2020VISION 2020 Vision is a bimonthly column covering fantasy and science fic~ tion movies, written by Colin Greenland. GETTING THE FRIGHT RIGHT It must be a headache making a horror movie these days. With technical effects of ever-increasing cunning, it's possible to show the most graphic mutations and mutilations, to a public which seems fable to stomach them all cheerfully and demand more. Campaigners for censor- ship often overlook the fact that fans of slash-and-slay pictures relish them not morbidly but as light relief from the actual, but less tangible, horrors that fil the papersand TV news. Condemnation, by Mary Whitehouse may be the best advertisement ofall; but no director Wants to end with a film that makes the Studio so nervous they won't release it One answer seems to be ~ add comedy, A streak of satire, @ pinch of farce demonstrate you're not taking your nec- romantics too seriously, and that the ‘audience shouldn'teither. Balancing the mixture, though — that needs skil The Return of the Living Dead Tartan, 18) is the first film to be directed by Dan O'Bannon, co-writer of Dark Star, Alien and Lifeforce. If you recall a previous movie entitied Night of the Living Dead, {and directed by George Romero, well, so did Romero, and he sued. This one got made anyway, more asahomagethana Fip-off, Barrals of zombies from the orig inal story have been misrouted by 2 bureaucratic cock-up to the basement of ‘a medical supplies firm. One springs a leak, and fairly soon all the cadavers and specimens upstairs are twitching into Macabreand lethal action. Meanwhile in the graveyard next door the local punks are having a party sprawls shapelessly but comfortably, with plenty of gruesome jokes. The two men minding the store inhale toxic fumes from the barrels and pass stra Bock! Back, you ros from being alive to being undead with: ‘outnoticing, There’sa hilarious moment ‘of embarrassment when their colleagues and assembled paramedics realise the pair have shuffled off this mortal coil, butdon'tknow howto break the news to them: Fright Night (Columbia, PG), is also a directorial debut for Tom Holland, who wrote the recent Cloak and Dagger, @ film about a boy obsessed with a spy role-playing game. Here, it’s a boy ‘obsessed with old monster movies, who discovers his new neighbour is a vam- pire butcan’t get anyone to believe him. Unfortunately Holland gets his mixture ‘of humour and horror the wrong way round, setting up a gawky teen-comedy {and letting itrun on far too long before deluging it with buckets of blood. One boy. an exploitative little brat who would have baen a sympathetic character ithe hadn't been so badly acted, is suddenly staked to the parquet, writhing through the most nightmarish transformations since The Company of Wolves ~ shock: ing, certainly, but callous, as is the lin- geting scene where the medallion-man Yampire gropesa schoolgirl atthe disco. We may be justified in suspecting that a film which has such contempt for its characters has contempt forits audience too. Teen Wolf (Entertainment, PG) goes t00 far the other way. I's so careful to cater to the kiddies that it collapses into trite moralism andcliché—a shame after ‘a wonderful beginning. Michael J Fox (who went on to star in Back to the Future) is delightfully perplexed as Scott, who finds growing up brings ‘many unexpected bodily changes: hair, jaws, fangs and pointy ears. Themovie's best okeis the scene where dad demands toknow why his son's hiding in the bath- room all the time. But after that it’s all downhill. Anxious that their movie should be perfectly wholesome, clean and bloodiess, writers and director forgot ‘Scott was supposed to be a werewolf, ‘and made him a basketball star instead. The London Film Festival does great things by way of airing all kinds of films from all over the world, but it does inci- dentally emphasize how far commercial success is a function not of quality, but of the machinery of fame. Fantasy films Quaranteed large audiences, for exam- ple, are A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway's elaborate conundrum about animals, amputations and the let- tors of the alphabet, and Shadey, a first film from satirical piaywright Snoo Wil son, in which a sad young misfit with a ‘Bush me out of bed, would you ‘supernatural power tries to sell his ser- Vicesto industry and gets chewedup by military intelligence. The screens of the 1985 Festival will have been dark for sev. feral months by the time you read this, but not everything first shown there automatically getsageneralrelease.For | every Turtle Diary or Back to the Future | there's a real gem stil waiting for a British distributor: Out of the Darkness, for instance, in which three visiting chil dren see a ghost in 2 Derbyshire village and become gradually and perilouslyin-_ | volved in the reparation of a terrible crime three centuries old, John Kirsh, directing on a tiny budget with four ‘stars’ who'd never acted before, has created a vivid and enthralling mystery ten times batter than the ghastly Goonies. ‘Two excellent programmes of anima- tion included the strange and spiky This Unnameable Little Broom, an insectile fever-dream; Canada’s The Big Snit, in which a couple squabbling over Scrab- ‘ble manage to miss World War Three: and a sombre vision of the Day After, in ‘an American home occupied only by robots and ash: There Will Come Soft Rains, made in Russia from a story by Ray Bradbury! But for me the prize was an enchanting French animated fantasy adventure, Gwen. A 13-year-old girl and her 173-year-old companion cross a desert strewn with giant furniture and. bedclothes, tofind a decaying city where solemn priests lead the people inchants taken from their sacred book, amail-order catalogue (‘Rust resistant watering. can... Itis the age after the Storm when the Gods abandoned the Worid, all but the one amnesiac, amorphous God who sleeps in a swimming pool, dreaming of rust-resistant watering: cans, Join me new in this heartfelt prayer: "Take back Fright Night, Give us Gwen! Ci