British '78s

Richard Burton stars in the curious British paranormal chilller The Medusa Touch from 1978. The chronologically jumbled narrative follows a detective’s investigation into the attempted murder of a man who’s witnessed a few too many tragedies but perhaps unsurprisingly a far darker truth is slowly revealed. This is a low budget curio which, despite some of it’s frippery, musters an effective brooding atmosphere that ticks along nicely towards a suitably grim finale and of course It does help to have Burton in the centre of the piece exuding a smouldering menace that far outweighs his screen time. Understated & underrated.

Shape shifting aliens, cannibalism & lesbians feature in Prey, another British horror from ‘78 that, although quite ridiculous, has a potent, dreamlike atmosphere that masks most of it’s shortcomings. On arrival to Earth the alien adopts human form and infiltrates a nearby mansion only to loaf about for days winding up the squabbling lovers that live there – so far so idiotic and though the script  is half baked and the acting, er, shit it somehow kind of works. There’s some nice directorial touches but I guess it was the sheer weight of all that strangeness that kept me watching to it’s baffling denouement. Probably just for aficionados of cult crap but there’s enough here to justify a remake,

More TVersity tales

Exam is a quite enjoyable closed-room thriller with some scifi murmurings. 8 candidates have nearly completed the selection process for a vacancy at a shadowy bio-chem firm and are lead into a room to complete their final exam, as you'd expect it's not a multiple choice quiz so they tentatively start working together but as the clock ticks down tensions and paranoia come to the fore. It's not exactly an original plot & the pandemic background story felt a little shoehorned in but otherwise it's a reasonably acted, intelligent thriller that eschews gore for the brains.



Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a nice little chiller from '72. Fresh from the funny farm Jessica & husband move to island fruit farm? but she soon struggles to maintain her sanity faced with strange whisperings, scarred local types, a slutty squatter and a house that's a touch spooky in this cheap but atmospheric film - I guess the obvious comparison would be Salem's Lot but it's more about the ambiguity of her experiences, helped by a strange zonked out performance by the lead.