Hello, world. I’m MacDara Conroy, and this is my blog.


My Letterboxd reviews of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, #Horror, Anguish, Father’s Day and The Baby

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion:

Stylistically confident by any measure, let alone for an exploitation sleaze-fest.

#Horror:

Who the hell called this #Horror when a far better title (Slashtag!) is staring you right in the face? It’s not even really a horror film, anyway, not until the last 20 minutes. Psychological thriller, then? Maybe, at a stretch, when most of it plays as a cyberbullying-themed tweenage drama with some blunt social commentary shoehorned in. First-time director (but long-time actor, fashion industry figure and multimedia artist) Tara Subkoff throws all her influences into the mix here, and it shows. More focus would help, but it’s hardly the worst film ever; these no-star reviews are taking the piss.

Anguish:

If you think the postmodern horror was invented by Wes Craven in the mid 1990s, then you obviously haven’t seen Friday the 13th Part VI. Nor this unheralded gem, what can best be described without giving it away as a cinematic bad dream, and the only effort in the (fuzzy edges of the) genre from a director now synonymous with arthouse fare like Jamón Jamón. It’s not perfect by any means, and its internal logic collapses well before the finale, but it deserves to be more widely seen regardless.

Father’s Day:

Troma was the perfect fit for this debut feature from Canada’s Astron-6 collective (Manborg, The Editor), a deliberately provocative, patently ridiculous – and just a little bit fun – grindsploitation tribute.

The Baby:

I first saw this late at night on BBC 2 in the ’90s and, while it’s a lot tackier than I remember, and it’s lost quite a bit of its shock value, it’s still a deeply unsettling piece of work.