Director: Anthony Straeger
Writer: Stephen Gawtry
Producer: Anthony Kelly
Cast: Michael Instone, Sarah Paul, Don McCorkindale
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: VOD
Website: www.callofthehunter.com

Call of the Hunter is one of the new breed of British horror movies, in that it’s a perfectly good (except for, well, see below) feature-length film which has received a DVD release on both sides of the Atlantic (albeit self-released by the film-maker over here) and yet absolutely no-one has ever heard of it. Apart from British Horror Revival obsessives like me. And I could count the number of BHR obsessives on the fingers of one address book. That’s why Urban Terrors has sold so many copies...

There was a time, not so long ago, when just the existence of such a thing would have generated interest and discussion. Magazines like Shivers and Samhain would have written about the film because, well, there was damn all else to write about. But now, when British horror features are routinely released at an average rate of one a week like some sort of cinematic Gatling gun, things like this pass everyone by. Look, there’s – oop, missed it. Never mind, here comes another one.

So, four years on, with Call of the Hunter available through various VOD sites for a princely 76p, which is cheaper than buying a secondhand DVD down the market (and saves the trouble of having to carry it to the charity shop afterwards), let’s take a look at the little fellow.

It starts out pretty good. A film crew are shooting a documentary about English folklore icon Herne the Hunter (you may remember him from such TV series as Robin of Sherwood and The Box of Delights). So we have funky-haired director Tamsin (Sarah Paul: Nickelodeon's House of Anubis), German camera-woman Natasha/Nat/Tash (Katrin Riedel-Kelly), Brummie sound-man Dan (Michael Instone: Lycanthropy), sensible production assistant Elaine (Julia Curle: The Spell) and fruity-voiced actorrrrr Ralph (Don McCorkindale: Dr Sleep, Grange Hill and two early Carry Ons) who claims to have had an actual encounter with Herne back in the early 1960s.

Ralph and his sister Caroline were with a friend who disappeared after foolishly blowing a casually discarded hunting horn. More recently, Caroline had become an item with Yank goth Gabriella (Angelique Fernandez, who was in Polanski’s The Ghostwriter) who looks like a cross between Lily Munster and Valeria Watt. Caroline has died, leaving her house to Gabriella (to Ralph’s annoyance), who now lives there alone except for taciturn gardener Jack. Now Ralph, Tamsin and the others have turned up to stay in the house while they film their documentary in the woods surrounding it, which is where Caroline and Ralph allegedly encountered Herne the Hunter.

The movie’s strength is in its characters, delivered through not just fine performances but a well-crafted, literate script which gives the actors something to work with. It’s a real delight to see genuine banter between characters rather than lame joshing or tedious abuse. Dan and Tash in particular have a flirtatious relationship which is a bang-on piece of subtle but effective characterisation. Tamsin does her best to keep everyone’s minds focussed on the job, while also trying to stop Ralph and Gabriella from upsetting each other. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: films are defined by characters and characters are defined by their relationships with other characters. Call of the Hunter gets this exactly right, if anything even more so when arrogant, wealthy producer Max (Jonathan Hansler) turns up in his flashy sports car. (Hansler is quite the BHR regular: he was in Patrol Men, After Death, The Devil’s Business, Axed, Nightmare Hunters and Convention of the Dead. He also narrated a production of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' directed by Frank Scantori.)

Into this cauldron of simmering tensions – sexual, professional, familial and otherwise – comes a supernatural force, subtly at first. Dan falls downstairs in mysterious circumstances, but he is fairly drunk by that time of night so maybe it’s not so mysterious. Or is it? Tash wakes up alarmed because she thinks something touched her in bed. Two of the characters disappear, one of whom turns up dead. There is, as one might expect, no mobile signal in the area and the landline is out of action so it’s a matter of driving somewhere to call the police. The minibus keys disappear which leaves the sports car. But the gate at the end of the lane is inexplicably padlocked shut.

Running back to the house, a character falls and is dragged away by invisible forces in full sight of the others. Any lingering doubt that there might be a rational explanation (“Perhaps it’s not Herne. Perhaps there’s a psycho on the loose.” “Of course there’s a psycho on the loose.”) is dispelled at this point.

And then it all goes to shit.

At about 50 minutes, just as this terrific little film is really pulling on its horror trousers and getting into its stride, it completely disintegrates. The characterisation is still there but any sense of narrative coherence goes out the window. Things happen randomly for no reason and don’t seem to relate to anything else. Out of nowhere, the gang hold an impromptu ouija board session to contact Herne, who demands the return of something. Ralph announces that this must be an item never previously mentioned, which has no obvious significance - and everyone sets to looking for it, a process interrupted by one of the characters becoming possessed. In some way and for some reason.

Suddenly continuity becomes something that just happens to other films. Costumes are splattered with blood one minute, then Persil clean again, then bloody once more. And that whole day/night thing is just glossed over to the extent that, if this was to be taken literally, the events of what seems to be 24 hours take place over the best part of a week.

What has very obviously happened is that something has been cut out. Either never filmed, or filmed but found unusable. It’s Alien vs Hunter all over again. Maybe the production ran out of money (£25,000), maybe it ran out of time (12 days) but it certainly ran out of something. And though the first half of the film was in the can, the second half has clearly had to be cobbled together into some semblance of an alternative plot using whatever was actually shot.

Characters run into the house, then out of the house, then back in, then back out as scenes are cut up and threaded together like a raffia table mat. Though the performances remain top-notch, our empathy with these characters evaporates as the story crumbles. I actually reached the point of wondering whether this was all some sort of dream or hallucination. Perhaps it was all taking place in Dan’s mind after he bumped his head falling downstairs in Act 1.

Parts of the third act take place in a collection of previously unseen, unmentioned farm buildings. Eventually one of our survivors realises that perhaps what Herne is looking for is not the previously mentioned arbitrary McGuffin but an important item discussed in some detail. This character then goes straight to a hidden cupboard and finds it there. It’s as if by that point the film has just given up and wants to get to the end credits as quickly as possible.

What a crashing disappointment, after showing such promise. Director Anthony Straeger clearly knows how to work with actors (on account of being one himself; he cameos here as Herne) and with a film crew too. Scriptwriter Stephen Gawtry (onetime drummer in obscure new wave band Excel) creates believable characters with clever but realistic dialogue and enough mystery to keep a viewer hooked. Cinematographer Dennis Morgan photographs both day and night, interior and exterior with aplomb, his fine work cut together expertly by editor Anthony Kelly. (Morgan’s various camera operator credits include Revenge of Billy the Kid, Lighthouse, Room 36 and ultra-obscure 1996 British superhero film Stone Man, which I remember writing about in an early SFX.)

But all of that is in the first half of the film. After that second death, Kelly (who also produced) and/or Straeger has manfully tried to create something but you can’t make a silk purse out of half a silk purse. Footage is missing, simple as that.

Elsewhere in the credits, Sally Alcott provided the make-up effects, which include a self-mutilated breast and a small intestine dragged out to its full length. She was fresh out of film school when she made this and has subsequently built up an impressive CV which includes Cut, The Last Seven, Kung Fu Flid, Jack Falls, Kill Keith, Cockneys vs Zombies, May I Kill U? and Dead End plus gigs on X-Men: First Class and World War Z. Nick Tregenza, whose CGI effects include a pretty passable decapitation, also worked on Tied in Blood, The Monuments Men and something about a clone of Princess Diana. Chris Reading (Stag Night of the Dead) handled the fine sound recording. Martin Shenton (Tomorrow Never Dies, 28 Weeks Later) co-ordinated the stunts. Elliott Daniels (Tuck Bushman and the Legend of Piddledown Dale) composed the score - although much of the soundtrack is listenable but not entirely appropriate rock songs. There seems to be no credited production designer.

The terrific cast all deserve plaudits but none more so than Instone who brings both cockiness and vulnerability to the cheery, cheeky Brummie - and gets most of the best lines (“If this was a horror film I’d be dead by now”). But though Dan displays a dry, wry sense of humour, the descriptions of Call of the Hunter as a ‘horror comedy’ are very much wide of the mark. A few moments of character-appropriate dark humour doth not a comedy make, and it is completely misleading of the film’s marketing to bill it as such. Or let’s put it this way: if Call of the Hunter is actually intended as a comedy, it fails because while it’s (50% of) an effective horror film, it’s not comedic. Since the ‘comedy’ angle seems a later addition to publicity, my suspicion is that it may be in response to the film receiving more laughter than intended at its handful of screenings.

R Squared Distribution released the film on DVD in the States in November 2009 and Straeger released a UK disc through his own Quid in Shrapnel Productions in September 2010. The movie doesn’t have a BBFC certificate but no-one seems bothered about that sort of thing any more. There was a brief review in Scream and a bunch of laudatory reviews on Amazon, IMDB and a few obscure websites, some of which are duplicates and most of which were obviously written by associates of the film-makers (4/5-star reviews by people who have never reviewed anything else).

But Call of the Hunter is one of the new breed of British horror movies, one with the freedom to explore different distribution channels. Is it worth buying on DVD for ten quid? With the best will in the world, unless you know the cast or crew personally, no it’s not. But is it worth 76p to watch on your computer? I would say yes. I don’t know whether Anthony Straeger gets a cut of that 76p or whether he sold the rights to someone who sold them to someone else who licensed the film to HorrorInc, Online Movies Box and the other places where it can be viewed. But that’s the distribution model de nos jours folks and it makes a heroic failure like Call of the Hunter justifiably accessible.

If it was all as good as the first half, I’d probably give this an A-. If it was all as much of a mess as part two, I’d probably go no higher than C-. So I’ll split the difference but please be aware that this rating represents an average, not a consistent level of quality.

MJS rating: B-

Originally published in SFX in early 1998, this was, I believe, the first major interview with Karey Kirkpatrick. At the time, he was working on Chicken Run and a Thunderbirds movie which eventually fell apart (for reasons unconnected with the script). This interview predated his involvement with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

Your first screenplay was The Rescuers Down Under. How did you get that job?
"I went to film school at USC. While I was there, my partner Byron Simpson and I wrote an animated screenplay, which not too many people do because at the time there was really only one market for it, which was Disney. But I have a musical theatre background - started as an actor - and he and I wanted to write musicals because we both write music. So our first thinking was: where can we do this and make money? And our first thought was Disney. So we wrote this musical and brought it to them and played it for them. They had a piano in an office there; he sat down and played and we sang the songs, and at the end said, ‘What do you think?’ And after a little bit of discussion they called us and said, ‘Look, we don’t like this particular project, but we like the talent.’ Because they were in the business of doing musicals. It was a little bit rare to have somebody who wrote all three - wrote music, lyrics and dialogue - so it was something that they weren’t looking for.

”So they brought us on board as summer interns. We wrote a few Mickey Mouse shorts, and they liked the way we wrote dialogue. At that time The Rescuers Down Under was a script that was in need of some work, so they asked us to come in and tell them what’s wrong with Rescuers, and what would you do to fix it? So we did that, and they said, ‘Okay, why don’t you come on board and write that?’ and they offered us a full-time staff position. So for three years I was a staff writer, with Byron as a partner, at Disney. Rescuers was the only thing that I wrote that got produced because they only make one a year, so the ratio of scripts developed to scripts produced is pretty high."

Did you find that material from unproduced scripts could be revamped into new scripts?
"No, I found that they pretty much owned every idea that I uttered. So if there were any ideas that I had that I wanted to do later, I had to pretty much keep them to myself. There were a couple of original ideas that I had, that I worked on, but when I left there they belonged to Disney. Pretty much the way it worked was that we would go in and have development meetings every Monday. Then after I’d finished one project, they’d say: ‘Okay, this week you’re going to be doing Romeo and Juliet - with ants.’ I actually did work on that. You work on it for a while, then send the treatment off to Jeff Katzenberg and he gives you the thumbs up or the thumbs down."

How many staff writers do Disney have?
"At this time there were probably about six, I would say, off and on, doing all sorts of different things. When I started there, Oliver and Co. was being made, so it was really before this animation renaissance. The next film that they did was The Little Mermaid, and that was really big. Then Rescuers after that. Unfortunately, Rescuers got sandwiched between Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, which were their two biggest of all time. Rescuers was the first one where they didn’t use cels. They had perfected a process of going from computers to film. It was always hand-drawn, but the inking and painting and photography was gone."

So it was scanned into computer and then transferred from computer to film?
"That’s right. And that’s why the opening of Rescuers is really spectacular. A boy goes out and goes flying with this eagle. The opening shot is a tracking shot across the Outback towards Ayers Rock, with all this stuff rushing by. It’s stuff you really couldn’t have done in the old style of animation, because you’re limited by things you stack up in a room. I think that opening shot moves through 32, 35 different planes. It was breathtaking."

Did they put you and your partner on this because it was a new technique, and new writers wouldn’t be hidebound by previous conventions?
"No, we had got put on board because we had written a couple of Mickey Mouse featurettes, that they were doing back then. They released one called The Prince and the Pauper which we didn’t write. They were doing lots of ‘Mickey in classic fairy tales’: Mickey in The Emperor’s New Clothes, Mickey the Pied Piper..."

Were these for TV?
"No. They released one as a short before Rescuers, a twenty-minute thing. I think they were going to do them as video. When we were writing those, we got known as being pretty good at telling a story without using too much dialogue. The problem most live-action writers have when they come into animation is depending too much on dialogue. So the trick in any situation is to try to let a picture tell a thousand words, and it’s even more true in animation because it’s a superficial medium. So I guess they just saw something there.

"It was great, it was a really great experience working at Disney. When Byron and I worked on that there were also nine storyboard artists, all in the same vicinity. We would write something; a storyboard artist would take it and board it, then they would give it back to us. They had made changes, and then we would refine what they did. It was close to collaboration. That was my first professional writing experience at age 23, 24: baptism by collaboration. And I never got into that frame of mind of being set in my work. I got used to being a member of a team, and I guess that was an attractive feather in my cap. It was really invaluable."

Did you get the job at Disney because of your connections from working at EPCOT?
"Well, indirectly, because when I worked at EPCOT, I did improvisational theatre for a company that was subcontracted by Disney."

Was that basically keeping people happy while they’re queuing?
"At EPCOT, they have all those different Pavilions, representing the different countries. They have the Mexican Pavilion, the Morrocan Pavilion, the Italian Pavilion, and each one is different. I worked in the Italian and the United Kingdom Pavilion doing audience participation street theatre, like the stuff you see at Covent Garden. In fact the troupe that I worked with performed at Covent Garden, although I never did."

Had you been to Britain?
"I had never been. My first trip to Britain was after writing James and the Giant Peach. I had been to Paris, but never Britain. We did bastardised versions of Romeo and Juliet, things like that, with really bad fake British accents. That was also a great experience. And here again, that was where I first started deciding I wanted to write. One of the guys from that troupe, he left that company and came down here, started working for Walt Disney. So he was the one who made the initial phone-call: ‘I know this guy. I saw the script that he wrote. I think you should take a look at it.’ It does depend on who you know."

After you’d done Rescuers, was James the next film you did?
"No, I actually wrote a film for Propaganda Films, which was a small company producing videos. That’s where David Fincher came from. They were starting to branch into features. They had done Candyman, Kalifornia. They had the rights to a children’s book, The Little Vampire. I was hired to write that screenplay, which I did. Then they sent it to Disney, asking if they wanted to co-produce. I had just gotten off three and a half years at Disney, and they sent me right back. Disney replied, ‘No, we’re not interested in making this.’ But one of the executives over there had read the script, was reminded of me, and he rang me up and said, ‘Why don’t you come in and have a crack at Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves? We have this idea for a new Honey movie.’"

Was that when it was still planned for a theatrical release?
"They sent it to Jeffrey and Jeffrey decided, ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to continue this script.’ So it sat there for a little while, but off of that script, David Vogel, the President of Disney, read the script and really liked my first draft. So he called and said, ‘We have a script that needs attention.’ They were going to shelve the current draft of James and the Giant Peach, so David said, ‘Before you do that, let’s have one more crack at it.’ So he sent it out to a few different writers. As a writer, you get a script and get asked: ‘Read this. Tell me what’s wrong.’ I knew the book - I’d read a lot of Roald Dahl - so I read it and I wrote up a twelve-page document: here’s what I would do to fix this. I met with Henry Selick. And that’s how I got the job."

Was it always planned that James would be a stop-motion picture with a live-action framing story?
"I’m pretty sure it always was, right from the beginning. Nightmare Before Christmas had been about 80 minutes long at a cost of something like $25-30 million. They wanted James to be longer, but couldn’t afford to give it a bigger budget, so they decided one way would be to have a live-action framing story. So it was already like that when I came on board, and I’m pretty sure that the concern at first was budgetary. I think they could probably have done it all as stop-motion, but I’m not sure it would have worked. Because this voyage across the ocean was a breaking point in the story, like The Wizard of Oz."

It’s also a bit like The Phantom Tollbooth.
"Yes, it follows a relatively classic structure, which makes it difficult, from the movie’s standpoint, to give it a through-line. That’s one of the first things that I noticed as soon as I came on board; that in order for this to work as an hour-and-a-half movie, it needed something that connected the beginning and the end. So I suggested the two aunts, who gave him the sense of adventure and mystery. I met with Lucy Dahl beforehand. She had some say in who she would like to write the script.

"As I explained it to her, a book - especially a children’s book - commands a different kind of storytelling. Very few people read a book in one sitting, and a lot of times parents are reading this book to their children. You can read a chapter at a time, and by the time you get to chapter ten or twelve, you’re not that concerned with what happened in chapter one, tying all the plot up. But in a 75-minute movie, it was just 75 minutes ago that you set this ball rolling. It would be nice to have everything resolved and come together at the end. So the biggest change that we made, that people still come to me and say: ‘Why didn’t you kill the aunts right away?’ I tell them that we have to have them show up in New York City. It’s something for James to overcome to show that he’s grown."

