Director: Ted Nicolaou
Writers: Ted Nicolaou, Michael McGann
Producers: Vlad Paunescu, Oana Paunescu
Cast: John Bluthal, Sharon Lee Jones, Sylvester McCoy
Country: USA
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Leapin’ Leprechauns!, produced and released by Charles Band’s kid-vid company Moonbeam Entertainment, is nauseatingly twee, an image of Ireland and Irish people which is about as accurate as Riverdance or those market stalls that sell those awful CDs of crappy Irish cover versions and unfunny Irish comedians. It also stars Doctor Who.

John Bluthal stars as Michael Dennehy who lives in an Irish castle which looks about as Gaelic as everything else in Romania, where he receives coachloads of tourists who traipse up the hill, take a quick look at a small arrangement of three flat stones, hear a bit of blarney/bollocks (depending on your point of view) then head off again. The speed with which they disappear suggests they’re doing Europe in a week and have to see the whole of the Republic of Ireland on Tuesday afternoon. Michael tells them that a hole in the ground underneath the stones is where the leprechauns live. Bluthal is now best known from The Vicar of Dibley but once upon a time he was a regular stooge for Spike Milligan and also the voice of Steve Zodiac in Fireball XL5. His other genre movie credits include The Fifth Element, Dark City, Superman III and The Return of Captain Invincible.

When the tourists have departed (and there’s no indication that Michael makes any money out of this stuff), two comedy surveyors (Jeremy Levine and Mike Higgins) arrive whose attempt to set up a theodolite is scuppered when the equipment takes on a life of its own, complete with magic glow and superimposed stars. They say they were employed by Mr Dennehy but the address is in America - so it’s Michael’s son, John (Grant Cramer: New Year’s Evil, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Raptor, Addicted to Murder 2 and 3).

Michael rings his son to ask about this and is assured it’s all a mistake and hey, why doesn’t he come out to the USA and spend some time with his grandchildren? But before heading off, Michael Dennehy explains where he’s going to some leprechauns. These three little fellows are white-bearded King Kevin (Godfrey James: Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Land that Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core, also in Moonbeam’s Magic in the Mirror and its sequel Fowl Play), silly Patrick (James Ellis: Z Cars, Nightingales and an uncredited bit-part in Re-Animator, also in Moonbeam’s Dragonworld II) and very silly Flynn (Sylvester McCoy!). They hold a conflab with the other leprechauns who are all played by Romanian extras. Only the leprechaun wizard (Ion Haiduc: a Band regular who played Lt Marin in the Subspecies sequels and was also in Trancers 4 and 5, Magic in the Mirror, Fowl Play, The Secret Kingdom, The Shrunken City, Clockmaker etc; more recently in Mimic 3 and Ghouls) has any lines and he warns of great doom because of an evil entity called Finbara, Lord of the Dead.

The leprechauns’ dinner is then interrupted by the arrival of some fairies who are all represented by Romanian extras in tutus and gossamer wings, dancing down the table. Tina Martin (Legend, Dragonworld II) is Maeve, the Queen of the Fairies who is considerably less delicate and has an enjoyable (if asexual) love-hate relationship with King Kevin which reflects the larger antipathetic battle-of-the-sexes between the fairies and the leprechauns.

The upshot of all this is that Kevin, Maeve, Patrick and Flynn magic themselves into Michael Dennehy’s suitcase (which is conveniently, but inexplicably otherwise completely empty) and accompany him across the Atlantic to Boston. There we meet John, his wife Sarah (Sharon Lee Jones from Princess Warrior), their ten-year-old son Mikey (Gregory Edward Smith, who had just starred in seal-buddy movie Andre and went on to appear in The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space, Small Soldiers and The Seeker: The Dark is Rising) and his younger sister, curly-haired moppet Melanie (Erica Nicole Hess). Sharon and John are welcoming, Melanie is excited but Mikey is grumpy, worried that his grandfather is a mad old bastard who will embarrass him in front of his friends - as indeed the mad old bastard promptly does.

What no-one knows is that John has plans to convert Fairy Hill, where Michael lives, into a theme park called Irelandland.

Well, naturally Michael is a bit put out to find the leprechauns in his luggage and they start playing pranks, including a sequence in the park when they cause all the swings and roundabouts to go crazy (though without hurting any children, of course). Mel is the first of the Yanks to see the little folk, who can only be viewed by those who believe in them; this is why Michael generally appears to be talking to himself. Sarah, who has unfulfilled ambitions to be an artist, learns to see the wee folk too and eventually so does Mikey.

