retro '80s evening at the halloweenfest: beyond the black rainbow and night of the creeps

Beyond the Black Rainbow: (2010. dir: Panos Cosmatos) Here is no ordinary slasher film but a Night Sea-Journey, complete with Kurosawa-esque (Kiyoshi, not Akira) use of ambient noise to lull and enervate simultaneously, with fearlessly long, even shamelessly sluggish scenes, and dialogue which might seem tepid were it not delivered with such fierce virtuosity as Canadian actor Michael Rogers gives it. And it's got one lulu of a cinematic drug-trip in it: not as good as the 18-minute mega-vision from the uncut version of Jan Kounen's 2004 Blueberry, more modest than that, but still a cracking good sequence wielding a powerful metaphorical uppercut.

What's it all about, you ask? Call it an exploration into how a true theophany (or perhaps the terrifying banality of the real world following such a moment) can make a serial killer out of an innocent spiritual seeker. Anyway, that's what it was about for me. It's possible that any five viewers would give you five different answers. Part of its creep-factor is that it's set in the early '80s, complete with Reagan's anti-Russky scaremongering on the television in the background, but in a futuristic compound without windows or fresh air, so that time and the real world seem distant and virtually powerless entities.

If the ending is a disappointment, it's only because the story-telling until then has been so radically unexpected that the downshift towards "normal" is a little like coming down off some very fine Orange Sunshine.

Regardless: this first-time director has guts and vision both. Keep your eyes on him, and on Michael Rogers, who looks like Christian Bale in the Machinist and is riveting, without mis-step, as the spiritually malformed Dr. Nyle.

Night of the Creeps: (1986. dir: Fred Dekker) You could call it a classic of sorts. It's one of those early, good-humored pokes at the horror genre, more specifically the zombies-disrupt-the-prom variety ("The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they're dead"), with alien invasion and slasher tropes tossed in. Long-time horror pro Tom Atkins (the Fog, the Ninth Configuration)is outstanding as a chain-smoking, disillusioned cop scarred by having seen his estranged high-school sweetheart hacked to death with a long-handled axe and having subsequently tracked the psycho down, murdered and buried him.

The fun starts earlier than that, though, in the first minutes: we are onboard a very enjoyably cheesy alien spacecraft where there's apparently a mutiny underway. Through subtitles, we come to understand that one of the aliens is stealing a potentially lethal "experiment", trapped in a metal tube. Next we see of it, it's crash-landing near a teenage make-out spot sometime in the 1950s, and the seeds, as they say, are sown.

You wouldn't call it one of the best, not now, but it was one of the FIRST of the best, I'll wager. Now it feels a little slow and dorky, but it keeps a tone sufficiently light to buoy it up across the bumps.