You adapted that into a children’s book, as well.
"That was actually Lucy Dahl’s doing. Lane Smith had done all these incredible drawings for the movie [NB. Not Lane Smith the Lois and Clark actor - MJS]. That was his job: conceptual designer. He designed the look of the characters and so on. He had about twenty drawings that he did, and the storyboard artists and the model-makers used them as a point of inspiration. After we were done, Lucy would see these drawings and say, ‘They’re breathtaking. What will happen to them?’ ‘Oh, they’ll be buried in the Disney archives somewhere.’ So she said, ‘Why not release them as a children’s book, telling the story of the movie?’ And she very kindly suggested that I be the guy to write the story to go with them. That’s how that came about. The only thing that Lane had to generate for the book, was that he hadn’t done any drawings for the live-action sections of the story, so he drew about five more pictures, and that became the book."

After James, did you go back to Honey?
"Well, during James I was actually working on another film for Disney, just another assignment. I found out, during the making of James, that they were going to make Honey as their first straight-to-video film. The reason they could do that is that by going to television resolution you can save money on the effects, by not having to get it to a projectable format. So they were going to give that a shot, and decided while I was on James to bring in another writing team to rewrite the script I had done."

So you weren’t involved in altering it from a $40 million script down to a $7 million script?
"No. I was on James at the time, so they brought somebody else in."

Were you happy with the film that Dean Cundey directed??
"Yes. The finished product, I thought was really good, with some good laughs in it. The only disappointment for me, was that when I had originally written it, the premise is that the kids think that the parents are away and have a party. In my head, that party escalated into something that’s more akin to Sixteen Candles or Say Anything, a huge party, out of control, with 150 kids."

In the end it was about five or six.
"In the end it was nine, politely listening to music. I had pictured something much more out of control. But that’s very costly, having that many extras for that many days. It makes it a much more complicated production. So that’s the only part that was a little less than what I had expected. The Hot Wheels sequence was in my first draft, so that was nice to see. It was a fun script to do, because I could walk round my house and think: where would be an interesting place to be if you were a quarter-inch tall? I had a sequence where they fell in the aquarium. Whereas in this one they float in a soap bubble, in my version I had them rise out of the aquarium in a bubble from the aerator. It really was fun to see that script, because it had been held then resurrected."

What came after James and the Giant Peach?
"I worked on a script for Disney that’s still sitting there; I don’t think they’ll make it. It was called Me and My Shadow. It’s interesting: I get a phone call, saying, ‘We have an idea for a movie.’ I say, ‘Okay.’ And they say, ‘A guy gets separated from his shadow.’ And I wait for a few seconds, then say, ‘Is that it?’ ‘Yes, that’s it.’ So I’m supposed to go off and build a story around that, which is awkward. You’re torn as writer: you’re glad that somebody’s offered you a job, and you’re eager to take it, but you’re also struggling because you’re not sure what to do with this. I get kind of frsutrated because it’s such a long shot that you’re going to crack this nut. They just have this inkling of an idea.

“Then a company called Interscope approached me. They had a film that was called Frank, about a kid Frankenstein. Here again, they had a script and they said, ‘This isn’t working. Read it. Tell us what you can do.’ So I read it and said, ‘Here’s what I think...’ So I worked on that one for a while, and that was where the Thunderbirds project first came to my attention. They had done some work with Peter Hewitt. Polygram owned the ITC library, and Interscope is a Polygram company, and Working Title is a Polygram company. So initially Interscope was going to do Thunderbirds. They introduced me to Peter Hewitt. What’s funny about Thunderbirds is that the film executives at Interscope called me in to say, ‘We have a film idea that we think you would be good for,’ having just worked with me on Frank. They said ‘Do you know the Thunderbirds?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Okay, well we’re doing a live-action version of the Thunderbirds.’ They started talking about Lady Penelope and Parker and all these different people for about five minutes, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’ Because in America, the Thunderbirds are the formation flying unit of the United States Air Force!"

The equivalent of our Red Arrows.
"Exactly."

And you weren’t familiar with the TV series?
"I had never seen it."

It has never been properly syndicated in America, has it?
"Well, it was, sort of. People who are about 40 years old remember it, but I was born in ‘65, when the show came out. When I saw it, it looked vaguely familiar. Maybe it was recalling some two-year-old’s memory that was stored somewhere. So after about five minutes I had to come clean and say, ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ So they sent me home with a treatment that Peter had written and the pilot episode of the show, and then I came back the next day when I had formulated some ideas. I met with Pete and we chatted, and in a couple of months I was in london, developing it with him while he was in pre-production on The Borrowers."

By this point had you watched the whole series?
"Yes. All 32 episodes were given to me on video-tape, so I have them all. I’m now an expert. I went to a film library in London and read about Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds. Because movie executives, the people at Polygram, they really don’t care if it stays true to the show because in their eyes, it has to play in the American market, and then subsequently at the world-wide box office. A movie studio won't do a $75 million experiment. Actually, Bean just totally reversed that idea. But Pete and I were thinking: ‘There’s a lot of really, really rich stuff in there.’

”And Pete had a very specific vision for how this should be. This should be a sort of retro look at the future. The charm of the show is that it was made in 1965 and its view of the future is ‘atomic energy is good’ and so on. I remember, in one of the first drafts I wrote, somebody picked up this cellphone, because I would try to use little things, and Pete would correct me and say, ‘No, everything has got to be big. With big buttons on.’ As opposed to Star Trek which has black panels with LEDs and little buttons. Everything in Thunderbirds has big switches; big knobs; big, bright, colourful machinery. Where other things are high-tech, Thunderbirds is low-tech. I really bought into that. I thought, ‘That is what will make this film unique.’ A big, colourful version of the future. So we started working on the story. I’m now into my fourth pass at the script. The first draft I did was 150 pages and probably would have cost more than Titanic, so we’re continually trying to call in the budget, keep it managable. Whenever we’re together working on it, we always come back to: does that feel ‘Thunderbirds’? Does that feel like a Thunderbirds thing?"

On the one hand you have an American market where a lot of people aren’t going to be familiar with Thunderbirds, and on the other you have the UK where you would be hard-pressed to find anybody under about 40 who couldn’t name every character. It’s intrinsic to Britain in the same way that Sherlock Holmes is. So is it tricky catering to those two different markets?
"I think that’s why I was hired: because I’m not a British writer. When I came clean and said, ‘I don’t know this show’, I thought, ‘I’m not going to see this job again’. But they said, ‘Actually that’s good because we need somebody to develop a movie who doesn’t know it all.’ Like over here, had I written The Brady Bunch Movie - The Brady Bunch is like Thunderbirds; you know every episode - I would be filling it with lots of inside jokes."

Which would have passed right over our heads.
"Exactly. So I wanted to take from Thunderbirds the stuff there that’s rich and really good. To be honest with you, I sit down and I watch the series - and it’s very frustrating. Because firstly, they look amazing. I don’t know if you’ve seen them lately, but they still hold up today. The art direction, the model work. Derek Meddings; the guy was a pioneer. The colour saturation - beautiful. There’s a lot of great work going on there. However, I think on a story and character level... Those came second."

There’s a lot of padding in some episodes.
"I think they had the idea and Gerry Anderson put Thunderbirds out there and all of a sudden it was really well received. The first ones they made were a half-hour, and because everyone liked Thunderbirds they ordered longer episodes. The first nine episodes were made as half-hours, then they added more footage. I think all of the history around the characters in Thunderbirds grew as the series grew. But there are things in there that when you’re a writer trying to create a movie for an audience that’s a tad more savvy, there are many frustrating things there. Like: it’s a top secret organisation, and yet the brothers turn up and show their faces to everyone at the rescues. When they leave, they go: ‘Now remember, this is secret. Don’t talk.’ That’s not very clever.

”So it was part of my job, figuring out ways to keep their identities hidden. And to really play up this fact that Jeff Tracy’s this billionaire that owns an island and has five rich playboy sons, that the world thinks are these John F Kennedy Jr types, born with silver spoons in their mouths, that they don’t do anything. Nobody knows who International Rescue are. Even the President of the United States doesn’t know who they are or where their secret base is. The other problem is that you can’t really tell a movie about people who just show up at random rescues. Because in essence, the Thunderbirds are firefighters. You look at the movie that Ron Howard did, Backdraft; in that movie they had somebody who was behind these fires. So the plot of the movie is: alright, somebody’s setting all these fires. We are telling a movie about firefighters, but we’re also trying to figure out who the villain is, what’s going on here. In a similar vein, in Thunderbirds, somebody’s behind some of these disasters that we’re showing."

It’s not The Hood, is it?
"The Hood is in the movie, but is an operative of the big villain. The Hood is a master of disguise that’s out there working for him. Someone is trying to get at International Rescue. That’s what gives us our plot, and as long as you have that, you can hang all the fun and the characters of it. Lady Penelope and Parker are such great characters to work with."

You’re keeping all the main characters from the series. Brains?
"Oh yes. I can tell you the characters: Lady Penelope, Parker, Jeff, all the brothers of course, Kyrano, TinTin, Brains, The Hood."

Have you got Grandma in there?
"Grandma isn’t in there yet, but she’s on the sidelines in reserve in case we need her."

She never did much except make cups of tea.
"And we have reporter Ned Cook [From the episode ‘Terror In New York City’ - MJS], who has made his way into the script. So those are the main characters that we use. I’ll tell you something funny. One Polygram executive read the script, this was right after Men in Black came out and made a lot of money, and I kid you not, one of them said, ‘Could one of the brothers be... black?’ We said, ‘I don’t think so...’ Pete and I just looked at each other and went: ‘Uh... no.’"

A lot of people are waiting to see what the actual vehicles look like? Have the designs been finalised?
"Yes. People are going to be so pleased. Because if you went in and you looked at the drawings right now, as a guy who knows the series, and you looked at Thunderbirds 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, you’d look at them and go: ‘Oh yes, they look like them. Uh-huh, that’s exactly what they look like.’ Then if I pulled down a chart and said, ‘Let me show you the old ones,’ you’d go, ‘Oh wow, there is an improvement here, just a bit more updated.’ But you wouldn’t look at them and go, ‘Oh my God, they’ve totally changed!’"

So Thunderbird 2 has still got the pods and things?
"Oh, absolutely. Just the lines have been changed a little bit, or maybe an engine casing here, or whatever. But they look terrific. The artists drew them up and then they were scanned into a computer so that we could start playing around with them. Because a lot of them will have to be computer-generated. We’re not building little models. Pete put together a little computer-animated sequence of them flying and dropping a pod, and Thunderbird 4 going into the water. It looks absolutely great."

Is FAB 1 in there?
"Yes. Our job is to build these really incredible action sequences, the rescues, and to tell an emotionally interesting story that has to have intrigue; Lady Penelope playing top secret agent games. It’s set all over the world. It’s a very global, big, big story. We're being very dilligent about staying as true to the series as we can, and still make it an exciting action movie."

What’s the projected date to start shooting?
"I think they’re planning to start shooting this summer, in July. The script that we’re working on now, should be the one that they greenlight. There may be some changes, but they mostly want to make sure that we have a managable budget."

Are they shooting in the US or the UK?
"The UK. It will be based out in Shepperton, from my understanding. So all the sound stage work, and all the effects work, will be done in the UK. Peter Chiang is the effects designer. Then of course we’ll be on location."

So there should be some hot casting news soon. Everybody’s waiting to hear who’s going to play these roles.
"And that’s something that we should be pretty clear on, because last year I got it back that Joanna Lumley had been cast as Lady Penelope, which was really sloppy journalism because it’s not true. I know Joanna from working with her on James, and it’s not fair to Joanna, it’s not fair to the production. But no-one has been cast. Although of course names get thown around. At one time, somebody threw around Julie Christie. I think Peter did say that he viewed Lady Penelope as a younger Julie Christie, which was possibly not the right thing to say. But in fact I just saw a trailer for a film that had Julie Christie in it, and my wife turned to me and said, ‘She looks just like Lady Penelope.’ With Lady Penelope, it’s pretty important that her age be hard to tell. You’re not sure if she’s older or younger; she’s somewhere in never-aging land. But no-one’s been cast."

Moving on to Chicken Run, how did you get on to that?
"Well, Jake Eberts is the producer, and he was the executive producer on James. While I was working on James, he said that they had just landed a deal with Aardman. Jake and Lenny Young, the co-producer actually went and saw A Close Shave when it first came out. They screened it at a theatre near the academy. He went to see that and then he turned to me and said, ‘You know, we’re still trying to figure out how to do the feature. And if you’ve got any ideas, let me know.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’ Meanwhile, I went off and was working on Frank. When I hooked up with Lenny at a later date, he said, ‘Oh, they came up with an idea that they want to do.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘It’s The Great Escape with chickens.’ And I said, ‘What a great idea!’ They were going to hire a British writer to write it, so they hired Jack Rosenthal."

An odd choice. He’s a very good, very respected writer, but he’s never written animation before.
"No, he hadn’t. But I think their big concern was making sure that it stayed very, very British. And I absolutely agreed. Because Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and all that are quintessentially English. So their thinking was: let’s get a guy in like Jack who’s written loads of plays, he’s great with character, let’s have him do this.’ Then his script came in and wasn’t quite what they expected. So they had a conversation with Jack which I understand was very amiable, and he said, ‘Well, this is the way I live and breathe, but if it’s not working for you, then no hard feelings. Look around, get some other opinions.’ This is when Lenny called me. He had suggested to Jake that they send it to me, and Jake knew me from James. And this was the exact same situation that I was in on James: ‘We’ve got a script. It’s not quite working. Take a look at it and tell us what you would do.’

”So they flew me over to Bristol, and I spent two days with Nick Park and Pete Lord. It’s very confusing, knowing all these British guys called Pete. I hear a British accent on the phone going: ‘It’s Pete here...’ We talked about what the script would be and what I would do, and I went away and they said yes. So I came back over to Bristol, and we all went up to the Yorkshire Dales - to Wensleydale, ironically - and pounded out the script in what was probably the two most creative weeks of my life. I can’t say enough good about these guys. Pete is a very collaborative guy, which is great for a writer. We came up with a lot of great ideas, and a 30-page outline. I went off and had four weeks to write that. I was living in London from August to November, working on Thunderbirds, because they had set up a think-tank over on Great Portland Street. We had artists, visual designers, set designers: all working together so they could share ideas. So I was in London, working on Thunderbirds and Chicken Run, trying to make sure they didn’t get confused. We actually spent four days working on the Thunderbirds script in The Royal Crescent, Bath."

Is the final draft of Chicken Run done now?
"It’s funny you should ask. I finished the latest draft. You know Dreamworks is the distributor? We’re getting together on Thursday and having a big pow-wow: Jeff Katzenberg, Jake Eberts, all of us are going to be in a room, talking about my script. Hopefully I’ve got all the right ingredients in the story. That’s especially important in claymation. If there’s something that I wrote in live-action, the dialogue could continue to be polished. When you get actors in to read, they come up with new lines. So it’s a very, very organic process. It’s organic nature is treated as a good thing. They don't call it ‘the creative process’ for nothing."

Have you got anything lined up after Chicken Run and Thunderbirds?
"I don’t. My wife’s having a baby in three weeks - that’s my next project. I’m going to be working on Thunderbirds and Chicken Run pretty much all year. After that I want to sit down and work on something that’s my own. Ever since James and the Giant Peach, I haven’t had the downtime to develop a project that I can go out and try to set up. So that’s probably what I’ll do. But sometimes you get a call that you can’t pass up. That’s what Chicken Run was. I’ve had a really good time on both these films, and they’re both going to get made.”

[In fact, this version of Thunderbirds never got made. A completely different film was released in 20045, when Karey filled me in on what had happened to his version. - MJS]

interview originally posted 3rd March 2005

In May 2004, when the live-action Thunderbirds movie was released, I asked Karey Kirkpatrick what had ever happened to the version he was working on when I first interviewed him in 1998. This was his reply by email.

"Peter Hewitt was attached to direct and he wrote a treatment and brought me on to turn that into a script. I wrote four drafts, working closely with Pete and a team of visual development artists in London. We were in what they call pre-pre production. The ships were designed, locations were scouted, some sets designed, several sequences were storyboarded. Casting was discussed but our particular incarnation of the production was shut down before any script went out to any actors.

"I think the movie fell apart for a couple of reasons. One, we were with Working Title when they were being financed by Polygram at the time Polygram was coming undone. So that didn't help. But also, Pete and I were going for a bit of that camp tone that was present in the series and I don't think everyone at the studio was on board with that approach, mostly because of how expensive the movie was to produce. It's tough to write a script like that because camp dialogue actually reads like bad on-the-nose dialogue. And then later I heard they made Alan much younger (in my draft he was 18, in the final film I think he's 14 or 15). So obviously, they changed their target audience.

"Also, the story changed. Pete had created a villain that lived on the moon and was trying to suck the atmosphere off of the earth. I suggested that this felt like a sequel villain and perhaps we should create a story using the Hood as the villain and his main objective is to uncover the secretes of International Rescue. That idea was shot down at the time. Ironically, I think that's the way they eventually ended up going."

I met director Peter Hewitt in 1997 on the set of the big-budget feature film version of The Borrowers.

What first attracted you to the project, because it's a bit of a change from Wild Palms?
"Yes. What was it? I was familiar with the books, so it just has a familiarity and childhood remembrance, resonant of blah blah blah and all that. But centrally I suppose it was the challenge of doing a little people movie; doing the definitive little people movie which I don't think has been done. They tried with Indian in the Cupboard [Starring Hal Scardino - MJS], and the effects in that were flawless, but it was such a slow dull film that they failed. So that, essentially. I suppose everyone's looking for something that hasn't been done before. Of course, this has been done, but it hasn't been done in quite this way. To do it, and also to do it such that their littleness almost was inadvertant, their littleness wasn't the most important thing."

