Director: Andy Thompson
Writer: Andy Thompson, Pete Benson, Tim Major
Producer: Tim Major
Cast: Marc Pickering, Susannah Fielding, Cheggers!
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: festival screening (British Horror Fest)
Website: www.killkeith.co.uk

I don’t know which is the more surprising fact about Kill Keith: that it got made or that it’s actually very good. Both seem unlikely.

On seeing the trailer, most people assume it to be some sort of spoof but no, as one surprised blogger wrote just before its release, “Incredibly, this is a thing.” I must admit that when I first saw the advance poster artwork on the DOA Digital site a couple of years ago I assumed that it was something doomed to spend forever in development hell. A good idea, a wouldn’t-it-be-great-if, but not a serious cinematic proposal. I mentally lumped it in with horror comedy Frank in Staines Monster rather than obviously serious projects such as Ellie Rose, the retitling of Tristan Versluis’ Not Alone, which is still awaiting release.

But no, Kill Keith actually got made. It is a thing. It is a film. I have watched it in a cinema. And it turns out to be far, far better than expected, and far, far better than it has any right to be. It is one of my favourite films of the year and I can’t wait to enjoy it again,

Another surprising fact about Kill Keith is that it is, at heart, a romantic comedy. The Tarantino-esque poster of Keith Chegwin in an Uma Thurman-style yellow track suit suggests an action movie and it screened at the 2011 British Horror Film Festival as a horror picture (obviously) but it is first and foremost a comedy, with a will-they-won’t-they couple at the centre. It is also a horror movie, I’ll give you that, in that the plot revolves around a series of gruesome, gory deaths. And just for good measure. it also has aspirations to be a superhero picture, an action movie and a film noir.

This shouldn’t work, but it does. And the proof that is does is the fact that I laughed very long and hard at Kill Keith. This is one of the funniest British comedies of recent years and certainly the funniest British horror comedy since Shaun of the Dead.

(Just in case you think that’s damning with feint praise, like calling this ‘the best D-list Celebrity Psycho Slasher Romcom you’ll see this year’ let me just remind you that there have indeed been several British horror comedies since Shaun, including Freak Out, Evil Aliens, The Cottage, StagKnight, Lesbian Vampire Killers, Doghouse, Vampires of Bloody Island, Stag Night of the Dead and Attack the Block. Some are good, some less so, but none have made me laugh like Kill Keith.)

The film is based around The Crack of Dawn, a fictitious breakfast television show hosted by the eponymous Dawn (played by the impossibly pretty Susannah Fielding, who was in Noel Clarke’s 4.3.2.1 and the ‘WW2 Daleks’ episode of Doctor Who) and the suave Cliff (played by Family Affairs/Brookside’s David Easter as an arrogant slimeball of the first water). Cliff has announced his decision to leave and a secret shortlist of replacements has been drawn up: former DJ Tony Blackburn, comedian Joe Pasquale, astrologer Russell Grant and the irrepressible Keith Chegwin - all of whom play themselves with absolutely gleeful abandon. Chegwin is already a regular on The Crack of Dawn, out in the street surprising people in their homes in a segment called Cheggers Knocks You Up.

Among the staff of ‘Iam-TV’ is studio runner Danny (Marc Pickering: Sleepy Hollow, The Task), a likeable, enthusiastic-but-clumsy, gawky young chap who has dreams of one day being a TV presenter but is still stuck on the lowest rung of the industry, in charge of ‘coffee and arsewipes’. Danny carries a torch for Dawn and has a lifesize cut-out of her in his bedroom (in his mum’s house) which he swiped from the studio reception. Dawn herself is on the rebound from an abusive, testosterone-addled boyfriend known as ‘Rob the Knob’ and there is a great chemistry between Fielding and Pickering which makes an audience desperate to see them somehow get together, which is what any good romcom should have.

What very few romcoms have is an unidentified psycho in a boiler suit, only ever shot from the chest down, who brutally (and hilariously) murders a TV exec for the secret shortlist and then sets about shortening it even further. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know that Pasquale and Blackburn both end up gruesomely despatched. Who could be responsible for these atrocities, and can they be stopped before they... Kill Keith?

There are plenty of candidates. Cliff himself is a thoroughly unpleasant, supercilious twat, convinced of his own greatness and utterly obnoxious to those around him, especially Danny. Perhaps it’s recently employed studio cleaner Andy (the ubiquitous Simon Phillips: Jack Says, The Reverend etc) who seems to have a lot of questions. Maybe it’s vampiric quizmaster Brian - a wonderful performance from Stephen Chance (The Shadow Within) combining gothic eccentricity with genuine pathos - who receives constant instructions to further dumb down questions that wouldn’t tax a five-year-old.

In casting around for a killer, as one must perforce do in a whodunnit, however gory, the possibility cannot be discounted that either Danny or Dawn might have a dark side, or could it be one of the studio’s various other employees, or even somebody connected with one of the celebs themselves? Perhaps it’s Rob the Knob?

As the bodies pile up, Danny and Dawn move hesitantly closer together, a series of finely judged comic misadventures constantly letting down Danny’s attempts to impress the love of his life. Part of his problem is that he is a dreamer and there are several quite wonderful Walter Mitty-style daydreams scattered throughout the film as Danny’s alter ego ‘Danny Danger’ becomes a gun-toting Rambo, a golden age superhero and a tough-talking 1940s ‘tec whose car comes equipped with its own dodgy back-projection.

Throughout all this we have the quartet of celebs themselves, all of whom worked for free on this low-budget production (other celebs were approached, including Vanessa Feltz, but were unable to fit into the Kill Keith shooting schedule). All four are consummate professionals and helpfully already have a broadcast persona. When Russell Grant or Cheggers appears on TV they are already a version of themselves. Blackburn, as an old-school DJ, is very much a self-made media construct. And as a stand-up comedian Pasquale is playing a role every time he steps on stage. For this film, they have no problem just slightly exaggerating themselves, which works perfectly as all four are already exaggerations. Then again, it’s clear they don’t mind playing against type and there’s some magnificent swearing on show here.

It is also worth noting that Tony Blackburn is treated slightly differently to the other three, resulting in one of the film’s funniest scenes, featuring my pal Frank Scantori (Room 36) at his skin-crawling best in a small but gloriously funny role.

The romcom plot and the psycho killer plot both build towards Cliff’s final show, on the morning of Halloween, with the set full of pumpkins and plastic bats and the hosts in fancy dress as vampire and witch. There is a brilliantly original, almost Hitchcockian ‘ticking clock’ as our hero races to save our heroine, the two plots finally colliding in one unforgettable finale.

The whole film looks fantastic, utterly belying its small budget, and one of the main things that carries the movie is a cast which, right down to the smallest bit-part, never puts a foot wrong. Iain Rogerson, who was one of the ex-commandos in The Scar Crow, tuns in a particularly good supporting performance as the studio’s security guard.

Cinematographer Luke Bryant makes his feature debut here after shooting some impressive shorts including Human Assembly, Deathless and an adaptation of Michael Marshall Smith’s short story ‘Later’. Production designer Danny Rogers (The Hike, Jack Falls) does a great job with not just the studio and domestic sets but also the hyper-realism of Danny’s daydreams. Editor Richard Colton (Airborne, Strippers vs Werewolves) also deserves praise as does John Zealey whose renditions of appropriate songs make for a beautifully sympathetic soundtrack.

Make-up effects designer Kristyan Mallett has amassed a hundred or so credits in the few years since he started as a trainee on Harry Potter 3 including WAZ, The Cottage, Doomsday, Eden Lake, Mutant Chronicles,Strigoi, Heartless, The Reeds, The Holding and The Inbetweeners Movie. The gore which he provides for Kill Keith is just gruesome enough to be funny without tipping over into silliness.

The final surprising thing about Kill Keith is that it is the second feature from Andy Thompson - as it could not be more different from The Scar Crow. Not just in its tone, style, subject matter and approach but also in having a tightly constructed, narratively satisfying script rather than the previous feature’s enjoyable but ultimately plothole-riddled story. Pete Benson, who co-directed The Scar Crow, restricts himself to writing duties here, working with Thompson and with producer Tim Major from an original idea by Andy (who already knew Chegwin slightly before starting on the project). Freak Out director Christian James is credited as associate producer.

Finally, a word must be said about Chegwin himself who already has some remarkable, little-known credits to his name. This is actually his second British horror film, or even his third if you’re of the school which considers Polanski’s Macbeth (in which young Cheggers plays Banquo’s son) a horror movie. Personally, although it’s a great version of my favourite Shakespeare play, I don’t think of Polanski’s film as horror; the supernatural elements are rationalised away and it’s not as gory as people seem to think it is. Be that as it may, Cheggers certainly does get a horror credit for narrating the Fun Dead zombie game show seen briefly on TV in the epilogue of Shaun of the Dead.

In his pre-Swap Shop acting days, he was also in a couple of episode of The Tomorrow People and played the title role in Robin Hood Junior, long before a different actor with initials KC donned the Lincoln green tights.

Whatever you think of Keith Chegwin, Kill Keith will make you see him in a completely new light. This could be the start of a whole new career for the man, a reinvention of his cheesy image in the light of his incredible performance as the epicentre of this film.

Brilliantly written, marvellously produced and directed, flawlessly acted and genuinely hilarious, Kill Keith deserves to join the pantheon of great cult movies.

It will be a sod to sell in overseas territories, mind.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writers: Ben Wheatley, Amy Jump
Producers: Claire Jones, Andrew Starke
Cast: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Michael Smiley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release
Website: www.kill-list.com

Some critics have suggested that the best way to approach Kill List is with as little foreknowledge as possible. This is absolutely not the case and frankly unfair to the film’s audience. There are some things which you really should know before taking the time to watch this film.

First, despite early indications, this is a horror movie. Not quite supernatural horror but more than just excessive violence. The third act involves some sort of Wicker Man-style pagan/wiccan cult, positioning Kill List on the very edge of fantasy, depending on whether or not their magick is real (that’s not made clear). This is important to know because the first act, which introduces us to ex-squaddie Jay (Neil Maskell: Doghouse, Tony), his Swedish wife Shel (MyAnna Buring: The Descent, Devil’s Playground), his son Sam (Harry Simpson - no relation) and his oppo Gal (Michael Smiley: Burke and Hare, Outpost), goes on far too long.

We see the outward normality of these people’s lives. We learn that Jay and Gal were together in the army, then worked for a private security firm, then became freelance hitmen. Jay hasn’t worked in eight months and his savings are drying up, further cracking his strained marriage. Gal has been offered a job and wants Jay in on it.

While the quality of the writing, the direction and the performances ensure that this first part of the film doesn’t drag, the fact remains that it’s not what we’ve paid to see and the same ideas and information could have been conveyed in half the time. This would bring forward the start of the second act when the film turns into a thriller and hence hasten the arrival of the third act that we’re all waiting for.

The other thing which you really should know in advance is that you will be sorely disappointed if you expect any sort of explanation or resolution - and this is the film’s biggest failing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that everything should be wrapped up with some pat explanation. I’m not even saying that all the questions raised should be answered. But at least some of them should be answered, otherwise what’s the point?

I’m all for films that leave unanswered questions. The Descent, for example, never explained what the crawlers were or whether they were even real. The ending of the film (in the British cut) was clearly in the main character’s head, but when did the narrative pass from reality to fantasy? Was it getting stuck in the narrow gap? Was it the accidental killing of a friend? My personal theory is that it was the car crash in the prologue and that everything after that is fantasy (an idea born out by the often overlooked scene of the hospital lights mysteriously switching off). The point is that the lack of a definite answer makes the debate all the more fascinating.

In a similar vein, Vampire Diary refuses to confirm or deny whether the central character is a real vampire or just a disturbed young woman with a taste for blood. There are plenty of other examples. In fact, there are legions of horror films which leave an audience wondering what happens next, especially those with a Carrie-style sting at the end.

But Kill List isn’t a film open to different interpretations, it’s a film which raises a whole bunch of unconnected questions and leaves them all hanging at the end - including what actually happens at the end. Without wanting to give away any spoilers, the climax of the movie is genuinely disturbing and shocking. For a brief moment I was in awe at the audacity of the film-makers, amazed at what they had revealed, but this was immediately muddied by confusion over character reactions which completely contradicted everything we had been told and shown so far - and then the whole thing just suddenly stopped. In an instant, ‘Wow!’ turned to ‘What?’. It is possibly the most disappointing, arbitrary cop-out of a non-ending since The Blair Witch Project.

However, while Blair Witch was 70-odd minutes of nothing happening to people we didn’t care about, so the crap ending came as something of a relief and the main disappointment was at the waste of an evening and the cost of two cinema tickets, with Kill List the opposite is true. This is a terrific film (or rather, this is 98% of a terrific film). Everything up to that ending is great because up to that ending we are impressed at the originality and the diverse range of weirdness happening on screen. We are impressed - as we would be with any finely wrought, complex, convoluted narrative - that a writer has crafted a tale which weaves all these ideas together and will make sense of them at the end.

But implicit in this adulation is the assumption that the writer will make sense of things at the end. And this, Ben Wheatley and his wife/co-writer Amy Jump singularly fail to do. Watching Kill List is like seeing all the theatrical preamble to a large-scale magic trick and then just as the magician raises his magic wand - the curtains close and the house lights come up. In other words, it’s a con, a swizz and a rip-off.

Here, we venture unavoidably into the realm of spoilers, so beware:

Gal’s new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) carves a symbol in a hidden spot in Jay’s house. Why? Along with several other later actions by Fiona, no explanation is offered except that she is part of the pagan cult/conspiracy.

We never find out who Jay and Gal’s employer is, nor why he wants these people dead. That’s not such a problem; it’s not the driving force of the film or the character’s motivations. These are two men doing a job - nothing more, nothing less. The second kill is of a man involved in some sort of violent underground pornography ring (possibly kiddie porn) although it is unclear whether the others on the ‘kill list’ are also involved or whether this is coincidental.

The first victim, a priest, accepts his fate and says ‘Thank you’ before being shot. Ooh, that’s mysterious. Will we ever find out why? No.

The second victim goes further, enthusiastically thanking Jay with every agonising crunch during a violent - but far from exploitative - prolonged torture scene. Some reviewers have been shocked by this but it doesn’t linger, it’s technically clever, it’s not gleeful in any way, and it is frankly a lot less disturbing than similar stuff shot for a fraction of the budget eight years ago for The Last Horror Movie. What is more significant is that this victim, when Gal is out of the room, praises Jay like some sort of celebrity. What is it about Jay? What is going on here? We will never find out.

A major problem with the plot is that very little attention is paid to the folder of documents and photographs which Gal takes from the victim’s safe (presumably to make the hit look like a botched burglary). This folder is all about Jay and Gal, it includes a whole dossier on something which happened in Kiev (frequently alluded to but never in sufficient detail for us to care about) and there are even photographs taken of the duo carrying out the hit on the priest a few days earlier.

This should have been a complete game-changer, a wake-up call that the two men are not just hired guns but somehow mixed up in a much bigger, more deadly and more personally relevant situation - but Gal doesn’t even show Jay the folder. He just mentions it in passing and they pretty much shrug and go, oh, that’s weird.

There are a couple of other situations which simply don’t ring true. On discovering that the next hit is an MP, Jay and Gal seem unconcerned. But a disappearing priest or a random bloke killed by a burglar are one thing, assassinating a Member of Parliament is quite another. Any investigation will be massive and much more likely to lead to their arrest - but they just accept it as Another Job.

The MP has a huge estate and it is here, bivouacked in woodland for the night, that our two leads are woken by a torchlight procession of 20-30 people, some naked, some in hooded smocks, some wearing wickerwork masks. This comes completely out of nowhere and although the downing of hoods identifies some minor characters we know, the significance or relevance or meaning of it all is glossed over. Incidentally, it’s never indicated whether any of the cult members is the MP in question.

And here comes the final problem with the story (non-ending aside). Jay and Gal start shooting the cult members. That’s two trained, professional killers, hidden among dark woodland in the middle of the night, armed with a shotgun and an automatic pistol, against a couple of dozen unarmed, brightly illuminated individuals. Yet not only can the cultists somehow see where the two hitmen are but the hitmen are unable to take out more than one or two cultists as the latter race unsteadily towards them across several hundred yards of rough terrain.

None of this is in any way believable or credible and none of it will be explained so don’t get your hopes up.

It’s worth for a moment considering the sine qua non of pagan-cult movies, The Wicker Man. One of the reasons for that film’s success is its careful structure. By the third act, Sgt. Howie (and hence the audience) has worked out what is going on. Then in that classic finale Howie (and hence the audience) discover that there is something even bigger going on. The Wicker Man actually answers more questions than it asks, because the actions of the characters are not only explained by Howie’s initial assumption but also by the reality. This is important: every single thing that anyone does or says in that film - however spooky, however random - can be seen, in retrospect to be part of the overall scheme to entrap Howie in accordance with the Summerisle beliefs.

The Wicker Man has a coherent narrative. And while not every film can be The Wicker Man, a coherent narrative is not too much to ask.

It’s worth also taking a look at the Kill List production notes. They won’t explain what is going on, but they offer some clue as to the problems with the film, which become more numerous and more significant the more one thinks about it (and that’s not good for a film which sets out to make its audience think abut it after seeing it!).

“Eight months after a disastrous job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier turned contract killer, Jay, is pressured by his partner, Gal, and wife Shel, into taking a new assignment.”

Is there any indication in the actual film that Kiev left Jay “physically and mentally scarred”? No, there isn’t. As previously mentioned, it’s just referred to in passing a couple of times. Mental scarring? None that I could notice. He argues with his wife. Who doesn’t do that? Physical scarring? He has spurious lower back pain, that’s all.

“the [second] victim acknowledges Jay and thanks him for his fate. The shock and confusion are too much for Jay who viciously attacks the man.”

Nope, that doesn’t come across at all. Jay is already viciously attacking the man and everything indicates that his anger is based on the victim’s involvement in orchestrated child abuse. If Jay was shocked at being addressed directly and continually thanked, all he has to do is slit the guy’s throat and the bloke will shut up.

“As they descend into the dark and disturbing world of the contract, Jay begins to unravel once again – his fear and paranoia sending him deep into the heart of darkness.”

Again, this just doesn’t come across in the movie. Is this press officer hyperbole or was this the actual intention of the film-makers? Either way, it doesn’t match what is on screen. Jay certainly goes over the top but there is nothing to indicate this is anything other than a previously expressed utter hatred of kiddy-diddlers. There’s no sense of fear and paranoia, the very opposite in fact. Neither Jay nor Gal seem particularly bothered at what they are getting into, treating the job at all times like just another set of contract killings. If the above is what Wheatley and Jump were aiming for, they have missed their mark considerably. And even if they had nailed this aspect of the story, that would not in any way excuse the cop-out at the end, when it really looks like they just ran out of ideas.

Here’s a quote from a short interview with Wheatley in the press notes: “I’ve always loved horror films, but there seem to be so few that are actually scary. I wanted to make something that would make the audience afraid and unnerved. I sat down with Amy Jump and we thought about the things that scared us the most and then built the script around that. A lot of the sequences are built around re-occurring nightmares I’ve had since childhood. I thought that if these things scared me then - they would scare a larger audience.”

Therein, I suspect, lies the problem. Wheatley and Jump have prioritised scaring people over actually telling a good story. They have written the script as a ghost train ride: a succession of freaky, creepy events that has no actual continuous narrative thread and which stops arbitrarily when the car re-emerges into the fresh air. It’s possible to give a ride a narrative, as many of the bigger, better theme parks have found with their fancy-dancy 3D wotsits, but Kill List exhibits no more storytelling structure than you will find at Billy Bates’ funfair.

This is Wheatley’s second film after a thriller called Down Terrace. That received extensive critical praise but so has Kill List so I can’t see myself wasting an hour and a half of my life watching another of this director’s films. More interesting, and I think relevant, is that Wheatley was both director and writer on The Wrong Door.

Regular readers may have come across mention of this BBC3 sketch show before, in my review of Just for the Record. That film - inarguably the worst British movie released last year - was written by Phillip Barron, who was also a writer on The Wrong Door. Maskell, Buring and Smiley all have The Wrong Door on their CV, as do numerous other cast and crew. Ah, it starts to fit together...

The biggest problem with The Wrong Door, the thing which made it stand out as particularly shit and unfunny even by the dirt-scrapingly low standards of BBC3 sketch shows in general, was that it was clearly made by people with absolutely no understanding of comedy. The sketches were written to some sort of formula - incongruous character in normal situation or normal character in incongruous situation - and pumped out without any thought for whether they were actually amusing. It was production line ‘comedy’ made by people with no concept of what they were doing, like poor Chinese factory workers hand-painting unlicensed rip-offs of western TV characters. Just a mechanical process without thought or care.

And it is my conclusion that Ben Wheatley has here approached horror the same way that he, Barron and others approached comedy on BBC3. He has knocked together something that looks like a horror film - it has strange events and sinister characters and brief, brutal violence and a hint of the mystical or supernatural - and then he has given it a lick of paint and watched it sail off down the conveyor belt to be packed into a box and stacked on a pallette and lifted into a container and shipped across the ocean and unloaded onto a lorry and shelved in a warehouse and sold by a wholesaler and taken in a white van to a shop where everything costs one pound.

It looks like a horror film but it’s not a horror film. Because the purpose of a horror film is not to scare people. The purpose of a horror film is to tell a scary story. And a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Wheatley has played a trick on people, making a stylish and compelling film which seems, for 98% of its running time, to be so good (and comes with such hype) that many viewers have developed a blind spot for the completely crap, run-out-of-ideas ending. It’s a common (and annoying) tendency among film/TV fans nowadays to praise poorly crafted stories and try to defend them by setting up straw men among critics and/or by creating extraordinarily convoluted explanations. Take a look at online discussion about most of the recent Doctor Who episodes and you’ll see what I mean.

