Circus of Fear:(1966. dir: John Llewellyn Moxey) Ah, Carnaby Street! Peglegs and moppy hair and anglophilia. This isn't, it turns out, a horror film so much as a murder mystery concentrated around a travelling circus. The production is a German/English cooperative effort, with a mixed cast of tommies and huns. Christopher Lee is here, playing a badly scarred lion-tamer and wearing a bag over his head for most of the film (but what eyes! and, when the bag comes off, that marvellous face!), and Klaus Kinski, cold and still and positively glittering with danger. It begins with a cracking good, and largely silent, heist of an armoured car on Tower Bridge (or, as they pronounce it, "Tahr-bridge"). From the first shot, a close-up of Kinski projecting a quiet enjoyment of his own inimitable menace, until the first murder-by-circus-knife, it's great fun. It slows up as it moves, giving us circus-folk in-fighting, probably too many tangled back-stories, and a smirking detective who is constantly being offered cups of tea, but it's still a good time.
Chocolate: (2005. dir: Mick Garris) The Masters of Horror series is more miss than hit. The trouble seems to be that the entries are short enough that the "masters" assume they can get away with the shadow of an idea, rather than a fully thought-out script. Chocolate is one of Mick Garris' entries, and it's a particularly wretched offender.
The dialogue is pretty awful, especially once the "love story" starts. The initial idea is not earth-shaking: a lonely man begins, suddenly, continually, and for no reason that is ever made clear to us, having spells during which he experiences the world through the senses of a beautiful stranger. Soon, he knows how to love like a woman, be fucked like a woman, and, since it's a horror film, commit murder like a woman. He tracks the stranger down, convinced he's in love, and it's no spoiler to tell you he winds up with her blood on his hands (and neck, and down his shirt-front), because the framing device is his police interrogation and he confesses as much in his first words.
The only thing it's got going are a few effective visual and aural effects, when he's fading from one "reality" into another. Believe me, it's not enough to make it worthwhile.
And that's too bad, because Henry Thomas deserves better. Watch Dead Birds instead.
Bonnie and Clyde vs Dracula: (2008. dir: Timothy Friend) This was a family project. Practically everyone who worked on it has the last name "Friend", and that doesn't bode well, right? But this one has some mojo to it. Despite a tiny budget, it's got really good lighting, good photography and music, and the two lead actors are engaging. I think this guy spent his whole budget getting an honest-to-god scream-queen to play his Bonnie (Tiffany Shepis). She's good. The only downside of her casting is that when she gets out of the bath you get pulled up out of the movie thinking, "Did women really shave off their pubic hair in the 1920s?" (I googled it. They didn't.) In a production this tiny, there are going to be weak spots, bad performances, etc, and there are. The sound is not great, and one of the characters in particular (the "innocent" sister) is just awful, just a terrible idea with a terrible realization.
On the other hand, there was one plot twist in particular that I didn't see coming, and it's just so brazen, the whole thing, I couldn't help but dig it.
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