Has it needed the technology that's only available now to do justice to this?
"Yes. Part of what I did to paper the cracks between the real world and the oversize world, which we're doing either with effects or with huge sets, was to make the whole world in which this takes place a bit odd. So that even if something doesn't quite work, you're that much more forgiving. So in that respect, you could always have done this. If you apply those techniques, we have a weird environment that could be somewhere in the 1950s but isn't. It's an alternative present. The only cars that exist are Morris Minors. People have mobile phones and televisions but dress in '50s clothes; a very well-defined colour palette. This weird red-brick utopia. So that look could have been done fifty years ago."

But in terms of motion control blue-screen work...
"But in terms of keeping the camera moving in long scenes where human are just having long conversations with Borrowers , that's only possible now. Some of the effects shots we're doing, I'm confident have never been done before. Or the special effects elements we're bringing together are for the first time."

Producer Tim Bevan said some very nice things about you. He said you brought a vision to the film. What is your vision?
"I'm glad he said that, but a lot of this film's riding on his enthusiasm and tireless charging forward. So that I get my nice bit to say about him. So what was my vision? I suppose essentially that the script I first got had the Borrowers doing fantastic things, things that were too fantastic. Like they got stuck on a train. Well, not too fantastic, but they get stuck on a big train. They're being hurtled out of town. The family move house from one town to another. What I was interested in was the fact that for a little person, a life-or-death situation could take place in the corner of a room. You can have an action-adventure sequence in the fireplace. That's what really interested me. That something humans would do without even thinking could easily kill Borrowers.

"So every situation they fall into, every set piece, comes about through tiny occurences. Like when the family move, Dad is a bit heavy with the brake on the removal truck, and it has big consequences for the Borrowers who are hiding in the back; they fall out onto the road. So some tiny event is troublesome for them. I didn't want the family moving from one town to another town. I thought: let's have them move two streets away, just to a slightly different part of town, which to the Borrowers would be the other side of the world. But for us, we could walk there in two minutes. Similarly, in the house one adventure takes place in the kitchen, one adventure takes place just outside in the hall. Five feet away for us, but another neighbourhood for Borrowers.

"I also wanted to create, as I say, this slightly weird world in which the whole story is taking place. partly to soften the edges between the effects stuff which we were going to have to do, and the real world. And partly just because I like doing that. That kind of environment is fun and interesting. Like Wild Palms; that was 2007 so that was specualting as to what Los Angeles might be like in 2007, but not really being remotely realistic about it - using it as an excuse to have fun and twist things around a bit."

The oversize props gave us a big thrill. Are you getting that?
"It's an enormous thrill. One thing I was very sure of and very interested in was building big props. And whereas, I suppose Indian in the Cupboard used science as their yardstick; they wanted to be incredibly optically accurate. I believe an audience gets a real kick out of seeing big sets and knowing that they're big sets. Just looking at it and going, 'Wow, they built that.' I think there is a way of getting that thrill without being taken out of the movie. But the more we work on these sets, they are so good. I think they may even just hold up so that you won't be able to tell what are the trick shots and what are big sets. But even if you do, I think it's going to work because they are so fun to look at and they are so fun to be on. That's something an audience will go for."

Are you finding that you can keep in mind that these are still rubber and not actual items?
"No, it's easy to detach yourself. That opens up a whole film prop question. Film props are film props; they're meant to last a day. Which is why restaurants like Planet Hollywood are so bad. There are these things put in glass cases high up on the wall, and they look crap. Because they're not on a film set. Because they're supposed to look glorious for the 15 seconds they're in front of the camera, when somebody's just polished it, just put a lick of paint on it, lit it in the most wonderful way. Take it away from that environment and it just looks like a piece of plastic."

Are you coping with keeping continuity between the already-filmed real-size sequences and the oversize sequences?
"It has been very precisely worked out. I often say, 'Bugger! What are going to do?' but it's never for those reasons. It's because we've got a lot of work to do in a little time. It is very, very complicated stuff. One interesting thing is, when you're on these big sets, to stop yourself from doing really fancy things. To try and remember you're just looking at a little guy running across a shelf, and for a human being to be really shooting a little guy, you'd do it very simply. But when you get there, because you have these cranes and all this great suff, you want to swing in with the crane and do all these great moves. Or do something funky that you would never actually do because you would be moving, like, seven inches. You'd never do a tiny little move and spin round here.

"But I digress, I think. One thing that has been difficult to do, like when we did the scene with John Goodman and Mark Williams ripping up the house looking for the Borrowers, it was difficult to remember to keep in focus that this wasn't a scene with two people in it. It was actually a scene with four people in it; two of them are behind the wall cavity. So consequently we're getting twice as much coverage, because you're having to cut away into the wall cavity, and then we come back to re-establish where the humans are. So I think the crew were getting frustrated there; they perceived it as being overkill. We were overkilling this scene, but that was because we were only shooting half the film. The human half for the first six weeks, and all the blue-screen and the Borrowers side of it afterwards."

Does it make you nervous that you'll only know if that's really worked when you edit them together?
"No, it's all working out really well so far. There have been a couple of times when we were rehearsing a shot and it just is awful, and I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, it's never going to work.' We had John Goodman up to his waist in liquid cheese. He was supposed to ram against the end of this cheese slide, covered in slime, and then have this row of bottles clinking on his head. We rehearsed and it was just awful. It was the end of the day and he was freezing cold and miserable. We had a guy pulling this line of bottles and it was just rubbish. Then we just turned the camera on the first time and it all worked. I have no idea how it all worked. But we got it, and spent another five takes trying to get it again and didn't. That was just complete luck.

"But in terms of the overall look of the thing, that was very well crafted and well thought out. The whole film was thoroughly storyboarded. One thing that I supose always is a concern is you have all these great plans and thoughts, but at the end of the day you have to relie on a little special effects guy sitting in a basement somewhere, painting it all together frame by frame. So we've tested as many things as we can without actually going ahead and doing them. And the ones that we tested have come out really really well. They've come out well enough so you can feel confident that yes, this is going to work. Interestingly enough, what we did learn from Indian in the Cupboard was that being incredibly scientific and accurate about all this stuff is not the way to go.

"The way to go is just to say, 'There's a little guy in the shot. He's jumping on your nose now' and let the actors do that. Just say, 'There he is, he's swinging from a rope and landing on the fridge' and keep it free. Just do what feels right. At times I'm really butting heads with the special effects guys because they're saying, 'If we do this job, we haven't got a stage big enough to accommodate the blue-screen element. Because the little guy's five feet away from him here and the soundstage we've got is only 70 feet, so it ought to be blah blah blah. So I'm saying 'Well, just cheat. We'll cheat and make it up and fudge it. If we can get away with a 50 foot fridge, we can get away with cheating 70 foot for 60 feet or something like that. So our basic philosophy is that: if it looks good and feels good, then it's right.

"I've seen a load of it put together. We're cutting it as we go along. Where we haven't done stuff we're slugging in storyboards. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. It's a kind of organic thing that grows and changes, but for the most part it's looking really good. We've got a really good cast, who can really do this stuff, especially Flora, who is completely new to this. Her first test shot she was doing this immense blue screen set-up, in a goldfish bowl with moving cameras. she was basically standing in the middle of an enormous soundstage, surrounded by blue, acting to blue dots. It doesn't get much harder than that - she was just brilliant."

Alastair Kirton played the title role in Marc Price’s terrific zombie featureColinand very kindly answered a few questions by e-mail in October 2008.

How did you land the role of Colin and what attracted you to the role?
“I had met Marc a few years earlier filming some footage for a mutual friend’s production of Bash by Neil Labute. When Marc moved to London we met up again to film Midnight. It was on that short film I think we realised we worked really well together. We had a lot of the same interests, influences and reference points filmwise and his way of shooting I found really exciting. It was adventurous, fast and really collaborative. He loves working with actors and seeing what they can give him and his enthusiasm for what he is doing is infectious. After that we worked on a couple of other projects together and would meet up quite a lot to chat about ideas and films.

“Marc pitched the idea of Colin to me pretty early on in its development. We were in a café and he was using sachets of sugar and wooden stirrers to mark out the structure of the film as he explained it. I knew about ten minutes into the chat that he wanted me to play Colin because he stopped saying, ‘Colin does this... Colin eats him,’ and started saying things like, ‘then you get smacked in the head with a hammer.’ I was really pleased that he had thought of me while putting together the film in his head.

“At first though I really wasn’t sure whether I could pull it off or whether it would be 90 minutes of me shuffling and pulling faces. I think in the end that fear helped though. A little bit of terror is always good, going into a role. It keeps you on your toes. I think it was the challenge of trying to play a zombie really well and as a properly rounded character that made me want to do it. Also that Marc wanted to make a really different, personal kind of film within the genre was a really exciting prospect.”

What are the particular challenges of playing a character like this, with no real emotions, limited responses to events around him and no dialogue beyond the occasional grunt?
“This is a really tough question! One of the major challenges was to get the audience to actually care about Colin because they are with him for the entire film. Doing this without the usual ways of expression was pretty daunting but then you can’t really think about that while shooting. I think so much of the character comes out of his reactions to the things that happen to him on his travels that I had to find a physicality for Zombie Colin that made sense in terms of what he is but that could be expressive and that people might respond to. It was also a challenge getting the fine balance between doing too much (to which Marc would shout, ‘Too human!’) and showing nothing. I really just wanted, though it might sound odd, for the performance to be as natural and honest as possible given his zombie condition.

“The way we filmed though, really helped find it I think. Firstly by starting with human Colin’s death and then shooting the birth gave me a great starting point to work him out. Also a lot of the character stuff was done with just me and Marc so we gave ourselves the time and freedom to experiment and find out what worked. I also think I have a pretty good range of grunts, growls, snarls... and a couple of roars!”

This is a very physical role: what was the most difficult and/or dangerous part of the movie for you?
“Not being allowed to blink during takes! Seriously that was rough. That and Marc making me lie in an icy puddle for ages. I actually really enjoyed the physicality of the role and the rough and tumble of fighting zombies, being mugged, punched, bundled into bags and baths was all good fun. I was pretty bruised after my death scene but it wasn’t the time to hold back. Sometimes I would get quite into being Zombie Colin and try and chew the other cast members if they weren’t looking or came too close.”

How did you cope with the zombie make-up?
“The basic make-up was fine. Michelle Webb came up with the initial Zombie Colin look and I learnt how to do that myself. As his face wrinkles and falls apart I got some more quality time with Miss Webb (which is always ace) only this time it involved latex and a hair dryer! There was some discomfort but it was well worth it in the end and latex skin is really satisfying to peel off. Especially if there is a stranger nearby to scare while you are doing it.

“The only really painful time was when we were trying for an effect where there is a hammer stuck in my head (from the street battle). We tried for about an hour to glue this fake hammer into my hair and it kept falling out taking lumps of skin and hair with it. Eventually we managed to fasten it (painfully) with elastic bands and glue only to find out it looked wrong. So we ditched it.“

How much of a back-story did you and the director create for Colin himself and for the zombie outbreak as a whole?
“We didn’t really discuss the back story for the outbreak at all as it didn’t directly inform what happens to Colin. I really like that the story is seen from such a personal perspective that there aren’t any answers to the bigger questions.

“With Colin though, we asked and answered a lot of questions about who he was, his relationship and his family. We knew exactly where he was going and why. There were actually a few scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut but planning and shooting them added a lot to Colin’s identity. Stuff like a phone call to his Mum before he dies or when Zombie Colin is sitting in the empty cinema he used to go to on his own when he was alive.”

I gather that you've been involved with shuffling, reanimated dead bodies before, on stage: what can you tell me about that production?
“That was a production of Frankenstein I did while at college. It toured Europe and I played Henry Clerval. It was quite a good show but I really always wanted to play the monster!”

interview originally posted 24th October 2008

Rich Knight designed and created all the great make-up effects for William Winckler’s Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove. That meant he had to make not just the Frankenstein monster and an ersatz Gill-man, but also a werewolf, the Bride of Frankenstein, the ghost of Dr Frankenstein himself, assorted injuries and even scars on his own face because he was in the cast as Salisbury, assistant to mad Dr Lazaroff. Rich very kindly answered some e-mailed questions in July 2005 and also provided me with these terrific behind-the-scenes photos.

How did you become involved with designing and creating the monsters for WWFVTCFBC??
“I was originally contacted by Bill Winckler to work on the sequel to his film the The Double-D Avenger. He wanted to have me design some retro style werewolf characters for the movie. Soon after he contacted me, Bill told me that he had placed DDA2 on the back burner, but he had another monster movie in mind. Bill sent me a copy of his script for Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove and once I discovered that it was a Frankenstein remake I was hooked. That's basically where it all started, it would be two years later that the film was finally made.”

And how did you end up playing a major acting role too? Is acting something you're interested in or was it just convenient?
“The role of ‘Salisbury’ was originally supposed to go to the late actor Ed Bishop. However for whatever reason he was not able to take the part. There was even mention of casting one of the actors from the old Godzilla movies to play Salisbury, but that never happened either. As we grew closer and closer to getting the green light for the project, Bill came up with the idea of making the character a scarred victim of the creature and suggested that I play the part in make-up. This immediately appealed to me, and gave me the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of such make-up greats as Lon Chaney and Tom Savini, both of whom are famous as make-up artists and actors.

“I did have prior acting experience before WWFVTCFBC, but this would be the first speaking role I would receive. Soon after production ended on Frankenstein, I was offered acting roles for two other movies: Night Walker in which I play a vampire, and Killer Sound (currently in pre-production) where I play a musician who becomes a killer.”

What sort of brief - artistic, technical, financial - were you given for the various monsters?
“I pretty much had complete artistic freedom on this project. I had been in contact with the director for a period of two years, corresponding via e-mail and phone. I would design sketches of the monsters and e-mail them to the director, he'd then put in his two cents, and I would create more designs based on his input. This process carried on until both he and I were happy with the designs. Technically everything had to be designed from scratch, so we started with life-casting the actors and then commenced with the sculpting process.

“Financially there wasn't much to work with. Although I am not at liberty to discuss the exact amount of our make-up effects budget, let's just say that with that amount of money you might be able to buy a used car, and if you saved up some more money, and if you're lucky, you might be able to get that car to run. I ended up investing some of my own money in order to ensure a higher quality production value to the make-ups, but even with that, the money we had to work with was very low.”

Very few make-up designers have had the daunting task of creating a full-body, completely practical monster suit on a low-budget, let alone one that could withstand submersion in water. In creating the Creature, how much were you working from experience/learning and how much were you finding your own way?
“The budget was definitely tight on this project, and naturally the bulk of it went towards designing and creating the Creature suit. It wasn't really the cost of creating the suit that was most challenging, but rather the time we were given to do so. In total our crew had one month and two weeks to create not only the Creature suit but all of the make-up and effects for the film. There was a tremendous amount of work to do in such a short amount of time. On top of the time crunch, we also encountered many setbacks due to the heavy rains we suffered here in Southern California throughout the month of January.

“I relied on my experience in creating monster suits and creature effects for this project as there simply was no time for experimentation or error. This suit had to be able to withstand the abuse it would receive during the fight scenes, and be able to go underwater. To top it all off we only had enough time and money to create one suit. A shoot like this really calls for three suits (two for on-set use and one as a standby) but we were only able to create one. In addition we should have had six months to create the suit, but we were given a mere month and a half (part of which was during the Christmas and New Years holiday), despite my constant appeals to the director to rearrange the shooting schedule.

“I didn't get too much sleep throughout this shoot as I was commonly working for ten to twelve hours on set in Woodland Hills, then driving back to my shop in Riverside County (about two and a half hours driving distance) to finish the work needed on set the next day. The first week into the shoot we still did not have a Creature suit; I literally worked day and night along side my crew to make all of these make-ups happen on time and within budget.

“The Creature suit held up surprisingly well because I tried my best to account for the wear and tear that it would surely endure. I spent many hours late into the night patching and repairing the suit as well, preparing it for the next day of shooting... only to repeat the process all over again for the next day of shooting. Honestly the suit was never really finished as it was intended to be. The work was rushed in order to accommodate the extremely tight shooting schedule. In the end, the suit worked, however it could have looked and functioned so much better had the director only given us even just one more week of pre-production time.”

How long did each of the various make-ups take to apply and remove?
“My own make-up was a very simple application of rigid collodion scarring material, combined with a blind eye contact lens - the total application took me about twenty to thirty minutes. The Frankenstein make-up, a multi-piece foam latex appliance, took an average of two and a half hours to apply which is pretty standard for such an intricate appliance. It took about 45 minutes to remove the make-up. The Wolfman make-up took about the same amount of time to apply and remove.

“The Bride make-up took the longest, mostly because we had to actually run the moulds on set. I created a gelatin appliance for the Bride's stitches, but unfortunately I only had enough time to make the mould for those appliances. Once again time was against us, so to make up the difference I brought the moulds to the set and ran them right there on location. The total time for the Bride make-up was somewhere around four or five hours... but again, this was mostly time spent preparing gelatin and running moulds, actual application time was about the same as the other make-ups.

“The Creature suit was easy, simply put on the suit, darken the actor's eyes, put on the feet, the gloves, the mask and the teeth and there you have it - instant monster. It took about 15 minutes to get the actor in and out of the Creature suit. The ghost of Dr Frankenstein was just an over-head mask, so all it required was a little blending around the eyes and hands. Of all the make-ups, the Frankenstein monster was the most rigourous because we had fifteen days with the monster on set. That means fifteen separate appliance applications in a short period of time which can be stressful on anyone. Lawrence was a real trooper though, and he did a wonderful job bringing our monster to life! In all honesty I believe my crew and myself must have broken some sort of records with all the work we did in such a short amount of time, but sadly the director still felt that the average time of two and a half hours in make-up was too long.”

