Iced Arbo Minis for a Chill Summer's Day!

Looking pretty damned good at thirty, Rod Hardy's THIRST (1979) masks its limited means and rushed production schedule with an abundance of style and wit. The conceit of corporate vampires running an Outback dairy of "blood cows" while grooming the last heir to the legacy of Erzabet Bathory is straight out of EC Comics but Hardy and scenarist John Pinkney (a self-professed authority on the paranormal) keep the proceedings on the smart side of cartoonish with deft underplaying from the cast (among them David Hemmings and Henry Silva) and a string of stand-out setpieces.

Takeshi Furusawa's shot-on-video joint GHOST TRAIN (OTOSHIMONO, 2006) is a mishmash of shopworn J-horror tropes admixed into a silly but sincere spookshow that is elevated somewhat (and only somewhat) by a motif of urban loneliness in an increasingly modernized and depersonalized world. The folding in of ideas from H. P. Lovecraft doesn't really give the film any appreciable depth but the scenes of damned souls chasing the protagonists through the underworld reminded me in a pleasing way of the exorcism vignettes from Kropachyov and Yershov's VIY (Вий, 1967).

To get the most out of Amat Escalante's LOS BASTARDOS (2008), you should come to it cold with few expectations and no foreknowledge and then stick with the deliberately paced drama about two migrant workers who... well, I don't really want to say. The film has a kinship to such sting-in-the-tail tales as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WHY DOES HERR R RUN AMOK (1969) and Catherine Breillat's FAT GIRL (2001); while its ultimate outcome may be somewhat predictable, few will be prepared for the ferocity of the execution.

Taken (heh!) on its own terms, Pierre Morel's TAKEN (2008) is a pretty good rescue adventure film starring Liam Neeson as an ex-black op who must save his daughter from Albanian white slavers in the City of Lights. Compare it to John Frankenheimer's FRENCH CONNECTION II (1975), however, and it looks like a piece of shit. So... à chacun son goût.

Hollywood FX man Rob Hall's sophomore feature, LAID TO REST (2009), wastes the talents of its name actors (Kevin Gage, Lena Headey, Richard Lynch, Johnathon Schaech) in the service of the half-baked tale of a chesty amnesiac (Bobbi Sue Luther) who escapes from a coffin and spends the rest of the film a.) trying to find out who she is and b.) running from a skull-masked serial killer. This may be the only slasher movie in which the protagonists Google the monster (who has vanity plates and a video cam on his shoulder) but that's about the extent of the innovation. Apparently, the production reaped big savings by shooting in Maryland but Hall gets no real mileage out of the rural setting and the pile-up of contrivances to keep heroes and villain within striking distance of one another begins to stink worse than Chrome Skull's charnel house.