Kim Newman's Video Dungeon February 2005

There's a bit of a gritty feel for February, with three low-life crime flicks out. First is The Tesseract, directed by Oxide Pang from Alex Garland's novel, which opens strikingly with Matrix effects in a Bangkok hotel room, but falls apart thanks to an answers-on-a-postcard-please plot and characters that pretty much deserve everything that happens to them - and quite a bit that doesn't. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers glooms and pouts as usual, Saskia Reeves explains things very slowly and the street-kid her is downright irritating.

Never Die Alone, directed by Ernest Dickerson from Donald Goines' book, is much better, with a rare solid lead performance from a rapper. Bicoastal drug dealer DMX is fatally shot and leaves his care to journalist David Arquette then listens to DMX's cassette autobiography, flashing back to his amoral, sordid, nasty lifestyle - while the ripples from his death run through the city.

Finally there's Aussie Park Boys, an ultra-violent thumping movie, which starts out as if it's going to be a realistic account of Italian-Australian low-level crime, with bare-knuckle fights and prison feuds with Aboriginal gangs, but once the heroes get out of stir at the halfway point it becomes a rerun of The Warriors. It's grim to the point of being gigglesome, and the biggest items on the budget must have been the tattoos and gym memberships.

This month's cheap, one-step-up-from-homemade horrors are Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill, about some pesky kids (a school debating team kidnapped by a drug dealer) who wander into a ghost town where a Confederate badman and some amateur zombies attack them, and Chupacabra, a wander around LA in search of the titular Latino bogeyman (aka 'the goat-sucker'). The former is competent schlock, jazzed up by those herky-jerky step-frame edits that have become the zombie cliché of the new millennium, but the latter is chubacbrafrajelisticexopialitrocious, with a low-rent monster suit and ho-hum performances.

DUNGEON BREAKOUT: THE NORMAN WARREN COLLECTION
In a coffin box comes this selection of vintage British exploitation from the genial auteur Norman J. Warren. It includes Satan's Slave, Terror and Inseminoid but pick of the pack is Prey, the minimal tale of two neurotic, nagging lesbians who take in a mysterious stranger - who turns out to be a werewolf from outer space, on Earth to see if humans are good eating. All the films have features of interest, though, in their mix of homey British tea-drinking and fab'70s fashions with mad gore, sleaze and dementi. A word also for the wonderful array of commentaries, documentaries and extra snippets; going the extra mile for titles like this turns a cult curio into an essential purchase.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire no.189 [March 2005] p.141 [UK]

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