What did you learn from working on this film which you will be able to apply to future work?
“I think that the most valuable lesson that I learned on this shoot is the importance of a proper budget and pre-production time. I took on this project for one main reason, because it was a Frankenstein remake. Because this project appealed to the ‘Frankenstein fan’ in me I was willing to cut my salary in order to get the gig ... this was a big mistake! I believe that when you allow yourself to work for less money than you are worth the production company either has no respect towards you because of it, or they will try to get away with adding more to an already agreed upon FX budget. This project was no exception, and I suffered for my art to say the least. The most disappointing part of this sacrifice is that the director never ever realised just how much he was getting for such a small budget and he probably never will.”

interview originally posted 25th July 2005

Watching Krrishwhen it was released in June 2006, I decided that I had to interview someone who worked on the film. I contacted Marc Kolbe who, with Craig Mumma, provided the effects for both Krrish and Koi... Mil Gayaand he very kindly agreed to answer some question by e-mail.

How did you and Craig Mumma get the job of providing special effects for Koi... Mil Gaya? (Was this before or after you worked on Devdas?)
“We were working on Devdas at the time and Rakesh Roshan had just watched Independence Day and saw our names and had heard we were working in India. So we had a meeting with him and hit it off. We were very excited about the project and we were looking for projects that would allow us to push the Indian talent to the limits. And this was the perfect fit.”

How familiar were you with Bollywood cinema before you started working on Indian films?
“Not very familiar. But we learned very quickly. And are still learning. But then, we are still learning in Hollywood...”

What are the biggest differences, as a visual effects artist, between working in Hollywood and working in Bollywood?
“The biggest difference is the culture. And I use the term ‘culture’ because I haven't really found the perfect word that explains it. Oh sure, the technology is the same, the talent is working its way up the ladder to the same quality levels, that just takes time, it’s the look and feel that is different. But this is why we shouldn't make Bollywood films feel like Hollywood films. They should stand on their own. Now as for quality, yes, they are in the process of coming to International levels.

“Now for us, growing up with the Hollywood style of film making, it is a very different mindset than in India or anywhere else in the world for that matter. But that is why working with good film-makers, who understand their market and genre, and listening to their ideas and taking that and adding the quality of work which they are wanting - that is the challenge. Trying to mix ideals and getting something different.

“As for the artists, all they want to do is learn. And that only takes time. With each project, they get better and better. They have a huge desire to succeed in this industry. Which I really like.”

How closely was Rakesh Roshan involved with the effects on Koi... Mil Gaya and Krrish?
“Very involved. As I implied above, he was our guide to his market. We brought the experience and quality to get his vision up on the screen. But he brought us into his world. There were many times that we would argue about a particular shot and the look and feel of it. Craig and I would make sure the quality was there and he made sure it was the vision. When all was said and done it worked very well.”

What new challenges did Krrish present over and above what you had done on the first film?
“Every film has its own set of challenges. The biggest one was learning to work with basically two directors at the same time. I had Rakesh and then I had Tony Ching directing the action stunts. Two completely different people. But I learned so much from the both of them, it was an exciting project. Working with Tony was more like choreographing a dance number. He worked with Hrithik during the stunts and then would play with camera speeds to get the flow of the stunt. Great experience. Working with Rakesh is always fun, we have a great time and have a great admiration for each other’s expertise. I enjoy learning new areas, I always say there are no experts in this industry, only ones that have made more mistakes. And obviously, the key is to learn from them...”

How has Bollywood’s understanding of effects and effects technology developed in the time that you've been working on Indian films?
“By leaps and bounds. With every project we do, the level of professionalism gets better and better. That goes for the production side as well. I feel we have finally convinced the producers and directors that if they want to do this level of VFX and have it be a key element in their film, they need to think and plan for it way in advance. This was a big issue when we started in India. Once, VFX was an afterthought; now films are built around them.”

interview originally posted 6th July 2006

Director: Creep Creepersin
Writer: Creep Creepersin
Producers: Creep Creepersin, Nikki Wall
Cast: James Porter, Nicole Nemeth, Kelly Kingsbury
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: VOD (HorrorInc)
Website: www.creepersin.com

When perusing obscure indie horror films, there are a couple of danger signs to watch out for. One is a possessory credit. In marketing terms, it means something if this particular New Nightmare belongs to Wes Craven, or if John Carpenter is prepared to accept personal responsibility for these Ghosts of Mars. But a film you’ve never heard of that was made by a person you’ve never heard of? Who cares? That’s just vanity.

The other warning signal is an obvious, quirky but not actually funny, horror-related pseudonym; an, if you will, ‘spookonym‘. What’s wrong with the name your parents gave you? And if your parents were Mr and Mrs Carpenter and named you Johnny and you want to avoid confusion (if only to make it clear that you are not to blame for Ghosts of Mars), well there are plenty of distinctive but sensible sounding names to choose from.

These two elements don’t always indicate that what you are about to watch is a piece of ultra-low-budget, me-and-my-mates, self-indulgent crap. But they are red flags of which you should beware.

Which brings us to Creep Creepersin’s Frankenstein.

I first became aware of Mr Creepersin last year when I was writing my review of Ivan Zuccon's Wrath of the Crows and I noted that Domiziano Arcangeli had appeared in a number of films by this director (albeit not this one). Given that Creepersin’s 40+ credits include such cheap-jack exploitative title as Orgy of the Damned, The Brides of Sodom, Awesome Girl Gang Street Fighter, Alien Babes in Heat, Caged Lesbos A-Go-Go and, ahem, Vaginal Holocaust, I really was expecting this film to be unashamed, unadulterated, unapologetic - and quite possibly unwatchable - trash. But I’m a sucker for Frankenstein movies and it’s available on VOD on HorrorInc for 75p, and I had 55 minutes to spare, so what the heck?

Let me clarify that first point. I love Frankenstein movies. Larry love ‘em. They fascinate me. I’ll never knowingly turn down a chance to watch a new Frankenstein film. Some people love slasher movies, some are obsessive zombie fans. For some folks it’s vampire or werewolves or kaiju or whatever. For me, it’s Frankie and his pals.

And one of the interesting things about Frankenstein films is that they are very, very difficult to do. Sure, you can go the gothic historical route if you have the budget. Or you can laugh it up and spoof the whole idea in some way. But a serious, modern-day Frankenstein story is a very difficult thing indeed to pull off. Pretty much the only good one I’ve seen in recent years was Sean Tretta’s The Frankenstein Experiment/Syndrome. That one worked but, with the best will in the world, John R Hand’s Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare is incomprehensible and that 2007 BBC version from Jed Mercurio was all over the shop.

The inherent problem is that the Frankenstein story is both a science fiction tale and a gothic romance. There’s room in the world for medical science fiction, of course. And gothic romances can still work if they rely on magic and mystery, which is why vampires and werewolves don’t go away. But it’s 200 years since cutting edge science was in a sufficiently rudimentary state that it could effectively meld with the gothic romance genre. Modern medical experiments are neither gothic nor romantic and trying to squeeze the two genres together, especially within the limitations of a well-established story, is a very, very difficult thing to do. Lean too far either way and you’re no longer a Frankenstein film in anything but name.

All of which preamble does indeed lead me to discussion of the motion picture entitled Creep Creepersin’s Frankenstein and to the revelation that this is, in fact, a very good film. Despite all the warning signs, despite the inherent difficulties of this particular subgenre, despite my own low expectations, I was captivated by this and I’m not ashamed to say that it is one of the best Frankenstein films I have watched for a long time. Let me clarify that: not one of the best films about Frankenstein - clearly there are many better (though also some worse) - but one of the best uses of Frankenstein ideas and tropes in a film.

So I loved this for its originality and the brilliant way it did something radical and new with the Frankenstein subgenre. I also loved it because it is grim, bleak and wrist-slashingly depressing - and that’s the sort of horror movie I enjoy. Don’t come here looking for gore and splatter. Certainly don’t come here looking for lurching monsters. But if your idea of a good time is an hour-long study in mental illness interspersed with clips from classic horror films, brother you’ve come to the right place.

James Porter stars as Victor, a lonely, middle-aged guy without apparent friends or family, or job. He lives in a small apartment on a farm in Hicksville somewhere, his only companion a white rat named Frankenstein. Victor has what we might term learning difficulties, and we are left to decide for ourselves whether his awkwardness and stilted mannerisms have contributed to his social isolation or have resulted from it in some way. In what is apparently his only screen role, Porter is absolutely terrific, bringing real sympathy to the pathos of Victor’s sad existence.

The one human being with whom he has any contact is a neighbour, Shelly (Nicole Nemeth), who is actually his landlord (I didn’t pick up on that but there is a clue). In one of several innovative and effective directorial decisions, all of Shelly’s dialogue is played backwards on the soundtrack. Victor hears and understands her and the two converse normally, but the garbled pseudo-speech we hear underlines Victor’s alienation from even his single point of contact with the rest of the world.

Every day in Victor’s life is the same. He rises, cleans his teeth, subsists on a diet of scrambled eggs, talks to Frankenstein and watches old horror movies. We see this two or three times. In fact one of the first scenes in the film, after a five-minute title sequence, is a single locked-off shot of Victor cleaning his teeth for more than a minute (when we all know you should scrub for at least two...). At first sight this seems like padding, the work of an incompetent director who doesn’t even understand how to edit a scene together. As I waited for the camera to cut away, I pondered how other film-makers could show a person’s entire morning routine with a handful of one-second shots: alarm, shave, breakfast, teeth, dressed, out the door. Sorted,.

But Creepersin doesn’t want to be conservative or succinct with his storytelling. The whole point of sticking with the mundane scene of dental hygiene is to let us witness the mundanity of Victor’s life. And the reason it’s repeated later is to emphasise the repetitiveness of Victor’s life. We see him clean his teeth, we see him feed his rat, we see him eat his scrambled eggs, we see him watch his old movies - because that is all he does. That is his life. And he’s not really aware enough to try and break out of this. But he is lonely. And haunted too.

Not literally, but by visions of his mother (seen only from the back, played by the director’s spookonymous wife, Mrs Creep), an overweight sack of hate who hurls homophobic abuse at Victor because he let his father sexually abuse him.

Victor’s only relief from all this is a succession of flickering images: scratchy prints of old horror films on his TV, all of them public domain for obvious reasons. We see clips from Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, the silent Phantom of the Opera, the silent Hunchback of Notre Dame and Carnival of Souls. The actual Frankenstein mythos is represented by two early 1950s telecasts. One is Tales of Tomorrow, in which we see John Newland as Victor Frankenstein in the creation scene but not Lon Chaney Jr as the monster (this show was the infamous incident when Chaney was so drunk he thought the live broadcast was a rehearsal and was careful not to smash any of the break-away props). The other clip is Chaney in full Universal get-up dancing with Lou Costello in The Colgate Comedy Hour.

From watching these clips, which are cleverly selected to intercut with and reflect Victor’s own actions and feelings, and from a voice in his head (played by the director) which he believes to be his rat speaking, Victor gets the idea to create a bride for himself. Next thing we know, he has the bloodied corpse of a young woman laid out on his couch. Her name is Mary, so our three named (human) characters are Mary, Shelly and Victor. Which reminds me that another danger sign inappropriate in this case is in-joke character names.

We don’t actually see how Victor came by Mary until later, in a scarlet-tinted flashback (yet another unconventional but thoroughly sound directorial choice). What we do see is Victor denying to Shelly that he has seen the missing young woman, and then setting about re-animating her. For reference he uses a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (which he owns, somewhat improbably) and a hardback copy of The Annotated Frankenstein. I didn’t get a great look at this but I think it was the 1977 edition published by Clarkson N Potter, edited by Leonard Wolf.

Here’s where the film really gets clever. Of course he doesn’t reanimate Mary. He can’t do that, he’s just a socially awkward loner in a grubby, untidy apartment whose only companions are a pet rat and a hallucination of his abusive mother. Plus, reanimating dead people is impossible.

But a significant part of this film takes place inside Victor’s broken mind. So instead of sewing Mary together, he draws the stitches onto her skin with a magic marker. This is a startling and audacious move by Creepersin but it bloody works. It tells us exactly what is happening in Victor’s head and shifts the already compelling film up a gear as we wonder what will happen next.

What happens next is that Mary is living once again, drawn-on stitches and all, but because Victor only understands love through his crackly old PD films, especially the silents like Hunchback and Phantom, Mary herself appears in a scratchy sepia world, communicating through intertitles. This is a conceit which in anyone else’s hands would have been a gag. God knows a silent pastiche like this has been used for comedy plenty of times, but here it’s just another facet of Victor’s increasingly disturbed reality. There is even one superb shot where Mary’s sepia, silent existence and Victor’s physical world share the screen.

But there is a problem. Mary is not the loving girlfriend Victor desires, not the kind companion, not his Esmerelda but his Christine, immediately negative in her attitude towards him. Victor has no concept, outside of those flickering frames on TV, of what a real woman is like. Shelly is alien to him so that his only notion of womanhood is his mother and before too long Mary and Mother are laughing together at his expense, driving Victor further and further away from reality and deeper into a black hatred.

What I particularly love here is that this is a perfect retelling of the essence of the Frankenstein story: the creator rejected by his creation. Just like his namesake, Victor has hubristically sought to create a human but has not thought ahead to what would happen once that human has freedom. He has assumed loyalty towards himself but finds rejection from one who did not ask to be made. That’s the essence of the story. The whole original novel is encapsulated in the quote from Paradise Lost which appears on the frontispiece: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay. To mould me Man, did I solicit thee. From darkness to promote me?” That’s Mary Shelley’s novel right there in 21 words. And that’s Creepersin’s film story too.

In fact this is doubly apposite because in creating a female companion for himself, Victor is also reflecting the later part of the story when Shelley’s hero, hidden away from the world on a remote Scottish isle, sets to making a female companion for his first brute creation who is pathetically lonely and seeks only a mate. This aspect of the film has just dawned on my as I write. Honestly, with every paragraph, my admiration for this little film grows.

One more thing that impressed me was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it close-up, after we have seen Mary drinking coffee and smoking, of an untouched coffee cup and cigarette on Victor’s table. That’s the cold harsh reality of Victor’s physical world right there, but it is barely touched on because we see this story through Victor’s mind and he is almost entirely detached from cold hard reality. He does not acknowledge the unfilled cup, the unsmoked cigarette, yet he has provided them explicitly for his imaginary companion, like a little girl playing tea party with her dolls. What makes this absolutely perfect is that Victor tells Mary he himself doesn’t smoke. Has he found a cigarette somewhere, specially for her? Has he made it himself by rolling up a piece of paper? It doesn’t really matter, what matters is the storytelling and the characters and what we see happening inside and outside of Victor’s head at the same time.

This is masterful storytelling, and the fact that it’s being told in a film which gives every impression to the casual viewer of being a tuppeny-ha’penny piece of crap, of having been made for next to nothing in, according to Creepersin, only a day and a half, just makes it all the more impressive.

Creep Creepersin’s Frankenstein is a bleak, thankless hour spent in the bleak, thankless world of Victor as his misguided attempt to create a semblance of a normal life falls apart under the weight of his own paranoia. I loved it! There’s no happy ending, but nor is there a tragic one, it’s just more bleakness and thanklessness and it completes the story (inasmuch as it will ever be complete). This is one of those films where, after the closing credits, one has to sit still for a while and consider what one has seen. It put me in mind of another obscure on-line marvel, Joe Wheeler’s extraordinary The Rise of Jengo, not least through the magnificent performance of James Porter who is entirely without reservation in his sometime very physical portrayal of a descent from madness, a descent from a glimmer of optimism and self-content, into a deeper madness riddled with angst and anger, fear and loathing.

The credits are pretty much limited to Creepersin, Mrs Creep and their associate AL Smith who appears briefly on screen as Mary’s companion. Creepersin self-released the film on DVD in May 2009 and it is now available on various VOD sites including Amazon and Daily Motion.

According to his Wikipedia page (which needs updating), Creepersin is a Californian musician who formed a sort of garage-goth-punk band - called Creepersin, naturally - in 2004, since when they have released a couple of albums and some other stuff. He has also recorded some solo stuff and, with Mrs Creep, one album as The Sci-Fi Originals. From what I can gather, most of his songs are related to or inspired by old horror movies. After a number of short films and music videos, Frankenstein was his first long-form movie (it’s not quite a feature).

I really don’t know whether Creepersin set out to make the brilliant film he has ended up with. I don’t even know whether he realises what he has created, but that doesn’t matter. It would be the final superb irony if what many people (to judge by IMDB/Amazon comments) consider to be a hideous monster of a film actually took on a life of its own, beyond what its creator envisaged.

Perhaps this was all intentional. Perhaps if I were to explore Creepersin’s filmography further I would find that Caged Lesbos A-Go-Go is a sensitive tale of a gay woman’s sexual awakening, that Awesome Girl Gang Street Fighter is a harrowing exposé of inner city teenage violence, that Alien Babes in Heat is... no, I’m really not sure what Alien Babes in Heat could be if it’s not a trashy exploitation picture about sex-mad space-women. Frankly, even if everything else that Creep Creepersin has ever made is utter shit, that doesn’t detract from the achievement that is Creep Creepersin’s Frankenstein; if anything, it makes this film all the more remarkable.

Maybe he peaked early in his cinematic endeavours, but in any case Creepersin continues to bang out films at a prodigious rate, several each year. Recent productions have included Zombie Dollz, Satanicus, a remake of White Zombie with Creepersin himself as Murder Legendre, and Frankenstein’s Bride. This last appears to have no connection with the film under review but does feature some actors who have been in real episodes of real TV series and even in some films I have heard of (not seen, but at least heard of). Creepersin seems to be building up quite the rep company around himself.

So: Creep Creepersin’s Frankenstein. I am fully aware that this film is not everybody’s cup of tea. But if you have an open mind, if you seek something different from standard video fare, different even from the oft-times formulaic crap which believes itself to be different, if you want to both amazed and depressed for 55 minutes, if you want to get some idea of the tortures which can go on inside the mind of a lonely soul, if you want to see a Frankenstein film which is thematically closer to what Mary Shelley wrote than a dozen lurching monsters - then seek out a copy today.