Hoping to have his father certified insane, thus making it easier to take control of the land in Ireland, John invites to dinner his next-door neighbours, psychiatrist Dr Voyznic (Mihai Niculescu: Nostradamus, Vampire Journals, The Secret Kingdom, The Shrunken City, Clockmaker) and his wife, psychiatrist Dr Voyznic (Dorina Lazar: The Shrunken City, Phantom Town, Subspecies IV, Wolf Girl). Naturally the leprechauns have great fun playing with the food which John can’t understand although the rest of the family find it hilarious.

As so often with Moonbeam films, the ending ticks the right boxes but is rather incoherent. Sarah, having accidentally trapped King Kevin in a pedal-bin and then released him, is granted three wishes. She rather wastes these by wishing for her family to see the leprechauns (which Kevin explains is not really up to him) and then later for her family to be safe (which Kevin again explains he can’t guarantee). She may use her third wish for something but to be honest I didn’t notice.

The safety issue arises because John goes driving off with his father in the car but is pursued by Finbara, Lord of the Dead, who has somehow also got over to the States. This threat is briefly shown as a vaguely anthropic (and rather scary) dark cloud and later reappears as a Death-like figure - dark cloak, skull face, glowing red eyes, stout staff in place of scythe - who is backed by a small number of similarly dressed figures with animal skulls. This is all rather frightening to be honest, especially when combined with a spectral black horse, rearing wildly like it’s auditioning for a Lloyd’s Bank advert, and the distant screaming of banshees supposedly foretelling a death.

Mikey chases after his father on his BMX, utilising several shortcuts, and Sarah and Mel follow behind in another car. John’s car crashes and overturns, though the two men are unhurt, and there is some sort of malarkey whereby they can only defeat Finbara if John believes in leprechauns and/or something to do with John telling his son that he loves him. Frankly, it’s vague and not explained but it’s all very feelgood and family and leads into an epilogue showing the family (and the wee folk) back in Romania, um, Ireland with John providing the bollocks for another batch of tourists.

Leapin’ Leprechauns! is okay, I suppose. It’s a direct descendent of Darby O’Gill and the Little People and should not be confused with the Warwick Davis-starring series of Leprechaun horror movies. I mean yes, family is important and yes, John Dennehy has learned his lesson and cancelled plans for Irelandland (which, as his wife points out, is a really, really stupid name) and yes, believe in magic and all that. And I suppose Americans might not know the difference between an Irish castle and a Romanian one (in fact, many of them probably don’t know the difference between Ireland and Romania). The story is not what you would call satisfying but it rarely is with Moonbeam films. The denouement in particular is rushed and vague but makes up for this to some extent with its genuinely unnerving (if only briefly glimpsed and thoroughly unexplained) antagonist.

What marks this out as unusual is that unlike films such as Magic Island and Prehysteria, the child characters are incidental to the plot. Although this does, as usual, see reconciliation between father and son, both are grown men. As for the three leprechauns and the fairy, their role is basically to cause mischief, much like the tiny dinosaurs of the Prehysteria trilogy. They are catalysts more than characters.

Ted Nicolaou presumably directed this film back-to-back with its sequel, Spellbreaker: Secret of the Leprechauns (just called Spellbreaker in some territories and released in the UK as Leapin’ Leprechauns! 2) which featured all the same main actors and much of the same crew. He also helmed both Magic in the Mirror films and both Dragonworlds; the former were shot back-to-back but the latter were separated by a few years. His other films include The Shrunken City, Bad Channels, The Horrible Dr Bones, the non-Band Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys and of course all four Subspecies pictures.

Nicolaou co-wrote the script for this film and its sequel with someone named Michael McGann who has no other credits. Charles Band and his then-wife Debra Dion share the executive producer credit; Dion worked on Band’s productions as far back as Ghoulies in 1985 but they must have split up shortly after this film as Spellbreaker is one of her last movie credits. The actual producers on Leapin’ Leprechauns! were Vlad and Oana Paunescu, owners of Castel Studio in Romania, home to dozens of Charlie Band movies as well as everything from Pumpkinhead III and IV to Incubus. Ray Bright, who plays a tourist in the opening scene, was associate producer.

