Summer of Slash: Capsule Reviews

Every year I do this Summer of Slash series, I watch more than I end up writing about. This is mostly because I only want to write about the slasher films that I either enjoy enough to write more than two paragraphs on or lend themselves to be written about. And let’s be honest, taking the entire slasher subgenre into consideration, there aren’t too many that fit that criteria. A lot of the movies I watch for this summer series lend themselves better to the capsule format than the essay, so I figured rather than just scraping the notes I had written for these films, I would just present to you a very rough paragraph or two for each film in capsule format. It’s safe to say that the bulk of the movies that get capsule reviews fall into that “for slasher fans only” category. Enjoy.

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Summer of Slash: Frightmare

This nihilistic British slasher had its day in its homeland as one of the most notorious horror films of the ‘70s. Pete Walker’s Frightmare is pretty boring throughout (I’m just not a huge fan of the British horror film), though, with the occasional creepy set-piece (especially the farmhouse) and funny gore moment that offset the rather banal narrative. Call it a push, I suppose; however, if there was one reason to push you over the the uncertainty it is the gonzo performance by Sheila Keith as a rabid, flesh-eating granny. Firghtmare is an interesting entry for its history as a “Nasty,” but it ultimately fails to engage the viewer until its final moments which are laced with nihilism that is definitely a jolt to the viewer.  Hindsight obviously makes one wonder what all the fuss in Britain was about (Walker even claims on the DVD commentary that he wasn’t really going for any kind of culture message film) in regards to the gore and the film’s “indecency”; however, there are enough good moments if you can get through the creaky narrative and the typical, 1970s British aesthetic that make Frightmare an interesting entry into the subgenre. 

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