Please note: this review is not a spoof. I really, genuinely do think that this is an awesome film. It is the discovery of hidden gems like this which makes wading through all the shit worthwhile.

MJS rating: A

Screenwriter Chiaki J Konaka has worked on many Japanese series that are familiar to western audiences, including cult anime (Bubblegum Crisis), Saturday morning cartoons (Digimon) and live action (Ultraman Tiga), as well as writing feature films, notablyEvil Dead Trap 2. Now, with the extraordinary Malice@Dollhe ventures into CGI territory. Mr Konaka has his own website and, since his English is considerably better than my Japanese, I was able to interview him by e-mail in January 2003.

What was the original inspiration for the story of Malice@Doll?
"The idea came from imagining the world where Malice lives. Before writing the script, I had wanted to make this film using stop-motion animation like Czech film-makers such as Jiri Trnka or Jan Svankmajer.”

How did your script affect the character and creature designs; or how did the designs affect your writing?
"The writing of the script and designing of the characters proceeded in parallel. I gave inspiration to the designers and they in return inspired me.”

How closely did you work with the director Mr Motonaga and the designers Mr Nishioka and Mr Moriki?
"I had worked with Mr Motonaga and Mr Nishioka before Malice, on Devilman Lady, so we knew what we could create by our chemistry.”

Why was the 'camera' kept stationary in every shot in the film?
"That was what Mr Motonaga wanted. He doesn't like typical CGI images.”

Why was Malice animated traditionally, rather than by computer, when she became a spirit at the end?
"That was not only the spirit Malice; she was variously animated both by computer and human animators. Mr Motonaga is an anime director, not a specialist in CGI. He made the film as he wanted to see it.”

What are the literary or cinematic influences on this story? Is it influenced by Alice in Wonderland? Or by the novels of Philip K Dick?
"As I said, I quoted the stop-motion animation films of Trnka, Svankmajer et al. But the frame of the story, yes, is Alice in Wonderland. And you are correct in surmising that Philip K Dick is one of my favorite writers.”

How long did it take to make the film?
"Almost a whole year.”

How was the film distributed in Japan? Did audiences like the film? What did critics and reviewers say about the film?
"Malice was released on video in Japan. I can't honestly say it was successful at a commercial level, but people who like cutting edge films loved it.”

When writing the script, did you treat the story as anime or live action or something different?
"I wrote this as grand guignol.”

What is the significance of the ghost of the little girl?
"Whatever she signifies or symbolises, that is something that belongs to the audience and is for the audiences to decide.”

Why does Malice stay beautiful when she becomes human, but the other dolls become monsters?
"Malice was the carrier of the ‘infection’. This story can be grasped as a variation of the traditional vampire story.”

Perhaps I am seeing something which is not there, but: in this film, there is a sort of disease (life) which makes people suffer and die, and it is spread by love (kissing) - is this an allegory for AIDS?
"In anything that I write, I don't want explain too much about the story. I just want the audience to see and feel things that are influenced by their own standpoint. But in this case, I have to say no, it’s not an AIDS allegory. If I dealt with AIDS in my fiction, I would do it a different way.”

Do you have any plans to work again with Mr Motonaga, Mr Nishioka or Mr Moriki?
"Unfortunately not this time.”

What is the connection between the film Malice@Doll and the dolls which you make?
"Making actual dolls is a completely different matter from writing. But this film was an interesting experience which led me to think about what a doll actually is.”

What projects are you writing now?
"I have just finished writing the second season of The Big-O. I am now working for some new animation series, and I will write a long horror novel this year.”

Konaka-san, domo arigato gozaimasu.

website: www.konaka.com

In July 2006, Danish actor Mads Koudal’s name cropped up in the cast list of two films that I plugged on the news page. I contacted him through his website and he kindly agreed to answer a few questions.

Why did you go to the UK to study acting?
“Well, I have always had a love for the English language and I thought if I went to study in the UK, I would have a much better chance to get into English language films as well as Danish films. I have also always been very keen on studying Shakespearian theatre. And if you want to ‘work’ with Shakespeare, I guess there is no better place in the world than London.”

What sort of films do you like to make and what sort of roles do you prefer to play?
“First of all I have to say that I like the idea of doing a lot of different kinds of films. It is such a cliché to say, but there has to be a good story. On the other hand, let’s say the story is not perfect - then there has to be something unique or something I have not tried before, something I am little afraid of doing maybe. If you don’t challenge yourself you cannot change, and if you cannot change there is no point in acting.

“As long as I can find something interesting in the project I’m in. If the script has substance to it, I’m not concerned about the genre at all; it can be drama, comedy, horror, musical, sci-fi or western - anything. I prefer to play people that carry a development with them through the film. I’m always open towards portraying stories. The people can be evil, good, ridiculous - whatever - as long as there is a secret, an inner struggle or the like to them. I like progression.”

In Jeff Brookshire's Awaken the Dead you have a small cameo as ‘blender zombie’. How did it feel to go from playing leading roles in European films to a very small part in an American film?
“It felt weird because the part was so small in Awaken the Dead, there was nothing I could actually do with the part. I was a zombie... I mean, it’s pretty hard to do research in real life, so I watched a few zombie flicks to get an idea.

“The reason I choose this specific movie was because I wanted to be in an American movie. I lived for a while in Los Angeles and at that time Awaken the Dead was my first part ever in an American production. So I kind of thought if I don’t get any roles at all in Los Angeles ... well, then I could always say that I have played a ‘blender zombie’... ha ha ha! But I must say I did thankfully get other roles after Awaken the Dead and there was a lot more substance in those characters.”

What is your character like in Rovdrift? What can you tell me about this film?
“I’m playing a pretty terrible human being. I’m playing one of these sociopaths that is stalking young girls. In the movie I am the first person the girl meets. During the whole story she meets three really unpleasant guys. My character is walking into a bar where the girl works as a bartender, she is closing down for the night, but my character is a complete and utter scumbag, so of course he is not keen on leaving. Instead he is walking to the bathroom and is just staying there until the girl comes in to kick him out. My character then attacks her physically. So basically the story is about a girl and her meeting with three mostly unpleasant men.”

Of all your roles so far, which one is your favourite (and why) are there any you regret?
“That is a tough one... I’ve got three favourites, three movies that mean a lot to me in different ways. One month ago I finished the movie Six Reasons Why in Alberta, Canada. It is a western. I played the part of ‘The Sherpa’, a cowboy whose mission it is to track down a killer dressed in black.

“It was such a great adventure to be on this set. Everybody involved was so talented. We shot on location in the desert, running around with hats and guns - almost like when we were kids... But Six Reasons Why is a lot more than foolish men running around with guns - personally I think it is a really good drama dealing with a lot of emotional issues like loss, revenge and father/son conflicts.

“Another great project I did was a movie called Footsteps, shot in Wales. It is a social realistic tale about loss and what loss can do to people. I play the part of Paul and my character is forcing the lead character, Andrew, into a world of snuff movies and drugs. It’s a very brutal and dark story, but made in a very intelligent way. So far it’s the most powerful thing I have done, because there is no hope for the people involved. This was a really good example of great screenwriting.

“The third one is a Danish movie called Skuespilleren (English title: The Actor) and ironically enough I am playing a Danish actor who wants to go to the US to try to make his way in the movie and theatre industry. There were so many parallels to my own life in this story so in a way it was an ‘easy’ role. At the same time challenging, because I had to bring so much of myself into the part. Of course actors in general bring themselves into the stories, but this was pretty close, I think. The director had a great eye for making the movie really intense, he did a good job.

“And no I don’t regret anything - why should I do that? I can’t change it now anyway. I would say though that I have done some things in the past I would turn down now for sure. And another cliché; my choices of yesterday make me the one I’m today.”

How closely is your career following the path you hoped for or expected when you started acting?
“Well, my dream was to work as an actor and be able to do a mix between Danish and English speaking projects. There are a lot of things I still want to do of course. I want to continue to be open minded about choosing projects. I have always been that, and that’s also why I have been working in different genres. And of course, I want to learn something new each time.”

website: www.koudal.net

Frankie Krainz, writer ofStuck!andThe Casserole Club, kindly answered some questions by e-mail in April 2011.

What was your writing experience before Stuck!?
“Theatre. I started as an actor in the theatre but I’ve always been a restless person so I kept trying to find ways to perform in venues other than the typical proscenium theatre. I did stand up comedy for a while and wrote my own material. I joined a comedy troupe called Hot Dish! in the early nineties and we wrote material together and toured. I wrote plays and performance art pieces that were mostly one-offs. Recorded little fragments of characters I would make up, crazy songs and radio pieces.

“I’ve written dances, poetry, a couple musicals, lots of songs, shorts, you name it, I wrote it. My life was really about travelling and trying new things, building experiences. A true nomad. And then I had a nervous breakdown in 2001 after 9/11 and that essentially shut me down publicly until I met Steve in 2007.”

How did you meet Steve Balderson and how familiar were you with his work?
“I met Steve in 2007 at a restaurant in Kansas City, MO. Steve had contacted my roommate about auditioning for a role in Watch Out and my roommate wanted me to go because he thought Steve and I should meet. Now, I was terribly agoraphobic at the time and, honestly, I couldn’t tell you why I agreed to go... but I did.

“Well, Steve and I hit it off immediately. We both have an insane love of the movies and as the meal progressed and the glasses of wine were emptied and filled, he brought it up that he had always wanted to make a Women In Prison film. And, you know, I’m the king of movie trivia... I love every kind of movie and every genre and have watched thousands and we both said 'I Want to Live!', the movie with Susan Hayward.

“That’s what sparked my interest. He wasn’t interested in those salacious, revisionist campfests (which I love!) but wanted something with an older feel. And that hit me. I love the old black and white movies like Caged. So I told Steve I’d write the movie for him and he said okay and kind of giggled like he does, like a mischievous boy. And on the way home from the dinner, I wrote Stuck! at the top of a piece of paper. I didn’t know anything about Steve’s previous films or what he was about. But something inside me wanted this chance. I felt stuck in my life see and this script felt like a way out.”

With Stuck!, what aspects of the extensive WIP genre did you want to celebrate or subvert?
“Celebrate the women and the atmosphere! I knew the foundation would be the old black and white dramas, film noir and early TV shows like Playhouse 90. I liked the way those early films had a theatrical quality, that they were character driven and the heavy dramatic quality of the black and white and the intrusiveness of the camera that acted like a voyeur.

“I used the tenets of the WIP genre for the outline, for the skeleton and then I just did what I wanted to do. Which was create a claustrophobic world where every character, in or out of prison, was literally stuck in their lives. I knew I didn’t want to create a tits and ass movie that was overtly campy. I’ve written that kind of thing before when I was doing sketch comedy and working the drag clubs. I wanted to create something more theatrical, more interior. There is an innocence about the movies from the ’40s and ’50s because there was no nudity or profanity. I wanted to explore those clichés through dialogue and honest emotion.”

What are the origins of The Casserole Club?
“Steve came back from Macon after shooting Stuck! and told me he and some of the actresses had heard about this group of marrieds who had a casserole recipe party but that the party detoured into a swinging orgy. And he wanted that to be his next movie, did I want to write it? I said yes but honestly I wasn’t sold. I thought this had been done to death, the whole swingers thing and I didn’t really feel it.

“So Steve sent me to Macon to do ‘research’ and I came back and still didn’t know what the hell I was going to write. I couldn’t get into it. Finally, I decided that maybe this story was a comedy. Because the overall feeling I got was that these people were vulgar, just a bunch of irresponsible adult children. I wrote a first draft that was much more of a farce, very trippy but Steve wanted something that was more rooted in reality, in the here and now.

“So I kept the characters and the first half of the script and then with Steve’s support and thoughts, reworked the story to be more of a meditation on selfishness and consequences. More lyrical. Images like the moon and the mask. But still with hints of parody. In a way I was writing a poem about one married couple. It’s as if the couple has been shattered into multiple pieces and those pieces are the couples whose lives are explored in the movie. I also wanted there to be a difference between the way the couples acted at the parties and the way they acted when alone with each other in their own homes. At this point, I knew what Steve could do visually, he has an amazing eye... so I tried to play into that, to write fragments that would add up to a feeling, a mood.”

To what extent did you write these scripts to match Steve’s directorial style, or create characters to fit specific actors?
“Stuck! was written in the dark. I didn’t know anything about Steve or his work. I just wrote. The Casserole Club I knew Steve more by then and had watched his movies so I knew that his composition was extraordinary, is extraordinary. He has a very unique way of telling a story visually. Really brilliant. So I wrote into that. Giving him shattered fragments of people that he could embellish with his camera.

“I knew that certain actors might be in these projects but I really didn’t know who would play which character. Honestly, you just have to write. The story is a character and I trust that Steve can bring that character to life. We have similar sensibilities, I think. So I trust that relationship and just write. It’s refreshing, believe me.”

What can you reveal about the next Krainz-Balderson project?
“Culture Shock is about four American college grads on a Euro vacation who get entangled in the shenanigans of an international crime ring. It’s an action comedy. Crazy, mischievous, pop fun.”

interview originally posted 27th April 2011

Director: Roy Allen Smith
Writers: John Ludin, John Loy, Dev Ross
Producer: Roy Allen Smith
Cast: Scott McAfee, Candace Hutson, Kenneth Mars
Country: USA
Year of production: 1994
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Don Bluth was pretty much the only viable alternative to Disney when it came to feature-length animation. From The Secret of NIMH in 1982 to Titan AE in 2000, he directed eleven animated features, including The Land Before Time for Universal/Amblin in 1988. This straight-to-video sequel was released six years later, a few months after The Return of Jafar became the first DTV sequel to a theatrically released animated feature. Bluth was not involved.

In the original (which I haven't seen) five baby dinosaurs led their respective herds into the Great Valley, somewhere where they would be safe from predators. This is of course an ecologically unsound move since without predation the populations of the herbivorous species would outgrow the capacity of the area to feed them, and without any means of escape from the isolated valley - the only pass is blocked off by rockfalls - the result would be mass starvation. But let's not worry about that because there are far bigger moral dilemmas in this film.

The little dinos are inquisitive brontosaurus Littlefoot, bossy triceratops Cera, nervous pterodactyl Petrie (Petrie speak ungrammatically and always refer to himself in the third person), cute anatasaurus Ducky and bulky stegosaurus Spike who never speaks and is the dinosaur equivalent of 'the fat kid.' For some reason which is probably explained in the first movie, Spike has been adopted by Ducky's family; similarly, Littlefoot is being raised by his grandparents.

In LBT2, the dinos get into trouble attempting to cross some quicksand and have to be rescued by their parents. Fed up with being treated like babies, when they spot two oviraptors (crafty Ozzy and thick Strut) stealing an egg from Ducky's parents' nest, they decide to apprehend the villains themselves. Chasing Ozzy and Strut causes a rockfall which opens a path to the outside. The egg gets passed from oviraptors to dino-babies and back, eventually disaappearing; what the little dinos recover and bring back to the valley is an egg which is the same colour but, when sneaked back into the nest, is clearly far, far too big.

Undaunted, Littlefoot and pals decide to incubate the egg themselves, which they somehow manage, but when it hatches - quelle surprise - they find themselves presented with a baby Tyrannosaurus rex. Initially frightened, they decide that they can look after him and name him Chomper (although it mostly sounds like 'Chopper' when characters say it). Herein lies the unsubtle and frankly not-very-well-handled attempt at morality in the film. Meat-eaters ('sharp-teeth' in dino-speak, which gives some idea of how anodyne the whole thing is) are banned from the Great Valley, but the dino-babies have brought one inside. But should they fear him? He's only a baby and he is dependent on them. On the other hand, what is he going to eat?

There is a story to be told about tolerance for those with a different lifestyle, but put into this situation it just doesn't work because the idea falls apart when that lifestyle specifically requires 'the other' to kill members of one's own group. The little dinos have every right to fear Chomper because in order for him to survive he will need to kill and eat their own kind. Other animated films which have dealt with the moral aspect of carnivores, such as the excellent Ice Age, have a character agreeing not eat his/her friends but remaining a carnivore. But the Great Valley is a self-contained ecosystem where all the herbivores live together as one big happy herd. The introduction of even a single carnivore threatens that ecosystem and all the individuals within it.

Littlefoot, Cera and pals should not fear Chomper because he is different, or because they assume that he will be dangerous, they should fear him because he is dangerous and has no other option but to be dangerous.

Anyway, a few life lessons are learned, there is some more comedy schtick involving the two oviraptors, including a scene where they are frightened of a giant T rex shadow which turns out to be Chomper. Then two adult T rex enter the valley, leading to some almost exciting fights. Well, of course they are Chomper's mum and dad and they eventually help Littlefoot and co to send the oviraptors packing. Then, having collected their son, they return to the outside and the adult herbivores engineer another rockfall to once again isolate the Great Valley. Where, as we have seen, they will all starve to death in a few years because there is a fixed amount of vegetation but nothing to stop their population increasing exponentially.

This is a weak film and I understand that the original is not so bad. Candace Hutson (Cera) is the only returning voice artist from the original and she stayed for the next two sequels, as did Scott McAfee (Littlefoot) and Heather Hogan (Ducky). Jeff Bennett (Johnny Bravo) as Petrie and Rob Paulsen (Pinky in Pinky and the Brain), who is credited as Spike though I don't recall the stegosaurus ever saying anything, continued on through all the sequels which at the last count had reached ten, meaning that there are more Land Before Time films than Star Trek movies!

