the Legacy: (1978. dir: Richard Marquand) Katharine Ross and Sam Elliot are so young and beautiful, and they seem to take such pleasure in one another's company that this slow-paced, clumsily-plotted horror classic is hard to resist. I've never seen Ross look so happy and relaxed, and this may be the only horror film in which the hero sells her soul to Satan and comes up with a happy ending and enhanced personal relationships.
Let me add a word about Margaret Tyzack (who plays the... well, the witch's familiar, with a nurse's costume and nine lives): she's part of that generation of English actresses who seem entirely practical, strong, and so layered with complexity that every movement of the eye seems to communicate something definite but mysterious, as if she knows something that we, in our simplicity, never will entirely understand. She reminds me in this of the magnificent Billie Whitelaw in the Omen, and was there ever a stronger and more unsettling presence onscreen than that one?
the Editor: (2014. dir: Matthew Kennedy & Adam Brooks) A loving send-up of Italian Giallos from the '70s, done with attention to detail: conspicuously bad dubbing, sudden zooms into close-up, swimming fades into flashback, sexually punning prop placement. Laughable amounts of completely gratuitous nudity and violent machismo, buckets of gore, bountiful moustaches, ridiculous plot-turns. Like most send-ups, the joke gets old before the end, but it has its enjoyable moments. My favorite line is when the investigating policeman (a detective named Porphyry) is told by a priest that in ancient times, editors were mistrusted as "bridges to the nether-regions."
the Nightmare: (2015. dir: Rodney Ascher) Ascher continues his journey as the most inventive of documentarians with this terrifying follow-up to 2012's Room 237. The Nightmare explores an age-old Fortean manifestation sometimes called The Old Hag (see here and here). It's a sleep disturbance as old as mythology, and shows up in the horror-lore of most every culture around the world. You wake up; you can't move; something awful approaches the bed, and you are helpless to do anything about it.
Ascher doesn't involve the rationalists. He goes straight to the sufferers, and has them tell their stories, some of which are re-enacted. Some involved have conquered or at least tamed the ongoing horror; others have resigned themselves to continued suffering, and, as one man says, eventual death within its throes. Some remember suffering it from infancy; one, chillingly, claims to have "caught" it from a girlfriend who told him the story of her sleep paralysis episodes, and to have passed it on to another girl the same way.
the Final Girls: (2015. dir: Todd Strauss-Schulson) At last! After several decades of movies about the angstiness of father-son relationships, here's an inventive, funny, and touching look at a girl coming to terms with her mother's untimely demise, all dolled up in the robes of a loving homage to slasher films. Truly, it's like no other movie I've seen, and I mean that in the best way.
When the Masked Killer leaps, ablaze, from a second story window, it is awesome to behold. When the characters transition into black-and-white "flashback" mode, or find themselves caught in slow-motion, it's done in playful and engaging ways. The comedy feels light-hearted and improvised, and the "slut" girl's strip-tease after she's taken too much Adderall (to the buttrock classic "Cherry Pie" by '80s hair-farmers Warrant) is one for the ages.
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