Inherit the Witch

 Well, Hellooooo, camp as tits folk horror film! We have missed you! Inherit the Witch is a batshit crazy lower than lo fi UK film featuring an OTT witch running amok in the New Forest, plus a toxic gay couple and family drama galore. 

Cory returns to his hometown for his dad's funeral, alongside Scandi f-buddy Lars but never makes it as he is visited by estranged sister Fiona who wants him to remember weird shit that happened in their childhoods. Plus, an older couple are enacting some ritual with a metronome. Then Fiona stumbles into a basement..... 

Bizarre set pieces, terrible acting, a nonsensical plot and some questionable accents mean that this one is a very, very guilty pleasure but I enjoyed it mostly. I really wanted to see a proper Final Girl but Fiona is so, so passive, spending her time in peril mostly gasping for breathing and shrieking. FFS, girl. Run!

At least Fiona gets some nice lighting, especially when she is bumbling through the forest with her lit torch, hunted by robotic Lars and possibly satanic Cory. Hide, girl!

One part Hammer Horror mixed with The Owl Service, Inherit the Witch is not a great film. But it is entertaining. 

Trailer

Mistress of the Dark Shines Her Light

 Great to hear that the Mistress of the Dark, Elvira, has been sharing her life with a ladyfriend for 19 years. But are we really surprised? The camp innuendo, the raised eyebrow and the enormous beehive have always marked her as in on some old, queer joke. And it reinforces the connection between horror and queerness. Fab. 

Elvira, born Cassandra Peterson, has just released her memoirs, marking 40 years inhabiting the persona of the Mistress of the Dark, and I am trying to remember when I first saw her. Possibly mid-80s on some late-night TV show, which would make me a wide-eyed teen, ready to be inculcated into a cult. 

1981 was also the year that the Oak Ridge Boys released their quite popular cover, "Elvira", celebrating: 

Eyes that look like heaven, lips like sherry wine

That girl can sure enough make my little light shine

Coincidence? I think not. 

Family Values

I am doing a lot of catch-up with Oscar nominees this week, having seen both I, Tonya and Get Out, and was struck by the formidable and ultimately destructive role played by family matriarchs in both.

I can totally see why Allison Janney has been nominated for best supporting actress for her scenery-chewing turn as LaVona Harding in I, Tonya. She is both hilariously foul-mouthed and painfully abusive in the role and LaVona's insistence that she is doing it for her daughter's own good shows her lack of self-awareness. It's one of the reasons the film works as well as it does, though I share concerns others have raised that it lets the younger Harding off the hook for her own behaviour. LaVona, rejected by her husband, turns her gaze on her young daughter and continues to undermine her into adulthood, a powerful statement about life patterns.

The mother in Get Out--or rather the onscreen mother in Get Out--is played by the redoubtable Catherine Keener who does her best with this slippery, hypnotic character. The key offscreen character is also a mother: the protagonist Chris's mother who was killed in a car crash and never came home to tuck little Chris in that night. This loss dogs him throughout the film and I wondered if it was meant to emphasise his lack of relationships with women and the distrust he carries.


Or is it the filmmaker Jordan Peele's mistrust? There is not one woman in the film who is helpful or trustworthy. What does that say about the film's underlying politics? I found Keener's part rather underwritten, although I think she should have been nominated. But the character I really wanted to know more about was Georgina, the family maid who it turns out is carrying *spoiler alert the brain of the family matriarch inside her and, it is intimated, was seduced by Rose, the girlfriend of Chris. Wow! Betty Gabriel is sensational in this small but important role and I wish we had seen more of her. We never even learn her character's real name, as the film makes clear the zombified characters are given new names when they are rebrained, a not so subtle allusion to slavery.

The female characters in Get Out seem that much more remote and othered than the male characters. It's a pity. I would love to see a Get Out prequel that explained "Georgina"'s back story, as she ends up as the nameless queer black woman nobody ever gets to know before she is despatched.

Slumber Party Massacre

Well, here's to waiting and waiting. I first heard about Slumber Party Massacre in the early '80s, possibly when Rita Mae Brown made an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. As I recall, when the film came out, she disassociated herself from it. But, it appears all of these statements are bones of contention because when the film appeared on the NFT 3 screen on Friday, there was her credit as screenwriter. It really boggles the mind. Rita Mae Brown of Rubyfruit Jungle and Lavender Menace fame writing a screenplay for a slasher film? But, it appears she had ideas about refreshing the genre, making it feminist. And on this viewing, possibly making it queer, as well.

But, the finished film, reworked by director Amy Holden Jones, is far from those heady heights. It is a scream, in every sense. Viewing it with S., we both laughed, gasped and issued those well-known exultations of the horror genre. Something on the order of "Uh-oh" or "Oh, No!!" or "Ack!" many, many times. The film works brilliantly as both a send-up and an exemplar of slasher cinema: teenaged girls trapped in a house by a maniac try to survive and then fight back. Brown may well have had plans for sporty Trish and new girl Valerie, but the finished work leaves their relationship dangling, as both lie panting next to the bloody pool that contains their nemesis the Driller Killer. Ah, well.

The film and one of its sequels, Slumber Party Massacre II, were screened courtesy of The Final Girls, a group linking horror and feminism, which I heartily endorse. Their conversation between films touched on such topics as the nudity in the film (a requirement of producer Roger Corman), the relationships between the characters, and their means of fightback, which included a baseball bat, a drill and a large machete. I popped out for some air, so missed the end of the chat.

And then it was back for the sequel, making its UK premiere. It is truly batshit cray-cray. The original killer is now a leather clad, black-booted facial-haired singing and dancing rock god driller killer, something on the order of a hillbilly George Michael. What's more, he's touting a guitar-shaped drill, which in no way highlights the whole phallic symbol thing going on in these films. Oh, No. It was all fun and games until the last shot, which kind of undermined the whole film and left us all going, "Oh, really?" Nevermind. The girls had a band in this film! And they practised in a garage!

The backstory of these films is really fascinating and the way they have sort of crept into the mainstream via much better known films such as Scream and Scary Movie is pretty much par for the course. Female-written and -directed horror films have never got the credit they deserve. SPM is worth making an effort for. And whatever happened to Rita Mae's screenwriting career?