In recent years, the US releases of the films have tended to drop the number which makes a certain kind of sense if there is no specific order to them or development from one to another, although the numbers remain on the UK releases. In order, the eleven movies are:

• The Land Before Time (1988)
• The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure (1994)
• The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving (1995) - ie. the Christmas one!
• The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists (1996)
• The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island (1997) - which brought back Chomper, resulting in a rather curious double-bill re-release of parts II and V...
• The Land Before Time VI: The Secret of Saurus Rock (1998)
• The Land Before Time VII: The Stone of Cold Fire (2000)
• The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze (2001)
• The Land Before Time IX: Journey to the Big Water (2002)
• The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration (2003)
• The Land Before Time XI: Invasion of the Tinysauruses (2004)

Bennett and Paulsen also voice the two oviraptors and Paulsen provides Chomper's baby gurgles. Linda Gary (Aunt May in the 1990s Spider-Man cartoon and its spin-off DTV feature Sins of the Fathers, also in Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night) is Littlefoot's grandmother and no less than Kenneth Mars (Young Frankenstein) is his grandfather; Mars continues in the role to this day but Gary is only in parts II-IV, though in her case it's because she died in 1995. John Ingle (Skeeter, RoboCop 2) and Tress MacNeille are also in the cast (MacNeille does voices for The Simpsons and played Lucille Ball in the video for 'Weird Al' Yankovic's early hit 'Ricky'!).

Director/producer Roy Allen Smith and co-producer Zahra Dowlatabadi were also responsible for Part III and Part IV which probably explains why these three films are some sort of loose trilogy, at least in terms of cast and crew. Of the credited writers, John Ludin worked on LBT II and III, Dev Ross worked on LBT II, III and IV as well as The Return of Jafar, and John Loy worked on LBT II, III, V, VI, VIII and X plus the Hercules/Xena animated movie, Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein and Alvin and the Chipmunks meet the Wolfman!

Although there were (I understand) no songs in the original, this film has a few, mostly written by sisterly singing trio The Roches. And not to put to fine a point on it, they are awful (although to be fair, they were the only parts of the film when my guest reviewer, 18-month-old TF Simpson, actually paid attention). The rest of the music is by Michael Tavera (Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, Cinderella II, Beethoven). Most of the other names in the credits are Korean as the (thoroughly unremarkable) animation was all done by Akom Productions Co Ltd (which also does animation for The Simpsons). Akom’s President Nelson Shin is credited as ‘animation producer’; he directed Transformers: The Movie and allegedly designed the lightsabre effects in Star Wars!

MJS rating: C-

Director: Charles Grosvenor
Writer: John Loy
Producer: Charles Grosvenor
Cast: Robert Guillaume, Thomas Dekker, Anndi McAfee
Country: USA
Year of release: 2001
Reviewed from: UK VHS

When I reviewed The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure, it was just a whim. I didn’t think too many people would be interested in the first of an endless stream of stravisnuts spun off from a non-Disney animated feature about baby dinosaurs.

How wrong I was. LBT2 has consistently been one of my most popular reviews. In fact, as I type this in the middle of May 2006, a quick check of the stats page shows that The Land Before Time II has been viewed 74 times already this month, making it the ninth most popular review on the site. And unlike certain pages, I know it’s not getting the hits from people googling the names of porn stars.

So here is my second venture into the prehistoric world of Littlefoot, Cera, Ducky, Petrie and Spike - The Big Freeze. In this one, an ice age comes to the Great Valley; at first everyone loves playing in the snow (“frozen ground stars”) but they soon discover that the plants are dying because of the cold, taking away the leaves or “tree stars” on which the dinosaurs feed. (Remember: the Great Valley is home only to herbivores, despite the ecological unsoundness of such a set-up.)

Back in Part II, the valley was completely isolated and the story involved the baby dinos accidentally opening a passage to the outside world. By Part VIII, the valley is obviously accessible because a herd of stegosauri (“spiketails”) is passing through. Silent, ever-hungry Spike is the only resident steg in the valley, an orphan who lives with Duckie and her family. Now he meets a new friend, Tippy, and goes with him and his mother as the herd leaves the valley, just as the snow arrives. Duckie, who was up till then getting increasingly fed up with her adopted brother’s snoring, misses him dreadfully and sets off through the snow to find him, so Littlefoot, Cera and Petrie follow on later in search, in turn, of Duckie.

New to the cast is Mr Thicknose (Robert Guillaume), a grumpy old styracosaurus who is revered as the wisest dinosaur in the valley and who teaches the children. Unfortunately, his failure to predict the ice age and the disappearance of all the food makes him a pariah. Isolated, he accompanies the youngsters on their quest to find their friend. Unfortunately, as they go through the pass, a massive snowfall leaves the way behind them blocked - which is basically the reverse of the plot in Part II.

After locating Duckie and escaping a T rex, they discover a hot spring which not only supplies a refreshingly warm pool of water but also fosters the growth of plants. By causing another snowfall to clear the pass, they are able to lead their parents and the others to the food and warmth, just as Spike arrives, having led the shivering, hungry stegs with his unerring ability to locate food. Everyone lives happily together until the thaw comes - so it’s more of an ice week than an ice age - whereupon Tippy and his herd leave with the promise that Spike can visit any time and Duckie welcomes her big brother home again.

I actually enjoyed this more than Part II. It wasn’t as cute and it didn’t play up the whole herbivores-vs-carnivores stuff. I think the songs are marginally better and there is some surprisingly serious social commentary in the dinosaurs’ attitude towards Mr Thicknose. Cera’s father in particular is keen to ostracise him. The film therefore has stuff to say about old people as well as youngsters. On the downside, the pool fed by the hot spring is pretty small and there seem far, far fewer dinosaurs than in the earlier film, suggesting that the ecosystem is collapsing - although there are at least another three films after this one.

Littlefoot (in Parts V to IX) is voiced by Thomas Dekker who was 13 when he made this film. He also had the lead role of Fievel in Parts III and IV of An American Tail and, aged six, was one of Picard’s alternate reality sons in Star Trek: Generations. I assume his voice broke after Part IX, but no such problems for the female voice artists: Anndi (sic) McAfee was Cera from Part V to Part XI and in the forthcoming, inevitable Land Before Time TV series. Her coolest credit is a 1998 animated episode of Batman: Gotham Knights in which she voiced Carrie Kelley, the girl who took on the mantle of Robin in The Dark Knight Returns.

Jeff Bennett’s voice broke long ago (he was in his mid-20s when he made Friday the 13th Part VII) but Petrie has such an artificially squeaky voice that it doesn’t matter so he has played the little pteranodon in every film since Part II. He also has Batcredits: the Batcave computer in Batman: The Animated Series, TV anchorman Jack Ryder in Gotham Knights and various voices in Mask of the Phantasm and The Batman vs Dracula, plus a million cartoon shows, animated features and Star Wars video games. Most of all though, Jeff Bennett is the voice of Johnny Bravo and we, therefore, are not worthy. Aria Noelle Curzon has played Duckie since Part V and Rob Paulsen has provided Spike’s occasional grunts since Part II, with both of them still around for the TV show.

Kenneth Mars (Parts II to XI) and Miriam Flynn (Parts V to X) are Littlefoot’s grandparents while Tress MacNeille who voices Duckie’s mother is better known for playing Principle Skinner’s mother in The Simpsons. Tippy is Jeremy Suarez (Koda in Brother Bear) and his mother is Susan Krebs (Earth Girls are Easy). Robert Guillaume’s distinctive, rich tones provide the voice of Rafiki in The Lion King and its sequels and spin-offs. His genre credits include Meteor Man, Big Fish and Pandora’s Clock. Mr Thicknose did not appear in any of the other LBT sequels.

Charles Grosvenor seems to have made a career out of the Great Valley. He has a few earlier credits but since 1997 all he has done is direct and produce Land Before Time sequels. John Loy, curiously, wrote Parts II, III, V, VI, VIII and X (but not IV, VII, IX or XI) as well as O’ Christmas Tree, the Hercules and Xena animated movie, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein/Meet the Wolf Man and, by way of a live-action change, Beethoven’s Fourth.

Incidentally, take a look at the two sleeves here. One shows the five main dinosaurs, but in the other, Cera has been removed and Tippy added (as well as a few adjustments like flipping Petrie so he flies the other way). This instalment in the saga is much more about Duckie and Spike than Littlefoot and Cera, although Cera does get to sing a song and ultimately saves the day by yelling loud enough to cause a snowfall, so it’s a bit rotten that she has been cut from the most commonly used video sleeve. She needs a better agent.

MJS rating: C+

Director: Emil Hyde
Writer: Emil Hyde
Producer: Emil Hyde
Cast: Rom Barkhordar, Derek Dziak, Erin Myers
Country: USA
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.thelandlordmovie.com

The Landlord is that rare creature: a genuinely funny horror comedy which derives its humour from character and situation rather than lampoon or spoofery. I first caught part of the film at the 2009 Festival of Fantastic Films and a few months later, when a press release about the DVD appeared, I made sure that I collected a screener. And I’m glad I did.

Derek Dziak stars as Tyler Czarnecki, the landlord of the title. The building he manages was his childhood home although it technically now belongs to Tyler’s sister Amy since he sold her his half.

There are three apartments: Tyler lives in one, Ms Lipinsky (Joan McGrath) in another and the top floor is rented out to a succession of tenants, none of whom stays very long. This is because the building is home to two flesh-eating demons: lupine demon-queen Lamashtu (Lori Myers) and her servant Rabisu, played to comic perfection by resonant voice-artist Rom Barkhordar (who does Subzero for Mortal Kombat games, appeared as a child in Every Which But Loose and was also in a stage production of The Elephant Man).

Lamashtu speaks only in a (subtitled) demon-tongue and maintains a haughty regal aloofness from the human world but Rabisu, with his cheery, optimistic disposition, is a great foil for Tyler’s impotent frustrations as yet another tenant falls prey to the demons’ murderous possession-powers before paying their second month’s rent.

There is a great sitcom in here somewhere, especially with the law enforcement double act of uptight, white Detective Lopez (Kurt Ehrmann, whose stage credits include Equus, Rhinoceros and Death of a Salesman) and calm, black Detective Rosen (Ezekiel Brown). Lopez is determined to uncover Tyler’s serial killer status but he’s got no evidence and Tyler is adamant that he is just unlucky in having tenants who up and disappear.

Enter Donna (Erin Myers), with one crate of belongings, she is on the run from her abusive husband Reggie (Brion Bliss, who was half of a Blues Brothers tribute act) and wants only two things: a divorce and an abortion. When Donna moves into Tyler’s vacant apartment, Lamashtu takes an interest in the phoetus and makes Rabisu imprison the young woman. This drives Tyler to desperation, especially as he and Donna seem to be getting along so well when she accompanies him to the local bar’s karaoke night.

Meanwhile, Amy (Michelle Courvais, who was in a horror short called A Haunted House) has her own problems. She is a bent cop, cheating on her husband Gary (Brian Amidei, a member of the Wildclaw ‘horror theatre’ company which has presented versions of Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House and Machen’s The Great God Pan) with her equally corrupt partner Warren (Rob McLean). Amy and Warren have some sort of scam going on with various individuals with scuzzy skin, long sharp teeth and an invulnerability to bullet wounds. It’s not entirely clear what these are; they’re referred to as ‘ghouls’ in the credits. It’s also not entirely clear what the deal is between them and the cops but it involves setting the ghouls on junkies and other lowlifes and some sort of payback to the bent cops.

Things get complicated when Amy, with Warren’s assistance, kills a ghoul out the back of a cafe for - well, it’s yet another thing which isn’t entirely clear but seems to be because he approached her in the cafe with a pile of bloody money when he wasn’t supposed to be seen with her in public. Or something. Anyway, it seems these ghouls aren’t invulnerable to having a broken beer bottle rammed repeatedly into their chest. Quite a bloody scene this, and short on laughs.

This angers local gangster ghoul Dimitri who takes his revenge first on Warren and subsequently on Amy. And here’s where The Landlord has its biggest problem which is: there is no obvious connection between Tyler’s A-plot and Amy’s B-plot. Yes, they’re siblings and granted, Tyler is crashing over at Amy’s on the night that Dimitri’s ghouls come calling. But her situation is entirely unrelated to his.

We eventually learn, in a flashback to Amy and Tyler’s childhood, the origins of Lamashtu and Rabisu and the reason why the two humans are enslaved to them (although Amy seems remarkably unenslaved, living happily with her husband and kids a few blocks away while Tyler has to paint over the blood and dispose of the body parts). But there is no indication of how or why Amy became involved with the ghouls. It’s like two different films have collided.

This is unfair on audiences. We expect things to come together at the end and, while some things do come together - including the otherwise underused Ms Lipinsky and a nice comic performance from Amanda Cohen as Baba, cynically efficient proprietor of a local witchcraft shop - the whole Amy/Warren/ghouls thing is entirely separate to the Tyler/Donna/demons storyline. And, without giving away any spoilers, it is also slightly frustrating that the demons’ eventual downfall comes from infighting rather than any triumph by Tyler.

While we’re at it, there is a funny but basically irrelevant scene introducing Donna as she tries to rent a room in an ultra-scuzzy hotel, with writer-director Emil Hyde as the clerk letting rooms by the hour to local whores. It’s a good scene but it has no bearing on the plot and in fact leaves us wondering why Donna is one minute trying to pay for a room for the night in a shit-hole and the next time we see her she can afford to put down a deposit on a whole apartment (albeit one with a surprisingly low rent).

However, such structural problems are more than compensated for by Hyde’s brimmingly confident script and direction and some terrific performances which generate laughs by playing things straight. At heart, the comedy in The Landlord comes from that old staple: exploring the practical aspects of a fantastical situation. There is a great gag about Tyler realising that the dimensional portal to hell in his basement can also function as a waste disposal for body parts.

But it’s Barkhordar who is the comic soul of the film, with Dziak’s Tyler as essentially the straight man. Green and scaly, with a polite, formal nature and a penchant for Hawaiian shirts, Rabisu is a terrific comic creation, especially when he finds Tyler’s credit card and starts ordering products from a shopping channel.

I laughed out loud several times at The Landlord, and we all know how many ‘comedies’ there are out there which don’t so much as crease the corners of one’s mouth. Phil O’Neil’s cinematography suffers in some of the dark scenes but the editing and effects are good and Karen Sandvoss’ music works well.

Emil Hyde (it’s not his real name but it’s similar to his real name), Phil Johnson and Norwegian teenager Ole Jørgen Næss are credited with visual FX; Jen Hiltwein and Matt Stratton with special fx; Kristin LeClair and Crystal Portillo with make-up FX. Most of the cast seem to have a background in theatre companies around Chicago.

The DVD, released through Tempe, includes a deleted sequence, an extended scene and two full-length versions of video clips watched by characters in the film, totalling seven and a half minutes altogether. There is also a fairly entertaining 23-minute Making Of, a silly three-minute film by the same cast and crew called Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast, a trailer for The Landlord and a trailer for Hyde’s earlier film Escape from Planet Love, plus a cast and crew commentary and optional drinking game captions.

Very enjoyable and skilfully crafted, The Landlord is a solid slice of monster fun.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Emiliano Ranzani
Writer: Emiliano Ranzani
Producer: Emiliano Ranzani
Cast: Omar Ramero, Alessio Vacchi
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

A few months ago (as I write this), Tim Lucas was bemoaning in his Video Watchdog editorial the lack of Italian horror cinema nowadays, with all the old masters being dead or making half-hearted, low-budget (even by Italian standards) TV/DTV stuff. I pointed out that, in listing currently working Italian directors, Tim had not mentioned Ivan Zuccon. Turns out Tim had not heard of Ivan. Hopefully he’ll get the chance to see some of Ivan’s work soon.

I mention Zuccon for two reasons. One is that, eight years ago when I saw the original short version of The Darkness Beyond (which was just called The Beyond) I spotted something special. Since then I have championed Ivan’s work to anyone who will listen, seen him blossom and develop as a director and now his latest movie gets a world premiere at a festival in New York with people like Don Coscarelli and Tony Timpone in the audience.

And with Emiliano Ranzani’s short film Langliena, I may have found another Italian film-maker who can carry that country’s tradition of frightfilms well into the 21st century, making horror movies that are not only very, very good but also very, very Italian.

On the other hand - and this is my second point - maybe Emiliano’s work isn’t that special. Maybe it’s just the first Italian film I’ve seen in a while that wasn’t directed by my pal Ivan. Because at the same film festival in Torino where Zuccon’s Colour from the Dark is receiving its domestic premiere, Langliena is showing as part of a package of no fewer than thirty home-grown shorts, ranging from Bruno Sartorini’s four-minute Stria-Strega (in which ‘a mysterious book provokes strange and destructive instincts’) to Luca Baggiani and Emanuele Contadini’s borderline feature-length, 65-minute Le Legione Fantasma (‘a distant epoch and a curse that breaks the barriers of time’).

Inbetween these are Marco and Riccardo Di Gerlando’s Dylan Dog adaptation Taxi, Stefano Colombo’s anthology Snuff: Niente e Come Sembra, Luca Ruocco’s Jekyll/Hyde, Roberto Loiacono’s Hellequin, Pierluigi Rossi’s Where She Lies, Francesco Erba’s Asylum, Francesca Fini’s Immortals and Filippo Palmesi’s astoundingly titled Bazaar: Scrotum Amputation, plus many more. Also at least one other full-length feature, Renato Esposito’s A 6 Giorni dalla Fine about four boys spending their last week alive before a comet slams into the Earth.

So perhaps fantasy film-making is alive and well in the land of Popes, pizzas and pasta. Maybe there is an Italian Horror Revival to match the British Horror Revival of recent years. Could it be that we’re just not getting to see this stuff here in the English-speaking world? Perhaps Langliena will open the floodgates.

Because this extremely professional-looking six-minute short is a little gem that any international horror film festival would be pleased to screen (and indeed some already have). And if all those other films playing the Tohorror Filmfest are half this good, then I want to see them, you want to see them, we all want to see them.

