Hot Love (1985, Jörg Buttgereit)

"Hot Love" is one of the pre-"Nekromantik" shorts that German auteur Jörg Buttgereit did on good ol' super-8 back in "the day". It's a pretty simple, yet highly off-beat little splatter/love story about a guy (Bernd Daktari Lorenz - from "Nekromantik") who meets a chick at a drunken party and they fall madly in love. Through a consciously corny montage of loving attachment and frolicking we see their relationship building into something serious - until, eventually, the dude comes across his woman in the arms of another man (played by the very Aryan looking Buttgereit) and blows his stack. He storms into the room they're about to start fucking in and gets his ass handed to him by his girl's strapping new lover and tossed out. The lovelorn stooge soon follows his ex-girlfriend out into the woods, knocks her out with a branch and rapes her unconscious form. Later on, he's found with his wrists cut and the chick is apparently knocked up... This leads to a pleasantly strange and violent conclusion that just SCREAMS Buttgereit.

The flick is enjoyable. Seeing a baby spawned through rape vomit up a slimy, mangled creature that swiftly murders two people with a whiskey bottle and hatchet was something I thoroughly appreciated. "Hot Love" isn't as "deep" and moody as his later works, such as "Der Todesking" and "Schramm" or even a few of his other early short films I have seen, but it's a worthy little low-budget horror flick to check out.

Le nécrophile (2004, Philippe Barassat)

I don't really know what to make of this one. "Le nécrophile" is a weirdo French short film about a bug-eyed wackadoo with a frog tongue he uses to catch insects with and platform shoes that seem to be connected to rickety leg braces. He takes his bicycle out at night and robs graves - taking the bodies back home where he presumably has sex with and eventually eats the remains. He also lives with a young girl whom he clearly feeds the human meat to. There's a suspicious young black boy with a soccer ball who hangs out in the street outside of the necrophile's house who eventually rats him out to the cops...

That sounds like a spoiler, but it's really not. The flick is only like 40 minutes long and is pretty dull, overall. They do this dumb dubbing thing for whenever someone speaks it sounds like trumpets or bird sounds, while a silent film-style French caption pops up on the screen. Obviously, they were going for some kind of 'avant-garde' thing here, but I guess I missed the significance. The film also gets oddly perverse around the end when a young girl is shown lying nude on a table as the necrophile - also nude - climbs on top of her and awkwardly prepares to fuck her. Not sure how old the girl was, but she looked pretty young... In all, I wasn't all that impressed with "Le nécrophile". I'm usually a fan of bizarro "art-house" films, but this one just struck me as silly. Especially with the zombies at the end...

I Don't Want to Be Born (1975, Peter Sasdy)

The Brits really made a shitty "Exorcist" / "Rosemary's Baby" rip-off here. The 70s were all about demonic possession-themed horror cash-ins and I'd probably call "I Don't Want to Be Born" one of the worst. It's just an hour and half of pure, unadulterated nothingness. Plain and simple...

A former exotic dancer's newborn doesn't waste any time proving that it's possessed. Turns out, Momma made the mistake of turning down a grabby tap-dancing dwarf she used to share the spotlight with and the inimical little goon puts a hex on her future child, making it strong and evil. The malevolent little dickens lashes out at every one of it's caregivers by scratching them, slapping them and, on more than one occasion, murdering them.

I guess, no matter how possessed an infant actually is, I still have a hard time buying the fact that it can push a nanny into the drink - killing her instantly or decapitate Donald Pleasence with a shovel. Unless we're talking a serious fucking BEAST of a baby like in "It's Alive". Here though, Junior doesn't look like anything other than precious little angel, which was a little disappointing. Also, speaking of disappointing - the lovely Caroline Munro plays a stripper who has NO stripper scenes! What the hell?!

"I Don't Want to Be Born" - also alternately titled "The Devil Within Her" (which, it's BARELY in her at all... Hell, the little shit's born in the first minute and a half) as well as "Sharon's Baby" (her name was Lucy, but whatever...) and "Monster" which is a befittingly boring title - is just a DULL flick. The script is listless and dry and the direction has NO style whatsoever. For a better "Exorcist"/demon-baby-hell spawn film, check out "Beyond the Door".

Sinister (2012, Scott Derrickson)

"Sinister" was pretty much a disappointment. Not as derivative as I had expected, but it DID tread on VERY familiar ground at a certain point, as I should have assumed it would.

A true-crime writer and his family move into a house where a family was murdered (his family is oblivious) so he can research the case for his latest writing project. While looking in the attic, he discovers a box full of Super-8 reels labeled as to imply they are home movies from the previous residents. Upon viewing the film, he sees that the family merriment captured on the grainy, soundless reels quickly turns into a group murder. The rest of the spools end in similarly macabre fashions - drowning, burning, a lawnmower massacre, etc... Apparently, each family shown being cleverly killed on camera was inexplicably missing ONE child. The writer then notices an eerie, ghoulish figure present in each of the films and attempts to get the bottom of this string of mysterious slayings...

There were some things this movie did well, like the Super-8 murders were shown using sounds from dark-ambient bands, which added a very creepy and atmospheric tone to these scenes. Plus, I NEVER thought I'd hear the Norwegian drone band, Aghast, in a mainstream production! I'll be honest, I was SURPRISED and a bit over-joyed by this one detail. Aside from the music, the performances from Ethan Hawke and Juliet Rylance were quite believable.

On to the negative. The 'creepiness' factor aside from the intermittent "found footage" segments, was pretty weak, mainly due to the excessive use of cliche 'jump scares' (unknown banging noises, some pointlessness involving a kid with night terrors, etc) and the inevitable atrophy into a standard 'kid ghost' culmination. I dunno, I really saw the whole "climax" to this movie as highly 'phoned-in' and cheesy - with the 'ghost children' making the "shhhhh" gesture with their finger up to their lips at the camera. Ugh.

I think "Sinister" COULD have been a really cool supernatural-themed horror flick - possibly along the lines of "Insidious" - if it had just made an attempt at some kind originality in the conclusion. It was just FAR too mundane and predictable. Haven't we had ENOUGH ghost kids at this point? I know we're currently living amongst the "Paranormal Activity" generation who can't get enough "found footage" re-hashings and pale-skinned ghost kids, but when is enough ENOUGH?