ANGST (1983) A mentally deranged man (Irwin Leder) is released from prison ten years after committing cold-blooded murder and immediately sets up shop at an isolated house where he indulges in terrorizing its inhabitants. Since the film is narrated by Leder, there’s no mystery as to why he’s performing these acts of violence—he tells us he kills for no particular reason, making his character all the more sadistic. Leder pontificates about the crimes of his youth, which are juxtaposed with the torture and murder of his latest victims; much like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, Leder ultimately becomes an unreliable narrator by blaming his his actions on a troubled upbringing. Any shred of sympathy the viewer might gain for Leder is throw out the window in a brutal instance where Leder viciously stabs a woman to death before having sex with her corpse—a particularly unnerving scene that’s a ghoulish highlight to this surreal Austrian shocker that has influenced a number of filmmakers, including Michael Haneke, and David Fincher.
FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982) Roger Corman-produced Alien clone in which a group of scientists and space jockeys are menaced by a genetically engineered creature. The gimmick here is the monster has the ability to change its shape and size, and giving it the perfect opportunity to hide all around the intergalactic research lab that’s home to a bevy of high heel-wearing nymphets and their libidinous male cohorts. The place’s janitor has a a hole punched into his skull through which the mutation stows away until it feels like killing again. Despite the fact a parasitic monstrosity is running around doesn’t help the performers from surpassing their porn-level acting by engaging in naked steam baths and having lots of sex. The monster appears in Xenomorph-like form but looks more like a garbage bag with papier-mâché teeth. One of the more civilized scientists (June Chadwick) tries to communicate with the beast only to end up getting impaled with an extra-sharp monster appendage. The monster is eventually overcome when the hero (Jesse Vint) force feeds it a cancerous tumor ripped out of the dying doctor who created the creature in the first place. Much like the jagged, atmospheric blanket that covers the film’s desolate planet, Forbidden World can be summed up as puerile space junk.
IT’S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE (1987) The mutant babies from Larry Cohen’s offbeat seventies twosome,It’s Alive (1974) and It Lives Again (1978), are back in this polished but languid final series entry. After numerous deaths at the hands of the monstrous infants, the US government declares the babies a public danger and ship the remaining five creatures to a deserted island to live out their existence. Years later, the father (Michael Moriarty) of one of the mutants is coerced by a pharmaceutical company to travel to the island under false pretenses, not realizing the babies have grown at an accelerated rate into adults—and are breeding. After killing most of the expedition party, the monsters hijack a boat and set sail for Florida to find Moriarty’s ex-wife (Karen Black) and grandmother to a new generation of mutant baby. While competantly made and acted, It’s Alive III doesn’t offer anything new to the Cohen cannon other than a colorful, typically wigged out performance by Moriarty, and some gory highlights of faces getting shredded. Filmed back-to-back with A Return to Salem’s Lot, which was also directed by Cohen and released the same year.