Of course there’s always the matter of language and it helps enormously that Langliena has very, very good subtitles, a quite poetic translation of the voice-over monologue which a character identified only as ‘the Protagonist’ (Omar Ramero) recites into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. In the flashback which constitutes the bulk of the film, we watch him investigating an old shack in the woods wherein he finds evidence of horror: blood, meat-hooks... and something else. Something alive.

“Do you know what a ghoul is?” he asks the tape recorder and the audience. Played by Alessio Vacchi under some impressive make-up, this sub-human creature begs to be fed. But the ghoul is not what has created this little house of horror in the woods because the ghoul is chained up and the door was, until our hero broke it open in an act of feline-dooming curiosity, firmly locked. The ghoul belongs to someone and if that someone traces whoever has broken into the forest shack... well, the ghoul may be fed after all.

This is an almost perfect little slice of horror. It’s not a second too long, there’s not a shot wasted, it is edited together with precision (by 23-year-old writer-director Ranzani) and the cinematography by Mauro Regis is simply gorgeous. Regis captures the beauty of the Italian woodland as expertly as he photographs the shadows and bloody gloom of the shack interior.

The excellent special effects were created by Emanuele De Luca who was a protégé of Rosario Prestopino, an effects man who worked with Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato, Michele Soavi, Lamberto Bava and many other big names in Italian horror. Langliena is dedicated to Prestopino’s memory; you can see some more of De Luca’s work at www.emanueledeluca.com. The music credit is shared between Giorgio Grosso and Richard Kosinski, the latter being a regular Full Moon composer whose credits, mostly directed by Ted Nicolaou, include Leapin’ Leprechauns, Totem, Vampire Journals and all four Subspecies pictures.

I’m really glad that Emiliano Ranzani sent me a copy of Langliena and I am very much looking forward to seeing what this exciting young director can do in the future.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Justin Hardy
Writers: David McNab, Justin Hardy, Charlie Foley
Producers: Ceri Barnes
Cast: Ian Holm, Paul Hilton, some dragons
Country: UK/Germany
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

I completely missed the first broadcast of this unusual feature-length fantasy in March 2005 so when a repeat turned up in the schedules eight months later, buried away in the small hours of Channel Four with no real clear description on the listings, I had to tape it and find out what it was, especially as there was no sign of it on the Inaccurate Movie Database. The only thing that I could tell in advance was that it was definitely not the martial arts picture Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon.

What it turned out to be was a fake docudrama - I suppose that makes it a dramadocudrama or a metadocudrama or a pseudodocudrama, or maybe just a drama. I don’t really know what it is, to be honest.

Fifty per cent of The Last Dragon is in the mould of Walking with Dinosaurs; that is, presented in the manner of a nature documentary, using CGI creatures in real locations. We actually follow three or four different dragons through the ages.

Back in the cretaceous period, we find a young male dragon, searching for food in an arid desert, who encounters an equally hungry Tyrannosaurus rex, who has a slight size advantage. Fortunately, the youngster’s mother appears and fights of the T rex who take a severe scorching and lopes off to die. However, the adult female dragon received a broken wing in the fight and so can no longer hunt for food for herself and her son. Weakened, she also dies and the juvenile, who is not yet old enough to fly, survives on his mother’s carcass for a period.

But a big lump of dead dragon meat attracts pterosaurs and circling pterosaurs attracts the attention of an unusually old male dragon, who can only have reached his great age by seeing off a lot of younger challengers. He would rather eat fresh meat than rotting flesh so he chases the younger dragon, and here’s where the biology comes in.

It seems that dragons have two large sacs, connected to their respiratory system, which they are able to fill with hydrogen as a result of aerobic exercise. These not only provide the fuel for their fire-breathing, they also act as buoyancy aids, giving the dragons sufficient lift to be able to fly using their large wings, which would otherwise need to be impractically huge to get them off the ground.

So the young male dragon learns to fly, just in time. After some aerial wandering, he encounters a mountainous area with an established breeding pair and he successfully fights off the male to claim both the territory and the mate.

The question then arises over how something as large as the dragon could have survived the ‘K/T event’ which killed off the dinosaurs, and the answer is that it didn’t. But... there were other species of dragons, including ones which had adapted to life in the sea. With their hydrogen sacs adapted as swim bladders and their vestigial wings in use as fins, these were essentially sea serpents. As the age of mammals dawned, some of the sea dragons returned to the land in Asia to become forest dragons - hence the rather elongated, wingless dragons of Chinese folklore. We watch one of these prowl through the bamboo, stalking a (real) wild pig and then fighting a (real) tiger.

The suggestion then is that some of these forest dragons evolved into mountain dragons not too dissimilar to those that existed alongside the dinosaurs, and our final tale involves a lone female living in the Carpathian mountains in the 15th century. She is able to mate with a male who has travelled up from the Caucasus and one of their two eggs successfully hatches. However, after the male leaves and while the female is out hunting, having been forced to start raiding farms in the valley, a couple of knights arrive to ‘slay the dragon’. They kill the juvenile and then fight the lonely, heartbroken mother - the last dragon.

So that’s half the programme, but intercut with this is a modern day ‘drama’ about a young American palaeontologist - variously called ‘Doctor Tanner’ and ‘Professor Tanner’ (Paul Hilton) - who is working at the ‘London Museum of Natural History’. (It’s not clear whether they actually mean the Natural History Museum or whether they’ve invented a fictitious museum for copyright/legal reasons. the actual museum scenes were shot in Oxford.)

This is where the science, which was quite well thought out in the ‘walking with dragons’ sequences, falls apart. Tanner has unearthed a fossilised T rex skull and believes it was attacked by a dragon because it has scorch marks on it. This is slightly ludicrous of course because a fossilised skull is not made of bone but is simply rock on the shape of a skull which has filled up the gap in older rock where the skull was. So running your finger along the blackened bits on the outside and saying “This is carbonisation” should be enough to get you thrown out of any decent museum.

Tanner and two unnamed colleagues - identified only as ‘biologist (Katrine Bach) and ‘data analyst’ (Aidan Woodward, who gets a curious stand-alone credit as ‘co-writer’, as distinct from the ‘script’ by David McNab, Justin Hardy and Charlie Foley from a ‘story’ by those three plus Kevin Tao Mohs) - are sent to the Carpathians to examine the alleged frozen corpse of a dragon. Their investigation of the body - and the scorched remains of two medieval bodies found alongside it in an ice cave - is intercut with the dramatised dragon footage. Their scientific method, however, leaves something to be desired. Tanner investigates the hydrogen sacs by cutting open the body, sticking his hands in and ripping the organs out. And it is only after extensive study and numerous x-rays - which of course could not actually be done in situ - that Tanner and his colleagues realise the creature has six limbs. Duh.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting and entertaining programme. The dragon sequences certainly have the edge - in terms of both script and production values - over the present day stuff, but I can see why the two have been combined in order to provide a more cohesive narrative. As aspects of dragon physiology and anatomy are discovered and/or theorised by Tanner (in voice-over, mostly), we also see how they related to the real things when they were alive.

The most surprising thing about this whole production is that it is British; technically it is Anglo-German, but the principal production company is Darlow Smithson “for Animal Planet, in association with Tandem Communications and Sat 1 Satellitenfernsehen". Checking the Darlow Smithson website it’s remarkable how many of their programmes I have seen and enjoyed, bearing in mind how little TV I actually watch: dramatised documentaries on Albert Einstein (E=mc2) and the Wright Brothers (The Wright Stuff), Station X, Lost Buildings of Britain, What We Still Don’t Know, The World’s Biggest Airplane: Airbus 380; they also made the successful theatrical documentary Touching the Void.

Director Justin Hardy is best known for being the son of Wicker Man director Robin Hardy and for helming the Christopher Lee-starring public school black comedy A Feast at Midnight. His surprisingly extensive CV also include the 2001 Raffles telemovie (with Bach in the cast) and two other 2005 docudramas, The Princes in the Tower (with Hilton as Henry VII) and the rather good Trafalgar Battle Surgeon. Also episodes of Harbour Lights, London Bridge and Hope and Glory, plus a 1997 paranormal documentary series, Strictly Supernatural, narrated by his old pal Chris Lee.

Charlie Foley, director of development at US cable channel Animal Planet, gets a ‘created by’ credit as well as co-credit on story and script. John Smithson, David McNab and Alice Keens-Soper were executive producers. Ceri Barnes, former head of production at Tigress, was producer. Ed Neumeier (RoboCop, Starship Troopers) is credited as ‘consulting producer’. Matthew Graham, who wrote the enjoyable post-holocaust sci-fi drama The Last Train (as well as episodes of Hustle and Spooks) get a credit as ‘script consultant’. Tanner’s boss at the museum, in the prologue and epilogue, is played by Tom Chadbon (The Stone Tape, The Beast Must Die, The Tenth Kingdom).

Curiously, there are three different versions of this programme with three different narrators of the (pre-) historic sequences. When it was broadcast in the USA (as Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real - which is why I drew a blank with the IMDB) the narrator was Patrick Stewart but for the C4 broadcast it as Ian Holm. Apparently there is also a version narrated by Brad Lavelle (Hellraiser II, Nightbreed, Judge Dredd, Razor Blade Smile) which seems to have been prepared for trade screenings but not used because Lavelle (who does a lot of voice work on anime) is not well-known enough. This may also be the version called Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real, which seems to be another variant title.

John Howarth, who also worked on Walking with Dinosaurs, was one of two cinematographers while the editor was Rick Aplin whose credits include the outstanding Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, without a doubt the best documentary series of recent years of any sort at all. Framestore CFC handled all the CGI effects, with Alec Knox (Walking with Dinosaurs, Dinotopia, Batman Begins) as CGI supervisor and Mike Milne as director of computer animation. Jamie Campbell was physical effects supervisor.

Three biologists are credited as ‘dragon consultants’ and, buried away in the credits, one can spot no less than Neil Gaiman as ‘creative consultant’; I suspect that just means that Neil offered to have a chat with them if they needed him.

Leaving aside some dodgy science and the rather intense, unsympathetic nature of the main (human) character, The Last Dragon is an entertaining, imaginative and clever hundred minutes.

MJS rating: B+

Director: David Noel Bourke
Writer: David Noel Bourke
Producer: David Noel Bourke
Cast: Morten Vogelius, Peter Ottesen, Gry Bay
Country: Denmark
Year of release: 2003
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Official website: www.lastexitproductions.dk

After watching David Bourke’s Danish indie feature Last Exit, I felt similar to how I felt after watching Cronenberg’s Crash. It’s not that there is any real stylistic or thematic similarity between the two, it’s just that in both instances I thought: ‘That was very good and I’m glad I’ve seen it, but I don’t really want to ever see it again.’

Last Exit is a grim, grimy, rather unpleasant look at the underbelly of Copenhagen, without a single likeable or sympathetic character - and I think it’s meant to be like that.

Morten Vogelius stars as Nigel, of English parentage but raised in Denmark, who is now living in Copenhagen after several years in the UK. Though his background is not gone into in any detail, he evidently owes a considerable amount of money to various parties and has an ex-girlfriend with a young son. Nigel has sought temporary relief from his responsibilities by moving to Denmark with his Danish ‘wife’ Maria (Jette Philipsen, whose name is unfortunately misspelled on the poster and curiously omitted from the cast list on the film’s website). He has a penchant for porn, she has a drug habit and they live together in a small flat with the lowest ceiling I have ever seen,

Seeking some form of income, Nigel meets a one-eyed stranger named Tobias (Erling Eliasson) in a bar who recommends him to a mysterious figure known only as ‘The President’. This turns out to be a scary, bald gangster (Peter Ottesen) whose mood swings between taught politeness and brief fury. He has two pet thugs, hulking Scandinavian ‘Full Force Finn’ (John Kelleher) and Latino weasel Pedro Rodriguez Iguana (Micah Epstein - surely not the same actor who was in the awful Numb?). When Nigel realises quite how much pain these chaps can inflict with a teaspoon (yes, a teaspoon: bear in mind how many eyes Tobias had...) he also realises that just by coming to The President’s office and speaking to him, he is dipping his toe into murky waters.

The President has a young woman named Tanya (Gry Bay, voted the 97th sexiest woman in the world by the readers of Danish FHM) also working for him, who is ‘assigned’ to Nigel and begs him to go to bed with her. He resists as long as he can, even though his marriage to Maria, which seems to be one of convenience that enabled him to move to Denmark, has become loveless and bleak. But eventually he gives in.

There is no real nudity in the film apart from the occasional flash of tits but there is a terrific love-making scene where Tanya and Nigel are both slightly high and the director projects various images onto their bodies. Very clever, stylish and effective.

Nigel’s first job for The President is simple: storing 50 boxes of dirty videos in his flat, but he mucks this up - or at least, The President tells him he has mucked it up - and each successive job drags him further and further into the seedy, sleazy underworld. However, as we learn about his abandonment of his British family and get hints at his not entirely legal past, it’s difficult to have any sympathy for the character. Eventually, he becomes involved in death and murder, not all entirely of his own doing.

There is one scene that completely baffled me, when Nigel is trying to get rid of incriminating evidence by cycling around Copenhagen, putting plastic carrier bags into widely space litter bins. As he is about to put the last bag into a wheely bin, he sees that there is a girl in there (it’s not clear if she’s dead, drunk or what). He then cycles back along his route, collecting all the carrier bags, and disposes of the evidence elsewhere. That made no sense.

The character’s downward spiral continues but the film seems to finish just short of an ending. There’s no climax or even an anticlimax: things escalate (or deteriorate, depending on how you look at them) and then everything just stops.

Providing some sort of subplot to, or commentary on, all this is a Scottish dope-seller named Jimmy (Nicholas Sherry) who talks at great length, spouting pseudoscientific nonsense about the meaning of it all and humanity’s place in the universe. While most of the characters are repellent (apart from Maria, whose drug addiction is never really explored and who makes an effort at one point to try and turn her and Nigel’s lives around), Jimmy is just massively, massively irritating and hearing him drone on his existentialist stoner claptrap is like being stuck with the most boring drunk person at an otherwise interesting party.

When we first meet Jimmy he hales Nigel by name, even though Nigel has never met him before. This, together with The President’s deliberate attachment of Tanya to Nigel, suggested some sort of conspiracy but in fact Jimmy’s role - in the sequence of events and in the film itself - is never explained and if Tanya is some sort of honey trap that doesn’t come across at all as The President seems to take no interest in her relationship with Nigel after putting the two together.

The film’s look is very rough and basic, mirroring its themes. Although there are too many effects for this to count as a Dogme movie, it does seem to use available light a great deal, there is a lot of handheld camerawork and the sound quality is sometimes a little poor. Where the film does score a lot of points is in the editing which is excellent. The publicity calls this ‘a film by David Bourke and André Moulin’ and both are credited as editors. (They also share the ‘camera operator’ credit while Moulin gets sole credit for cinematography and art direction.)

The acting is mostly okay, possibly because this is a Danish cast working in English (speaking a foreign language is not the same as acting in it). A few brief scenes, when The President loses his rag, are in unsubtitled Danish which is a brave and sensible move. A soundtrack of indie music, much of which sounds (to my ignorant ear) a bit like Goldfrapp, fits the visuals well but the film mercifully stops short of falling into the ‘90-minute music video' category that entraps so many indie movies nowadays.

There’s nothing wrong with Last Exit. I think it achieves what it sets out to do very well. I’m just not overly keen on what it sets out to do. It left me feeling dirty and in need of a shower, and because I felt no sympathy for anybody in the film, I wasn’t bothered by any of their suffering, most of which seemed to be brought on by their own greed and stupidity. As a study of the bottom level of life in Denmark, I guess this works but it’s not quite thrilling enough to be a thriller, not quite dramatic enough to be a drama, so I’m unsure what it is.

It’s a well-made, credible first feature but I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed watching it. A few other reviews have referred to the film as having elements of black comedy but that didn’t come across to me at all (unless they were referring to the deeply irritating Jimmy). I found the film to be unremittingly bleak and pessimistic to the point of nihilism and I assumed that was the intention.

Last Exit is currently available in Germany through a distributor called Cult Movies and a US release is planned.

MJS rating: B

Director: Julian Richards
Writer: James Handel
Producer: Zorana Piggott
Cast: Kevin Howarth, Mark Stevenson, Antonia Beamish
Year of release: 2003
Country: UK
Reviewed from: Festival screenings (FFF ‘03, Far Out ‘03)
Official website: www.prolificfilms.freeserve.co.uk

Julian Richards showed great promise with his short student films and then got his break with Darklands, his ‘homage to Hammer’ which was, to all intents and purposes, The Wicker Man in 1990s Newport. Despite a lead performance by the notoriously wooden Craig Fairbrass (Proteus, Cliffhanger) - without whose participation the film would simply not have been made - Darklands proved to be a corking exercise in industrial-gothic paranoia.

Richards followed this with Silent Cry, a thriller which has so far only been released in Germany. Cannily, he used his £50,000 fee from Silent Cry to fund the first film made entirely by his Prolific Films company. And here it is. (Not to be confused with the 1982 slasher The Last Horror Film.)

I have seen the film on the big screen twice now, with UK and US theatrical distribution still a few months away, and have been fortunate enough to see it without knowing the plot in advance. If you would also like to enjoy the film, which I’m rating ‘A+’, and which stars Chris Adamson from Razor Blade Smile and Evil Aliens as a psychopath terrorising a bunch of American teens - or does it? - without prior knowledge, then stop reading now and come back to this page after you’ve seen the movie. If you can.

Have they gone? ‘Cause there be spoilers ahead!

So: fifty grand. For an entire, professional, feature-length movie? Like all the best ultra-low budget films (and certain unwatchable shit), The Last Horror Movie uses its financial limitation to its advantage. Shot on DV using available light sources, it’s a video diary recorded by a calm, amoral psychopath. This is a film which wears the influences of Man Bites Dog and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as unashamedly and confidently as Darklands did with its own antecedent.