I‘ve seen some ludicrous explanations for the shoddy plot of Kill List: Jay is the Antichrist; it’s all a dream; whatever... The truth is that it’s the Emperor’s new clothes. People just won’t believe - can’t believe - that the film doesn’t have a true and wonderful meaning.

Ah, the heck with it. That’s 3,000 words and I think I’ve made my point. Kill List is overhyped, over-rated and demonstrates that although the film’s writer-director may enjoy horror, he doesn’t understand it as a genre. The movie might work better if you lower your expectations. Don’t believe the hype.

The cast also includes Struan Rodger (who was the voice of the Face of Boe!) as the mysterious client, Esme Folley (The Horror of the Dolls) as a hotel receptionist, Sara Dee (Room 36, Zombie Office) as a newsreader, Alice Lowe (Liz Asher in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace!), Ben Crompton (Going Postal, Doomwatch remake) and Twins of Evil’s Damien Thomas as a GP who is also in on the conspiracy (for some reason and in some way).

Cinematographer Laurie Rose does camera-work on The X Factor. Editor Robin Hill is the same Robin Hill who worked on Project Assassin (on which Wheatley helped out), Are You Scared and Pumpkinhead 4. Composer Jim Williams scored Philip Ridley’s Heartless and the remake of Minder.

One final point is to consider whether the film has any of the social relevance that characterises the best British Horror Revival titles? Well, yes and no. The characters’ lives, if not the characters, are solidly middle class and aspirational. Jay and Shel have a jacuzzi in the back garden and own a holiday cottage in the country. But we see nothing of their greater lives or their social situation. Where the film scores best is in its depiction of Jay and Gal’s bland existence in motels and travel lodges as they move around the country on their mission. But when, an hour in, the film-makers decide they’re bored with making a thriller and want to make a horror film instead, all that goes out the window.

MJS rating: C-

Director: Peter Goddard
Writers: Peter Goddard, Darren Barber, Ruaidhri O’Mahony
Producer: Daniel Coffey
Cast: Mhairi Calvey, Ryan Spong, Zammo!
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: screener
Website: http://anyminutenowmovie.com

There is some irony that it has taken me several months to get round to watching a screener for a film called Any Minute Now, but things happen and stuff gets in the way. Anyway, here it is, the second feature from Peter Goddard, director of The Season of the Witch. And it turns out to be a spookily effective ghost story which is let down by some curious plot inconsistencies, although not so much as to render the film unenjoyable.

As with Season, a teenage girl comes to a new location and uncovers insular conspiracy among the locals. In this case it’s Anna (Mhairi Calvey, who was the young Catherine McCormack in Braveheart, aged five) who is dumped with her aunt and uncle for a couple of weeks because her parents are going through a rough patch and on the verge of separation. According to the blurb, she’s 16 which is pushing it a bit to be honest because Calvey was 22/23 when this was shot in Dorset in 2011. She settles into her new school where she initially befriends Abi Hartford (Alexandra Hansler aka Alexandra Kelly, who had a bit-part in Kill Keith and looks like a young Olivia Colman).

Now here’s our first problem. Anna is studying for her A-levels but you can’t just switch temporarily to a different sixth form in a different school in a different town midway through your A-levels, and certainly not just for a couple of weeks, just because your parents are having a barney. That’s not how the education system works. I couldn’t help wondering whether the part had originally been written younger, especially as there’s a rogue bit of dialogue where Anna’s aunt, walking her to school on her first day, talks about how much trouble they went to in getting her a school uniform. But Anna and her classmates, like most A-level students, don’t wear uniforms.

The childless aunt Jennifer (Philippa Tozer, who mostly does stage musicals) and uncle David (Darren Matthews, who played Peter Sutcliffe on the Discovery Channel) are exactly the wrong people to temporarily house a teenage relative, strict and disciplined. “We don’t normally eat away from the table,” says Jennifer, telling us pretty much all we need to know about these two.

At school, Anna also meets ditzy pink-haired gothette Lydia (Tallulah Webb) and floppy-haired nice-guy Josh (Ryan Spong). There’s some really good characterisation among these ‘teenagers’ with taciturn Anna unsure who to trust between Josh and Abi, whose families have history. Josh lives with his stepfather (Rob Talbot: Jack Says, Call Me a Psycho and a bunch of zombie/vampire shorts) who runs a shop that is described (in a note which Aunt Jennifer leaves for Anna) as “the convenience store in town” but which is clearly some sort of delicatessen.

There is also a problem with the ‘town’ itself which, according to Josh, is a shitty little town that has been depressed since the local steelworks closed down. For a post-industrial town it’s remarkably rural: all we ever see are 18th/19th century cottages (Jennifer and David live in a huge, thatched farmhouse) surrounded by fields and moors. Everyone keeps calling it a town - and it’s clearly big enough to have its own sixth form college - but every location we see looks like a village. There is a pebbly beach, but again the dialogue diverges from the location with Josh arranging to meet Anna “by the main steps” when this beach is backed by dunes and there are no steps to be seen. This sort of thing spoils the ship for a hap’orth of tar.

Anyway, Anna is narcoleptic and unsure if her new medication is working as she is having hallucinations - or is she? A small boy with bleeding facial wounds (Josh Toop, suitably unnerving in a role originally lined up for Rohan Gotobed) at the foot of her bed, a strange man underneath the tree in her aunt’s garden. She also sees the boy floating in the sea and dives in to save him but he disappears.

Clearly something is going on in this never-named town/village, which has to do with a little-talked-of, shameful historical situation that Josh knows about. I liked the way that this and another scene introduced, without explanation, a layer of unmentioned (but narratively relevant) snow to a story set during the summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people scoff at that as an extreme continuity error but it is clearly a deliberate decision by Goddard. And, crucially, it makes sense. Having just re-read my review of the awful, pretentious, over-hyped Kill List, a film where random spooky things happen for no narrative purpose whatsoever, it’s nice to watch a movie where a whole bunch of mysterious shit happens which all makes some kind of sense at the end. If Peter Goddard can manage this, why can’t Ben Wheatley?

Any Minute Now builds its spookiness and mystery effectively while also developing the teen romance between Josh and Anna. The back-story which Josh reveals is original and horrific, and the film’s satisfying climax achieves the tricky balance of being both gory and supernatural.

On a technical level the video photography is generally good (Goddard shares the DP credit with Tim Parsons) although some wobbly shots could have benefited from either a tripod or being handed to Steadicam operator John E Fry (The Harsh Light of Day, Jack the Last Victim). Producer Daniel Coffey handled the sound mix which suffers unfortunately from Calvey’s underplaying of her character. Everyone else is clear as a bell but Anna’s lines throughout the film are quiet and sometimes get lost in the mix. She’s a taciturn, introspective teen but she’s just a little too taciturn to hear a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, Calvey leads a fine cast which also includes Kevin Hallett (Kill Keith, The Scar Crow), Carl Wilkins (The Harsh Light of Day) and ‘name value’ Lee Macdonald - Zammo McGuire himself! - as the teens’ teacher. Macdonald is one of several cast members to have also appeared in Kevin Hallett’s short The Sharpest Knife. Not unexpectedly, many were also in Season of the Witch and/or Goddard’s various shorts.

Despite running for the best part of two hours, which would normally be a no-no, Any Minute Now kept me engrossed and by the end I was really digging the film. Goddard set out to make a distinctly British ghost story, tapping into that whole British Horror Revival thing by setting it very much in the domestic, realistic hear-and-now. The result, which premiered at the 2013 Festival of Fantastic Films alongside Season of the Witch, can be judged a success.

MJS rating: B

Director: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
Writer: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
Producer: Derek Rundell
Cast: Marco Zaror, Miguel Angel de Luca, Caterina Jadresic
Country: Chile/USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

Around this time of year I like to kick back and relax with a Chilean martial arts movie. Most years I end up frustrated and disappointed on account of there being no such thing, but not this year, not 2008. Two years after it was released domestically, Kiltro is available in the UK. At last I can satisfy my craving for Santiago-style action!

And let me assure you, Kiltro is fab.

Twenty-eight year-old man-mountain Marko Zaror stars as Zamir (‘Zami’), a bored youth with a rudimentary sense of morality but a naive view of the world, who lives with his mum in one of the less salubrious parts of town. Late one night he saves a young oriental women from an attempted rape and carries her home where she gives him a thank-you kiss. Zami is smitten but knows not the ways of women and, being a bit of a lunk, thinks that the way to make the girl (half-Korean Kim: Caterina Jadresic) fall for him is to beat up anyone who talks to her.

Kim’s father Teran (Man Soo Yoon) teaches Tae Kwon Do but pours scorn on Zami for only knowing street-fighting. Zami never knew his own father but has a pendant that means something to certain people.

Enter our bad guy, Max Kalba, played to debonaire perfection by Miguel Angel De Luca. Broad of shoulder, trim of facial hair, he’s a pig-tailed, badger-bearded bastard who wears an immaculate three-quarter-length coat and carries a swordstick topped with a vicious silver claw with which he easily rips out throat and stomachs. Kalba is on a mission to kill all the members of a sect which included Teran, Zami’s missing father and Yun (Pablo Chuyin), a draper who employs Kim in his shop.

After despatching Yun, Kalba comes looking for Teran, fighting off all the Korean’s students. Zami stands up to Kalba and, although he is soundly beaten, that enables Kim to escape.

Kim and Zami end up in a shoreline shack, home of a dwarf named Nik Nak (Roberto Avendano) who was also a member of the sect. Without mentioning him by name, there is a brilliant gag about Yoda in this sequence. And in fact there are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments in Kiltro which, while far from being an actual comedy, has great fun playing with the conventions of the martial arts saga.

Nik Nak sends Zami on a quest to find a master named Soto (Alejandro Castillo), another member of the sect who is now a drunken bum. But Soto takes Zami under his wing, take him out to his desert camp and gives him a drug that clears his memory. Unencumbered by any thoughts of Kim, Teran or his father, Zami trains, learning to react instinctively. Eventually, Soto judges that he is ready to return to the city and face Max Kalba.

The climactic fight starts with Zami - bare-chested for the first time, revealing his rippling pecs - fighting a whole gang of Kalba’s acolytes. Zami wears the face-paint that distinguishes members of the sect and also has some vicious spurs on his heels - and the blood flies. Finally, Zami faces off against Kalba. Kalba who has found and kidnapped Kim, Kalba who has a history with Teran from their younger days, involving a woman, and who now keeps the Korean barely alive.

It’s a terrific fight; heck, all the fights in Kiltro are terrific. Short and brutal, the influence seems to be more from samurai movies than chop-socky flicks. Blood spurts, bodies crumple, victors stand still. The final image in the Zami-vs-Kalba fight is a real punch-the-air moment, sheer action cinema brilliance.

Part of Kiltro’s appeal is undoubtedly the unusual setting, helped by a score by ‘Rocco’ which is pure western, complete with wailing Mexican trumpets (well, Chilean trumpets I suppose). The cinematography by Victor J Atkin is magnificent, especially in the desert training scenes. But this isn’t just an oddity, trading purely on its novelty value. Writer-director-editor Ernesto Diaz Espinoza understands the martial arts action genre perfectly and directs with a light touch that leaves audiences grinning at both the dialogue (despite some slightly iffy subtitles) and the action.

A former Chilean national Tae Kwon Do champion, Marko Zaror started his film career in Mexico where he was working as a model. In 2001, after moving to LA, he had a bit-part in Hard as Nails as a bodyguard, then starred in Chinango and Into the Flames before landing a role as stunt double for The Rock in The Rundown, an action thriller also starring Christopher Walken and Rosario Dawson, for which he won the 2004 ‘Stuntman of the Year’ award. While it’s a bit of a shock to discover that The Rock uses a stunt double, you can see a definite facial similarity between the two men, not to mention their physique, so it makes perfect sense.

Kiltro and the follow-up from Espinoza and Zaror, Mirageman (a non-fantasy superhero picture) were big hits at the Fant-Asia festival in Montreal in 2007. A proper English-language release for both films should see Zaror getting some decent offers for DTV action films. It’s a shame that the KCM subgenre seems to have faded away as he would make a great kick-boxing cyborg!

Both films were produced by Derek Rundell, a US entrepreneur who co-founded Mandrill Films with Zaror and Espinoza, who both take a co-producer credit on Kiltro. The cast also includes Francisco Castro (Angel Negro) and Luis Alarcon who was in Chilean Gothic, a 2000 adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s 'Pickman’s Model'.

I enjoyed Kiltro enormously and now desperately want to view Mirageman. I look forward to following Marko Zaror’s career because he’s a great fighter and a good actor.

MJS rating: A-

Directors: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Writers: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Producers: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Cast: Scott Hillenbrand, Pat Morita, Casey Fallo, Hoyt Axton
Year of release: 1999
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

It takes a lot to make a Big Animal Movie that disappoints this reviewer. As a general rule of thumb, you can pick any animal you like, make it abnormally large, have it threaten a cast of unknowns and has-beens - and I’m as happy as Larry. But King Cobra is, unfortunately, a stinker.

An explosion in a research lab, caused by an over-zealous, drug-taking assistant, frees some snakes. These turn up much later outside a small town which is just about to hold its annual beer festival, on which its tenuous tourist trade depends. Once the existence of a giant snake is discovered, and before you can say “Jaws rip-off”, the mayor is demanding that the festival goes ahead, despite the number of people who will be camping in the woods and thus in great danger. And in another less-than-subtle steal from the 1975 classic, a group of completely useless, unsuitable hunters set off to hunt the thing with whatever weapons they can find.

The local sheriff (Fallo) and doctor (Hillenbrand, S) - who were an item but he’s about to leave town - team up with snake expert Nick Hashimoto (the always reliable Pat Morita) and track the thing down. But nothing makes any sense and set-pieces exist in their own right, without fitting into a coherent story, as when a couple of deputies are attacked in their car, and sit there radioing for help instead of - hey! - driving off...

The snake itself is sensibly kept off-screen for a long time, though when it appears it’s a not too bad creation by the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space). However, the budget clearly wouldn’t stretch to a snake that could actually attack people, so every single tussle happens just off-screen. There are also far, far too many POV shots which are supposed to be the snake but - goodness me - are actually just somebody else.

For some reason this cobra has a rattle, something not normally found in that species, and it’s well into the movie before this anomaly is explained as due to this snake being a cobra/rattler hybrid! (Or, more obviously, because a cobra by itself doesn’t make a scary, threatening noise.)

Rather than using the limitations of their obvious tiny budget, the Hillenbrand brothers exhibit them embarrassingly. A ‘crowd’ at an outdoor pop concert is clearly about two dozen people. There is also, for ‘name value’, an otherwise pointless cameo appearance by Erik Estrada as a massively camp marketing executive.

King Cobra has all the faults of a typical low-budget Big Animal Movie - but none of the charm, wit or fun that the subgenre usually exhibits.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted before November 2004

Director: Kenneth D Barker
Writer: Kenneth D Barker
Producer: Kenneth D Barker
Cast: Simon Kirk, Manouk Vandermeulen, Andy Moore
Year of release: 1999
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK VHS
Website: www.wotr.co.uk

Kenneth Barker’s ambitious debut feature is a children’s film which tells us three things we didn’t know about dragons: they’re real; they’re invisible; and they live in Leeds city centre.

A prologue set 2000 years ago sees beardy chieftains Duretus (bad) and Vortigern (good) sent to sleep by two glowing entities called Necrellians, but Duretus somehow wakes up in 1789 and promptly imprisons Vortigern, who is ‘the Keeper.’

Scoot forward to 1999 and we meet accountant Troy Franklin, who wears a suit but has long hair and a beard. He is sent by his oddball bosses to investigate a wealthy financial partner named Mr Duretus, in the grounds of whose stately home he encounters trespassing oddball amateur scientist Aristotle Wood and his children Spartacus and Ophelia. Aristotle is looking for ‘cryptomorphs,’ for which read dragons.

Duretus, in order to take over the whole of Britain using a frozen army kept in the 2,000-year-old cellar of a Leeds office block, has to eliminate the few remaining dragons, and to this end calls in a dragon hunter, Mademoiselle Celine. Armed with an outrageous French accent, a dwarf sidekick in a bowler hat, and a sophisticated telescope, she sets out to hunt down the five remaining dragons, known as War, Wisdom, Vanity, Greed and Naivetë. Aristotle and Troy rescue Vortigern and brace themselves to defeat Duretus.

For a kids’ film, the script is pretty complicated, and the two youngsters have relatively little to do, though that’s fair enough as eccentric Aristotle and incredulous Troy are the interesting characters. The acting, it must be said, is mostly no great shakes, though Simon Kirk plays Troy well, reacting with the right mix of cynicism and pity to those who believe in dragons until he meets Wisdom herself. Manouk Vandermeulen as Mlle Celine has the best part, hamming up a villainous role and making the most of her many costume changes (including one very odd moment when the film becomes a 1920s silent for a minute or two...). Graham Hughes is also excellent as her sidekick (who is revealed in the end credits to be called Ismail Beard); he looks and sounds remarkably like the late David Rappaport.

And what of the dragons? Well, they’ve been created on a desktop computer so don’t expect Jurassic Park, but they’re well animated and well-integrated with the backgrounds. Unfortunately they are mostly seen static in profile or head-on, which rather defeats the purpose of rendering them in 3D animation. The designs (by director Barker and Arif Majothi: The Witches Hammer) are interesting, especially War with his two pairs of wings, and the characterisations fit their names. However, they do need to be seen in terms of the film’s tiny budget (and the state of desktop animation a few years ago) - or through the eyes of a small child.

A tighter script and tighter editing would have helped. Dialogue is a little leaden, not helped by pauses between lines. Kids and adults alike would enjoy this more with more zip to the dialogue and, to be brutally honest, more wit. Mlle Celine is great fun in her pantomime way and some of Troy’s background reactions to Aristotle and Wisdom are priceless, but Vortigern and Duretus are bland characters with no real sense of mission or conflict.

Kingdom is an interesting curio and is recommended to fans of independent cinema interested in seeing what can be achieved on a tiny budget (£30,000 for the whole thing!), especially those fans with small children. Artistically it doesn’t achieve the standards that it reaches technically, but Barker and team are to be congratulated on their ambition and dedication. Why not take a chance on an independent British production which is trying to do something a bit different?

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 17th December 2005

Directors: Elisabeta Bostan, Nicolae Codrescu
Writer: Elisabeta Bostan
Producer: Nicolae Codrescu
Cast: Mirceau Breazu, Ana Szeles, Ion Tugearu
Year of release: 1968
Country: Romania
Reviewed from: UK festival screening

There was no way that I was going to miss the first ever British screening (from a 16mm print, courtesy of Gerald Price) of a 1968 Romanian children’s fantasy. Fortunately, when Gerald showed this on Sunday morning at the 2003 Festival of Fantastic Films, the other rooms were showing Kiki’s Delivery Service (sorry but anime leaves me stone cold, and this is not an invitation to try and convert me - the only thing I hate more than anime is evangelical anime fans) and the truly execrable Supernova.

Actually this is the 1971 American dubbed version of the film, copyrighted to - bizarrely - the Xerox Corporation. How close it is to the original Romanian script I don’t know - but it’s probably an exact copy! (Please yourselves...)

A young man - who is never given a name so let’s call him Kevin (Mirceau Breazu) - sets out to seek his fortune, specifically to find the Kingdom of Eternal Youth which is high above the clouds. This is because he has often heard of people in stories living ‘happily ever after’ and he likes the sound of the ‘ever’ bit. The first person he encounters on his travels is an old giant, Father Time, who constantly winds an infinitely long rope onto a wooden wheel. This is the Wheel of Time, and he cannot slow it down. but he wishes Kevin good luck on his quest.

In a forest, Kevin encounters a talking sunflower which begs for a drop of water. This the young man kindly gives and the flower turns into a beautiful princess (Ana Szeles) who thanks the young man for his kindness by giving him a horn, on which he may blow to summon her when he needs help, but no more than three times. He wastes the first blow, using it to summon her back immediately so that he can see her face again.

Further into the forest he encounters the Queen of the Forest Birds, a large white dove, who is pleading for mercy from the Prince of Liars (Ion Tugearu), a half-man-half-crow being who has imprisoned all her subjects in a large cage. Here I’m sure that the English sub divulges from the original because the Queen says that she has been turned into a ‘mechanical dove’ but I think she’s just meant to be a large, magical bird. (She is animated in a few shots through stop-motion.) Kevin fights and defeats the Prince of Liars, pulling off his mask and saying, “You’re not a bird! You’re a man!” The caged doves are set free and Kevin pushes the evil prince into the cage instead, which he then drags to to edge of a nearby cliff before pushing it over. On hitting the rocks below, the cage explodes! (I half expected to see a single wheel come bouncing out of the pillar of black smoke.) The Queen of the Forest Birds gives Kevin a magical feather in gratitude.

Eventually he reaches the Kingdom of Eternal Youth where he must complete three tasks before being allowed entry. First he must retrieve the ‘golden rod’ (actually a large ear of corn) which is held by a witch so consumed with jealousy that she has turned green. The witch lives in the Land of Fire and Decay and demands of Kevin that he turn the place into an oasis, which he manages to do surprisingly quickly, clearing the rubbish, dousing the fires and sprucing up the witch’s cottage and windmill. At the same time, he fetches water for a nearly-dead magic horse which belonged to a previous unsuccessful applicant.

The witch reneges on her word, but Kevin uses his magic feather, which turns into a flute which, when played, causes the witch to dance uncontrollably and so somehow releases the golden rod from her possession.

Next is a quest to retrieve the golden apple from the Kingdom of Liars, the location of which is revealed to Kevin by the princess when he summons her. This land turns out to be inhabited by lots of really scary looking men in black costumes and oversize masks who dance around and eventually ensnare Kevin. They are led by the Prince of Liars who somehow survived the exploding cage. Kevin uses a magic leaf to lull his guards to sleep, steals the King of Liars’ magic ring and uses it to open up a wall in a cave wherein lies the golden apple, while fighting off a small army of black-clad soldiers.

