On May 5th, Slash ½ starts, the spring offshoot of the bold Viennese genre film event.
Tired scraps of cardboard are no longer part of the program in cinemas – including at the Slash ½ genre film festival. This year, even the masked murderers often dare to appear on the screen without a mask. From May 5th to 7th, the little sister of the autumnal Slash Film Festival will be showing eleven films that make you want to cover your mouth with your eyes again and again – it’s that horrible sometimes.
In Ti West’s “X” (with 1970s era and Southern local color) it is at least clear from the start what is going to happen – in other words, a bloody carnage. This is where softcore porn meets hardcore horror: you don’t see sperm squirting in this shocker, but you do see a lot of blood. West knows the two body-hugging genres have more in common than their respective money shots, which effectively culminate in sex and violence respectively. This is presented in “X” with a great deal of dramatizational wit and at the same time in a self-reflective manner.
A butcher couple chasing vegans
Also in the farce “Some like it rare” a butcher couple feels very turned on – by killing and eating their vegan prey. Cannibalism serves the two as a revitalization cure for the broken marriage and the debt-ridden butcher shop. If all else fails, you can always bite off the (hated) fellow man: The film seems to give us that as a mischievous tip for the prevailing inflation and blackout panic.
How to deal with it when the lights go out: You can also find out in “Dark Glasses”. In his first film in ten years, Dario Argento equates the loss of sight with a loss of control. There are enough splatter show values here too. For the director, who became famous with “Giallos” (pronounced highly stylized slasher films), the tender portrait of a blind sex worker is far more important than repetitive close-up slaughter. This has to learn to find its way in a visually calibrated world.
She could hardly enjoy films without her eyesight. So no neon-chic voodoo gothic drenched in club music, like in “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon”. No sauerkraut therapy in Baltic wilderness (“upurga”). And no transdimensional kung fu mayhem like in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the festival’s opening film. In other words: without seeing, there is no slash ½. Eyes open, masks off – and through.[SH0NP]
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