Kevin Howarth (Razor Blade Smile, The Ghost of Greville Lodge) plays Max, who makes his living shooting wedding videos but whose hobby is altogether more brutal. Using an assistant/protege named James (Mark Stevenson), Max is making a film about himself. James follows him around, videoing him with friends, with his sister and her arsehole of a husband, even having tea round at his gran’s. And he also films Max killing by a variety of unpleasant methods - stabbing, strangulation, bludgeoning with a meat tenderiser, etc.

This is a nasty film, but also a compelling one. We’re never asked to judge Max, and he comes across as a bit weird but kind of fun (his two young nephews think he’s great because he does dinosaur impressions). Max receives no punishment for his crimes, he achieves no redemption, he just is what he is and does what he does. Like Henry, he doesn’t seem to get off on it; the video diary is actually his way of exploring his own motivations. The fact that he shoots and edits videos for a living justifies decent camera-work which makes the film eminently watchable.

A film like this could very well be a one-joke story (which is not to say it’s a comedy, but there are elements of very black humour) but psychology-trained writer James Handel, working from a treatment by the director, creates not only a fascinating character but real narrative development. The film starts as the aforementioned teen slasher flick, over which Max has recorded his own home-made film. And towards the end we start to discover that we’re not the first people to watch this film but that it could very well be, for us at least, the last horror movie.

The great irony here is that the film’s central conceit works best on VHS, in which situation this will be a genuinely terrifying film to rent. Metro Tartan are releasing this theatrically in the UK and Bedford Entertainment/Fangoria are putting it into US cinemas; on the big screen the film is just as scary but can’t have the same personal, emotional impact. Nor will a DVD. But don’t worry. Rather than being terrified, you’ll be relieved that you’re not in a position to be terrified.

I am confidently expecting The Last Horror Movie to be a big hit, and possibly a controversial cause celebre. Already, it is selling out at festivals. It does exactly what it sets out to do and does it brilliantly, helped by some terrific performances, most notably Howarth of course, and also some fantastic effects courtesy of Paul Hyett (I Zombie, Lighthouse). The cast are largely unknowns - recognisable faces would have destroyed the illusion - but include Antonia Beamish (Dead Creatures) as Max’s friend Petra, Mark Stevenson (Man Who Sold the World) as Max's assistant, Rita Davies (The Wolves of Kromer, Monty Python’s Flying Circus) as his gran, Paul Conway (Penetration Angst) and Jonathan Coote (Razor Blade Smile, Virtual Terror, The 13th Sign).

Do everything you can to see this film.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Worth Keeter
Writer: Dan Duling
Producer: Steve Beswick
Cast: C Thomas Howell, Jennifer Rubin, Billy Wirth
Country: USA/Germany
Year of release: 1997
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS

I picked this up in a charity shop and fully expected it to be shite. As it turns out, while Last Lives is far from what you could call ‘good’, by the end I was actually quite interested and starting to enjoy it.

Judge Reinhold (Gremlins, Big Monster on Campus) plays a bonkers scientist on a parallel Earth who thinks he has found a way of transporting people between the two worlds - his and ours. Well, I say parallel (and so does he) but his world is a global totalitarian regime with technology impossibly far advanced from ours, so there’s not that much parallel about it. Reinhold’s character, incidentally, is named Merkhan which unfortunately sounds enough like ‘merkin’ to provide some juvenile humour.

For his test subject, the government provides him with a convicted rebel, Malakai (Billy Wirth: Body Snatchers, Space Marines) who wears his hair long and has two expressions: slightly moody and very moody (well, three if you include ‘blank’). He is suitable because he is obsessed with his deceased true love - another rebel who was killed when they were captured - and so has some sort of psychic link to her equivalent in our world. This turns out to be a woman named Adrienne, played by Jennifer Rubin (Screamers, Little Witches, Sanctimony) in a hairstyle that makes her look so much like Big Brother presenter Davina McCall that it is difficult to think of anything else when she is on screen.

After an initial brief foray into Adrienne’s bedroom, Malakai breaks out of the massively spacious (but entirely unfurnished) high-tech cell which he shares with two psychopaths, Khafar and Benza (Robert Pentz - Cyborg - and David Lenthall - The Rage: Carrie 2 - who were both in The Stepford Husbands). These two never say a word but grin whenever they kill people (which they do, a lot). They can be distinguished because one of them is skinny with an automatic rifle and one is fat with a grenade launcher, but I’m not sure which is which.

Malakai and his two goons knock Merkhan unconscious and zap themselves from his massively spacious (but almost entirely unfurnished) laboratory to our world ... arriving outside a church just as Adrienne is inside getting married to Aaron (straight to video king C Thomas Howell). They knock out the congregation with some sort of gas bombs, stab the best man with a bloody great knife, knock out Adrienne with a sort of gas-mask thing and then shoot Aaron. Actually, the skinny psycho blasts away with his M16 (weapons technology being one of the few things in his world that is parallel, apparently), knocking chunks out of the pews behind which Aaron is ducking - and this is not a big church, so the range is about ten or twelve feet tops - without hitting him until he stands up.*

Grabbing the unconscious Adrienne, the three bad guys make their escape in the white stretch limo parked outside, just as Merkhan zaps himself into existence on the church steps.

Before he left his world, Merkhan took from an alcove a large cylinder with ten things wrapped round it that look like futuristic wristwatches. He puts one of these on Aaron and, hey presto, his wounds disappear and he returns to life. Merkhan tries the same trick with the best man but to no avail, apparently because he has been dead slightly longer. In the background, we see someone trying to stand up but it’s not clear whether this is the congregation coming round or just an extra who wasn’t paying attention. (We do later hear on a police radio that, “Everyone in the congregation is wandering around like zombies.” Which of course isn’t grammatically correct, but what are you going to do?)

Merkhan and Aaron set off in pursuit of the limo, using some sort of telepathy to determine its route, I think. Malakai is certainly a telepath, absorbing a knowledge of cars and driving skills by touching Adrienne’s temples. Anyway, Merkhan explains what these wristwatch doodads or ‘lifebands’ actually do, and this, I felt, was worth transcribing exactly because it is some of the most ring-a-ding technobabble I have ever come across:

“Each lifeband is a muto-genetic cloning stimulator. I designed them to be activated by the biomechanisms of dying. Within a short span of time, depending on the severity of the damage, the body can be fully reanimated.”

Right...

The limo stops at ‘Stan’s Gas and Food’ to refill, where Khafar and Benza decided to kill everyone inside the diner for no apparent reason. Before leaving, they fire a grenade at Aaron’s rapidly approaching car which explodes but remains in one piece, smashing into the petrol pumps, which also explode, although not as much as one would expect. Incredibly, Aaron and Merkhan both survive intact although they are critically injured; Merkhan gives Aaron the remaining lifebands so that he can track down Malakai (who apparently presents a terrible threat because he will “kill everybody” though it’s not clear how or why).

There were originally ten lifebands but two were damaged (apparently) and Aaron has already used one. He slips the other seven onto his arm just before expiring, but his injuries then disappear (in quite a nice morphing shot) and he is whole again. His next problem is the cops who turn up, led by Lieutenant Parks (JC Quinn: Maximum Overdrive, CHUD, The Prophecy). When they arrive, Aaron has changed into the gas attendant’s overalls for no obvious reason (and they are suspiciously devoid of bloodstains). He tries to escape in a police car but is shot through the head (“Nice warning shot,” says Parks, drily) but one of the lifebands activates and brings him back to life, enabling him to drive off as the cops look on in amazement. (Thinking about it, he’s fortunate that all seven lifebands weren’t “activated by the biomechanisms of dying” as that would have blown his remaining lifelines.) The middle act of the film is then a long car chase between the limo and the police car.

What we have here is the idea of limited immortality: Aaron can cheat death six more times. He has seven lives and he has just used up his first one. Unfortunately, this means that not only do we know that any potentially fatal threat won’t harm him, but we are actually counting down the lives as they are used up and will know when the crunch comes. There is also no real link between the idea of an escaped convict from a parallel world and a wristband which can restore the dead to life. This feels like two movies which have been merged into one.

Malakai, his goons and his hostage hole up in a large, deserted hunting lodge, to where Aaron tracks them. This final act perks up a lot (apart from a short, tasteful sex scene which starts as Adrienne dreaming about Aaron before jolting into reality when she wakes to find Malakai on top of her). Once Aaron is sure that he can’t be killed, he despatches the two goons by luring them, one at a time, into fatal situations then committing suicide. One of these tactics involves blowing himself up and there is a neat but loopy shot of a hand and arm melding back together. It’s loopy because we subsequently see that although his arm may have been blown to bits, his sleeve remained intact. And you have to wonder at his luck that the other arm, the one with the lifebands on it, did not become similarly detached and cause all the devices to fall off.

The ending, as cops surround the lodge, is not terribly surprising although it does contradict what it says in the video sleeve. There is a short epilogue, set a few years later, which presents a nice twist in a surprisingly clever way.

Despite my initial misgivings, this worked out okay. The first act is bollocks, admittedly, and the middle act car chase is singularly uninvolving, but the third act, as Aaron turns his defence mechanism into an offensive weapon, is not bad at all. None of the acting is spectacularly good but none is spectacularly bad, possibly because none of the characters are particularly deep or complex. The script makes sense within its own parameters and doesn’t try to cheat, although there is some decidedly dodgy dialogue. I particularly enjoyed Malakai’s description of his world as: “A world where war was constant, life was torture and dreaming was a punishable offence.” That’ll be Blair’s Britain then (little bit of politics...). And Parks has a corker of a line, even if it is meant ironically: “Don’t worry about any crazed killers speeding away from here. We’ll deal with them at the right time.”

Also in the cast are Richard Fullerton (who was also in The Stepford Husbands) as Merkhan’s boss, the extraordinary-looking John Bennes (The Night Flier, Children of the Corn II, Weekend at Bernie’s) as the minister at the wedding and writer Dan Duling (who has written plenty of other scripts but has no other produced credits) in a cameo as a cop.

Worth Keeter kicked off his directorial career with the straightforwardly titled lycanthrope picture Wolfman in 1979, taking in such stereoscopic classics as Tales from the Third Dimension, Rotweiler: Dogs of Hell and Hot Heir before settling down to a career making episode of Power Rangers and other less well-known Japan-derived Saban product (VR Troopers, Beetleborgs, Masked Rider).

Producer Steve Beswick was also responsible for Alien Express and Tim Bond’s The Shadow Men. The Inaccurate Movie Database lists John Kramer as executive producer which would be an unusual career move if it actually was the Canadian editor of that name. In fact the two executive producers of this Promark/Videal GmbH movie are Jon Kramer (The Shadow Men, Metamorphosis) and Conny Lernhag. Cinematographer Kent Wakeford also lit China O’Brien I and II and Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade while composer Greg Edmondson contributed music to Firefly, Quantum Leap and, erm, Cop Rock.

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 11th December 2005

* LJ Brooks of Kingston, Ontario informs me that this not in fact an M16 but "a gazed-up copy of a Sterling-Patchett 9 mm Submachine gun".

Director: Larry Fessenden
Writers: Larry Fessenden, Robert Leaver
Producers: Larry Fessenden, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
Cast: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton
Country: USA/Iceland
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

You know, it’s not often that a critic gets to watch the birth of a new subgenre. Usually these things only become evident in retrospect. But I think that The Last Winter is in the vanguard of a whole new type of horror picture.

Eco-horror - it’s the coming thing.

Let’s be clear. I don’t mean the old nature-amok subgenre like Grizzly or Piranha where a particular species was selected to be fiercer and/or larger than it is normally and then just set free to rampage across the screen and most of the cast. No, eco-horror is a whole new subgenre that owes as much to An Inconvenient Truth as it does to Jaws or Phase IV.

The Last Winter may or may not be the first eco-horror film, but it’s the first one I have seen. And I would venture to suggest that, unless this particular subgenre turns out to be absolutely fantastic through and through, this will ultimately be regarded as one of the best eco-horror films. Larry Fessenden’s latest film sets the bar very high indeed.

An opening corporate video explains that an attempt to drill an oil well in an Alaskan wildlife reserve many years ago was abandoned, but that now North Oil are back for another try. A small group of men and women are already out in the snowy wilderness, measuring and marking out the area before an ‘ice road’ is constructed to the location. They’re shacked up in a collection of Portakabins and their only link to the outside world is a radio telephone and occasional visits from a light aircraft, which drops off team leader Pollack after he has spent five weeks back at company headquarters.

Pollack is played by the world’s busiest actor, Ron Perlman, who is just in everything. I mean, the Inaccurate Movie Database already lists 21 other credits since this! To be fair, that includes four animated Hellboy features, an animated Conan feature, a Hellboy video game etc but still there’s things like Hellboy 2 and Mutant Chronicles (he was on set when I visited but wasn’t in the mood for interviews alas). I mean: Star Trek: Nemesis, Blade II, Scooby-Doo, Batman, Titan AE, The Outer Limits, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, City of Lost Children. It’s hard to find something cool this guy hasn’t done in some respect. Hmm, didn’t know he was in Police Academy 7, I must admit...

In opposition to Pollack is Hoffman (James LeGros: Phantasm II, Destiny Turns on the Radio), one of two ecologists or ‘greenies’ which North are required to have on site, monitoring the environmental impact of the work. So immediately there’s conflict - conflict which is not helped by Pollack’s discovery that, while he was back at North HQ, Hoffman has not only joined the team he has also hitched up with Abby (Connie Britton: Spin City, plus recurring roles on The West Wing and 24), a female worker who had previously been keeping Pollack warm at night.

This is conflict which builds. Initially Pollack is welcoming, if naturally wary, and everyone joins in a ‘welcome back’ meal and a game of American football outside on the ice. Pollack is a company man and it would have been very easy to paint him as a bastard, a sort of blue-collar Paul-Reiser-in-Aliens, but he has an agenda based on his own values, his own belief that the fuel reserves as yet untapped in Alaska will make the world a better place, not a worse one.

The rest of the team are interesting but not caricatures and we get to know them slowly over the next 50 minutes or so.

Because it is only halfway through this 101-minute film that anything really scary happens, and then only very, very briefly. That might sound like a long build-up but that’s just what it is: a build-up. The feeling that something is awry up there in the snow increases gradually. The vast expanses can do strange things to a person’s mind; you can see illusions, you can start to feel a little strange.

Odd winds from nowhere, curious feelings, half-seen images - there’s nothing overtly supernatural. In fact everything that happens seems to be natural and perhaps that’s part of the film’s great strength. Because this isn’t a monster movie. The monster, if there is one, is nature itself. Not animals - we never see any animals except a few crows - but the world, the snow, the planet, the ice, the cold air and the Northern Lights. And if it is a monster, it’s Frankenstein’s monster, not in the sense of being man-made but in its pitiful, victimised defence of itself. It’s a monster that can be pushed so far and then must lash out at its attackers.

Describing too much of the plot would spoil a film that I really, really don’t want to spoil for you. But I can say that from the halfway mark, things start to get worse for the team and people start dying. And things get worse and worse and they have so much empty space around them they have nowhere to go. Simmering at the heart of this is the antipathetic relationship between Pollack and Hoffman which never boils over into rage. Towards the end, the two must work together and it would have been easy for the film to fall into a simplistic storyline about people learning to understand other folks’ views - but this never happens. Fessenden’s marvellous script and direction ensures that these characters stay three-dimensional and their relationships remain believable.

The Last Winter is a sort of edgewhere movie, balanced on that precarious border between reality and fantasy. There are parts of the film where it’s clear that what is happening is inside somebody’s head - psychological horror. There are other parts where it seem reasonably clear that some genuine physical phenomenon has occurred, one that should not have done so - supernatural horror. These two elements both contradict and complement each other and a third element is present too: scientific horror. As Hoffman tries to understand why the permafrost is melting, why it’s warm enough in Alaska for rain, the horror of what humanity is doing to the planet - and what the planet may do back - becomes the ultimate driving force behind the film’s emotional push.

Fessenden’s last couple of films, Habit and Wendigo (someone mentions a Wendigo in this one) were written solo but for this script he has teamed up with Robert Leaver, a “New York based writer, poet and teacher” who has two short documentaries to his credit, The Session and Oil and Water (although these are not mention in The Last Winter’s publicity for some reason). Fessenden, whose acting credits include Session 9, The Roost and Cabin Fever 2, has a cameo in an aeroplane on its way to visit the base.

The frankly flawless cast also includes Kevin Corrigan (True Romance, Bad Boys), Jamie Harrold (Erin Brockovich, Kingdom Hospital), Zach Gilford (Rise: Blood Hunter) and Grammy-winning Native American singer-songwriter Joanne Shenandoah. But possibly the finest member of the cast is the location which is as much a character as New York in a Woody Allen movie. Full credit for this has to go to the stunning cinematography of G Magni Agustsson who works wonders with not just the vast, widescreen emptiness but also the lived-in confines of the base.

Agustsson is Icelandic and indeed much of the film was shot in Iceland. Variety actually lists the film as a US-Icelandic co-production and I’m prepared to go along with that unless proven otherwise. Producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte also produced Wendigo as well as films like Laurel Canyon and Mysterious Skin. Executive producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson’s previous credits include Wild at Heart, In Bed with Madonna, Candyman I and II, Kalifornia, Lord of Illusions and Arlington Road. Stefan Jorgen, who contributed the make-up effects, also did make-up for Lazy Town! Glenn McQuaid provided the visual effects. Douglas Buck (Cutting Moments) shot a Making Of which is sadly missing from the vanilla UK release.

If you want scary monsters and/or gallons of blood and/or a roller-coaster ride then you’re looking at the wrong film. This may be Fessenden’s most accessible film to date but it’s still not obviously commercial (note the lack of attractive young people in the cast, for example). But if you want a powerful, unnerving, original, beautifully constructed slice of disturbing, thought-provoking eco-horror, here it is.

MJS rating: A