The final quest is to retrieve the golden key (the film’s French title was Le Clef d’Or) which will unlock the book of wisdom owned by the King and Queen of the Kingdom of Eternal Youth, who for some reason throw their daughter’s hand in marriage into the reward - a daughter who turns out to be none other than the princess with whom Kevin is in love. The key is in a tower on the edge of the sea, but the Prince of Liars overhears this and sets off for the tower too. Once there, he claims to have repented his evil ways as the only way up the doorless, windowless tower is for him to work with Kevin. However, once he has the key - boo! hiss! - he leaves Kevin stranded inside the well of the tower with no rope while he hightails it back to the Kingdom of Eternal Youth. But Kevin escapes by answering three riddles posed by the old giant from the start of the film, and also obtains the genuine key which he brings back to the King and Queen just in time.

While that bad old Prince of Liars is suitably punished, Kevin weds the Princess but is warned by the Queen never to drink from the magical brook or he will lose his new-found immortality. Of course, this is the first thing he does but the Princess loves him so much that she drinks too so that they will grow old together. Ah, bless.

What a magical film! Did I mention that the Kevin’s steed which he acquires in the Land of Fire and Decay can not only talk but also fly? Or that the Kingdom of Eternal Youth is reachable only by crossing a rainbow bridge. All the effects, whether physical or created using blue-screen, are excellent for the age and origin of the film. It looks quite expensive with big sets, plenty of extras and an exciting horseback chase as the King of Liars’ soldiers attempt to retrieve his magic ring.

People leaving the screening were heard to compare this to The Singing Ringing Tree but that’s only because most people have never seen any other East European fairy tale movies and have no idea of how prolific a genre it is. The story this most resembles is actually the Monty Python tale about Prince Walter and Princess Mitzi Gaynor which was included in the 1972 German episode. It’s clear that the Pythons were spoofing not fairy tales in general but specifically East European film versions (The Singing Ringing Tree was East German, but Kingdom in the Clouds is Romanian and there was a long tradition of such films throughout the Soviet Bloc).

Writer/director Elisebete/Elisabete/Elisabeta/Elizabet Bostan made 25 films from 1956 to 1991 including The Hoopoe on the Lime Tree and Recollections from Childhood (both based, like this film, on stories by 19th century Romanian writer Ion Creanga). Her short silent films about an eight-year-old peasant boy called ‘Naica’ were edited together into a feature entitled The Adventures of Naica which won her a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a special mention at Cannes.

Of course, Romania is now a popular location for western film crews and one of the other cast members, Emanoil Petrut, recently appeared in Donald F Glut’s softcore monster flick The Mummy’s Kiss! The original Romanian title of Kingdom in the Clouds is apparently Tinerete fara Batrinete which roughly translates as ‘eternal youth’.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 29th November 2004

Director: Ross Shepherd
Writer: Ross Shepherd
Producer: Raj Sulaman
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (FFF 2005)
Official site: www.paravelfilms.com

At the 2005 Festival of Fantastic Films I was once again roped in by my old mate Steve Green to help judge the competition for short amateur films. Steve had single-handedly whittled the wide selection submitted to a dozen movies which were then marked for various elements by a panel consisting of myself, Headpress editor David Kerekes and director Norman J Warren (Satan’s Slave, Incident).

The overall winner, by a considerable margin, was this original and charming fantasy; we all three scored it highest and as such its combined score was considerably in advance of the (very good) films which received commendations.

The title refers to a famous quote by Maxim Gorky on seeing his first film, a Lumiere production: "Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. ... It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.” Various books and documentaries on early cinema have also used the phrase.

In Ross Shepherd’s student graduation film, an eight-year-old boy named Alex becomes bored at home, ignored by his parents. Exploring the loft he finds a large cardboard box, full of tangled bird’s nests of 35mm film. Then crawling inside, as a young boy is wont to do, he finds himself entering another world; it’s a sort of The Lion, the Witch and the Carton.

This is the world of the silent film - and it is really silent. Alex finds himself unable to make any sound whatsoever and coloured grey, and everything around him is equally monochrome and silent. He finds people in Victorian clothes at a railway station but they don’t respond to him. Crawling back through the tangle of film, he re-emerges at home and tries to tell his parents what happened. His mother dismisses her son’s tales as nonsense but his father (Keith Eyles: Bloodmyth, Ten Dead Men) is intrigued enough to look in the box himself.

The Kingdom of Shadows is a lovely-looking film with an interesting and worthwhile point to make, made for the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. The acting is good, including a nice appearance by Dennis Chinnery, the veteran actor who was in Plague of the Zombies and numerous Doctor Who episodes (as various characters) as well as the False Profit segment of Nightmares. He plays one of the Lumiere Brothers, who appear in a prologue set in 1948, the year that the first brother died, and again later in a less substantial form. Shot on 16mm, which is increasingly rare nowadays, the silent sequences have been digitised into monochrome and provided with a few suitable fake scratches. Cinematographer James Watt does sterling work in both colour and faux black and white.

A deserving winner in Manchester, I hope it goes on to greater things at other festivals. And let’s keep an eye on Ross Shepherd and see what he can do in the future.

A smashing little film which is thoroughly professional and delightfully entertaining.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted 7th September 2005

Director: Michael Ferns
Writer: Mairin Macleod
Producer: Joan MacPherson
Cast: Mark Harvey, Amiera Darwish, Rachel Gibson
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: festival screening (FFF ‘09)
Website: www.michaelfernsfilms.com

In the 1996 movie Loch Ness, Ian Holm warns interloping American Ted Danson about “the power of kirk”, to which Danson replies, “Would that be Captain Kirk?” So let me be the first (but assuredly far from the last) to point out that this is not some Star Trek Origins spin-off sci-fi feature but a historical drama about a man named Robert Kirk. As he was a minister, the Scottish use of ‘kirk’ as ‘church’ gives the title a double meaning. Well, one and a half at least.

Kirk made its debut at the 2009 Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester where director Michael Ferns, most of his cast and his executive producer were all in attendance to see the film win Best Independent Feature. What is extraordinary about this is that Ferns could not celebrate with a pint in the bar afterwards because he was only seventeen years old. Most of his colleagues are a similar age.

And yet, despite the director’s youth, this is one of the most accomplished, mature, professional and impressive films I have seen for a very long time. I think it no exaggeration to say that, if Ferns lives up to the promise of this debut feature, then Kirk marks the arrival on the scene of a major new talent. Possibly several of them.

The year is 1692 and the Reverend Robert Kirk is the Minister of the parish of Aberfoyle. This was an era when clergymen were often gentleman scientists, studying and documenting wildlife or rocks while also researching theology. But Kirk’s research was unusual: he studied fairies and elves. Many country people still believed in ‘the little folk’ but a university-educated man like Kirk was expected to know better, not least because the existence of such Pagan beings was anathema to Christian teachings. Yet Kirk, as portrayed in this film, considers the fairies to be part of God’s creation too, “somewhere between man and angel” (to doubt the existence of the latter would be heresy indeed).

This is very much a borderline fantasy film, with no overt fantastical content but an all-pervading theme - almost an aura - of magical belief. Thematically it bears most comparison with the brace of ‘Cottingley fairies’ movies from the 1990s, Photographing Fairies and Fairytale: A True Story, but as I have seen neither of those I cannot comment on any similarities or differences.

Kirk (Mark Harvey, who has had various roles in Scottish superhero web-series Night is Day) keeps a notebook of his ‘discoveries’, initially based on his collection of local folklore but subsequently adapted into a detailed, supposedly factual account of the fairy realm and its inhabitants: part nature study, part travelogue. He also sketches many of the things described therein. But in devoting himself to this work (while also carrying out his parish duties) he is ignoring his steadfast, reliable, rational wife Abigail (Amiera Darwish).

What becomes apparent is that, in his visits to a particular tree on ‘Doone Hill’ - which Kirk firmly believes to be a point where the worlds of fairies and humanity cross over - the Reverend is not alone. Rather, he is accompanied by one of his parishioners, pert teenage minx Mary (Rachel Gibson who, despite what the IMDB thinks, did not write the short fantasy animation called Isobel). With our twenty-first century eyes we can see that she is leading him along, gradually ensnaring the handsome, naive man of God by telling him what he wants to hear. And Kirk believes every word. In the days before scientific rationalism, it was common practice to simply accept anecdote as fact and never suspect that people might lie about something like this.

Abigail, who is pregnant with their first child, can do little when she discovers her husband’s weakness in the face of temptation, trapped as she is by the marriage laws and societal mores of the time. She turns for help to the Minister of a neighbouring parish, Reverend Young (Callum Fuller), and has sufficient dignity to fight against that relationship also becoming more than platonic. It’s a veritable four-sided triangle.

This quartet, with the addition of a publisher’s clerk (James Watterson), are the only significant characters - but they are all that is needed to tell this tale of monomania and a calm, smiling descent into madness. One important element of the film’s success is that we are never sure about Kirk’s motivation. For certain, there are no fairies. It would be twee and disappointing if magical beings appeared on screen to prove Kirk’s point, even just to himself. Special effects, such as they are, are confined to solarised dream sequences, with Gibson looking suitably ethereal as the Fairy Queen.

So we are left to wonder whether Kirk’s solid beliefs, stoked by the comely Mary for her own saucy ends, are simply sheer, misguided naiveté or actually something which, in a later age, would be diagnosed as a form of mental illness. Because somewhere in the intervening three hundred-odd years, abject belief in such supernatural beings has changed from a blasphemous notion inspiring pity or anger to a bewildering notion inspiring sympathy and concern. Not that Abigail is short of concern for her husband, even as they face off against each other, invoking the seventh commandment as a possible sermon text in a powerful scene where neither can make the unequivocal accusation that would lead off in such a situation in this day and age.

However, audiences need not worry about the film being some sort of 17th century soap opera. Yes, it’s about people and their relationships; all good films are, even good action thrillers and good kung fu comedies. Characters are defined by their relationships to one another and the way that those relationships change: that’s what makes a good film of whatever genre.

The McGuffin here is Kirk’s book, his leather-bound, handwritten manuscript entitled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. He wants to publish this, believing it to be an important treatise that will advance humankind by revealing more of the wonders of God’s Creation, potentially as important as Newton’s Principia Mathematica, published just five years earlier. (There is no mention of Newton in the film, I offer it merely as an illustration of the time.)

The ending of Kirk - and indeed, the ending of Robert Kirk - is mysterious, magical, prosaic, satisfying and yet satisfyingly vague. An excellent finale to a magnificently told story, Kirk’s death is neither explained nor described, not even directly alluded to. In a fine example of show-don’t-tell, our first image of Abigail in widow’s weeds is all we require to understand the key events of that climactic ellipsis.

That this comes shortly after she has given birth to their son makes the whole matter more poignant in that the child briefly brings the couple back together again. Real hope is raised, it seems, that this flesh-and-blood ‘wee man’ may finally distract the Reverend Kirk from his imaginary wee folk. But it is not to be. Robert is more determined than ever to find a way, via the tree and a curious, eye-shaped rock among its roots, into the fairies’ world. At the end, we are left to ponder: perhaps he did. Not whether it was true, but whether it was, to him, in his final moments, true.

Now, it may be that Robert Kirk is better known in Scotland than England. I was unaware of him although the title of his book rang a very feint bell with me. Perhaps I had read a mention of it in Fortean Times or suchlike. So, once home, I hied me to the internet where I was surprised to find that the man does not even have a Wikipedia page - although there is some information about him on the Aberfoyle page. From that and sundry other sources, I could determine the liberties that writer Marin Macleod has - quite justifiably - taken with the source material.

Kirk was a real person, a real rector of the real parish of Aberfoyle, with a passionate belief in ‘the secret commonwealth’. And he did indeed write and illustrate this extraordinary book, although there seems to be no evidence that it was published shortly after his death (which was in reality just before, not just after, his son was born) but rather that it first saw print in 1815. There is also a legend about Kirk’s ghost being seen at his son’s christening which is not included within the film. Oh, and he was 52 when he died, apparently, whereas Harvey plays him as a young man.

None of this matters. This is not a biopic, not a dramatised documentary, it is a historical drama ‘loosely based upon’ a real person and real events which are so distant - and so curious in and of themselves - as to render ‘a loose one’ the only sort of basis which they could ever provide.

Macleod’s script is superb, full of authentic-sounding dialogue. I am sure that, were we to send a chrono-camera back to the 1690s and observe Kirk and his entourage for real, we should not understand a damn word out of their mouths. A combination of archaic language and impenetrable accent would render them entirely unintelligible. So ‘authentic-sounding’ is all we ask and Macleod’s script rises brilliantly to the challenge, even including occasional subtitled lines of Gaelic.

But a script is more than dialogue. It is story and action and character which can be brought to life by the director, the actors and the work of the crew. Kirk bristles with great scenes, skilfully woven into a whole, often letting us see what is not shown - somewhat appropriately, I suppose. One standout moment occurs when Kirk asks Mary to describe how the fairies dance and instead she shows him. The two of them dance, the soundtrack letting us hear the music in their heads. Without rehearsal, without the formality of the strictly formulated dances of the era, the two bodies move in almost unison, Robert following Mary’s lead with an empathy that leads her on in turn.

It’s a brace of fine performances but only a single example of the remarkable acting talent on display. Harvey is quite superb in the title role, imbuing this remarkably complex man with a simplicity that not only makes him real but makes his beliefs real too. His beatific smile at the wonders he is discovering breaks only occasionally when he vents his wrath on Abigail for her just accusations of near-infidelity. At those moments we can see the shame in Kirk’s eyes, and the hypocrisy in his soul, as he knows he has trapped himself into falsely and wickedly defending the indefensible.

Gibson could have played Mary as a coquette, a calculating vamp-ette determined to get her claws into the most eligible man in the parish, even if he is married. But that’s not Mary. She has genuine feelings for Kirk but is too young and naive to know the weaknesses of married men. She has convinced herself that the sincerity she sees in him is directed at her when it is directed at her unknown alter ago, the Fairy Queen whose diaphanous dress floats behind her as she glides across the sward to the bewitched, dreaming Reverend Kirk.

In her dual role (well, one and a half at least) Gibson brings a reality to the character that lets us share her joy at spending time with Kirk, her worry as she finally realises how seriously he takes all this and her uncertainty as she too finds herself trapped. In Mary’s case, she is trapped by the stories she has spun. It is impossible not to compare the character with the story-spinning young girls whose lies precipitated the Salem witch trials, dramatised in Miller’s The Crucible and, coincidentally, conducted across the Atlantic in that very same year of 1692. But whereas that was a whole town brought to murder and chaos by something which, however it started, became deliberate duplicity, in Kirk we see only one man brought down by a girl’s (initially harmless) lies and he goes to his metaphorical scaffold not with defiance on his lips (“Because it is my name!”) but with a gentle and contented smile.

Darwish’s Abigail is trapped also; trapped by her marriage and trapped by her love for her husband who should, by all rights, be the most holy and honest man in the parish. Spelling it all out like this, it becomes clear that the theme of this film is entrapment, particularly entrapment caused by love. Mary is trapped by the foolish web she spins in pursuing her unattainable love for Kirk. Kirk himself is trapped not only by Mary’s advances but also by his love of God and his unflinching belief that connecting these two parts of Creation will sing His praises and fulfil His wishes. Kirk does not seek any personal glory; he does not document the fairy realm because he can but because he believes that he should. As a Minister, his every action must surely be God’s will.

Meanwhile Abigail is trapped by love in the most obvious way. She loves her husband dearly, so that when Reverend Young’s comfort threatens to tip over into something else, she has the strength to pull away - alas not before Kirk witnesses the moment. She knows that a wife must do as her husband commands, even more so when her husband is the parish priest, a conduit for God’s word and a rock on which the whole parish can depend.

Darwish does a wonderful job in portraying Abigail, torn between her promise to love, honour and obey and her awareness that Robert’s struggle with reality could destroy not only him but both of them, maybe even the whole parish. She will fight for her husband even as she has to fight against her husband. The performance resonates with anyone who has known (or read about) a wife or husband fighting to preserve the dignity of their spouse as that loved one succumbs to Alzheimer’s or other dementia.

This trio of astoundingly powerful performances are supported by Fuller as Reverend Young and Watterson as the clerk. Young is a reactive character and his own internal struggle with his feelings for the tormented, handsome woman married to his neighbour can only be alluded to in a film which must perforce concentrate on the Robert/Mary/Abigail triangle. The fourth corner of a four-sided triangle will always be the smallest but that doesn’t prevent Fuller from giving real life to the character, especially when he rises to his Holy duty of trying to prevent the publication of such a seditious volume.

In this he faces off against Watterson who naturally has the most straightforward role, unencumbered as he is by sexual or romantic entrapment. Yet, though the clerk may seen an incidental character to the main story, he is actually enormously important. He provides the connection between the principal quartet - busy resisting the web of delusion and deceit which softly wraps them in its sticky folds - and the real world. He has come from the city. His is a world of printing presses and bookshops, of engineering and commerce. A world which has no time for such silly dalliances as fairies and elves except insofar as they might provide subject material for a potentially profitable book. Watterson’s solid, honest performance contextualises and anchors the world of Kirk.

And what of young Michael Ferns, who not only directed Kirk but also handled cinematography and editing, turning in a quite magnificent job under all three hats? The picture looks wonderful although, as I seem to have already said many times, you would need to work hard to film Loch Lomond badly. The countryside, whether daylight, daydream or day-for-night, is superbly photographed, bringing out the true beauty of wild Scotland. The interiors are shot and lit with similar skill, making full use of the National Trust for Scotland’s preserved buildings at Culross. A few street scenes, shot from just the right angle, provide the verisimilitude that convinces us we really are in the 1690s. No telegraph poles or TV aerials on display here.

Ferns is seventeen (and looks younger!) and has been making short films since he was twelve. When he shot Kirk, over 19 days in June 2009, he was studying for a BA in Digital Film and Television at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Even before Kirk he was getting noticed and had directed various corporate and promotional films plus a 40-minute teen drama which was co-opted by the police as a tool in their support work for young people.

Most of his shorts had been shown at the Strathendrick Film Society, a community cinema group which screens blockbusters and art house hits to the good folk of West Stirlingshire. The Society’s secretary, Joan MacPherson, acted as executive producer on Kirk (and chaperone for the youngsters on their trip to Manchester!). The budget for the film, sourced from Stirling Council, the Co-operative Community Fund and similar places, amounted to just under £7,000.

The look of the film, like the dialogue, seems right to me, ignorant as I am of the finer details of life in late 17th century Scotland. Art director Carol Angel and costume designer Tracy Macdonald have both done sterling work (or possibly Stirling work) to make everything on screen seem credible. The make-up team of Jo Durham, Irene Tremble and Christabel Wilson are also to be congratulated. I don’t know whether Abigail’s series of gradually expanding bumps count as costume, make-up or even props, but it’s one of the better screen pregnancies I have witnessed. (And the newborn baby actually looks convincingly newborn and not six months old like most ‘newborn’ film babies.)

Michael Ferns’ alarmingly prodigious talent extends to his own digital effects and sound editing, both of which he pulls off with aplomb. A crappy sound mix is often the downfall of low-budget independents, as regular readers of this site will know, but Kirk has no such problems. The haunting and effective score, which somehow manages to avoid resembling the soundtrack to a Visit Scotland TV ad or a collection of Clannad B-side despite its Gaelic melodies and the rich landscapes which accompany it, was composed by Ferns’ father Raymond, who has some of the cues on his website.

Small cast, small crew, tiny budget, limited experience: Kirk is proof that talent will out if given the chance. It’s an almost perfect film, it ticks all the boxes, both technical and artistic. There’s a palpable sense of magic on screen - the magic of cinema as well as the magic of fairies, fauns and elves - which one so rarely finds these days. Everyone who saw it at Manchester on Sunday morning was blown away and by the afternoon the word had spread that something special had screened earlier that day. At the closing ceremony, it took home the top prize.

When a film is this good, I feel really awful making any tiny, pedantic suggestions for improvements, or at least for consideration. But it is sort of my job. There were three minuscule things which I felt might make an extraordinarily good film even better. One is the font used for the opening titles, or rather the colour of the letters. Using a gradient colour, rather than a solid colour, would be fine against a solid background but makes the letters harder to read when they are overlaid on sunlight-dappled woodland.

A book-ending pro-/epilogue cuts between Robert Kirk stroking and listening to his tree in 1692 and a dog-walking young woman doing the same in the present day. While I can see the idea behind this, it’s potentially misleading for any audience who have not read a synopsis. I was expecting the young woman to be relevant in some way, either communicating with the past or finding some relic that lets the past communicate to her. If these scenes are kept, we don’t really need the captions identifying one scene as 1692 and the intercut scene in the same location as present day. We can tell that they are in different time zones by the costumes, and the preceding text captions about Robert Kirk have told us (or could tell us) that his story is set in 1692. I shall gloss over the fact that any large tree today would have been a tiny sapling, if it existed at all, three centuries ago...

So: one technical matter, one artistic choice which might be worth exploring (I could be wrong) and one more. Before we get to the caption screens about Robert Kirk, there are a couple of screens explaining that the director was seventeen, the cast and crew mostly amateur, the film a low-budget first effort etc. On this point I am adamant: none of this is necessary. This on-screen text reads like an apology for the film and this is a film which has absolutely nothing to apologise for. Kirk does not require special consideration, it is a magnificent, accomplished and utterly compelling film in and of its own right.

The fact that it was made by amateurs and that the director has barely started shaving only makes the achievement even more remarkable. But nobody will give the film special dispensation for its unlikely genesis because there is nowhere within the experience of viewing this film where such dispensation could be granted. Festival programmers and potential distributors or sales agents assuredly need to know about the director’s youth - it’s a great publicity hook - but audiences should neither know nor care until or unless they look the film up on the web.

