This was on this week in the UK as part of Channel 4’s 3D week which I’ve become increasingly excited about since I first heard about it (it’s not hard to get me onto a 3D kick really). This was to me the clear star item on their schedule, not just because it had never aired on TV like this before, not just because Mark Kermode (my favourite film critic, who despises the resurgence in 3D of late) called it the best of the old 3D back catalogue, but also because it’s just such a curiosity … I knew nothing of it really except of course some link to Frankenstein and that Andy Warhol was connected to it. I really expected something supertrashy … but as the word “End” appeared on screen at the end, I found myself speechless.
There is something Herschell Gordon Lewis / John Waters / Roger Corman -ish “trashy” about this movie … there’s plenty of gore and gratuitous sex (the camera literally just goes in on a woman’s bare breasts at one point “just because it can and it’s 3D!”) and lines like the insanely brilliant, “To know death… you have to f*ck life in the gall bladder,” and (from a man who just lost his hand), “It’s all your fault!” call to mind the deliberately shambolic humour of The Rocky Horror Picture Show … and yet, there are fleshes of real and genuine art, romance, tragedy in this story that frequently had me with a sort of lump in my throat. I just, I don’t know, felt like I really “got” this one.
I still frankly don’t know what to make of this first viewing except for the certain, that this film is surely unique. I would love to see it again in the better polarized, cinema variety of 3D; failing that, just to see it again without the 3D effect and see if it works on me the same way again that way. The use of 3D is better than most I’ve seen, incidentally; the feeling of depth extends even to scenes that don’t exploit it, though again there’s plenty of that throughout from a grisly beheading (really, if only Tim Burton had been onto 3D when he made Sleepy Hollow …) through to the bats that plague the children as they hide from their father, the aforementioned requisite 3D boobs right to the final extraordinary shot that is best kept to myself as I’m guessing most that read this won’t have seen the movie yet. I just found the experience truly mesmerising, and there’s not much more you can ask for from a movie like this.


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