New review: The Comeback
I’ve dug out my old Pete Walker DVD collection (you know, the one in the shape of a coffin) and have been enjoying revisiting a few classics from the very early days of the British horror films website.
Pete Walker’s films were the ones on which I built my reputation (such as it is)… at the time (early 2000s) I’d suggest that they weren’t particularly well known. I saw House Of Whipcord and Die Screaming Marianne and was immediately hooked. Who was this Pete Walker, and just what was his problem with clothed women and happy endings?
My British horror films odyssey boinged from Hammer to Dr Phibes to Horror Hospital to Pete Walker to all sorts of random crap. On the way I found some absolute belters and some frankly shoddy efforts. And I wrote about them all, developing a sort-of style as I went.
Which meant that some of the earlier reviews can be a bit lacking in any kind of critical understanding… although that’s not really what the site was all about. I think I carved out an audience who thought like me, that these films were in the main a bit rubbish, but still had a shoddy charm about them. I didn’t take the films seriously, they didn’t take the films seriously, and most of the time they enjoyed my jokes at the films’ expense.
So I absolutely don’t want to remove the jokes, when they’re funny.
A couple of points about Pete Walker’s 1978 musical slasher The Comeback. Firstly, my original review was a bland and humourless affair that didn’t really cut the mustard, so after seeing it this afternoon I’ve tried to do the film a bit more justice and you can read my effort here.
Secondly, imagine how surprised I was when flicking through the disc’s extras and coming across chunks of said lacklustre review in the “film notes” section. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered. And it’s not the entire review, just some of my sentences pasted into the kind of oddly syntaxed, typo-strewn text article you always get lurking in the background of discs like these. But seriously, Anchor Bay… how hard is it to watch a 90 minute film and then bang out three paragraphs of your own thoughts (and then spell check it)? I’ve just managed more than 1,200 words (this blog post and the new review) this afternoon, it wasn’t hard.
