Norman J Warren. The no-budget exploitation mogul has particular significance, as his oeuvre marks the exact point where the Right Kind of Horror ends and the wrong kind begins. We can just about take the confused eye-skewering meanderings of Satan’s Slave, but the rest we prefer to leave on the side of the plate. He did rubbish Alien rip-off Inseminoid, and here’s his rubbish Suspiria rip-off to shelve alongside it. In this post-Evil Dead world, we’re meant to love this sort of heroic, shoestring-budgeted, director’s-mates-at-the-weekend ultra cheapo fare, but watch most of them and you soon start to weary of championing the underdog. Poverty on its own is not a virtue, to quote the Duke of Westminster. Unless you love badly-acted, no-budget, plotless haunted house gorefests with no style, humour or any redeeming features whatsoever, we say don’t bother. Glynis Barber and Dr Who’s Ben Jackson vie for the dubious honour of Person You May Have Heard Of, there’s a famed scene where a bloke gets attacked by 900 feet of cine film that isn’t that good when you finally see it, Makepeace gets impaled on a tree, some old cars come to life, fly about and run over a copper, and there’s plenty of that cheapo horror signifier, green and magenta gels on all the lights.
Lee James Turnock
September 14, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Harsh, Cream, harsh. Whenever Terror turns up on the gogglebox I always end up watching it. Likewise Inseminoid. Why? Because Norman J.Warren was a bloody good director. He understood that however daft the screenplay and however low the budget, as long as you kept things moving along at a decent pace, you had an entertaining film. A lesson not learned by Xtro.