You know, a few days ago, the letters page in the paper included one from an irate woman, who wondered why they had to broadcast mediocre repeats on primetime tv, then save the good film for late at night. She was talking about tonight, and the film in question is Mississippi Burning - a good film indeed, but I've already seen it. And with the dross on telly, I went to bed early - and thought to myself, you know, I have this new tv that's set up for Amazon Prime, and I've never really used it..
So I thought, I wonder what horror-type stuff is available. And I looked up a list online. As usual, many of the films on the list aren't available on my Amazon Prime library - but searching the list, behold, I came across one that is. Coherence is a sci-fi, and can be considered a slow-burning horror.. Basically, a group of old friends meet for a dinner party, somewhere in L.A., but the evening takes a peculiar turn when a comet passes overhead, and strange things start to happen. Imagine the shock our friends feel when they realise that there's a group of people, in a house over the way, that look just like them..
Now, this is best enjoyed by people that are into quantum mechanics, simultaneously occurring states of existence, and probability and games. Ooh, just like me! So I really perked up when they started going on about this. The basic premise is that the comet has somehow acted as a catalyst to bring several simultaneous realities (think Schroedinger's cat) in contact with each other. So, eh, this means that there's more than one dinner party happening on this night, with the same people at each..
They have great fun with this, and there are some really clever scenes where we realise that the people we're looking at, who are dressed the same, and look and sound the same, as the people we thought a minute ago that we were looking at, are not actually them. There's a little mystery to solve, involving seemingly random numbers written on the backs of photographs. And there's an interesting sequence that plays with the idea of choosing your reality. But.. this is no Christopher Nolan film, and they just can't resolve the ideas. All possible outcomes to the film finally collapse to a single plot twist that doesn't logically make sense in the context of the film. But hey, it makes for an interesting, and somewhat comprehensible, ending. Felt to me like a cop-out, though.
Afterwards, with nothing unmissable on telly, I decided to continue. Took me a while to find another that was available locally, but I eventually hit on The House of the Devil. As you'd expect from the title, this is a more conventional horror - a surprise throwback, indeed, for one made so recently! And sure enough, it's also set in the bygone era of the 80s - cue those flimsy headsets, cassette walkmans, Farrah Fawcett hairdos, and, crucially, no mobile phones! So much easier to stage a horror when you're dependent on a landline that can be cut, and when someone not answering might just mean they're not in, and you can't check whether they've picked up their messages..
So, it's the classic story of a cash-strapped student who takes a babysitting job that turns out to be in a massive old mansion, out in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, but the job itself isn't as advertised. Her friend (Greta Gerwig), who drops her out there, quite rightly thinks she's out of her mind, but she does desperately need the money. So the friend drives off and leaves her there, promising to return just after midnight. Oh, and in a similarity to the other film, there's an astronomical event - in this case, a lunar eclipse. And this is the best place in the world to see it, wouldn't you know!
It's a reasonably conventional story, but the terror is very enjoyably built up, the soundtrack is good, and those of us who remember the 80s will experience a burst of nostalgia at the props. A very decent horror film!
Tomorrow, I have my reliable Cultureseekers quiz to fall back on - tomorrow, it's The Great British Seaside! Hey, I might know something about it.. so I'm calling it a night on Amazon Prime horrors..
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