Tilbury (1987)

Have you ever heard of the Icelandic creature known as the tilberi? Not unlike the automatons I was only recently introduced to in the wonderful November, these creatures are created by women of little means from various odds and ends mixed with communion wine in order to provide for themselves in times of hardship. During a time when women were considered doomed if they didn't have someone possessing a penis watching over them and bankrolling them, this could be extremely useful for lonesome witches and women of fearsome independence. The lore itself is interesting, if bizarre, but how would one go about adapting it into a modern horror story? Enter Tilbury, an appropriately Icelandic TV movie about the very same creature only now he's running amok in a time and place much closer to our own. 

Let me just say up front that there was a lot I respected about this film even though I think I hated it. It was interesting in an academic sense, but it didn't suffer from the dreadfully slow pacing of some of the other films from All the Haunts Be Ours that I could mention. I especially like the attempt at juxtaposing an old creature of folklore with the modern day and all its strange complexities; the tilberi is a parasitic creature who has become a general in the British army somehow, which only makes any sense when you realize that the film is set during the British occupation of Iceland in the '40s. I like the performance of the man playing the tilberi, and the way he speaks in stilted English, which just adds to his bizarre, otherwordly qualities. I also laughed out loud a few times when characters suddenly broke into English to swear like sailors; a western TV film this is not.

But ultimately, while I enjoyed it fine throughout the viewing, upon distancing myself from it, I come to the conclusion that it was kind of awful and extremely unpleasant to sit through. It was great seeing some Icelandic representation in the genre, but man: where are the characters? The arcs? The scenes of social commentary that would make the connection between the British soldiers and this creature of myth and legend more clear? Or indeed, horror? It never once comes off as scary. It's a little disturbing when the tilberi sucks from a makeshift teat on a woman's thigh, but that's about it, unless you're especially terrified or violently disgusted by the constant streams of bright green puke being excreted all over the place, which would be understandable.

The worst part of the film is its ending. It works thematically but our main character is blatanly sidelined (as if he ever had any character or agency in the first place) and the acting and writing here is so poor as to be downright embarrassing. It actually makes one wonder if the entire film hasn't been this bad all along, only previously less obvious because you had to read all the dialogue in the form of subtitles; hearing it spoken in English is pure cringe. Hardcore genre fanatics will probably get enough out of it to justify its short runtime, but mostly because of the obscure folklore that the film introduces them to and not because of what's happening in the actual film. As someone who's never been big into gross-out, this film is the antithesis of what I was looking for in All the Haunts Be Ours and despite the audio commentary track that is available, I could almost guarantee you I will never stoop as low as to sit through this entire film again, even at sixty minutes.