Deer Woman: (2005. dir: John Landis) Another entry in the tepid "Masters of Horror" series, this one is actually fairly funny. Jumping off from Native American legend, it brings a figure from myth into modern life. Told the story of Deer Woman by a worker in a casino (she is a beautiful woman with the legs of a deer; she seduces men, then stomps them to death), the cops ask what her motive is and are told, "Why does everything have to have a 'why' with you people, you know? She's a woman with deer legs. Motive isn't really an issue here." True to that myth-persistent ambiguity, there is no real closure to this case, only a sort of temporary cease-fire.
Why do I think it's funny? I'm not sure. It's got a nice, light tone, and there's something funny about a cop walking down a city street and knowing he's being stalked but the footsteps sound like the clacking of bipedal deer hooves. There are nice touches like the talking stag named Steve who's the "official greeter" at the kitschy casino. There's something funny about Bambi turning killer, and Landis makes great hay of that in the dramatised daydreams the cop has about how the murders might have occurred. There's even a direct reference to the werewolf-killings in the director's own an American Werewolf in London. Landis, for all his faults, is usually unpretentious, and I may at last be coming to terms with his idiosyncratic preferences in story-telling.
the Four-Sided Triangle: (1953. dir: Terence Fisher) One of those early b&w Hammer films from before they caught their Hammer groove and sailed into glory on the technicolor waves of fear and lust underpinning our collective unconscious.
More sci-fi than horror, it involves a pair of boffins in the English countryside who invent a machine which will exactly duplicate ANYTHING, from a cashier's check to an atom bomb to... a living girl! When they both fall for the same girl, complications ensue. Slow-paced and talky and very, very English, it's of interest as an oddity more than a genuine success. There are shades of early Goth recognisable in the girl's character, sounding like she might have walked off a Val Lewton set with her deadpan justification of suicidal thoughts ("I never asked to be born, so it's my right to die.") and slow, assured, glamorpuss way of moving, as played by sex kitten and fading Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton.
I'm convinced that studying the genre films of an era is as important in understanding a time as delving into the accepted tomes (who won what battle, what explorer planted what flag on that promontory first). In that respect, these early Hammer films are a treasure trove, giving us unbroken surface complacency electric with a crazed current of malcontent and barely-controlled hysteria slamming up beneath it.
On its own merits, however, it's a little slow.
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