A Horror Film Blog

 Suitable Flesh materialised on Shudder recently and I watched it almost straight away. I had low expectations.  They were not met.  I mean that in a bad way. I knew, going in, it was a product of the Troma-style group of film makers associated with Stuart Gordon, a film maker often but inaccurately described as an 'adapter' and sometimes even a 'great' or even the 'greatest' adapter of Lovecraft's fiction. This accolade only makes sense if you have a) never read any of Lovecraft's fiction and b) never seen a Stuart Gordon film.  If you have done both, you'll know even if Stuart Gordon was the only person trying to adapt Lovecraft, he wouldn't be the best.  Some non-Euclidean director existing only in the curious space beyond the walls of Keziah Mason's would be doing a better job, even if the films produced could only be viewed though special spectacles manufactured by Migo and had the unfortunate side effect of rendering the viewer insane. ...

Oh, dear. Why is it whenever a director wants to make a controversial, boundary challenging and confronting film, they cleave to precisely the same format?  Take a beautiful woman. Deposit her in an isolated location. Surround her by deviant, thirsty men. Have them rape her. Have her survive and exact bloody revenge. I call shotgun! This was the formula used back in 1978 for I Spit On Your Grave and (with slight alterations in the plot, allowing others to avenge the violation) Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) and its original source, The Virgin Spring (1960) by Bergman; and probably further and further back. Sex and cinema have gone hand in hand since the first moving images were captured, and there is inevitably a point where the male gaze becomes the male touch. But those films were, in their way, transgressive and had purpose - at least sufficient justification to sustain a beery argument. Even I Spit On Your Grave , in spite of its flaws (and there are...

So, there is a short film on Shudder called White Girl.  It's directed by Nadia Latif.  It's 13 minutes long. The plot is fairly simple, as befits a short film.  The titular white girl - a wholesome looking teen - wanders the streets of London, interacting briefly with various people - usually people of colour who react in a variety of ways, mostly guarded or hostile. In the end she is approached by an elderly woman in a hijab, and the girl savagely murders her. This is the picture pretty much everyone uses when they talk about this film, so I'll use it, too. On Shudder, a lot of the reviews complain about racism.  I mean, what are we to make of this? no polotics for Satans sakes Or what about: Next up, the sequel "Black Girl" and the prequal "Arab girl" and the remake "Asian Girl"....Oh, wait. Thats right, your only allowed to point at white folks in "current year". If people cant see the psychological programming going on in Hollywo...