Four weeks in and we’re more than halfway home. This week we hit some of my favorite films in the marathon to date with the fantastically scary and prescient His House, followed by the unnerving and twisted Saint Maud. After that is a minor yet enjoyable mishmash of horror and mystery in 1974’s The Beast Must Die, featuring a gimmick worthy of William Castle before jumping into the fable horror or Moroccan monsters with Achoura. Finally, end with a nod to the excess of the 80s, the manly hodge podge of The Hidden.
As always you can read the full reviews over at Cinema Dual. In the meantime, smoke ’em if you got ’em…
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Bol and Rial, along with the young Nyagak flee war-torn Sudan for a better life. After a tragic boat ride across the English Channel takes the life of Nyagak, Bol and Rial are released on probational asylum on the condition that, among other things, that they stay in a decrepit, shabby house in the outskirts of London. It’s not enough that Bol and Rial have to face outright racism, not only from the neighborhood but from the very system they are seeking asylum in, no. Something has followed them from their past. Something that will plague their dreams and tear apart their new home and lives unless they can figure out what it wants, and if that price is something they want to pay…
(full review here)
After a traumatizing death in a hospital, Maud has become a devout Catholic, being called upon for a higher purpose she has yet to find. Now a private nurse, she takes over the care of Amanda Köhl, a former dancer in the late stages of cancer. Through self-inflicted pain and prayer, Maud determines her role is to save the soul of Amanda. But Amanda has other ideas, and just what happened in Maud’s past to put her on this path, and where will it end? Is she truly hearing the will of God, or simply insane? Saint Maud certainly knows which way she leans, and she’ll make sure you do, too…
(full review here)
Tom Newcliffe is a very rich man. So rich that he sets up his entire estate with the latest in surveillance technology for one purpose: to catch and destroy a werewolf. To do that, he’s invited all the suspects to his house for the weekend…the weekend of the full moon. Who is the beast? is it the young bohemian artist? The concert pianist, or his lovely girlfriend? The disgraced diplomat or even the learned archeologist? It doesn’t matter, because the trick of the film is YOU ARE THE DETECTIVE, and you’ll have your chance to solve the mystery during…”THE WEREWOLF BREAK”!
(full review here)
Four young friends hear stories about the old, decrepit French House, out beyond the cornfields. Stories of an evil that takes children. When they meet Bashira, a young girl seemingly lost in the cornfields who beckons them to the house for help they go, only to come face to face with something horrifying that claims one of them. 25 years later Samir, the young boy lost in that encounter returns, and the group realizes the nightmare is back and needs to be stopped once and for all…
(full review here)
After a man with no criminal record suddenly goes on a killing and robbery spree the cops are at a loss as to why. Things get worse when he dies and the patient next to him in the hospital gets up and continues the spree. Can Dt. Beck figure it out? And how does the mysterious Agent Lloyd Gallagher from the FBI fit into all of this? He says he’s after revenge because his partner, wife and child were killed, but soon things once hidden (get it) come to light and Beck realizes the world is much bigger than he thought…and it’s FILLED WITH CRIME!
(full review here)
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Next week we’ll finally get to that Hellraiser movie (I’ve watched it but needed a little time to digest it), some truly awful science fiction/horror hybrid, a crazy pulp entry from the namesake himself Tobe Hooper, and some more madness.
Until then. keep it Blood Red.
-Chris
Nine Circles 