'Livid' (2011) - Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo.

Deliriously deviant directors of inventive in Utero insanity, 'Inside', Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo, take a toothsome bite out of a ripe Clockwork Blood Orange, and evilly concoct an especially Grimm-natured, balletically bloody, far-out Fairy tale phantasmagoria, fearfully replete with excessively nightmarish nocturnal necromancies, profane blood rituals, and a stark grisly-Gothic, kaleidoscopically weird creepiness! In a somnolent seaside town there have long been illicitly whispered tales about the ostensibly deserted, ostentatiously grand mansion of infamous, despotic dance teacher, Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla); now apparently reduced to little more than a dreadful living corpse, her pallid, desiccated remains are given the faintest semblance of life by regular transfusions of fresh blood, and the persistently eerie, mechanized wheezing of a respirator that robotically inflates her terminally ailing lungs....But just how physically incapable is this prone, impossibly gaunt, bed-ridden crone?

But just how physically incapable is this prone, impossibly gaunt, bed-ridden crone? And what of this rumoured treasure that so inexorably drew the young, pale, pixie-esque beauty of trainee care assistant Lucy (Chloé Coulloud), and her two blithely larcenous friends to so foolhardily break into the labyrinthine, oppressively vast Jessel property? 'Livide' (2011) is a perfectly perverse cinematic puzzle box, part Guillermo del Toro's macabre, mould-cracking 'Cronos', part super-charged Mario Bava Gothic delirium, plus an additionally flesh-crawling flourish of deliciously dark fabulist E.T.A Hoffman, while the insidious influences to Maury's & Bustillo's skin-prickingly sinister, morbidly majestic horror film are sublimely numerous, their maniacal melange of midnight movie madness coalesces into something uniquely monstrous indeed! And their witty reference to the 'Slaughtered lamb' pub certainly wasn't lost on me! Jolly good show, chaps!

'Many of us fear death...but the true nightmare is what comes after!'

 

 

'Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?'