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If you feel as though there's something missing in your life, there's a pretty good chance that aching, gaping void is caused by a complete lack of 19th century slasher movies. Friday night is your big chance to see if A Chronicle of Corpses can serve as spackle for your soul. The film, which is Night of the Living Dead for kids who cut their teeth on Ken Russell, is screening at the Dryden Theatre
Set in 1807, Corpses is much more concerned with weird camera angles and shadows than it is the spattering of blood. The action centers around a bizarre wealthy family and their plantation, and I do mean "action": Dad has a thing going with his brother-in-law, Mom does it with a stable boy... oh, and family members keep getting bumped off one at a time by this mysterious thing that's supposed to be a metaphor for their own decaying lives and lack of place in history (Hence the title and tagline: "What will our new history be but a chronicle of corpses?").
I think my favorite part was when I was nearly lulled to sleep by a very pedestrian scene depicting the delivery of communion wafers to the tongues of the Elliot clan, only to be startled awake by a shot of a Fat Bastard lookalike toting a body. Other sections of Corpses feature the kind of editing that makes you wonder if anyone could remember more than one line at a time. The cast is comprised mostly of theatre actors from Philadelphia, which is where writer-director Andrew Repasky McElhinney (he was 21 when he made this flick) hangs his hat. Think fellow Philadelphian M. Night Shyamalan funneled through Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and you're in the right neighborhood, despite the fact that Corpses probably would have been better if its running time hovered somewhere near the 60-minute mark instead of the 83.
1:23 - Not Rated
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