Bavarian director Werner Herzog describes his "non-remake" of Abel Ferrara's incendiary Bad Lieutenant as being less about the "burden of guilt" than the "bliss of evil". In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009, Lions Gate, 18) Nic Cage plays the increasingly addled detective for whom painkillers pave the way to narcotic addiction, launching him on a downward spiral into criminality and madness. Visions of iguanas and crazed monologues about the dancing dead ensue, with Herzog stopping occasionally to give us an alligator's eye view of a crumbling world – a trope you sense he was itching to use more liberally. It's a strange and ultimately slight movie; whereas Ferrara's visceral tract had a clearly tortured Catholic morality underlying its extreme cinema traits, Herzog's vision is both more playful and more inconsequential.
Although he claims never to have seen the screen predecessor, several sequences in Herzog's version seem directly to reconfigure Ferrara's most notorious set pieces. In particular, the spectacle of Cage shaking down a druggie couple has none of the fear and loathing of Keitel's horrifying harassment of a pair of young women in the unforgiving but ultimately redemptive original. What Herzog brings to the table is a vision of the world which is less racked than whacked, an awareness of the absurdity rather than the profundity of existence, a fascination with the poetry of life rather than the dogma of religion. His film is certainly a lot easier to watch than Ferrara's dark gem; it is also far less substantial.
There's a similar sense of incidental chaos about Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009, Scanbox, 15), a latter-day Greek tragedy in which a mad-eyed Michael Shannon kills his mother (Grace Zabriskie) and discovers God among the groceries while long-term Herzog team-player Brad Dourif holds forth on the cosmic significance of ostriches. Producer David Lynch played a reportedly hands-off role in the film but his aesthetic aura hangs over the project like an off-kilter cloud; shots of pastel houses cast adrift in the cultural desert could easily have been lifted from Wild at Heart, while the deliberately stilted dinner-table dialogue ("You love jello, it's good for your bones") smacks of the quirky craziness of Twin Peaks.
Occasionally it's hard to tell whether the film's rough edges are deliberate or accidental; as the killer's plot-explaining drama teacher, Udo Kier (surely the screen's most reliably demented presence) delivers his lines in a manner so peculiar it makes his offal-fondling turn in Flesh for Frankenstein seem positively naturalistic. Proceeding swiftly to DVD after only the briefest UK theatrical outing, this is at best a Herzog-lite whimsy, although even the director's most offhand doodlings remain essential viewing.
Exhibiting an equally fast turnaround from big to small screen, both The Horde (La Horde) (2009, Momentum, 18) and Cherry Tree Lane (2010, Metrodome, 18) remind us that DVD is now perceived to be the primary marketplace for horror. The former is an OTT French zombie romp with the merest hint of a political subtext; perhaps the marauding mob of faceless flesh-eaters who descend upon an urban tower block are the dispossessed of the banlieue who once spawned such groundbreaking thrillers as Mathieu Kassovitz's La haine. Cops and criminals band together as society collapses around them and the streets turn to fiery warzones, but the movie's main selling point remains the insane level of grue as bodies are butchered with machine guns and machetes. You know the climactic scene from Brain Dead in which our hero ploughs through a crowd of zombies with an upturned power mower? This is like that, but minus most of the laughs.
As for Cherry Tree Lane, there's no doubting writer-director Paul Andrew Williams's proficiency with raw, stripped-down thrills (think of the economy of London to Brighton rather then the indulgence of The Cottage) but there's something depressingly empty about this hoodie home-invasion shocker. While Michael Haneke may have been guilty of lecturing his audience with the thematically comparable Funny Games (both Austrian and US versions), Williams makes a point of having nothing to say, with frustrating results. The truth may be that he is a better director than writer; future works could benefit from strong collaboration in the screenplay department.
The controversy surrounding the depiction of violence against women in The Killer Inside Me (2010, Icon, 18) all but obscured the less headline friendly virtues of Michael Winterbottom's neo noir. Whatever one feels about the film's sexual politics, it is Jim Thompson's pulp paperback rather than Winterbottom's faithful adaptation which is the true source of the trouble. Having been often ill-served on screen, Thompson's literary misanthropy is distilled in this tale of a psychopath who batters and kills those who love him with utter detachment; no wonder Stanley Kubrick called the book the most believable first-person depiction of the psychopathic mind. For his part Winterbottom sticks close to the text, his use of music (Charlie Feathers's "One Hand Loose" during a driving sequence, for example) lending a particularly authentic ear to the proceedings.
In Ivul (2009, Artificial Eye, 15), unruly artist Andrew Kötting sends a tortured young man up into the trees after a row with his authoritarian father about a quasi incestuous encounter with his sister – and there he remains for the rest of this darkly fabulist oddity. It's a typically peculiar piece, distinguished by striking images (a caravan hanging from the branches of a tree) but frequently impenetrable in its headstrong construction. Extensive extras on the dual-disc DVD release include an "unmaking of" featurette, interviews and "deconstruction", alongside three short films from Kötting who made this feature in French after funding failed in the UK. C'est la vie.