Because two things are absolutely essential here for everyone to understand. The first is that for any teenager to direct (and photograph and edit) a coherent, 88-minute feature film is a terrific achievement, irrespective of the actual quality. To make that film within one of the hardest cinematic genres to achieve on a low budget is extraordinary. Most teenage wannabe-auteurs choose to film zombies or ninjas or gangsters (or zombie ninja gangsters - wow, there’s a film I’d pay to see!). Who makes a historical drama - for seven grand, and taking not much over a year from first draft script to premiere - as their debut feature? That’s just crazy.

The second thing to understand is that this is, for all intents and purposes, a professional film. It looks professional, it reeks of professionalism. This will go down a storm at festivals and I see absolutely no reason why some enterprising theatrical distributor won’t pick it up for a limited theatrical release - because it deserves to be shown on the big screen.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you find yourself at the very start of something that promises to be very big. I foresee Kirk becoming an art house hit and a celebrated debut. If Michael Ferns can do something equally good - but very different - with his sophomore effort, then he is well on the way to becoming a great director. This is absolute, raw cinematic talent, folks. It comes along only rarely.

MJS rating: A+
review originally posted 19th October 2009

Directors: Vatche Arabian, Conor Timmis
Writer: Steve Vertlieb
Producer: Conor Timmis
Cast: Conor Timmis, Norman Bryn, the spirit of Boris Karloff
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc

Conor Timmis, the 25-year-old behind Kreating Karloff, and I have at least one thing in common. We both believe that William Henry Pratt was one of the finest actors to ever grace a cinema screen and that he remains under-appreciated, beloved by a few horror movie fans but, in the overall zeitgeist, just a name at the back of people’s minds, vaguely connected with Halloween.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no such thing as a bad Boris Karloff film.

What Timmis would like to see, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable request, is a decently budgeted Hollywood biopic of Karloff. There’s a biopic of Chaplin, there’s one of Ed Wood for goodness’ sake. Why not Boris? So in May 2006 Timmis assembled a cast and crew for three days to recreate a handful of scenes from Frankenstein and The Mummy, with himself as Karloff, in the hope that this might demonstrate the feasibility of - and potential interest in - such a project.

And if such a feature did get made, well, there’s no reason why Conor Timmis should not be cast in the lead. (Well, there is a reason, of course. No-one has heard of Conor Timmis but everyone has heard of Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck or whatever name actor they might cast in the lead. Still, you can’t blame the lad for trying and at the very least he has created a terrific showreel which demonstrates not only his acting ability but also his determination and his organisational skills as a producer.)

Timmis directed the recreated scenes himself while the documentary footage that surrounds them was directed by Vatche Arabian. This mixes to-camera interviews with behind-the-scenes shots and includes potted biographies of Karloff (which very sensibly emphasises the range of his non-horror work) and make-up man Jack Pierce. Film/music journalist Steve Vertlieb (onetime Associate Editor of The Monster Times!) wrote some of the material and is interviewed.

Kreating Karloff works on all three counts: in recreating the physical appearance and mannerisms of Karloff, through the acting of Timmis and the extraordinarily detailed make-up of Norman Bryn; in recreating the look of the two films, thanks to excellent black and white HD camerawork by DP Scott Sniffen; and in documenting the whole process, not just the how but also the why.

This could easily have become a vanity project, but it’s not. What comes through above all is the sincerity. It is clear that Conor Timmis is a very, very smart young man who has managed this whole project - from finance to promotion - not to boost his own ego or to foolishly compare himself to Karloff but because he genuinely and sincerely believes that the work of a fine artist should be better known and duly celebrated. Combining this care and passion with the sensitive and uncluttered documentary skills of Arabian (who has previously directed Timmis in the title role of Booth, a short film about Lincoln’s assassin) has resulted in a film which is a delight to watch and which reawakens one’s desire to go off and watch a real Boris Karloff film. Can there be a better recommendation than that?

Conor Timmis has a few film and TV credits under his belt, most notably as Rudolph Hess in a production for the History Channel. Sniffen’s work includes Star Wars adverts for Pepsi and an extraordinary sounding fantasy feature called The 1,000 Year Reich (I’m sure the alarming Nazi theme developing here is pure coincidence!). Bryn worked for several years on All My Children and also did character make-up for Saturday Night Live. The role of Zita Johann in the Mummy sequences is taken by Liesl Ehardt, who has been in episodes of Monk, Dawson’s Creek and Sex and the City but was cast here because she is actually a distant relative of Zita Johann herself.

Ehardt does a good take on Johann but ultimately this stands or falls on two things: Bryn’s make-up (which is superb) and Timmis’ own performance. Or rather, performances: as Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster and as Boris Karloff as Ardath Bey. And he does a sterling job, truth be told. He treads a very fine line; it would be easy to go overboard on Karloff’s lisp or the way he rolled his Rs but Timmis keeps the vocal mannerisms subtle and therefore believable. While he’s no ringer for Karloff out of make-up, he has enough similarities - tall, thin with a narrow face and high forehead - to form a good base for Bryn’s prosthetics. Let’s face it, if Hollywood can make Martin Landau look like Bela Lugosi and Will Smith look like Mohammed Ali, anything is possible.

Timmis has obviously spent a great deal of time studying Karloff, both in general and in these specific scenes, and his portrayal - I deliberately avoid the term ‘impression’ or ‘impersonation’ - is remarkably accurate. And Sniffen’s photography is terrific too. If there is a downside it’s that the HD camerawork is too clean. We are used to seeing these films jumpy and crackly and this pristine version seems to jar with our memories in that way. But that’s pedantry and it won’t stop me from wholeheartedly recommending Kreating Karloff, which I expect to be a staple of film festivals for the next couple of years.

It would be nice to see this released on DVD, with maybe a selection of Karloff trailers and one or two pertinent interviews. But it would be even nicer to see it, one day, as an extra itself on the two-disc special edition of Karloff: The Movie.

MJS rating: A

Director: Pao Shiue-Li
Writers: China Shu-Mei, Ni Kung
Producer: Kou Fei
Cast: Din Lung, Shy Sy, Taur Ming-Ming
Country: Hong Kong
Year of release: 1981
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Movie Makers)

The first question with any chop-socky film is: how much can one trust what is on the sleeve? In this case the photos on the back are from another film (one of them appears to show Bruce Le) while the sword-wielding warrior in the painting on the front isn’t even Chinese! It actually looks very much like Barry Prima, suggesting that the artwork may have been ripped off from one of the Warrior movies.

On the other hand the vague blurb on the back seems to match the plot of the film and the credit block on the front matches the on-screen credits exactly. Even the title, Kung-Fu Emperor, is the same, give or take an article and a hyphen. The film, originally Gung Foo Wong Dai, has also been released as Ninja: The Kung Fu Emperor.

In this visually splendid and surprisingly enjoyable historical martial arts tale, the elderly Emperor of the Ching dynasty (who can barely walk, let alone do kung fu) has 14 sons by 14 different mothers, 13 of whom are martial arts experts while one, the Fourth Son, prefers to study books. Except that he has a master - hairless apart from bushy eyebrows and a trailing wisp from a large mole, given to wearing a red and yellow turban which makes him look a bit like the Blue Rajah in Mystery Men - who is secretly teaching him kung fu. The Emperor’s major-domo, Lord Long, has designs on the throne which he plans to see pass to the Fourteenth Son whom he will install as a puppet ruler.

Useful to know at the start, but not mentioned until near the end of the film, is the fact that the Emperor’s will, announcing which of his 14 sons will succeed him, is hidden in the booby-trapped rafters of the palace. When an attempt is made to steal the will, thwarted by a squad of guards, Lord Long suspects the Ninth Son (who is the best fighter) and has him killed by a grinning henchman in a fake hunting accident. On his mentor’s advice, the Fourth Son sets out to journey around the kingdom until the heat cools off.

He meets two street-performing acrobats, Brother Bai and Brother Gan, and acquires a comic relief servant (who isn’t too irritating). However, in one of several terrific fight sequences, the Fourth Son is cut with a poisoned knife. He and his companions are taken in by the daughter of an innkeeper, whose father was killed while trying to break up a previous fight. She takes them to the secret lair of her mistress, a counter-revolutionary plotting the overthrow of the Ching dynasty, who is fortunately out-of-town. When the mistress does show up (on horseback), she is just in time to demonstrate her superb swordfighting skills against Lord Long’s henchmen who have come calling. Afterwards, however, there is a tense stand-off when she discovers that she has been protecting a Ching prince. However, the Fourth Prince assures her that, should he ascend to the throne, he will rule fairly for the benefit of all the people.

When news comes through that the Emperor is on his deathbed, the friends enter the palace along with the Prince’s master and a couple of Shaolin monks who are his acolytes. Amid much fighting, Brother Bai manages to locate the will which says that the 14th Prince will inherit the throne. The Fourth Prince’s mentor slyly changes ‘14th’ to ‘4th’ - which, in Chinese, requires the addition of a couple of strokes of the quill - and has the document replaced.

When the Emperor finally expires, the remaining sons gather to hear Long Long read the will. He is sure that it has been tampered with so more fighting ensues between his goons and the Princes who are all good mates and frankly don’t mind which of them becomes Emperor.

This seems to have been the final feature from director Pao Shiue-Li (aka Hsueh Li Pao) whose previous films included Boxer from Shantung, The Iron Bodyguard and The Inheritor of Kung Fu). Though the plot may be wafer-thin, the photography by Yue Kim Fay is good and the set design is sumptuous. Above all, the fights are great, mixing kung fu with a variety of pole and blade skills. Often there are a couple of dozen people fighting in one (fairly lengthy) shot, all kicking, punching and slicing away. The IMDB credits Chen Mu Chuan (Iron Monkey) as ’action director’, who may or may not be the ‘martial arts director Chan Pon Chu’ credited on screen and on the sleeve.

Among the cast, Shy Sy (aka Szu Shih) was in Three Supermen Against the Orient, Martial Arts of Shaolin and Hammer’s The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires while Din Lung (aka Lung Ti) was in The One-Armed Swordsman Returns, The New One-Armed Swordsman, Shatter (the other film which Hammer shot in Hong Kong), Revenge of the Zombies, The Magic Blade and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow I and II. Tang Too-Liang was in The Hot, the Cool and the Vicious and Shaolin Invincibles while Chen Shing was in Ninja Terminator and Deadly Silver Spear.

I really enjoyed The Kung Fu Emperor, but what makes the film extra special is an oddly comic sequence when the characters consider returning to the palace in disguise and we see three ’might have been’ scenes - unfulfilled flash-forwards I suppose you could call them. In one, they make themselves up to look sick and enter as disease victims, in another they don masks and costumes and enter as a performing troupe (singing ‘There’s No Business Like Showbusiness’!) - this is shown on the US DVD sleeve. But in the middle of these two hypotheticals, we see what might happen if they entered the castle disguised as vampires! Proper Chinese hopping vampires, with the spells on paper on their foreheads and everything. Fantastic!

MJS rating: B+

Director: Xavier Leret
Writer: Xavier Leret
Producers: Xavier Leret, Jonathan Sothcott
Cast: Mat Fraser, Frank Harper, Faye Tozer
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener

I stood next to Mat Fraser at a bar once. I’m pretty sure it was him. He’s quite distinctive, with the little arms and everything. There are of course other people in the world who were born with similar Thalidomide-induced disabilities but he’s the only one I know who acts, and this was the bar at Nottingham Playhouse.

It was the launch event for something or other. I was working for the Regional Arts Board at the time and we had maybe put some money in. There was free wine so, naturally, I went along. I’m fairly positive that must have been Mat Fraser.

There are actors in wheelchairs, one-legged and one-armed actors, blind actors, deaf actors but as far as I know there’s only one thalidomide actor. His most prominent role was probably in the TV series Metrosexuality but he was already known in some circles for his fringe work including his provocative one-man show Seal Boy. He has also cropped up in things like Iron Maiden-directed Crowley not-biopic Chemical Wedding.

And then there’s Kung Fu Flid.

The first thing that hits you is the title. Either the best or the worst ever. Possibly both. Once heard, never forgotten. Controversial and bound to upset people who like to get upset. And it tells you exactly what you’re going to see.

Except, ah, it doesn’t.

This film sells itself as a martial arts picture. Check out the faux Hong Kong style poster design (it’s not really a poster as such, it’s a promotional design for the film’s online release). The designer has even, with jaw-dropping gall, used a font and lay-out that deliberately resembles the logo of animated kidflick Kung Fu Panda!

Based on the title, certainly based on that promo artwork, what we expect is a British equivalent of those Asian films which star disabled martial arts masters, like the One-Armed Swordsman or Zatoichi. There’s a whole subgenre of wandering warriors with parts of their body missing who nevertheless manage to kick seven shades of Oriental shit out of evil-doers and save the village or whatever. One of those films, but set in 21st century Britain, starring that short-armed bloke who was on the telly. That could be great.

But that’s not what we get. Kung Fu Flid actually turns out to be a fairly straightforward low-budget indie British gangster picture. Starring that short-armed bloke who was on the telly. It’s got a few fights, yes, but it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a martial arts film. It’s about as far from Zatoichi as you could get.

Fraser stars as Jimmy Loveit who is introduced to us practising his kick-boxing in a gym, where his trainer is played by Terry Stone (Doghouse, Ten Dead Men, Jack Said - who executive produced the film and owns the FilmLounge website where it debuted, having bypassed the DVD option). After this fight scene, which gives us some ‘action’ up-front but otherwise contributes nothing to the film, we get a (non-nude) love-scene between Jimmy and his wife Lu (Helen Watkins).

This is interrupted by a little girl of nine or ten years, Lola (Bethan Leret). The impression I got from this scene was that Lu is Lola’s mum and Jimmy is Lu’s boyfriend, a sort of adoptive father to the girl. It was only later that I realised that Jimmy is actually Lu’s husband and Lola’s dad. That’s just not made clear in that bedroom scene when it’s actually fairly important character establishment. I mean, all they had to do was have Lola call Jimmy ‘Daddy’ and we would all know where we stood.

Suddenly there is a banging on the door downstairs. When Jimmy answers it, two men burst in and there is a scuffle which leaves Lu shot in the stomach and one of the intruders extremely badly injured. In fact we subsequently learn that Jimmy, in wrestling the bloke’s gun away, shot him in the balls.

Next thing we know, blood-caked Jimmy is driving (yes, he can drive) at high speed with injured Lu in the back of his car. She’s screaming that she needs a doctor and he’s screaming back that he can’t take her to hospital so he’s going to take her to his mate - who, it turns out, is a vet in a wheelchair.

There’s a curious, possibly not even deliberate, touch of humour here because of course normally when you have a ‘disabled vet’ it’s someone who fought in ‘Nam, not an animal doctor. Much against his better judgement, the vet manages to remove the bullet from Lu and get her into a stable condition. Whereupon Jimmy goes in search of his daughter.

In an East End pub somewhere, the bloke who broke in but didn’t have his balls shot off turns up with the little girl, still barefoot and pajamaed. He explains to gangster boss Barry (Frank Harper: Bend It Like Beckham, Vendetta) what happened. Well, actually he doesn’t. He explains the bits we saw but doesn’t touch on the stuff not shown. Specifically we are left to wonder how and why he took Lola (last seen in the protective arms of her parents) from the house; and what has happened to his critically injured but still alive colleague.

Who, we learn, was Barry’s son Charlie (actor/rapper Beau Baptist). We later watch Barry visit Charlie in hospital. So hang on, how did Charlie get to hospital? Did the other bloke take him while also removing Lola from her parents somehow, who then rushed to get to a vet rather than try to hold onto their daughter? How come Jimmy can’t take Lu, the innocent victim of a brutal attack, to hospital but Charlie can go there without a problem and without Knacker of the Yard wondering how he got his balls blown off? On top of which, we have to assume that no neighbours called the police when they heard gunshots, that no-one has noticed the amount of blood around Jimmy and Lu’s doorway etc etc.

Anyway, inconvenient questions aside, Barry shows his displeasure by shooting Charlie’s friend right there in the pub then turns into friendly uncle to Lola, who is placed into the care of two of his goons while the boss tries to work out what to do with her. Despite their lack of paternal experience, the two goons do their best to look after Lola after she is brought back to Barry’s palatial pad, where his drunken wife Cristol turns out to be Faye Tozer from dreadful plastic pop act Steps!

Although Barry comes across as a decent bloke compared to his ghastly wife, he’s still a cold-blooded killer of course. A flash-back to ‘six months earlier’ demonstrates this, although a subsequent caption of ‘one week later’ leaves the viewer temporarily disorientated as he has to work out if this is the week after six months before or the week after where we were before we went back six months.

Barry and his gang are introduced to a Scottish people trafficker who has a bunch of smuggled East European prostitutes locked up in a dark container, who now emerge, blinking and confused into the daylight. ‘One week later’, Barry has discovered that the Scotsman is an undercover cop and tortures him. But hang on, if he’s a cop then either all the woman were cops too - in which case Barry has a much, much bigger problem - or this cop went so far undercover that he actually did imprison East European prostitutes in a dark, airless container before selling them to a gangster. Neither of those scenarios rings true.

Jimmy goes to the pub - with no real explanation of how he knew where to head for - and breaks in at the back to find a brothel underneath the building, apparently, where he is beaten up but escapes. Barry goes to the wheelchair vet’s with just as little explanation and kidnaps the two people he finds there, which is not overly difficult as one is recovering from a gunshot wound and the other is in a wheelchair. They are taken to a building somewhere, possibly on a trading estate, where Barry leaves them to the attentions of Gregor, a card-carrying psychopath.

Gregor (Dan Poole: Batman Begins) is probably the most interesting, if least sympathetic, character here. Stripped to the waist, wearing only a long, blue kilt, he has tattoos over about fifty per cent of his visible body. Not intricate designs or pictures but big, solid swathes of ink in vaguely celtic patterns. More to the point, this is a fine portrayal of a genuinely amoral sadist. What could have been a cackling, over-the-top performance or a blank-eyed automaton is instead turned into a genuinely chilling character who enjoys his job of inflicting extreme pain on people.

Jimmy races desperately to save Lu although once again I can’t work out how he knows where to go. There is a bizarre diversion at this point as he takes a ride in a taxi driven by a slightly loopy devout Catholic who witters on about things and has a small Christ figure on his dashboard. I couldn’t work out the point of the character - perhaps it’s meant to be a comic interlude - but the plastic Messiah later becomes relevant.

This leads into an escape by Lu and Jimmy (the vet has already copped it) in which Lu turns out to be as skilled at fighting as her husband, something of which there has previously been no hint and which certainly didn’t seem to be the case during that initial break-in. Furthermore, while we can accept that battered, bloody Jimmy is still going, pumped up on adrenaline, Lu seems remarkably sprightly for somebody who was shot, operated on by a vet, dragged from her sick-bed and then tortured. The whole film culminates in a stand-off - Jimmy and Lu against Barry and Cristol and their goons - in a junkyard somewhere which admittedly does contain some interesting developments and a neat twist.

Kung Fu Flid is not overly long at 90 minutes but never quite works. Very simply, it falls between two stools, unsure whether to be exploitational or grittily real. Writer-director Xavier Leret had an opportunity to make a quite unique film with something to say about disability, about society’s attitudes, about the media’s portrayal, about assumptions. Or he could have made a statement by not making a statement, by making a film in which a person with a very obvious and quite extreme disability plays an ordinary character, a role where the disability is irrelevant. But those are simply another two stools between which Kung Fu Flid resolutely falls.

I will admit, I am intrigued by physically unusual actors. Not just those who are missing part or all of one or more limbs, but actors who are particularly short or tall or skinny or fat or visually unique in some other way. How you look is such an integral part of the whole acting profession. I don’t mean just in terms of beauty: you can only play such and such a part if you’re Anna Paquin or Jude Law. That’s star quality. I mean the rest of the acting profession, the bit part players and character actors. It’s a job which depends on looks where you must look interesting and distinctive but not too interesting or distinctive. If you have a group of minor characters and one of them is a dwarf or has only one arm or whatever, the audience will start to wonder - or at least, film-makers seem to believe that the audience will start to wonder - well, why is he like that? What relevance does it have?

And yet, on the flip-side, the more extreme one’s physical appearance, the more suited one is to very specific roles. Roles that will not only never go to Jude Law but which most of SAG and Equity simply can’t play. If you’re casting a version of The Addams Family, only certain people are suitable to be Lurch, only some actors could possibly play Cousin Itt. No-one in either of those groups could play Gomez - but anyone suitable to play Gomez will be unsuitable for Lurch or Itt. Very simply, there are fewer roles for actors who are four feet or seven feet tall but there are fewer actors who can fill those roles.

It intrigues me, that’s all. But I suppose it’s no different from any other profession: specialism reduces your employability overall but boosts it in the few cases where specialisation is required.

What is always particularly fascinating is where physically distinctive actors get cast in roles where their physical distinction is either irrelevant or actually confounds the normal rules of casting. In the former would be, I believe, Warwick Davies in the Ray Charles biopic Ray. I haven’t seen the film but I understand that Davies plays a nightclub owner, not based on any particular real individual, so the role could have gone to any actor. Another example - it’s another short guy, sorry - is Deep Roy who was actually cast as a voice actor in The Corpse Bride, having evidently impressed Tim Burton by playing the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Obviously, in that situation his height was supremely irrelevant.

The latter type would be exemplified by something like Charlie Band’s The Creeps (sorry to keep giving short actor examples, they’re just obvious ones that I know about). Phil Fondacaro is never, let’s face it, going to play Dracula. So what does he get to play in The Creeps? A very short Dracula. By the same token Mat Fraser, that bloke off that telly show who has those weird little arms, is clearly never going to play an action hero.

