Frightmare dvd movie.|
Frightmare buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $19.95 Our Price: $17.99 You Save: $1.96 Features • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : July, 1975 DVD Release : 16 May, 2006 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Frightmare description Britain's answer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre finds its villain in a little old fortunetelling lady who likes to take an electric drill to the skulls of her customers. Sheila Keith is the seemingly dotty old woman recently released from an insane asylum with her doting husband (Rupert Davies). Brunette Deborah Fairfax's good-girl heroine helps stepmom through the transition with midnight visits and animal brains (yum!), while her thrill-killing delinquent half-sister (the appropriately named Kim Butcher) takes to the family business with a deliriously ferocious glee. This is the film that gave British goremeister Pete Walker his notorious reputation, with its brain-munching matron and her gory murder spree (including a red-hot fireplace poker through the stomach--ouch!). The movie is tight and well acted, and Walker's usually blunt style rises to the occasion of David McGillivray's script, a sad and savage psychodrama that takes the blood in blood relations with a cruel literalness. Walker's grainy black-and-white prologue is startlingly visceral, and his penchant for numbing, nihilistic climaxes remains as strong as ever. This well-mounted splatter film is smarter than most of its ilk, with a strong subtext of family tensions, but it's definitely not for the squeamish. Released uncut on home video for the first time by Image Entertainment, it's a sharp, colorful full-screen transfer of a good print, with only minor scratches. --Sean Axmaker |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Under-appreciated Masterpiece |
| The most famous and disturbing image of Pete Walker's 1974 exploitation horror film "Frightmare," is when psychopathic matriarch Dorothy (Sheila Keith) gleefully and with lip-smacking relish, uses a Black and Decker cordless drill on a poor chaps head. The disgust and revulsion of this sequence is matched only by Dorothy's look of ravenous hunger has she looks forward to a spot of cannibalism (well it certainly beats McDonalds!). This single image effectively signalled the end of Hammer's restricted and regulated gothic milieu and Amicus Studios overly simplistic tales of modern morality. Walker unceremoniously dragged the British horror film into the world of grime, dirt and perversion that "Peeping Tom" had hinted at 14 years before. Walker depicts a modern England of filth, degradation, moral decay, and destroyed social institutions. None of our sacred ideological institutions survive "Frightmare's" scathing and savage discourse. The family, normally presided over by a domineering patriarch, is instead ruled by a cannibalistic matriarch. She quietly dominates her hen-pecked husband who watches on helpless and mute. The next generation are no better; their children are violent, permissive and hypocritical, the older generation securing the possibility of a bleak future. Law and order is made of mockery of, non-existent or doltish, something Walker explored in his earlier feature "House of Whipcord." Most importantly psychology fails, our token hero ending up on the menu. This is social dystopia of the highest order. What makes the film truly special is how Walker extends his nightmare vision to the aesthetic presentation of the film. Dark, dank and dreary naturalist photography swamps the visuals in a drab, colourless shade. Furthermore the film explores issues that are still relevant to this day, and remain alive and well, beneath the surface veneer of society. | |
|