octavia_cade 's review for:

Frisk by Dennis Cooper

1.0

---

Yeah, I didn't much enjoy this. I can see the idea behind it - an obsession with sadism that propels a young man into fantasies of murder - but the execution seems to be more concerned with shock value than anything else. I often find that the horror films I like least are the slashers, the ones least concerned with story and more with gross-out gore, and that's the case here. There's only so often you can read about violent sex before the author's desire to shock starts to seem laboured and tedious, and constantly ratcheting up the gore value - there's a horribly explicit scene of the rape and murder of a child - doesn't increase my interest. On top of that, the prose just doesn't do anything for me. Sample line: "His head must have swivelled too quickly or something, because it started trembling like what's-her-name's... Katharine Hepburn's." Ugly prose kills even good stories stone dead for me, and this is just not that good a story to begin with.