Except, obviously, here he does.

Possibly the biggest problem with this film is that Fraser’s unique physique, the thing that distinguishes him as an actor and hence distinguishes any character that he plays, is sort of irrelevant. Not actually irrelevant, but not a feature of the plot either. Some characters do comment on his appearance (there’s a gag about “tie his hands behind his back”) but most of them don’t. But clearly his physical presence is relevant because this is a gangster movie with a deal of fighting in it and Jimmy Loveit’s failure or success in those fights - and he does get beaten up quite a bit - is influenced by the fact that he can’t use his arms except at extreme close quarters.

The fact that almost no-one who meets Jimmy Loveit comments negatively, or even curiously, about his arms is clearly totally unrealistic. Strangers who meet him (bearing in mind that most people in this film are deeply unpleasant) would be likely to either mock the man or be repulsed at his freakishness. Women might even be attracted to him because of it: something different, hmm, what could he do with those hands?

The thing is that, with a change of title, this script could have been made with absolutely anybody in the lead role. And you might argue that this is a good thing, that it moves Kung Fu Flid away from the group of films with deliberately provocative portrayals of disability, like The Creeps, and into the category of films with laudably progressive portrayals of disability, like Ray. You could argue that. But I would simply argue back that the film is called Kung Fu Flid (and has the tagline ‘Unarmed but dangerous.’) [For the DVD release in September 2009, the title was actually changed to Unarmed but Dangerous. - MJS]

Look, it just seems very odd to make a film about a man with vestigial arms fighting people in which not one of his opponents ventures to comment, before, during or after a fight, that it ought to be easy to beat a guy with vestigial arms. The reason why characters think they can beat Zatoichi or the One-Armed Swordsman is because those characters apparently present no threat on account of either (a) being blind or (b) having only one arm.

Casting someone like Mat Fraser (who, let us never forget, is a pretty good actor) in a film where his disability is irrelevant would be, if tastefully handled, an unusually positive representation of a disabled person. But casting him in a film where his disability is not only relevant but actually the whole focus of the thing - and then ignoring that disability - well, that just doesn’t make sense. It’s an opportunity wasted. Actually it’s two opportunities. It’s the opportunity to make a straight, serious (which doesn’t mean it couldn’t be funny) film about a disabled character and it’s the alternative opportunity to make a kick-ass exploitation movie which would piss off all the politically correct, self-righteous, mostly non-disabled twats out there.

In that respect, it’s difficult to see how Kung Fu Flid can do anything except disappoint. It singularly fails to live up to its marketing yet it doesn’t actually go far enough to confound expectations.

There are two other areas where the film falls down. One is the script which, as previously mentioned, glosses over the difficult-to-explain bits, like how Charlie got to hospital, while at the same time having too many unexplained instances of characters knowing where to find other characters. In fact, there is never a proper explanation of how far Jimmy’s involvement extends into in the criminal world, if at all. He is adamant to Lu, when driving her to his veterinary friend, that he has no idea why they were attacked in their own home, and in the subsequent pub scene Barry complains that his two hit-men got the wrong house. So maybe the whole thing was a genuine, tragic, brutal mistake.

On the other hand, Jimmy seems to know who he’s dealing with, where to find people and so on - so maybe he does know these gangsters. But then again, they don’t seem to know him. Nobody recognises him, but nor do they express any surprise at seeing him. And let’s face it, he’s a pretty surprising character, both when you first meet him and when you see what he’s capable of doing to protect his wife and rescue his daughter.

Ah yes, the daughter. Well, two things. First, there is no explanation of, or reason for, the daughter’s kidnap. More to the point, Xavier Leret cast his own daughter in the role and, sorry to say this, but she can’t act. And that’s a big problem for the film. Lola isn’t called on to do very much, she barely has any dialogue, but she does feature quite a bit - let’s face it, she’s the McGuffin - and the film will only work if we see how much danger she is in and how much she could suffer, especially at the hands of Cristol who is understandably bitter about losing (part of) her own child.

You can see why Leret cast his own little girl. It makes a lot of sense: he already knows her, she knows and trusts him, he can guarantee that the child will be supervised and he doesn’t have the tricky job of either exposing someone else’s child to the swearing, threats and violence of the film or shooting around the child so that she’s not actually in any shots where bad stuff happens. In practical terms, casting his daughter was a sound move.

But it would only work if she could act. And she can’t. Not even a little bit.

Having said all that, the film does have some good points. The (adult) cast all acquit themselves well. Fraser is very good indeed although the stand-out performance is Dan Poole as the sadistic Gregor. Dusan Kmac’s cinematography is fine, as is Ismini Xekalaki’s production design. Fight directors Pete Morgan (A Day of Violence) and Tony de Gale stage some realistically bloody and brutal fights. But none of that is enough to save this disappointing curiosity.

Also in the cast are Kugan Cassius (The Rapture), Johnny Vivash (The Fallow Field), Forbes KB (Jack Says), Adam Saint (Dead Man Running) and Dennis Santucci (It’s a Wonderful Afterlife). Jonathan Sothcott (Wishbaby) shared producer duties with Leret (despite what the IMDB says, Mat Fraser is not credited as producer). A quartet of associate producers includes Phil Hobden (Ten Dead Men, Left for Dead), Richard John Taylor (an editor who cuts extravagant trailers for EastEnders), agent Olivia Bell and and Croatian colour correction expert Dado Valentic who also supplied digital effects. Make-up designer Matthew Pimm works as hair assistant on Strictly Come Dancing!

Executive producer Terry Stone, as mentioned way back at the top of the review, owns a download site called FilmLounge where Kung Fu Flid was made available in April 2009. Other movies available from FilmLounge include Evil Aliens, Lighthouse, Lawrence Pearce’s little-seen British vampire flick Night Junkies, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust, Night of the Public Domain Living Dead and, ironically, The One-Armed Boxer II - which is exactly the sort of film that Kung Fu Flid isn’t.

MJS rating: B-

Director: George Miller
Writer: Tom Woosley
Producers: Phil Botana, Tom Parkinson
Cast: Robert Carradine, Stacy Haiduk, Nicholas Bell
Country: USA
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: Finnish DVD

So there we were, on holiday in Scarborough. Down on the front, there was a cheapo-cheapo tat shop selling all sorts of odd stuff. I bought a really cool Tron Legacy rucksack. No, seriously. They also had a bunch of Finnish DVDs, all carrying a sticker saying ‘DVD plays in English’. There was all sorts of crap there. In the end I bought Men in Black: The Series and The Real Ghostbusters for TF Simpson, and I treated myself to Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia and this little Sci Fi Channel gem.

All of which preamble really just leads to this: Attack of the Sabretooth is absolute bollocks. It is so bad, in such fascinating ways, that it actually becomes entertaining, as such things are often said to do but so rarely in fact, actually, you know, do. It really looks like the people who made this either didn’t know what they were doing, or didn’t care, or both. For example, the story takes place on a private isle within the Fiji group of islands. It was actually shot in Fiji, but clearly not on the idyllic atoll shown in aerial establishing shots: a ring of sand maybe half a mile in diameter surrounding a cluster of palm trees dotted with the occasional cabin.

The actual fictional location is big enough to have a half-built 500-bedroom hotel and enough additional space for a proposed zoo and theme park, plus some exterior scenes feature characters trekking across wide open grasslands with imposing mountains rising in the background. We see characters arriving by seaplane, wading through the surf from plane to beach - which would be in keeping with the stock footage atoll - but given the size and complexity of the buildings on the island, there must be a proper dock.

This is typical of the film as a whole: a complete disregard for massive contradictions and inconsistencies which only serve to reinforce the one-note characters, crappy dialogue, lacklustre direction and half-hearted design on offer. Sometimes it seems like there are scenes from two or more films here which have just been randomly shuffled together, except that the various contradictory stories do interconnect.

Oz-based, Huddersfield-born Nicholas Bell (Dark City, Crawlspace, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark remake and Zordon in the first Power Rangers movie) stars as rich businessman Niles who owns the island and is in the process of turning it into a high-class resort, Primal Park. (In Italy, the film was released on DVD as Primal Park: Lo zoo del terrore although on TV it was titled Wild 2: La caccia è aperta - ‘hunting is open’. Wild 1, or Wild: Attacco sulle montagne, was the 2002 picture Sabretooth directed by James Hickox, starring John Rhys-Davies, which has no narrative connection with this one but does share a writer, a producer and apparently the same CGI cat. Anyway...)

Niles has invited dozens of wealthy Pacific types to his size-changing island to encourage them to invest in Primal Park, although it’s not clear (a) how they all got there or (b) where they’re staying if the hotel complex is unfinished. His pitch amounts to little more than plying them with champagne on the beach and making a pathetically brief speech which wouldn’t persuade anyone to invest in an ice cream van on a hot day. It is notable that the handheld microphone he uses carries on working even when he holds it at arm’s length.

Elsewhere on the island, in what is referred to as a ‘zoo’ but is clearly more of a safari park, live Niles’ prime attractions, a pair of genetically recreated smilodons. It is amusing that while the film gets so much else wrong, it goes to the trouble of having Niles explain at one point that these are what are incorrectly known as ‘sabretooth tigers’, a point of pedantry which seems irrelevant compared with the film’s many other lapses in logic, consistency and reality in general. Niles has developed these cats - or rather, his scientist employee Sachariah (Maori actor Rawiri Paratene: Whale Rider, Man-Thing) has - but for some reason he is keeping them secret and does not reveal their existence to the various millionaires he wants to invest in his project, despite the sabretooths being the focal point of the park’s marketing.

The park’s logo is a silhouette of a sabretooth with the slogan ‘Primal Park: genetic miracles reasonably priced’. So if Niles is going to sell this place to punters on the basis of the genetically recreated big cats, why is he not letting the potential investors in on this; and if he wants to keep it a secret, why does he advertise it in his logo? Also worth noting is that the silhouette in question has been drawn by someone who has apparently never seen a cat, sabretoothed or otherwise, since it is completely the wrong shape. It looks like a capybara with a stick of celery drooping from its mouth.

Just in case that logo was too subtle, above the boarded-up entrance to the hotel is an enormous - I mean, huge - gold statue of a smilodon. And here’s what’s really weird. Although the CGI cats (when we eventually see them) are not great, they’re also not terrible. They at least move well and have shadows; they’re about the quality of CGI creature you would expect to see on the Sci Fi Channel. Yet the giant gold statue, which doesn’t have to move, which doesn’t even have to rotate because the camera is locked off, is the most piss-poor bit of CGI that I have seen in a very, very long time. It’s one step up from a cartoon.

So anyway, as well as geneticist Sachariah, Niles also employs a number of security staff, one of whom is Savannah, played by the utterly gorgeous Stacy Haiduk (Steel and Lace, Yesterday’s Target, Kindred: The Embraced, Superboy). Card-carrying member of the Stacy Haiduk Lustful Thoughts Society here; I’ve had a crush on this lady since I originally watched seaQuest DSV back in the 1990s. She’s not only still hot, she is also a much better actress than this crap deserves.

In a prologue, we saw one of the other security guards patrolling a fence which has notices on it saying it is electrified but clearly isn’t. He puts down his rifle (we never see a tranquilliser gun in the whole film) and settles down to enjoy a battered copy of NZX, a digest-sized porn mag which, a swift google reveals, is a genuine publication: “New Zealand’s largest selling adult magazine ... featuring genuine Kiwi men and women ... combination of high production quality with pictorials and articles featuring LOCAL amateurs ...crammed full of high quality colour glossy images of ‘typical’ New Zealand girls next door - the very girls you may meet on your next night out!, plus contact adverts and lots, lots more.” Let no-one say I’m not prepared to do my detailed research when writing these reviews.

For no reason - I mean, absolutely no reason - this guard tears a page out of the mag which is then blown away when he is distracted by his walkie-talkie. A succession of shots show the page being blown over the fence and then further and further into the jungle beyond. Two things do we notice here: first, that there is absolutely no other evidence of this breeze; not a leaf or a blade of grass moves. Secondly, this must surely be the nadir of computer-generated imagery: think of the technological developments which have taken place over the past decade or two, leading to the position where film-makers can use their computerised special effects to digitally create a windblown page of a scat-mag. Jurassic Park had CGI dinosaurs, Primal Park has a CGI nudie photo.

For no reason - and once again, I mean absolutely no reason - this security guard decides that he must retrieve the page. Why? Even if there’s some rule about litter within the fenced-off area, it’s just one sheet of paper in a jungle and there’s nothing to connect it with our man. It could have blown in from anywhere. Which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that this particular high quality colour glossy image (which we never get a really good look at, though we can see the girl is not nude) must be of the absolute sexiest New Zealand girl next door who ever lived. And maybe this particular issue of NZX is an out-of-print collector’s item so that it is easier for the guy to retrieve the missing page from the habitat of a dangerous wild beast than to simply order another copy. Though we’re still left wondering why he would have torn it out of the mag, halfway round his security patrol.

Eager to maintain his complete (if damaged) collection of gentlemen’s illustrated literature, the guard unlocks a gate in the fence, strolls through and fails to notice that it hasn’t closed properly behind him. He follows the wafting computer-animated art pamphlet until he is surprised by something large and fiercesome, represented by a digitised POV shot which would make sense if this was the Predator or something else capable of viewing an animal’s heat signature, but cats tend to use the whole ‘eyes and ears’ thing.

Typing all this up, it’s astounding quite how much nonsense we have just in this splash panel prologue, not least the crappy fencing. A single, six-foot-high metal fence, whether electrified or not, is not really a good way of fencing in large, agile carnivores, especially if that fence has gates at regular intervals which open and close using electronic locks rather than good old-fashioned sliding bolts, just one of which would have rendered this film’s narrative non-existent and allowed viewers of the Sci-Fi Channel to enjoy a blank screen for an hour and a half, which would probably have got better ratings and certainly got better reviews.

When the security guard fails to check in, Niles’ possibly gay assistant Alan (Nathaniel Kiwi - really?) goes to check out what has happened to him - and meets a similar fate. Then another security guard goes to look - and he also falls prey to the POV carnivore. In both of these instances, the guy finds the opened gate, goes through, doesn’t bother to close it, follows the tracks to the spot where the first guard got eaten, sees the bloody, dismembered corpse(s) and is still caught by surprise, mauled by the smilodon without letting off a shot. Really, these guys are just the worst security guards in the world. Their only job is to ensure that two large carnivores don’t escape from a fenced-off area of a private island, and they not only can’t manage that, they fail in truly epic ways.

This leaves the entire island staff as: Ms Haiduk; Brian (Brian Wimmer: Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Tank Girl, The Evil Beneath Loch Ness), a maintenance joe she’s knocking boots with; Sachariah; and the assorted non-speaking waiters and polynesian musicians respectively serving and entertaining the venture capitalists on the beach. When Savannah realises that the cats have escaped, due to an island-wide power outage, she warns Niles that they should evacuate the beach and tell all these visitors to lock themselves in their rooms, but he doesn’t want to frighten the investors. She then tries to warn people herself using the same PA system that Niles used, which is surprisingly still working despite the lack of electricity. Of course, the fact that the power outage has opened up all the gates is completely irrelevant given that one of the gates has been open anyway since the start of the movie.

Up to now, what we have is a crappy and ill-thought-out rip-off of Jurassic Park with a hint of Jaws. But there is an entire subplot going on which completely contradicts what we have seen and been told, while making no sense at all in and of itself. You see, it’s no good making a film like this unless there are young people to whom ‘the kids’ can relate. Hence, back in the first act, the folks we saw arriving by seaplane were five American students who are here to carry out a scavenger hunt in order to gain entry to their college fraternity/sorority. They are welcomed on the beach by Niles himself (I think he is the uncle of one of them) and he takes them, past considerable numbers of extras to the hotel (is it built/open or not?) saying “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

Sipping cocktails by the pool, the quintet of stereotypes - jock, geek, bimbo, gothette and token black girl (but not too black, obviously...) - open their envelopes. They have just 24 hours, starting from - well, whenever they feel like it, clearly - to find the following: a conch shell (feasible), a spear decorated with shells (unlikely), the bowl from a cotton candy (ie. candy floss) machine (highly unlikely), a ‘cannibal fork’ (what?) and a box of M80 firecrackers. A swift google reveals that a cannibal fork was a ceremonial wooden fork developed by ancient Fijians to enable chiefs to eat the flesh of their enemies without touching it with their hands. Now generally made for decorative purposes and sold to tourists.

That doesn’t really matter anyway because neither the fork nor the firecrackers are found. The conch and the shell-spear both turn up in a not-yet-open souvenir shop, while an unassembled candy floss machine is improbably found among a pile of unopened cardboard boxes beside a swimming pool. Atypically, the unopened boxes actually make sense in terms of a facility which is not yet open, but one can’t help thinking that stocking the souvenir shop would be one of the last actions before opening the place up, not something done before the building is even finished.

But that’s just mild stupidity compared with the idea that as a frat house pledge these students have to fly to Fiji, charter a seaplane to a private island, stay in a resort which isn’t opened yet and find five things which may not even be on the island. It’s quite clear that that screenwriter Tom Woosley has just chucked these off-the-shelf characters into the film without giving a moment’s thought to whether their presence makes the tiniest shred of sense. The five actors forced to cope with this inept script, incidentally, are Billy Aaron Brown (Headless Horseman, Jeepers Creepers II) as the jock, Parry Shen (Shrieker, Rolfe Kanefsky’s The Hazing, Hatchet I and II) as the geek, Aussie actress Cleo Coleman (briefly a regular in Neighbours) as the TBG, Natalie Avital (Shallow Ground) as the goth and Amanda Stephens (Between Floors) as the bimbo.

It was, incidentally, the geek who turned off the power so that they could all sneak into the unfinished building, which is still boarded up and is presumably somehow not the building they (and everyone else) are staying in. After some time the cats start hunting within the building, which is remarkably well-lit for somewhere with no power, and rip the head off the bimbo who attempts to defend herself by pitifully chucking the shell-spear. It’s a shame you didn’t find the M80 firecrackers, love.

One of only two clever, original or indeed ‘good’ moments in the film is when the geek sees the smilodon chomping down on the bimbo. Backed up against a wall, he is splattered with copious quantities of blood so that when he runs away, his silhouette is visible in the blood splatter. I liked that bit. He then hides in some sort of chest freezer from which he is eventually extricated. Later, the jock gets his head ripped off but the cheapskate production have apparently used the same crappy fake-head for both the bimbo and the jock, just sticking it in a different wig, meaning it looks nothing like either of them. Before this, the jock had met up with a girl named Sharona (Bonnie Piesse: Aunt Beru in the Star Wars prequels!) who seems to have no connection with anyone or anything and becomes cat-food when they try to make out in the souvenir shop. The two of them meet, incidentally, on a moving walkway which, like the PA system on the beach (and many of the lights) has no problem functioning during a power outage.

The surviving students prowl around the building with Brian who manages to destroy one of the tigers by releasing gas from a canister and then chucking a Zippo lighter behind him. A subsequent shot of the charred corpse shows a hilarious black, vaguely cat-shaped thing with its legs sticking in the air. This was presumably specially made for the production by the same props people who created the aborted smilodon phoetuses seen in jars in the genetics lab, all of which have huge, prominent fangs, which aside from the general low quality of the props, raises its own problems. Because, while I (like most people) have never seen an aborted smilodon phoetus, I can’t help thinking that animals which have large, external tusks - like elephants and narwhals - tend to develop them as they get older rather than have them at birth, on account of the likelihood of ripping open the mother’s uterus. And I’m prepared to hazard a guess that smilodon cubs were similarly born without huge, protruding, razor-sharp canine teeth.

With one cat dead, there’s now just one more to deal with - except that Sachariah reveals that there is a third cat, a huge beast with non-functioning back legs which wasn’t aborted for some reason and has been kept secret even from Savannah and Brian, because the best way to ensure effective security is to not tell your security managers what they are actually guarding. The second ‘good’ bit of Attack of the Sabretooth, the only vaguely clever piece of dialogue in the entire movie, is the explanation that because this third cat has to drag itself around, he should be really easy to escape from unless he actually corners someone.

We learn something else about the cats at this point, which is an explanation of why they are killing so many people, and leaving bits of bodies all over the place. I hope you’re sitting down, because it is stated that these three sabre-toothed tigers are all... bulimic! They are killing people, eating them, then vomiting them up again and going looking for more food. They are smilodons with eating disorders.

Attack of the Sabretooth (which was originally announced as Night of the Sabretooth but changed its title because everything takes place in bright sunshine) may be an utterly asinine, clichéed, nonsensical, inept piece of crap, but in terms of originality I suppose one must give props for the threat of an enormous, prehistoric, paraplegic, bulimic cat. Not too many of them about, even in my DVD collection.

Eventually Niles (remember him?) who has entered the boarded-up building through the front doors, manages to escape from the feline Ironside through those same doors which have now become inexplicably locked, but the smilodon’s relentless hammering against the now-locked-again doors causes the whole building to wobble until eventually one of the golden fangs drops off the massive shitty CGI smilodon statue, plummeting down towards Niles and impaling him in quite the worst effects shot that I have scene for many, many years.

Brian blasts the cat with his gun and our survivors (well, some of them) exit the building, confident that all three cats are dead. This is because they saw the charred remains of one, they have just stepped over the body of another having seen its brains blown out, and Brian is reasonably sure that he probably got the third when he was blasting at it and it “must have crawled away to die”.

Well, that’s all right then.

No indication is ever given of what happens to all the investors eating canapés on the beach or indeed whether they ever realise that anything is going on. The film just suddenly stops.

