Tuesday 15 December 2009

NECROMENTIA

CONTAINS.... OH, WHAT'S THE BLOODY POINT
And still they come: one tiresome, tortuous, one-star experience after another. I'm frequently minded to take all modern horror flicks off my rentals list and replace them all with the best of Kurosawa, Bergman and the French New Wave. Because if this is, honestly, genuinely, truly the best they can do then it's just not good enough. If you're expecting me to pay you money for your efforts then a modicum of professional competence is the very least I'm entitled to in return.

We don't get such consideration in Necromentia; we don't even get the strictly middling pleasures its auteur genius Pearry Tao's other movie The Gene Generation provided (namely Bai Ling wandering around in outré trousers). What we do end up with is a pair of charmless losers going back and forth into Hell to reclaim the soul of a faithless woman (who frankly isn't worth the hassle), with necrophilia, Satanic tattoos, and sadomasochistic torture for money thrown in, and a giant talking pig from a TV show cajoling the so-called hero's disabled brother to commit murder and suicide. Hell itself appears to be some kind of access tunnel on the Jubilee Line, with pipes and cables along the walls, lit by flickering fluorescent tube lights and ruled by a grey-skinned demon in a gas mask.

It's grim, dark, noisy, bleak, dull and goes on for a deceptively short 80 minutes; it's no fun, it's not interesting, it doesn't make sense and it's impossible to give a hoot what happens. Despite the nods to (or rips from) Clive Barker's Hellraiser, it's quite possibly, in all seriousness, one of the worst things I've forced myself through in years and I really wish I hadn't.

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