knightout

Oh great. After years of horror films going over the top with CGI-enhanced gore, it appears that the pendulum has now finally swung back around to the old way of doing things: 'Suspense', 'suspense' and 'suspense' and very little ever actually happening.

Too much gratuitous blood and guts swiftly turns horror to comedy, but lack of shock value can also be a bad thing: Undeveloped characters trapped in a house under siege for no purpose whatsoever was crap then and it's crap now.

There is almost nothing original about 'The Strangers', and had it been filmed on grainy VT, it could pass for something from the early 1970s, where the only things that made horror films scary was the reputation that they were scary.

The film contains just about every cliché of old-school suspense-horror imaginable - masks, stuck vinyl records, peering behind curtains only to find nothing there. It's like the production team took a handful of contrived elements from other films and spun them out in slow motion, relying on the imagination of the viewers to fill in the gaps.

I guess everything comes full circle, and it's now the time for a whole host of Living Dead remakes and small-cast unventful suspense flicks. Wake me up when this latest fad is over, please.

Without a doubt this is both the best comedy AND the best musical I've seen this year.

The spoof rockumentary format is not original, and the big climax is to be expected of a Christopher Guest film. The reward lies in the detail - the subtleties of the dialogue, the intricacies of the characters, and the spot-on pacing.

The music is top notch throughout - excellent '60's Americo-folk with beautiful harmonies and arrangements that stick in your mind, with wonderfully pointed references to a greater ouvre of work. In this area, the talent is second only to Neil Innes' Rutles.

The characters are numerous, and surprisingly well-defined, given the very short space of time each one was allocated, although the brilliant acting of Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer and Guest himself means that every single line delivered helped to develop the personalities.

My only criticism is that the film is too short (a lot of good stuff got cut out - see the DVD). Maybe one day we'll see a DC/SE running two hours plus, and with all the musical numbers reinstated in their definitive versions, padding it out into a full-blown musical.

This film deserves to be a classic, but will probably assume the mantle of 'largely unknown cult movie' which is a shame - it hasn't even got a release in the UK yet, and if I hadn't been in the US when it was showing, I would never have heard of it.

And, like Mitch Cohen, I would've been poorer for it.

I waited over 20 years to see this film, and for that reason, it has always held a fascination for me.

At one of my earliest visits to the cinema at the age of four, I remember seeing the poster for 'Rosemary's Killer' which was showing at the same time. Of course, being four, I didn't see it, but the image of the guy with the white eyes - pretty scary when you're four - stuck in my mind.

This was a forbidden film of terrors I could only imagine - the unknown horrors might've even given me a nightmare or two.

Once I was older, and having by then seen plenty of horror films, I discovered that this was one of the UK's 'original' banned video-nasties, and couldn't be seen uncut anywhere, so I forgot about it again for a while.

Flash forward to 2003, and it's out on DVD, so I finally get to see 'The Prowler' uncut. Ooh, goody. Will it have been worth the wait?

Well the introduction adds a touch of classiness/cleverness to the gore which follows, and for a low-budget 1981 slasher flick about a masked guy with a big fork, it's pretty much perfectly executed. There's more gore than most, yet more plot too, and I can see why it's regarded as a minor classic by fans of the genre.

But the mystique is now gone for me, and it's one of those films that leaves me wondering why it was banned in the first place. Were creative ideas for killing the victims and buckets of fake blood really such a big deal?