Well, actually there is a coda, tagging onto another subplot which I have ignored up to now because it is almost entirely irrelevant although it does allow the casting of token name value (Stacy H notwithstanding) Robert Carradine. He plays Grant, Niles’ ex-brother-in-law and business rival, who turns up with his new squeeze Autumn (Susanne Sutchy: Romero’s Bruiser plus religious sci-fi/horror oddity Left Behind II: Tribulation Force). Niles wants to piss off Grant by not letting him invest in Primal Park. Grant isn’t bothered about the park anyway but is secretly planning to ruin Niles by stealing all his scientific secrets, to which extent Autumn is not actually his girlfriend but a professional safecracker. When they find themselves alone in Niles’ office (through a series of events which they could not have planned), Autumn opens the safe and Grant makes a copy of the data-stick therein containing all of Niles’ trade secrets. Oh, worth mentioning that the little palm-computer thing which they use for this, like the computers in the lab and the security office, has a background display of cascading green numbers. Because that was in The Matrix so it must be a computer thing, right?

Let’s just pause here to give you some information about Robert Carradine, youngest member of the acting clan founded by John of that ilk. His brothers are/were David (Kung Fu, Kill Bill), Keith (Deadwood, Dexter) and Chris and Bruce (neither of whom did much, to be honest). The IMDB lists 19 credits for Bobby C including Blackboard Massacre, Orca - Killer Whale, Revenge of the Nerds I-IV, The Tommyknockers, Body Bags, Escape from LA, the remake of Humanoids from the Deep, a TV pilot called Martian Law(!), Bob Cook’s Lycanthrope, Fred Olen Ray’s The Kid with X-ray Eyes, something called Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Timecop 2, Ghosts of Mars, Slumber Party Slaughter, Bikini Spring Break and My Dog’s Christmas Miracle. On the basis of which we can see that (a) he has based his career to some extent on his father’s, and (b) Attack of the Sabretooth is, despite all its faults, far from his worst film.

Grant and Autumn head out across the grassland, for no apparent reason, and get eaten by the remaining cat which evidently didn’t crawl away to die but also isn’t still in the building that it was in a few moments ago. Unless we are supposed to think that there is still a fourth cat which even Sachariah didn’t know about.

Good God alive, this is jaw-droppingly awful film-making, even by the low, low standards of the shite that I tend to watch and review. No effort or care has been taken by the film-makers; it’s just an exercise in box-ticking which is evidently enough to secure a Sci Fi Channel broadcast and assorted DVD releases around the world.

The man who must hang his head in shame whenever Attack of the Sabretooth is mentioned is director George Miller. Now, you may be aware that there are two Australian film directors of that name. There is George Miller, who directed all three Mad Max films plus Babe I and II, Happy Feet I and II, The Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo’s Oil. He has been nominated four times for an Oscar, eventually winning for Happy Feet. He may have directed films about dancing penguins, talking pigs and Tina Turner’s hair, but he has never had any involvement with prehistoric, paraplegic predators with eating disorders.

No, this is the other George Miller, sometimes known (although not here) as George T Miller; T presumably standing for T’other. After spending the ‘70s and early ‘80s directing Aussie TV series, he moved into features with The Man from Snowy River, Les Patterson Saves the World, the oxymoronic NeverEnding Story II, seal comedy André, dog/dolphin buddy movie Zeus and Roxanne, a couple of Christmas TV movies, a version of Robinson Crusoe starring Pierce Brosnan, a 1999 Hallmark mini-series of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and canine sci-fi comedy Cybermutt. Attack of the Sabretooth was his 24th and last feature, directed when he was in his sixties, after which he presumably retired. He was never nominated for an Oscar (although André was shortlisted at Fantasporto one year).

Tom Woosley, who wrote the script and shares story credit with producer Phil Botana, can’t be blamed for things like non-matching stock footage and terrible CGI golden cat statues (unless that fell within his other role as ‘co-executive producer’). He can however be very much blamed for the film’s complete failure to know where it’s set or what it’s about. His only two other produced credits are the previous sabretooth film, Sabretooth (as mentioned above) and the truly awful skeleton warrior rubbish Army of the Dead. I’m sorry, but if this guy can’t fashion a decent script out of either sabretoothed tigers or skelly warriors, he should just give up. Which, by the looks of it, he has. He is actually an accountant by trade, although he describes himself on LinkedIn as a ‘freelance entertainment professional’; his most recent IMDB credit is ‘office production assistant’ on Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell.

Botana produced Russell Mulcahy’s Talos the Mummy, Babe knock-off My Brother the Pig and The Evil Beneath Loch Ness but hasn’t brought anything to the screen since the two Sabretooth pictures and is now Business Development Manager at a biotechnology company. It’s quite impressive that this pile of crap killed off the cinematic careers of its director and its writer and its producer.

Far more interesting is the other credited producer, Tom Parkinson. Incredibly, this is the same guy who produced Disciple of Death and Crucible of Terror back in the early 1970s! Even more incredibly, before working in films he played sousaphone in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band! He is, therefore, a god among men and I would be sorely tempted to revise all my views of Attack of the Sabretooth and proclaim it a modern classic, were it not for the fact that it is, with the best will in the world, terrible beyond belief. Born in India to British parents with a family background in owning music halls, Parkinson moved to New Zealand in 1975 and three years later was NZBC’s Head of Television, from where he went over to the other side, founding the country’s first commercial broadcaster. Some of his productions made it back to the UK, including Hunter’s Gold and The New Adventures of Black Beauty. Although Attack of the Sabretooth was Parkinson’s last narrative production, he did come out of retirement six years later for Billy T: Te Movie (sic) a documentary about Maori comedian Billy T James.

On the technical side, cinematographer Mark Melville has a number of genre credits including Hyperion, Triloquist, Murder Dot Com, Hellborn, Urban Legends, Phoenix, Star Hunter, Millennium Man and some episodes of forgotten superhero series Nightman. Back in the day he was gaffer on Nemesis and Dollman; now he mostly works in Italy. Special effects are credited to ‘Thomas T Parkinson’ whom I am assuming is someone different to Tom Parkinson, though I can find no other effects credits anywhere for either name.

Editor Cindy Clarkson keeps all mention of this film off her website - and who can blame her? She’s not too squeamish to admit that she cut martial arts silliness Warriors of Virtue 2, the Tom Parkinson-produced sequel to a movie about kung fu kangaroos - without the kangaroos. But Attack of the Sabretooth? Not me, pal. Must have been some other editor with the same name. And production designer Brent Hargreaves was last heard of art directing Eeling, a short film about a woman who is seduced by an eel.

There really is nothing to recommend Attack of the Sabretooth except as something to mock. If it had just been about a rich guy genetically cloning smilodons which get loose when he has important guests on his private island, it might have worked. Not well, but it might have worked. Or if it had been about a bunch of college kids breaking into somewhere which turns out to have genetically recreated big cats, that could have worked too. But bolting the two together in defiance of their incompatibility, and then adding in stupid ideas like the crappy fence, the massively important porn mag page and the prehistoric feline bulimia? Dude, there’s a limit. There is a line and that line has been crossed.

MJS rating: D-

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Shusuke Kaneko, director of the 1990s Gamera trilogy, at G-Fest 1999, a Godzilla convention in Los Angeles. His other films includePyrokinesis, the 2001 Godzilla movie GMK: All Monsters Attack and one third of the 1993 horror anthology Necronomicon. Years later, I have unfortunately lost any record of who translated for me during this interview although I'm sure that Norman England had a hand in arranging it.

How did you get the job of directing Gamera: Guardian of the Universe?
“In 1992 I had an offer from Daiei to direct this film. I wanted to be a kaiju director, not necessarily for Daiei. I told Toho that I wanted to direct a Godzilla film, so everybody knew that I wanted to direct a kaiju movie. I thought it might help me in that ambition to direct a Gamera movie.”

What did you want to put into a Gamera film that had not been seen in the 1960s Gamera films?
“The original Gamera films were for children but I wasn’t keen on them for that reason. So I wanted to make a Gamera movie for adults, a Gamera movie that everyone can watch.”

Was this film intended as the first part of a series, or was it made as a stand-alone film?
“I thought this was just one film when I was making it, but on the day of the premiere, the President of Daiei came to me and said, ‘Please continue’.”

How did the Japanese film critics respond to Gamera: Guardian of the Universe?
“They were very, very happy. We had a great response. Before making Gamera, I did not have a great reputation as a director, but with Gamera there was no problem with the critics - everyone said it was great. But with Gamera 2 the critics were divided - some said it was good, some said it was not good. G3 was the same.”

Why did you choose to bring back Gaos for the first film?
“I picked Gaos because I thought that Gamera - just one kaiju - was not enough to attract the audience on his own.”

How well have the three Gamera films sold outside of Japan?
“I really don’t know because those decisions are always made by Daiei. According to Daiei, they have sold Gamera for one million Yen.”

How did you choose your cast for these films, and how pleased were you with their performances?
“I chose actors and actresses who can really make you believe that kaiju exist in this world. The cast acted very seriously, they really seemed to believe that kaiju exist - and that makes the audience believe that kaiju exist.”

How involved were you with the special effects sequences, or do you leave all of those to your special effects director?
“For the first and second films, Mr Higuchi the special effects director and I wrote the storyboards for the effects sequences together. I worked on the editing too. In the third film we used more computer effects so we created the storyboards actually on the computer.”

Which is more important in a film: the story about the people, or the fights between the monsters?
“The people are more important than kaiju, but without kaiju I cannot tell the story. I know that everyone really enjoys the fight scenes between the kaiju, but in order to make the audience care about the climactic battle, we need human drama beforehand.”

Were there things that you would have liked to put in these films but could not because of budget or some other factor?
“I wish that we could have made Gamera bigger. If some of the miniatures had been bigger they would have been more realistic.”

Why has the appearance of Gamera changed over the three films?
“At first I was asked to make Gamera a little cuter because the classic Gamera is always designed for children, with a big head. The face and shape of Gamera in G3 is the closest to the design of the face and body that we originally thought up. After the success of G1, Daiei gave us fewer restrictions so we could get closer to our idea of Gamera, but also in G3 the character and appearance of Gamera is more frightening so that makes the audience more scared of him. I have an excuse about Gamera’s changes because in the ancient age Gamera was sleeping, so day by day, year by year, he awakens. It’s a strange excuse!”

Many kaiju have no real explanation of where they came from. Why did you give Gamera a history connected with Atlantis and so on?
“I think that it’s difficult for people to believe that a giant creature like Gamera could fly. I needed some kind of story, based around ancient history, so that it is easier for people to believe in Gamera’s existence and his flying ability.”

So Gamera is biotechnology, not just a monster?
“Yes, biotechnology.”

If you had a big enough budget, would you make your monsters entirely in a computer, like the American Godzilla, or are suits and miniatures a better technique?
“I think that monsters are in some ways like human beings and this technique helps us to express their feelings, but on the other hand people can clearly see that there is somebody inside the costume and that sometimes makes me annoyed. I am not very happy about that aspect of the technique.”

Is Gamera 3 the last Gamera film? If there are more, will you be making them?
“If Daiei ask me to make another Gamera film as my next movie, then I can make it, I can continue the series. I think the reputation of these films and the money they make is not really huge so I do not think that Daiei has made any decision yet.”

If you don’t make another Gamera film, what would you like your next film to be?
“I have not started production yet but I am working on the storyboards. I am also working on the script for an American movie, Guyver 3. And someday I want to make an action movie about giant robots like Gundam!”

Arigato gozaimasu, Kaneko-san.

website: www.shusuke-kaneko.com
interview originally posted 20th May 2009

I interviewed Troma supremo Lloyd Kaufman in the world famous London club Groucho's in April 1996. He was over here to help launch Troma UK but I only found out a few hours before he was due to fly back - so I hotfooted it to London pretty damn quick! I have since seen Lloyd at many film festivals (and sometimes at Groucho's!) and he is always the centre of attention because he is (a) a true showman, and (b) one of the nicest people in showbusiness.

You got turned on to films when you were at college. Were you not a film fan when you were young?
"Nope! I would have done something useful with my life. But I went to Yale University. There I was roomed, purely by kismet, with a movie maniac. We had a very tiny little bedroom - our beds were side by side - I caught his movie germs and the next thing I know I was making movies, and I couldn't stop!"

What were you studying?
"Chinese Studies was my major. Other than movies, China's my main interest; then my family, well after that. I have my priorities: movies, China, and then a poor third would be my family. So then I met Michael Herz at Yale and we decided that we would set up an independent movie studio."

Had you any idea how to go about that?
"No, it was a stupid idea actually. It was a very stupid idea, but this was the '60s and the individual was important in those day and peace was sort of a good thing and all that stuff. So we took a whack at it, we did it."

What was the first project when you set up the studio?
"The idea, right from the start to was to try to set up an independent movie studio and try to create a Troma Universe. Everything I learned at Yale was comic books. I've had a 25-year friendship with Stan Lee. In fact this Spider-Man tie I'm wearing was a Christmas gift. He and I have written some scripts together. In fact at this moment we're working on a script I wrote called Congressman, about a new super-hero. Stan loved it, and he and I have been writing the script. But the idea was to create Tromaville as small-town America and then try to find an identity.

"We had seen many of the great movies, but we had also seen movies by Roger Corman, and I saw that Roger was doing movies that were beautifully directed, and well-written and had good acting, with provocative scenes. And it proved that one could do good films on a low budget. One could do low-budget and one did not have to work for a giant international conglomerate. So that's what we started.

"When I was at Yale I made a feature-length movie based on Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter with a Bolex: black and white, feature-length. I'm probably the only director in history who's never done a short movie. I've always done features. I've done some promotional charity stuff for people where I've done shorts, but I didn't want to do it, I was just asked. But this was one long, black and white Bolex movie. No sync sound. We put the music and sound effects and narration on it. Then I did another one, a comedy called The Girl Who Returned which had some of the elements of the Tromatic touch.

"Then came the first sync-sound movie which was The Battle of Love's Return. Actually, Michael Herz, my partner, is an actor in The Girl Who Returned. Then while I was still at school, one of my Yale chums and I made The Battle of Love's Return and the great Oliver Stone worked on the film and he also acts in the film. Oliver Stone has a cameo performance in The Battle of Love's Return. Then that movie got into very fine movie theatres. It was in colour and black and white. I had to play the main part because I couldn't afford to pay anybody."

Where were these movies getting shown? In the local theatres?
"Well, the first three that I did were in the film societies: Yale, Harvard, Princeton. Rappaccini was extremely well-received. The Girl Who Returned actually did quite well on the college circuit because it was funny and had some decent people. The world was divided up into one group of men and another group of women, and every four years the people from the men-land and the people from the women-land would come together and hold these Olympic games.

"The Battle of Love's Return came next and that opened at a very famous movie theatre in New York, akin to the Prince Charles Cinema here, where by the way Sgt Kabukiman NYPD will open in May. The Battle of Love's Return got very good reviews and did well enough that I could then go out and raise approximately $150,000 to do Sugar Cookies which was our take on Vertigo. Instead of a man and a woman, I put two women in it. Sugar Cookies was associated with Oliver Stone, and there were a lot of Warhol people in there - this was 1970 or '71. That was a commercial hit, and we just kept going.

"Michael Herz and I slowly got the Tromaville situation under control and made a movie called Squeeze Play that made a lot of money - though not by Hollywood standards obviously - and that's how we bought the Troma Building. Most of our movies are inspired by the newspapers, so Squeeze Play was our take on the women's liberation movement which was starting to get going in the '70s. We did a movie about it; it was a softball movie - very funny though - and it broke the rule that you don't mix sex and comedy. Squeeze Play was a huge success: very, very sexy and very funny; good, old-fashioned slapstick; burlesque-type humour. It dealt with this women's softball team; the fact that every weekend the men would go off and play softball and leave the women in the house and the women would get upset. Fifteen years later, A League of Their Own covered that of course, but we already did it. Squeeze Play lead to Waitress, Stuck on You, The First Turn On - there was a series of these erotic comedies."

Were you building up a repertory company with the same crews and the same actors?
"We couldn't because we always had very small budgets. The actors would become successful and then we couldn't afford them any more."

Where did the name Troma come from?
"'Troma' came from the ancient Latin - Virgil - it means 'excellence on celluloid'. That's where we got the name from; the rest is history."

When you started off, where were you finding the people to work on them? Were these college friends and family?
"Yeah, pretty much. My father's in them; my mother, my brother, my family, my best friend. But then Squeeze Play was a huge success. We have a building in New York called the Troma Building. It's very famous in terms of movie-making because a lot of young people started out there. Squeeze Play, because it was so successful, there was a whole trend of those movies. Then we switched. We did about five of them, and after The First Turn On, which by the way my partner turned down Madonna for. What a loony he was; I never forgave him for it. He says that we should be proud that we turned her down because thanks to us she became a big star. Naturally, while The First Turn On was coming out and underwhelming critics, Madonna was hurtling into the stratosphere as a huge, huge success."

Anybody can turn her down nowadays, but you were there first.
"Yes, that's right. You're absolutely right."

The Toxic Avenger is the archetypal Troma movie. Where did the idea for Toxie come from?
"Like all of our movies, it comes from the newspapers. I was getting some newspapers in the early '80s that were talking about these toxic waste dumps ticking away like time-bombs all over the world. Children in South America going into garbage dumps and finding what they thought to be pixie dust. And the pixie dust turns out to be radium that the hospitals are just throwing away from the X-ray machine. So at any rate, in America, while we've got all this toxic waste and people are throwing away non-biodegradable McDonalds containers and all that kind of crap, they're going to health clubs. It's the health club fad and everyone's making muscles and cleaning their bodies and eating macrobiotic food. So it just seemed like a very interesting theme for a movie.

"We had to change out of our sexy comedies because the major studios were fighting very unfair. They were doing the same kinds of movies, but they were using good scripts and good actors, so we had to find something else. One day we saw a headline in a trade magazine that said, 'Horror films are dead' so we figured, 'Okay, that's what the experts are saying. We were lucky with the sex and comedy, we broke that rule and did pretty well, so let's see what happens and do a horror film.' Then after a lot of cogitation and re-writing and whatever I figured, 'Let's make the monster the good guy. Why does he have to be the bad guy?' Make him the good guy, and make it a comedy, and make him a hero and a superhero. Let's have a mop! Why doesn't the mop be his weapon? What a great symbol!

"In fact it was at the Cannes Film Festival that I got the brainstorm that the monster was going to be the hero: 'That's what we're missing. That's what's going to make it special.' And the rest is history. Again, when we made the movie we had the same problem that we always had. The movie theatres said, 'Wait a minute. This isn't Squeeze Play. What are you doing? This is a horror film but wait a minute, we're not scared. What's going on here?' I said, 'If you want Squeeze Play, we've got it, you can screen it, I'll give you a print. No, it's not a horror film. It's The Toxic Avenger; he's a superhero; it's a comedy. A grand guignol comedy.'

"Finally we got an excellent movie theatre in Greenwich Village. Are you familiar with New York? It's similar to the area we're in now, but not quite as fun. It's the equivalent of Soho. That theatre there played the movie, and it ran for a year. The night it opened, there were lines around the block. The Toxic Avenger played there for a year, then 400 copies were made of the 35mm print. Enormous success. 200,000 video cassettes. Success in every country in the world. Two more sequels, a cartoon show, licensing - other companies license different types of merchandise based on Toxie. So that's how Toxie began. The Shakespeare element entered into Toxie in Last Temptation of Toxie which was the third one. A Midsummer Night's Dream was an element that helped to inspire the third Toxic Avenger movie. The third Nuke 'Em High movie - The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid: Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 3 - has a strong influence of Comedy of Errors. Finally with Tromeo and Juliet we are actually doing Shakespeare."

How closely does Tromeo and Juliet stick to the Shakespeare story? What liberties have you taken with it?
"It sticks pretty close."

There wasn't a woman with popcorn in her stomach in the original Shakespeare play.
"Well, I'm not so sure of that. Shakespeare wrote such a marvellous play. He came so close to a really good work. So we made a few improvements. I don't think we re-wrote more than 80% of the play. We did take a few liberties with the ending, but other than that: it has all the car-crashes, mutations, special effects, decapitations, kinky sex, de-Capulet-ations, and all the stuff that Shakespeare always wanted. That was a pretty good joke there; a very intellectual, Shakespearian Troma joke.

"The interesting thing about Tromeo and Juliet is that it's again sort of drawn from current events. I'm 50 years old; I'm no longer a youth, that's for sure. And my generation, the folks who were baby-boomers, have I think done a number on your generation. People like Clinton and Hillary are so cool in their polo-neck shirts and their designer jeans. Usually their jeans cost more than my suits. They're just so cool, swinging and emotionless. In their world, it's horrible. You don't want to be emotional, you don't want to really be passionate. You just want to be cool. You don't have opinions, you don't have anything. Then on top of it, kids today can't even make love because of AIDS. So basically the way I see it is they turn inward upon themselves: tattoos and piercing. At any rate, Tromeo and Juliet is my take on American youth today, specifically in New York, downtown New York.

"I wrote the script with a young man named James Gunn who's 28 years old, so he's half my age. It's just our beat on what's going on in terms of youth. Obviously love is something the Clintons don't believe in. With most of the post-war baby-boomers, passion has gone. So with Tromeo and Juliet in this powerful world of gang-war and drugs and tattoos and piercing - I'm not saying tattoos and piercing are bad - but this is the world in which they find themselves. And it is Romeo and Juliet. The Romeo and Juliet story was marvellous for what I was interested in."

Are you going to work on some of the other plays? Macbeth or King Lear?
"I don't think so. We've been toying with Two Gentlemen from Troma. Some publishers came to us recently on writing a book on the history of Troma, and I suggested to them maybe we should call it Two Gentlemen from Troma, and once they heard that I think they went round to Quentin Tarantino."

