#38
Post
by Tom Hunter-Watts » Mon Jun 18, 2012 5:36 am
I'm new to this forum, hello everyone.
I enjoyed these two movies a great deal, although I had seen The Body Beneath before on the Something Weird edition. I'm not surprised, but at the same time a bit taken aback by Zedz's criticisms. I expected from Nightbirds something on the level of early Paul Morrissey/later Warhol, and that's what I got, along with a smallness, sourness and a focus on emotional extremity that I have valued a great deal in other low budget British pictures of the 60s and 70s (Duffer, or Little Malcolm, say, or Straight on Till Morning). With what Andy Milligan had – young, struggling actors, 14 days and a small simple camera – he pulled off something very effective. In terms of what he does with the sets and the camera, and in terms of the performances, I'm at a loss to see anything that could be described as inept. Indeed, The Body Beneath compares very well with Anger, Jarman or the work of any other independent low-budget filmmaker who works with cheap but imaginative eye-catching costumes and makes up for a poverty of set-material with swathes of rich colour. Nightbirds is a downbeat contrast, but has thematic links, and I don't think it's fair to come down too harshly on the rather melodramatic and misanthropic "twist" without seeing it in the context of Milligan's work as a horror film-maker, as someone working with lurid, pop-culture symbols rather than in the tradition of social realism. Even with Vapors, we have the story of the boy eaten up by sea-worms, and the strange, simultaneously touching and sinister gift of the box-wrapped sunflower. Not realism by any means, even in what might otherwise seem an attempt at "fly on the wall". Nightbirds is a vampire story, an attempt at urban legend, made at a time when Doxycycline had seen off the terror of syphilis but its surviving legend became part of the imaginative background to how people understood HIV 15 years later.
One complaint, in case anyone from the BFI reads these forums: the covers for the Flipside releases have such determinedly dull graphic design! I can't understand why, unless it's a desire born of pop-culture insecurity to seem more "serious", boring and hence safe. Who in their right mind would blind buy Nightbirds after looking at that cover? Or Duffer come to that? Are those really the best images that could be found? Plenty of times I've been unsure whether to click on "proceed to checkout", and it's the cover that's finally swayed me! These covers, with their uniform fonts and layouts, might well attract the blind buyers of every Flipside release, but these products from the cultural margins, so often raw and wild and energising, need a similarly raw and exciting design face, it seems to me.
