Mandy

 Saw Mandy (thanks, Lea!)   It was a dark, psychedelic horror film in the vein of Last House on the Left.  It follows a husband and wife who are terrorized by and then revenge themselves on a group of Charles-Manson-family-style cultists.  The film is full of rich reds and blacks, as colorful as Suspiria, and yet as morbid and bombastic as a Carpenter Brut album.  Heavy guitar grumbles and drum beats feature heavily in the film.  The good guys are grungy, beardy, lumberjacks and the villains are leather-clad psychotic bikers.  It's a hell of a trip!

I liked the film.  It's so over the top and serious and great.  It lavishes attention on paintings of tigers and ladies such as might be air-brushed on the side of vans, characters read intensely from self-serious high fantasy books, and the lingering strangeness of the drug-fueled 60s hovers in the background.  The film is set in the 80s and seems to have preserved the fears of that time: drugs, dungeons and dragons, religious cults.

In addition to the horror on display, there's a Lynchian northern strangeness to it, an Adult Swim-style manic weirdness.  At one point the protagonist visits a Timothy Leary-style LSD chemist/priest.  The lights turn on to the sounds of a xylophone being struck.  It's so strange.

The main character is played by Nicholas Cage.  He's being over the top and shouty and crazy but boy howdy does that man commit to his roles and here the over-serious near-insane intensity plays to his strengths.  He seems like a person who exists in a world of drugs, wizards, magic, and swords.  His wife is played by a very creepy-looking woman who is heavily evoking Shelly Duval in the The Shining for me.

Anyway it's a good movie.  Very visually pleasing and morbid and fun.  The obsession with the fears of the 80s is not so fun for me, but nothing's perfect I guess.