When you're developing new movies for Troma, which comes first: the idea or the title?
"In the case of Tromeo and Juliet I got inspired a few years ago when there was a big Troma season at the British Film Institute, at the National Film Theatre. Somebody from their staff was kind enough - probably to get me away from them because I was so obnoxious - they took me up to Stratford-on-Avon as a day trip. I genuinely love Shakespeare. I don't know that much about him, but I know a hell of a lot more than the people making these Shakespearian movies in America. At any rate, I was genuinely moved. Shakespeare's spirit entered my body - I can't tell you which orifice it came out - and I decided: Tromeo and Juliet. The idea, the title came to me. I wrote a draft. I worked with a 30-year-old young man to write another draft. That didn't work. Then I worked with a guy who was 19; that didn't work. Then finally, this fellow James Gunn and I came up with the direction that I was getting at, namely this treatment of the fact that post-war baby-boomers of the '60s, the people who are supposed to be so full of love and peace and individuality and passion, have really turned out to be these horrendous, cold-hearted, cool, emotionless, passionless people who have done a number on the heads of the people your age. Hopefully you have not been ruined by my generation."

Well, it turned me into a journalist...
"Aaargh! No, the Fourth Estate is marvellous. So the title was there ahead of the movie. But almost every other movie, I get an idea from the newspapers. It's usually something that festers. When they were building this nuclear power plant right next door to New York City it was just so outrageous and so disgraceful. Why did they have to build a nuclear power plant within a few feet of the most populated area in the United States?"

What is a typical budget and shooting schedule for a Troma movie nowadays?
"Kabukiman was the big one for us, the biggest we've ever done: nearly $3 million. But a big Japanese company called Namco who have an arcade here in Soho, a multi-million dollar company, they put up some of the financing. So that's the biggest. Tromeo and Juliet was about £500,000. Still minute compared to Hollywood standards, although it's a lot of money."

Are you happy with that level or would you like to go up to big multi-million pound pictures?
"No. I have no interest in going up; I have interest in attracting better writers. I think the young man with whom I'm working now is one of the best we've ever had. It'd be nice to have a touch more money so we could get some better actors. But Tromeo and Juliet, I couldn't ask for better acting. The acting in Tromeo and Juliet is superb, absolutely brilliant. I don't know if you've seen Othello. If you see the Shakespeare that's coming out of Hollywood that they're spending 15, 20 million bucks, it's absolute trash. Othello was just like a student film. It was absolute pure ego. That wasn't the worst, but it was just horrible. Kenneth Branagh was good, and Richard III, with Ian McKellen, but all the other Shakespeares have just been garbage. Because these people have no education. How can they possibly do Shakespeare. What does Lawrence Fishburne know about Othello? What has he done? Has he lived anything? Has he experienced anything? Has he read Shakespeare? Obviously not. He knew as much about Othello as I know about... James Joyce."

Do you think Shakespeare needs updating to make it relevant for today's audiences?
"Definitely not. Kenneth Branagh proved it. His movies are sensational. Shakespeare is something that one achieves over a lifetime. I may be Troma, but I've studied Shakespeare for 30, 40 years. I can't say I've studied it as a professor but I have read it and read it and read it and lived with it and enjoyed it and seen it performed over and over and over again. And I would say that I - and my partner also - we both love Shakespeare and we know more about Shakespeare I would say than any other American, saved people who have had the Royal Shakespeare Company experience. Obviously we cannot compare with British Shakespeare. I can't recall any decent American Shakespeare. There's some stuff that's done in New York in the off-Broadway theatres and that occasionally isn't bad. Pacino's pretty good, he did some good stuff. And Elizabeth McGovern did a Shakespeare that was very good. Obviously she's had some education - you can see it."

Troma films have a cult reputation in the UK but they're so hard to get hold of. Why has it taken so long to set up Troma UK?
"That's exactly why Harvey Goldsmith and Ed Simons decided to take the Troma plunge. They're major mainstream music impresarios. they bring the Three Tenors to Wembley and they do Madonna and the Smash Hits awards show and everything. They're 100% mainstream. They found that, first of all, they love Troma. They've loved Troma for years. They're sort of my age so they've seen Troma for 25 years. And they started to do some research. They would go to universities and say, 'Hey, you ever hear of Troma?' And they would go up to women because usually those kinds of movies appeal to men. And they'd find every time when they asked a student, male or female: 'Troma! Oh, Combat Shock! I love Combat Shock!'

"And the one complaint they found was people can't find our movies. The demand and the following for Troma has outstripped the supply. So what Ed and Harvey are planning is to get the Troma brand name and do what Troma has done in the States, which is to increase the profile. Get video shops to have Troma sections. Have theatrical runs on a regular basis. Obviously they won't be many many prints, but a small number of prints and run them at 30 or 40 venues around England, so that people can see the movies up on the big screen. And then create Tromaville Cafe which is a Troma TV show.

"We have Tromaville Cafe running in Europe now. It runs once a week in most of Europe. It's a 15-minute scripted show featuring Toxic Avenger and Kabukiman and the Tromettes and Melvina. Tromaville Cafe is a restaurant and has all of our characters. The presenter is a waitress-cum-action-news-reporter. So she's wearing the Tromaville waitress outfit but she has a microphone. That's running in Scandinavia, the Low Countries - which were the High Countries before Tromaville Cafe - central Europe, South Africa. It's got a big reach. Harvey and Ed, rather than using Tromaville Cafe, they are going to create a British version of it and have famous people appear on it as guests. So that's part of the plan. We're going to shoot part of Toxic Avenger Part 4 here, and we're probably going to be doing some other movies here. It won't be immediately, but it's part of the plan. We're writing The Toxic Avenger Part 4 now for filming in the UK. We might do a segment of the American Tromaville Cafe in London anyway. We have to do 15 more for filming. So if we did one or two of the episodes here, it'd be fun. The nice thing about Troma is this: I majored in Chinese Studies and taoism teaches you the way to be one with nature and it works."

Do you think characters like Toxie have got important points to make about pollution and such topics?
"Well, the purpose of Troma movies is to entertain. Our movies appeal to couples who want to have fun. They want to be challenged. The problem with Hollywood movies; you've just seen at the Oscars - it was the worst group of movies that I can remember. I'm going to show you the typical submission I get. We get millions of things, but this guy tracked me down. Toilet of Terror. This comes through the Troma solicitors too. They act like I'm nuts. I don't think this is what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in Toilet of Terror. Well, maybe, but there's no script. Where's the script? If the guy's serious, there should be a script in there.

"See, when we do a movie... We financed a movie called Bugged - we're going to show it at Cannes - it's an Afro-American Troma movie. Young kids who are trying to be their grandparents. A young guy who's brilliant, absolutely talented, he wanted to do a Troma movie from somebody else's perspective. Obviously it's going to be different from somebody else's perspective. So he did a movie called Bugged; it's got insects, and the fun of Troma, yet it's profound. This is this guy's first film. He's in a league with Peter Jackson - absolutely top of the line."

Do you watch other people's movies?
"Yeah, all the time. I love movies. And we get hundreds. We have acquisition stuff and an incredible number of movies."

There seems to be only you and Full Moon working on this kind of stuff. What do you think of their output?
"Charlie Band is a genius when he directs movies. But he hasn't been directing them, he's been hiring a lot of hacks. They've been more formulaic. I can't say I've seen anything good for a while. They seem to be following what Hollywood does then doing something similar for a tiny little budget. Of course, we made A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell ahead of Jurassic Park."

Do you think there's room for kids at college today to do what you did and follow in your footsteps?
"I think it's much harder, because of the conspiracy of the labour, bureaucratic and corporate leagues to control the minds, hearts and pocket-books of the little people of Tromaville. I think it's very very difficult. We are literally the only movie studio left consistently making movies. Roger Corman and Troma - that's it. There's nobody else out there that's got any longevity. And it's a disgrace, very sad. You're looking at the dodo bird. No, the dodo bird's extinct. I'm more like a passenger pigeon."

That's extinct as well.
"Is the passenger pigeon extinct?!"

You're like the Mauritius kestrel. There's 20 of those left.
"The vicious testicle, you say? I've got vicious testicles."

What about spin-offs? Ironically, one of the highest-profile things that Troma's had over here has been the Toxic Crusaders cartoon series.
"Toxie's huge. A toy company wanted to do an environmental toy, and they loved Toxie, and then we did the cartoons and the merchandise and all that. But that was not part of the plan, believe me. That was just luck."

Why was it changed from ‘Toxic Avenger’ to ‘Toxic Crusader’?
"Because we wanted to separate the two. We didn't want grandmothers of children buying the Toxic Avenger tapes and having a heart attack. Some stupid grandmother did buy one once and made a big stink about it. How anyone can be that stupid! The Toxic Avenger cassette says right on the front. You'd have to be a total idiot to bring it home for your kids. There was an idiot somewhere. I think she just wanted publicity or something. The director's cut says, 'Warning: This movie contains gross and disgusting footage. If you don't find it gross and disgusting, you need a shrink!' It says that on the package, and this woman somehow manages to bring it home to her grandchildren. Then it turns out she's head of some league of decency. But the point is they yanked Toxic Crusaders and Toxic Avenger from a whole chain of drugstores because of this stupid situation."

Was that a one-off or do you get much trouble from 'the moral majority'?
"No. We've had virtually no problems. Once you look at our stuff, it's pretty good. The New York Times gives us good reviews. The good critics like our stuff. Women like our movies. Once you see our movies, people realise 'These are pretty good.' You see a movie a like Die Hard; hell, that's much more violent than anything that Troma does. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, all that kind of stuff, that's serious violence, so our stuff, going to see it, people go, 'That's interesting stuff.' And as a result all these archival institutions - the French Cinematheque, the American Film Institute, the Kennedy Centre - have major Troma film retrospectives. In order for anyone to cause any trouble they have to at least look at the movie. Once they look at the movie, they go, 'Hey, it's kind of fun!' After all, Braveheart, which is considered the best movie in the world right now, has head-crushing in it, has torture, has many of the elements that Toxic Avenger pioneered. Toxic Avenger has the famous full head-crushing scene. When Toxic Avenger came out in 1983, I remember we had a screening for our investors and two or three of them never talked to me again. They walked out during the head-crushing scene. Eventually they got it, they got the gag. But here it is in Braveheart - people say it's high art."

Can you see a Troma movie being nominated for an Oscar?
"I cannot, no. If it ever happened, that would probably put me over the edge. I would go up to that microphone and I would totally flip out. That's so far from my universe. I think I would crack up. That would probably be the thing that would cause me to blow my brains out, and I would probably do it right on stage at the microphone: bang!"

Troma films have this image of gross and disgusting but funny.
"Even with the cartoon of Toxic Crusaders: 'They're gross but they still get the girls.' That was the line."

What is the level that is too gross, too disgusting for Troma?
"Well, it's not a matter of the grossness. It's a matter of what the movies say. I don't want to hurt people. I would not deliberately do something that is hurting people's feelings. Our movies are uplifting, I think that's why they're so popular. They basically are decent, they have a decency too them. Troma's War: we're patriotic. The movies have a very good value system. I certainly wouldn't do a movie that might make fun of somebody's disabilities. We have a shock-jock in the States and he makes fun of cripples and he makes fun of homosexuals on the radio and he's making millions. I don't like that, and I really don't care for it. People are hurt - people are unhappy - deliberately. Yes, I imagine 99% of the people are laughing, but to deliberately hurt the feelings of even 1% - why do that? I would not do that."

What's the way forward for Troma beyond Tromeo and Juliet, which will obviously be the biggest film this year?
"We plan to have more new directors. The notion of being the independent studio, that is a very sincere goal. Clearly my own writing and directing cannot possibly appeal to the youth and the Troma fans. Troma fans want Troma and we have to give it to them. I write and direct movies and I love doing it. I'm lucky enough at the age of 50, having done 20-something movies, to keep going. But from a business point of view we want to give more opportunities to young new directors, to real talent. That is a major part of what we're going to be doing, and what we are doing, what we have been doing for the past seven or eight years. We have been empowering more new young directors and hopefully out of that group will come the next wave of Tarantinos and Oliver Stones. So that is a very important part of what we plan. In terms of what we're doing I want to do Toxie 4 and I want to deal with the abortion issue in that. We've got a project called The Beaster Bunny which is being developed, and there are one or two other ones. The Congressman project with Stan Lee has been going on, but Stan does not want that to be a Troma movie. He wants it to be bigger; he wants that one to be a really first class production."

Are you going to expand into comics like Roger Corman's doing now?
"We have a big presence at the comic book convention in San Diego called Comic Con. But I don't see us doing comic books. Roger's doing it well, and if I had to I'd give it to him to do. We're good buddies. Comic books are a tough business right now because the market's saturated. I know everybody in the comic book business. If I have anything good, I usually do it the other way round. When I go to the comic book conventions I try to acquire comic books to make into movies. We have a movie called Frostbiter. We acquired the rights to that movie; it was a comic book. At the comic book convention we have a big presence for good will and we're looking for comic book properties to acquire and make movies out of."

Director: Jonathan Glendening
Writer: Adam Phillips
Producers: Duncan Napier-Bell, Nicholas Napier-Bell, Tom Reeve
Cast: Isabella Calthorpe, Gemma Atkinson, Tom Felton
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: UK DVD
Website: www.glendening.co.uk

In a few years, Marysia Kay has amassed an enviable collection of indie horror credits, from Johannes Roberts’ When Evil Calls to Ivan Zuccon’s Colour from the Dark, together with Blood + Roses, Ouija Board, The Scar Crowand a whole bunch of other movies. In January 2009 Marysia organised the UK premiere of Ivan’s film which is where I finally had the chance to meet her. Shortly afterwards, I e-mailed her a few questions:

How did you get started in acting, and specifically acting in low budget horror movies?
“I had quit a job with an internet company to become a secondary school teacher and then quit teacher training because the school system is such a disaster. So I was somewhat at a loss as to where to go next and it suddenly occurred to me that since I was unemployed and living in London, I was ideally situated to try acting. It wasn't a huge leap, more of a picking up of something I hadn't been confident enough to try when I was younger.

“I used to do a lot of musicals and operas in my teens in Scotland and even did a bit of extra work while I was trying to model. I would have loved to study music or drama but I didn't have the confidence in myself to go for it, so I studied science at University and ended up in computers after. I think I was always headed for acting, I just took the long way around.

“Not really knowing where else to start I turned to Google and found a few online casting sites (Shooting People, Mandy, Talent Circle). One of the first auditions I went to was for the feature film Forest of the Damned (then called Forsaken Forest) in June 2004. Forest was my first feature film, shot in September 2004, and partially responsible for me being primarily a horror film actress, as it did so well.

“I actually went to audition for the roles of Molly and Ally as, having read the description of the Angels (or Sirens as they were called then) as the most beautiful women they had ever seen, I didn't think I was up to the task! But at the audition I could sense things weren't going well - not a big surprise as I had no clue what I was doing - so I asked if I could try for the Angels as well. The nudity wasn't an issue for me as I was brought up not to think of nudity as a big deal.

“It was good to start in a non-speaking role. I think it took me a couple of years of learning by doing before I could really put in a good performance vocally, but physical acting came more naturally to me and I really enjoyed playing the role with its mix of animal and ethereal.

“I do a lot of horror because of Forest and also because there's a lot of horror made at the low budget end of the market. Low budget horror has a strong fan base and people know if they put the effort in people will watch it; you can't say the same for low budget films of any other genre. I'm actually not a big horror fan. I tend to go for action movies, sci-fi, fantasy and musicals. But when I do watch horror I prefer the supernatural stuff and all of the horror films I've done are based on the supernatural.”

Within the British indie horror scene you have made enough movies that you are now a recognisable name: to what extent is that a help or a hindrance in progressing your acting career?
“I think it's only really starting to kick in. For a long while Forest was the only recognisable thing I had on my CV and I think because it was a non-speaking role and a nude role it was assumed I wasn't really an actor but maybe a model. Then I did a lot of films that never got finished or that are still waiting to be finished or were just too low budget to get noticed. It wasn't till I worked with Jo Roberts again on When Evil Calls in 2006 that I got another line on my CV that actually meant much to people, at least in the world of horror.

“And then in 2007 I got another couple of horror credits that had some press surrounding them and by 2008 I think I was starting to become vaguely familiar. Also When Evil Calls and Forest of the Damned got a lot of play on Zone Horror in 2007/2008. It's becoming more and more common that I bump into people who have caught Forest on TV. Every little bit helps in the acting world - it's really tough. There are so many twentysomething women trying to become actresses. I believe what it takes is perseverance; a lot of people give up after a year or two because it is hard and it can be very frustrating.”

What was Mark Withers' mockumentary Hardcore like to work on?
"That was a fun departure from most of what I do. It's great to do any film, but it's also great to do something different. Actually I only shot for three days on that film - it was a huge ensemble cast and a tight schedule - but I've stayed in touch with quite a few people from the filming. Mark is a lovely guy who likes to push boundaries in his films: in Hardcore he managed to make something really funny while still maintaining the discomfort of the world of porn.

“My character was abused by her father and his friends as a child, but she's not terribly clever and she just never figured out that it was abuse, so when he was locked up for it she moved into porn because she confuses sex with affection. She's sweet and pretty and charming and still locked into a cycle of sexual abuse. She's one of the darkest characters in the film, yet it's told in throwaway comments where you're almost not sure you could have heard right and she seems so happy and perky you don't know what to think.”

How did you land a role in Colour from the Dark and, apart from the language, what differences did you find making a film in Italy?
“Ivan cast the film through three avenues. He took actors he already knew and had worked with in previous films (Michael Segal, Matteo Tosi and Alessandra Guerzoni) and through Tiffany Shepis (who starred in his previous film NyMpha) he contacted Debbie Rochon to play Lucia. But he wanted more English speaking actors (as the film was to be in English) from nearer at hand, so he used a service called Casting Call Pro to find the rest of the cast.

“He sent me a message through CCP offering me the part; there were no auditions as he was in Italy. I jumped at it, it was a great script and it's hard to argue with being paid to spend three and a half weeks in Italy. He found Eleanor James through CCP as well. I assumed originally he'd come across both of us via Forest but apparently not, he found us separately and we both had what he wanted.

“Italian film is very focused on cinematography, which I love. I'm a big fan of long sweeping pans and tracks and real thought being put into the composition of a shot, of shots being beautiful to look at. A lot (though not all) of the films I've done in the UK let things slip when it comes to the filming: shot lists are lost or never finished or tossed aside when the first shot takes five times longer than expected. Equipment is too expensive and time is short so only the basic coverage is done. Most films I do in the UK are shot in two to three weeks. Ivan took a solid five weeks to make Colour and that time makes all the difference. I think the film looks fantastic.

“The language barrier did make things difficult though. Most Italians in the area we shot in speak very little English, partly because all of their foreign TV and films are dubbed into Italian. They watch a lot of American TV but it's all dubbed by Italian voiceover artists who are often quite famous in their own right as the official dubbers of various A-list celebrities.”

Why did you take it upon yourself to organise a London premiere for Ivan's film?
“The official premiere was going to be in Cannes in 2008, and I was going to be there. But technical difficulties meant the film wasn't ready and instead Debbie arranged for a New York premiere in November, which I couldn't make. There was also very shortly after that a last minute inclusion at the Turin Horror Festival in Italy, which I also missed as it was so last minute. Eleanor hadn't been able to attend those screenings either and as I was really proud of the film I decided to have a UK premiere. I thought it would be fun; of course in reality it was a lot to organise. But the film means a lot to me and I really hope it does well for all of us. I'd love to work with Ivan again but he is still organising distribution for Colour and seeking funding for his next film.”

What are your plans for your own film, Hell Hath No Fury?
“I've been thinking about getting into directing for a long time, but I've never been drawn to short film as a medium. I think it was always going to be either a feature or a mini series. A friend of mine brought me a short film script that she wanted me to help her make and I saw such promise in it that I immediately set about making it into a feature script. It's a big project to undertake: there's a lot of action sequences, a lot of locations, quite a big cast...

“I'd like to make something that will get worldwide distribution and make enough money to fund a second film. Something that will stand above its budget, which is currently rather humble. Although so far I've enjoyed writing the script more than the rest of the things involved in trying to get a feature film project off the ground. So I may turn more to writing than directing in the end - I already have several other partly completed scripts tucked away.

“Right now we need to secure funding. We're looking for another £5-10K over what we have. Currently we're myself, my producer, our production manager and a fight director. We need to pin down a director of photography and a camera operator so we can really start working on logistics and get some decent rehearsal space so we can get stuck into the fight sequences. We're hoping to shoot the first scene, a big fight sequence, this spring and the rest of the film over the summer.

“I do a lot of combat training, particularly sword work, so the original idea was to make something where me and the people I work with could show that off. I have nearly three years of training in combat for stage and film but I hardly ever get to use it. The short already had a supernatural plotline and I brought out its horror aspects when I turned it into a feature. It's about angry women kicking ass and it's about not messing with things you don't understand and it's about learning to forgive instead of holding onto hate and anger. It also has strong pagan themes as I'm Wiccan. It's kind of The Craft for over-18s."

website: www.marysia.com
interview originally posted 3rd February 2009

I interviewed Brett Kelly by e-mail in August 2008 about his monster moviePrey for the Beast.

How did you hook up with screenwriter Jeff O'Brien and how did the two of you work together on this film?
“I met Jeff (if you can call the internet ‘meeting’) through the messageboards at Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia site. I had been looking for writers who were willing to write scripts based on my concepts. I had written the scripts to most of my previous films and was hoping to find someone who was better at it than me. Jeff is a really good writer with a great sense of humour.”

How important was the design of the monster and how pleased are you with the monster suit?
“I'm thrilled with the monster in the flick. I didn't have any part in the design - I asked Matt Ficner to come up with something scary and he surely did. Funny thing - I actually knew Matt back in kindergarten and we went to school together for a few years. I didn't realise he'd grown up to be a puppeteer until I reconnected with him via my make-up FX artist friend Ralph Gethings.”

Where did you find your cast and crew?
“Most of my crew has been with me for years. My AD is a fellow film maker for whom I acted several years ago. My DOP I met through a friend and we hit it off. You never know where they’re going to come from. My key grip Jodi Pittman has been my pal since we were 14 years old.”

