Piotr-9

A strange film... I like Argento overall, but I find his films, like this one, exist on a strange line where art and cheese meet. On one hand, the mostly wooden acting, some hilarious stretches in the plot and a few ridiculous premises (the phone cord!) make the film feel somewhat campy at times. On the other hand, the otherworldly atmosphere, awesome camera work and the eerie all-pervasive wind make this a stylish, twisted art horror that ranks right up there with many of the better examples of the genre that I have seen.

What more to be said? The special effects are surprisingly good (the coffee beans in water generated insect swarms), the plot twisted and in the same way that Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) had the red colour oozing out of every frame in the film, this film tends to dwell in a cold bluish palette of trees at night and silvery flashed of a hastily thrust blade. The razor wielding chimpanzee and telepathic insect communication just add to the weirdness. Donald Pleasance is his usual neat self, and watching a young Jennifer Connelly onscreen makes me remember what it was like to watch Labyrinth as a young lad in the sixth grade. A mildly flawed and largely twisted gem!

I was at first apprehensive to see what were some of my favourite books ever written being made into a film. Upon reading the books, I had always dreamt of adapting this work to the screen myself... though not everything was quite the way I envisioned it, the BBC has done an exemplary job in casting and set design, recreating the askew world of Gormenghast in a fashion that Mervyn Peake himself would have most probably been proud of.

Though the time limitations make for a very accelerated version of the slow, brooding books, and a few liberties are taken with the plot, Gormenghast is a very competent, excellently acted gothic fantasy drama. Though a little too bright & colourful and betraying the BBC's penchant for filmed stage dramas (it seems very much like a play), Gormenghast the miniseries does the brilliant books justice as much as any film could.

After all the horrible things I heard about this movie, I wasn't expecting much when I found it for $3 in a pawn shop... and, after watching it a couple of times, I don't know what the hell people who say this is "the worst movie in the world" were smoking... because this is one of the best low-budget sci-fi flicks I have ever come across.

Though it is by no means a sublime piece of art, I find the fact that the plot concerns one woman and her boyfriend fighting off this robot in her apartment, with the collapsing world as a backdrop around them to be somewhat refreshing in an age of sci-fi films trying to be epic and ending up trite. Though clumsily written at times and with the robot looking almost ridiculous at points, we get a nicely shot, stylishly lit sci-fi thriller that takes place on a human scale and whose premise has enough depth, symbolism and irony to make it all worthwhile. Best film I have ever seen? Hardly. But the best deal I've had for $3 in a very, very long time.