Random Short Horror Film Reviews

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
Dir: Tobe Hooper | 1974 | USA | 84min
With its Vincent Van Gogh sunflowered fields and Salvador Dali clocks on trees, a definite art movie. In the second half, a grotesque sitcom. The most pro-vegetarian film ever made; a metaphor for murderous McDonald’s if ever there was one.

PHANTASM
Dir: Don Coscarelli | 1979 | USA | 88min
The women are from Roxy Music record covers; one stands behind a bush holding a knife then turns into the tall old funeral director in the black suit. Little Jawas from Star Wars roam around. God knows what’s going on, but it doesn’t seem to matter: it’s all rather abstract, sometimes scary and sometimes beautiful.

DRILLER KILLER
Dir: Abel Ferrara | 1979 | USA | 96min
AMERICAN PSYCHO
Dir: Mary Harron | 2000 | USA | 101min
Both the film Driller Killer and the book and film American Psycho inhabit very specific settings which at once date them: the art scene of the seventies in Driller Killer and the yuppies of Wall Street in the eighties in American Psycho. Both are set in New York; both are about psychos. Both depict a ‘scene’ and the frustrations and pointlessness of that scene. One has no feelings, the other has too many feelings. But both are really about business and art just not mixing.