What sort of restrictions of time, money, equipment etc. did you have when making the film?
“It's always tough - you have to really love making movies in order to make as many as I have. We're often limited by availability of actors and particularly cash. My trick is to involve people who really love the process - it’s really the only way to do it on time and with no time.”

How has Prey for the Beast been received by audiences and critics who have seen it?
“The reception has been really good. Folks seem to dig that its a fun ‘man-in-a-suit’ monster flick. It's not Citizen Kane by any stretch. The laughter seems to be in the right places at the screenings as well as the screams.”

What is the current situation with your remake of Attack of the Giant Leeches?
“That's a slow process at the moment. The flick is wrapped and we're in post-production. Last summer was a busy time for me as I shot not only Leeches, but a pirate film right before that (Pirates: Quest for Snake Island). On my limited budgets, it’s a slow road to get so many flicks posted at the same time. Rapid distributor interest in the film I'm currently shooting (Iron Soldier) is also slowing down the post a little. I'm hoping to hand it off to an editor so I don't have to do so much work myself. It’s always busy in the world of little old me.”

website: www.BrettKelly.net

I had the enormous pleasure of interviewing Udo Kier in May 1999 when he was shooting The New Adventures of Pinocchio in Luxembourg. I only had a short time to talk with him while he was being made up for his role as Madame Flambeau but found him one of the friendliest, most open, honest and unfailingly polite interviewees I have ever dealt with. The part of this interview dealing with End of Days was later published in Fangoria.

You’re playing a man playing a woman in most of this film. Are the audience not supposed to realise that it’s you, who played Lorenzini in the first film?
“I think they will realise it’s me, but it’s me in another role. It’s not like you say, a man playing a woman; when you know the story it’s actually a man who becomes a woman who becomes a man again, the villain, so it kind of goes the other way round. It’s not a transvestite. He doesn’t try to look like RuPaul or some transvestite, it’s just that he is the villain, like a witch. I always wanted to play a witch. I don’t see it as a woman - it’s a witch more or less.

”It’s a female villain, a villainness. So it’s an interesting part. I also play three roles in a new film with Michael Caine, where I also play a woman, and it’s nice because when I put on the dress and all the make-up it’s hard to be a woman but it’s very effectual. I’m an actor and acting comes from that. If you see comedia del arte, the people had a lot of make-up and wigs. It’s coming from that anyway. And of course, a film like Pinocchio II is mainly for grown-up children. So for me it’s a big challenge to play it. I always wanted to play a witch when I saw other actors playing them.”

Having done the first Adventures of Pinocchio film, were you eager to come back to the character of Lorenzini?
“Actually when they offered me the second part, they offered me Lorenzini, they had planned that Madame Flambeau would be played by a woman with a German accent who’s supposed to sound like me. I said to the producer, ‘Why don’t I play Madame Flambeau?’ and he said, ‘Give me two weeks and then I’ll call you back.’ Then they called my management and said, ‘Okay, we agree to that.’ It’s so interesting, and the first one was also a lot of make-up. I like make-up. Make-up helps the actor enormously. So it’s actually Lorenzini, it’s actually the same look on both films”

How do you manage to fit in so many films?
“Now I have six films coming out. One is with Michael Caine and Randy Quaid and Catherine McCormack [The Debtors]. Then I just finished a film yesterday evening with John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack again [Shadow of the Vampire]. I did a film with Bill Pullman and Irene Jacob, History is Made at Night, in Finland, and I just finished the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie [End of Days]. And I did a film with Timothy Hutton and Maria Grazia Cucinotta [Just One Night], who’s the sexiest, most erotic woman. She was in Il Postino; she played my wife. And I’m doing music videos and commercials. In America they’re running a commercial with me and Andre Agassi at the moment for Canon.”

Don’t you ever take a holiday?
“I like to go from film to film, meeting new people and playing new roles. Because actors are like children: they want to play and I like to play. I take time off, but for example, I did these two films here. It was very hard doing Shadow of the Vampire and this film together for the last ten days. I could have said goodbye to this film but I didn’t want to say goodbye because it’s such a great script. It’s a great costume and make-up and everything - you will see me later, in half an hour. Too hard - I will never do that again, two films.”

Was it just a coincidence that both shot at the same time in the same country?
“Exactly, and there were some things they knew that I had to do, but I made it. I finished yesterday. A number of days I worked there in the morning and here in the afternoon. It’s not so much the energy you give it, it’s the roles you play: two totally different roles. I played Albin Grau, the producer, and Malkovich was Murnau. Right now my body and my head is flying everywhere. In Canada they have my body, Henson’s have my body, another company in Germany has my body, everyone has my body! So it’s good. I like special effects.”

About a quarter of your films are fantasy or horror.
“Mainly horror. I did Revenant with Rod Steiger.”

I saw that in Portugal.
“I don’t know why it doesn’t get a distributor in the United States. I like the film just for the fact that the director had a dream. He wanted me to be killed in his movie. I said, ‘Who’s killing me?’; he said, ‘Rod Steiger’; I said, ‘Okay.’ I wanted to get killed by Rod Steiger. It was a classical stake through the heart. I’ve played all the roles: I played Dr Jekyll, I played Dracula, Frankenstein, Jack the Ripper. The only thing that’s missing is the Werewolf, but I wouldn’t mind playing that. So now I’m doing this film for the next few weeks.”

What attracts you to a script?
“When I pick one, I look first at my part. If it’s got a beginning and a middle and an end, then I’m interested. There are only two kinds of roles: there is the role where you have a main role like here, or there’s the classic role in America where you have three scenes at the beginning, the middle and the end. Here it’s the main role and it’s quite interesting. I always like to play different characters.”

I read that you love Nosferatu, so Shadow of the Vampire must be a special project.
“It’s a special project because what they did is about the making of Nosferatu. It’s great because you see the recreation of the old scenes. They are recreated again in modern technology - it’s wonderful. And of course having Malkovich playing Murnau was amazing. The only thing is they are all supposed to be German and I was the only German on the set so all the American and English actors have to speak with an accent. And I guess I had the best accent!”

Who plays Max Schreck?
“Max Schreck is Willem Dafoe. He’s wonderful. He looked just like a recreation of the old movie. Willem Dafoe is a wonderful actor. He looked amazing and he also acted amazing.”

Was it shot in black and white or colour?
“It was in colour, but very special colour, very dark. They used special film, 800, which has only been on the market one year. It’s frightening because the camera sees more than your eye. I had a dark suit on with stripes and the camera sees more than you can see with your eye, so there’s very little lighting. They had a lighting man who worked with Kubrick before, and the camera team was all British - Mike Fox was the cameraman - and very good. But of course you can never say in advance; you always hope every film’s going to be good, but you never can say it’s going to be good. I never say a film’s going to be good because you never know.”

I also read that you wanted to work with Schwarzenegger, which you just have done on End of Days. Did you actually shoot scenes with Arnie?
“No, I didn’t. The Devil is played by Gabriel Byrne and I play the assistant to the Devil. They were actually thinking of me for the main role but then they thought two actors with German accents would be a little bit strange. Universal wouldn’t buy that so they gave Gabriel Byrne the part and I play his assistant. So I speak mainly Latin in the movie - I play the high priest. Peter Hyams directed it and it’s the second most expensive film of the year, $160 million. But it was like a small team who were very nice. Peter Hyams does the camera himself also. Look at this make-up. This is how I look as Lorenzini which climbs up to me. I am in transition to be again Lorenzini. It was Penny’s idea and it’s a great idea. We were thinking what could we do.”

As a European living in America, is it nice to come back to Europe to make films?
“Yes. If I have my romantic moods I like to be back in Europe, but if I have my financial moods I prefer to live in America. It’s shadow and light, and the light and the shadows are bigger in America. American films sometimes have no soul and sometimes European films have too much of a soul. But I like to be in American films. Especially because I am, more or less, German, and in the German industry where does a German film go? To some film institute in the jungle or to some festival, and I’m not interested in that. I did it for many years. I worked with Fassbinder many times and in Europe what I like is my favourite director, the genius Lars von Trier. I had prosthetics also when I played the baby of the Devil. You saw that?”

I’ve only seen the first Kingdom.
“The second one is good because I grow like 30 feet as the baby. It was very hard as an actor because in the whole film you never see my body. I’m born as a prosthetic and then they make me bigger and bigger and bigger. It was always the head with a false body. After this film here I’m going to London to do a guest appearance in Steve Norrington’s film. He does a little film with all his friends in it. Steve Norrington directed Blade. For some people who I like I would do that. Then after that I’ll do a film with Lars von Trier, a musical called Dancer in the Dark, written by him and with music by Bjork the singer. Catherine Deneuve is going to be in it.

”It will be interesting technically because the dancing numbers will be filmed with 100 digital cameras at the same time. He showed me a test he did with 30 cameras and it was amazing! It was almost three-dimensional. Every detail is organic because you can cut when you want to cut. It’s all one number seen from different views. So I’m doing that and I want to do a film they offered me with Jess Franco who has 35 different names. It’s very interesting: he wants to make a remake of his own film which he did already, Dr Orloff. And he wants me as Dr Orloff. I told him, because I’m getting used to Luxembourg, to shoot it here. So I might be Dr Orloff in another horror film.”

Franco must be one of the few horror directors you haven’t worked with yet. You worked with Argento, didn’t you?
“With Dario, yes, a long time ago in Suspiria. Now I’m going to do a film - they’re coming next week - from the middle of May to the end of September with Paul Morrissey in German. A Dogme film.”

That’s the principal of using natural light and suchlike.
“It’s all the films at the moment getting awards. The first one Lars von Trier had in Cannes with people starting to understand what it is, which was The Idiots. The second was Festen which got the award in Cannes. The third was Mifune which got the award in Berlin. And number four now Paul Morrissey is doing with me. And I direct my first movie by the end of the year, also a Dogme film. I’m going to be a transvestite in a wheelchair who lives on the sex telephone. I play a cripple.”

You’re really having to search for new roles you haven’t played yet!
“That’s why I play more. So I’m going to play it and nobody can tell me. I’ve worked also with directors who were not so good, so why shouldn’t I direct myself? I’m looking forward to it, and I want to do it very, very inexpensively. It’s really a challenge for me to play the role. It’s a black comedy more or less. It’s going to be called The Story of Lola Stein. Lola is living on telephone sex in a dirty apartment with pictures on the wall of Marilyn Monroe, Rita Heyworth and when they call she describes herself as these pictures. You see this transvestite, totally crippled, living in this sad apartment. There will be a lot of flashbacks.”

You’ve worked with great modern sex symbols like Madonna and Pamela Anderson...
“And Anna Nicole Smith. I think furthermore I always liked Pamela Anderson because she is a great erotic person. She really is erotic; a lot of people don’t think so - I tell you she is very erotic. If Pamela Anderson would be an actress like Meryl Streep, with that body, it would be horrible. I worked the first time with her in Barb Wire; I think Barb Wire is a great action film. The question is always why it wasn’t such a successful film: maybe men couldn’t do in the cinema what they could do at home when they see Baywatch. Which is true! I worked with her also in VIP, her own show. And Madonna saw me in My Own Private Idaho. I did the Sex book with her; I was in about 30 pictures in the Sex book and I thought we looked brilliant together. Anna Nicole Smith I wanted to meet too - I like blonde women - and we did a music video together, which I haven’t even seen.”

Has working with these great female icons helped you in playing a woman in this?
“No. You know there is a trick with playing a woman in a movie. Well, it’s not a trick. You don’t play a woman. I won’t play a woman. You will see it later - I don’t play a woman. I play myself in a wig and in make-up and in a dress! But I don’t try to do anything feminine at all because then it would be horrible and it wouldn’t work.”

Is your new film with Paul Morrissey the first time you’ve worked with him since Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula?
“He’s a friend of mine. I’m a very lazy person, I never schmooze around and keep in contact. But Paul Morrissey is the only one who I kept in contact with because he was very important to me in my life with Dracula and Frankenstein. We’re making a movie, a comedy about the fashion world. I play the lead. It’s called The House of Klang. It’s very interesting. It’s about 80% sure, it’s not 100% sure.”

Flesh for Frankenstein is notorious in Britain where it was banned for many years.
“I don’t know why. I made my first film in England with Mark Sarne, a short, 40-minute film called Road to San Tropez. I was at school in London - I didn’t want to be an actor - and I learnt English. They cast me, then I got offer by Mr Zanuck himself a seven-year contract, which I didn’t do.”

website: www.udokier.de

Director: Daryl Hemmerich
Writer: Daryl Hemmerich
Producer: Daryl Hemmerich
Cast: Sheryl Chambers, Danielle De Luca, Christina Rosenberg
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: VOD

Wolfpeople is a not-quite-feature-length horror film which starts out mediocre and gets progressively worse. It is also almost entirely devoid of any horror until right at the end. Despite that, it’s not completely terrible. I mean, it’s a long way from good but it’s not a shouter. I didn’t yell anything at the screen while watching it. Which must count for something.

Three young white couples head off for a week’s holiday in a massive RV - and further description of these ‘characters’ I could not give you. They drink beer, they smooch, they joke around - but they are entirely devoid of any actual identifiable characteristics. Which of course renders them indistinguishable from one another. Not since Army of the Dead have I seen a film with less characterisation. One of the guys has longer hair than the other two and one of them wears a hat. That’s it. In all other respects they look, dress, speak and behave alike. As for the three young blonde women in mini-skirts, they’re like triplets.

If you were to show me photographs of these six characters stuck to playing cards, I could not match them up into couples, despite having spent an hour watching them last night. Frankly, I couldn’t have done it immediately after watching the film. Heck, I couldn’t have done it during the film. It is in fact quite possible that the three couples switched partners throughout the picture, or that the actors swapped roles every other scene. I wouldn’t have noticed. There is literally no way at all to distinguish these characters.

You know what? This was the film that finally made me realise why Hollywood invented the concept of the Token Black Guy.

Despite constantly knocking back cans of cold beer, they are apparently not old enough to drink since there is talk of someone having forgotten his fake ID. So they obtain booze supplies at a gas station by having the three bimbos act as prickteases to distract the befuddled lone employee while the guys steal boxes of beer. Which now I come to think of it means that these people do have some characteristics, albeit shared between the whole sextet. They are dishonest and cruel, as well as shallow and vacuous.

Are we meant to like these people? Presumably so but really the few things we know about them show them up as unpleasant pricks. Why should we sympathise with them in any way? I guess it’s a good thing that they have no characterisation as that would make them more like real people we could genuinely hate, whereas they are currently just cardboard cut-outs that we don’t care about.

They are on their way to spend a week in a rented house in the middle of nowhere (raising the question of why they borrowed this massive RV if they are not planning to stay in it). On the road, they meet a young woman named Maya with long, dark hair who is meant to be Native American but frankly looks no less Caucasian than anyone else. The scene when these three pretty-boys and their bimbos decamp from the RV and start talking awkwardly to a random female stranger – “What’s your name?” “So, do you live round here?” “I like your hair.” – is straight out of a thousand porno flicks, which I might have considered an intentional lampoon of such things if there was any other evidence of imagination in this sorry affair. NB. There is no nudity in Wolfpeople and no lesbianism although all four actresses do later put on tiny string bikinis for a hot tub scene.

For no apparent reason, they invite Maya to accompany them on their vacation and for no apparent reason she agrees, despite having neither a change of clothes nor any toiletries, and despite being a very obvious gooseberry. It is Maya who raises the local legend of ‘wolfpeople’ who lived in harmony with the Native Americans until the white men came yada yada. Later they stop at a diner where they order seven specials and two pitchers of beer (without having to show ID). Maya introduces the gang to a friend of hers and also to the friend’s boyfriend/husband, the local sheriff. They too talk of wolfpeople and so the out-of-towners leave their specials half-eaten and their pitchers half-drunk and get back on the RV because this diner is just too ‘weird’.

Except it’s not. It’s not even vaguely threatening or odd, not the building nor the clientele. Nor is the house which they eventually reach anywhere near as ‘creepy’ as they constantly say it is. It is also, from all the evidence we have, not in the middle of nowhere. On the road the RV has passed lots of residential and commercial properties, including a shop where one of the guys purchases a full-head werewolf mask for 20 bucks. Later, at the house, he puts this on and leaps out to frighten the girls, one of numerous non-scary ‘scares’ throughout the film where one or other of these brain-donors jumps and shouts at one of the others to predictably unhilarious results. When they reach the house the lights aren’t working, creating further opportunities for such pranks.

Then there is a whole load of sitting around drinking, then the three guys play poker while the bikini-clad bimbettes wait impatiently, then they all get in the hot tub, then everyone except one couple get out of the hot tub, all the while drinking crappy American beer (which, as we all know, is remarkably like making love in a canoe). This is all really boring and it is only in the last ten minutes or so that the wolfpeople attack.

We have caught some glimpses of these wolfpeople earlier on, peering from between the trees. Let me describe them to you. They scamper around on all fours wearing full-body brown fur costumes, topped with werewolf masks which appear to be from the same shop as the one bought earlier. They put me in mind of Ed Naha’s description of the cut-price magical lion in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom: “like Nana the dog in a bad production of Peter Pan, the kind of production where you see a play and get a sandwich.” Eventually, for no apparent reason, these things attack one of the house-mates and I will grudgingly give credit to director Daryl Hemmerich for the way he handles this, using fast cutting and low light to ensure we never get a good look at the thing (with its immovable plastic jaws) while still conveying the impression of a savage, bloody attack by a wild animal.

Then they attack another person, then another. Only at this point do the other four realise that three of their friends are dead but, being idiots, instead of calling for help or barricading themselves in the house, they set out into the remarkably well-lit woods armed with nothing except mop handles and kitchen knives, whereupon they too are slaughtered one by one in quick succession. Except Maya who is spared because she is wearing a 200-year-old necklace that her mother gave her. Points to note no.1: The necklace looks a lot less than 200 years old. Points to note no.2: Since Maya had already gone to bed at this point, either she was sleeping in the necklace or she put it on when she ran downstairs to see what all the screaming was about.

A pointless, lengthy epilogue has the sheriff and assorted medics tidying up a ‘multiple homicide’ most likely caused by ‘a bear’ (what, a legally culpable bear?). The young people’s bodies are all laid out randomly (but neatly) under sheets on the driveway in front of the house, despite the fact that none of them died there. The sheriff allows a local TV reporter a clear view of one of the bloody corpses, which seems unprofessional. Oh, and the fact that the sheriff, when he received the call at home, said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” further emphasises how this house follows the Camp Blood idea of being nominally ‘remote’ without actually being very far away from stuff. Also, if everyone was killed (except Maya, seen still wandering in the forest) who made that call?

Wolfpeople is tosh from start to finish. It’s technically competent for the most part except for (a) the fact that most scenes in the RV ‘on the move’ were clearly filmed in a stationary vehicle, and (b) one exterior scene where the dialogue is almost inaudible, which desperately needed a spot of ADR. But Hemmerich knows how to frame a scene and he keeps the boom out of shot, and DP Justin Miller is able to cope well with some low light levels.

But what really raises this above the level of terrible is the acting which is way, way better than one would expect in something like this. While most of the supporting cast are so wooden that they must surely be the director’s friends, for the leads he chose some busy young professional actors. None of them are able to make anything out of the bland, featureless non-characters they’re given, but each individual line is delivered with conviction. These are jobbing actors with surprisingly extensive IMDB listings, mostly made of small parts in big films or big parts in small films.

So we have the guys: Val Tasso was in Like Mike, Revamped, The Vortex and an episode of Charmed; Matthew Herington was in episodes of Jericho and The Sarah Connor Chronicles; and Nick Vlassopoulos was in Spider-Man 3 and Drag Me to Hell. And we have the ladies: Sheffield-born Sheryl Chambers is a former model who was in Get Him to the Greek, Smokin’ Aces and a 1998 Invisible Man pilot that starred Kyle Maclachlan which no-one seems to have ever seen; Cassie Jaye produces and directs documentaries and has also been in episodes of The OC and Alias; and Danielle De Luca is a full-on genre star with roles in Psychon Invaders, Queen Cobra, Naked Fear, Zombie Farm, Blood Mask: The Possession of Nicole Lameroux, Necrosis and Shadow People plus the title role in The Curse of Lizzie Borden. Christina Rosenberg who plays Maya is an Asylum regular who was in Frankenstein Reborn, The Beast of Bray Road, Slaughter Party, King of the Lost World and Dracula’s Curse (as Elizabeth Bathory). Most of the rest of the cast were in Wolfpeople and nothing else. Hemmerich himself plays the Sheriff.

Wolfpeople was shot in early 2006 in North Idaho on a budget of $30,000. According to press reports, Hemmerich fell out with the owners of a local business called Wolf People whose signage he wanted to feature in the movie. Wolf People is a vulpine rehabilitation centre, a wolf sanctuary which works to dispell myths and prejudices about the animal so they didn’t want to be associated with a film which presented wolves as monster. Although of course these aren’t wolves, they’re ‘wolf people’ who look like Muppets with teeth. By the time the film was self-released by Hemmerich’s Northwest Picture Company in 2009, the director claimed that the title was derived from the ‘wolf people’ of Mexico and their genetic superhairiness disorder but that argument doesn’t really stand up given that the film is explicitly set in the obscure community of Cocollala, where the Wolf People sanctuary is based. Of course, another reason they might not want to be associated with the movie is because it’s pretty bad.

The DVD’s Amazon page reckons this to be 70 minutes, the magic Blockbuster minimum, but it actually runs 63. I watched a VOD version on the HorrorInc website which cost me the princely sum of 75p via PayPal, which I suppose was worth it. Hemmerich was planning a second feature, Death Becomes You, but apparently this never made it into production and it’s not clear what he’s up to now.

MJS rating C-