to play normally because one them can’t control her anger.In the first reel she grabs her sister’s doll and stabs it in the face, right in front of grandpa. So there’s not much ‘conceal, don’t feel’ here. But could the sister’s inner instinct for violence be part of an age-old family curse? Years later it seems it might, when workers at a mid-range fashion house start getting stabbed. Admittedly, Alan Turing might have struggled to follow the plot at times, but it’s an elaborate and absorbing whodunit, with gothic chills and a killer score.

Finally, we have Crimson, a horror thriller, peppered with random scenes of soft porn. It stars Euro horror fave Paul Naschy as a crime boss who gets shot in the head. Naturally, the only solution is a brain transplant: so they get a brain from Naschy’s arch enemy, another crime boss called ‘The Sadist’. When the henchmen try to decapitate him, though, they realise they’ve lost their knife. So they go for the next logical option, and use a train. It’s bizarre elements like that which make some Euro-horror a complete turn off for some audiences. But if you want your entertainment culture rich, fun and spicy then I implore you: keep the horror borders open!

“Donald Pleasence does an amusing Scottish accent as a paraplegic entomologist”