Cinematographer Adolfo Bartoli worked on a stack of Full Moon/Moonbeam/Torchlight titles including Trancers II-V, Puppet Master III-V, Robot Wars, Demonic Toys, Dollman vs Demonic Toys, Oblivion II, The Exotic Time Machine II and The Creeps. His non-Band credits include Octopus, Caved In, Operation Delta Force 4, The Second Jungle Book and teenage witch telemovie spin-off Sabrina Goes to Rome plus gigs as camera operator or second unit DP on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, Alien Contamination, Iron Warrior and Curse II: The Bite.

‘Visual effects designed and supervised by Jim Aupperle’ - who also worked for Band on Dollman, Troll and this film’s sequel. Aupperle started out in the 1970s working on films such as Planet of the Dinosaurs and Beware! The Blob and later provided visual effects or stop-motion work on such movies as Evil Dead II, Critters 2, Gremlins 2, Tremors II, The Gate I and II, RoboCop 2 and 3 and Here Come the Munsters. The credit block does not mention Aupperle but says instead ‘special visual effects by AlchemyFX’.

Mark Rappaport gets a separate credit for ‘leprechaun effects’ although his name is misspelled as ‘Rapaport’. Now, there are three basic techniques used to make the leprechaun actors appear tiny - well, four if you include simple editing between ‘humans’ looking down and ‘wee folk’ looking up. Green screen is used sparingly as it is complicated and expensive. Some over-the-shoulder shots of Michael Dennehy looking down at the leprechauns are achieve by standing John Bluthal and the camera on a high platform above Ellis and co., then using a long focal length to get all the actors n focus. And for a few reverse shots they use puppets.

I assume it’s this puppetry that constitutes Rappaport’s credit as his other films include puppet work on Puppet Master I, II and III, Prehysteria, Batman Returns, Scary Movie 2 and Child’s Play 3. More recently, he has been supervising effects on such blockbusters as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I am Legend. Among his team the heads of department were ‘mechanical supervisor’ John ‘Teenie’ Deal (Kraa! The Sea Monster), ‘artistic supervisor’ Allen ‘Weenie’ Barlow (Tremors, Total Recall, Van Helsing) and ‘costume supervisor’ Christine Papalexis who is also credited as ‘FX puppet operator’ and went on to be principal puppeteer on Team America: World Police!

The costumes for the actors themselves were designed by producer Oana Paulescu and Mihaela David (miscredited as ‘Mihael David’) who worked on Subspecies II and III, Trancers 4 and 5, Totem, Highlander: Endgame, Dracula II and III and many other Romanian-filmed movies. Mark Rappaport’s unusual ‘leprechaun effects’ credit, incidentally, is superseded in the oddity stakes by Luiza Popa who was ‘fairy co-ordinator’ - by which I assume she choreographed the fairies dancing down the leprechauns’ table as during the rest of the film there’s only one fairy to co-ordinate.

Buried in among the credits is concept artist Reiko Kobayashi who went on to be production designer on the Andy Hurst-scripted ‘sequels’ to Wild Things and Single White Female. The actual production designer on Leapin’ Leprechauns! was Radu Corciova (Mandroid, Subspecies II-IV, Retro Puppet Master, Elvira’s Haunted Hills).

The irritatingly fiddly-faddly music to this movie is jointly credited on-screen to Richard Kosinski (Totem, Killjoy, Langliena and, um, Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw), John Zeretzke (whose surname is actually ‘Zeretzka’) and William Levine - although Levine’s name is curiously absent from the credit block. All three gentlemen also worked for Nicolaou and Band on the Subspecies films.

In summary, Leapin’ Leprechauns! was a product of Charles Band’s Romanian period which, like most of the Moonbeam films, has entertainment value for small children and reasonable production values, but little or no adult appeal. I have now watched it twice in ten years and that’s probably often enough.

MJS rating: B-

Dave Jay is the principal author of Empire of the ‘B’s: The Mad Movie World of Charles Band, a magnificent tome on the first stage of the epic career of C Band Esq. The book was published in February 2014 which is when Dave answered a few questions by email. 

What was the first Band film you watched and when did you become aware of Charlie Band as a film-maker with an identifiable body of work? 
“I guess I first became aware of Charles Band after a random viewing of The Dungeonmaster, which was released in the UK back in 1984 (prior to its US theatrical debut) under the rather clunky title of Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate. Unlike some other Empire pictures, it’s not a film that’s aged particularly well, but it being an anthology of sorts that changed scenarios every ten minutes and mixed together horror, sci-fi, fantasy and even a post-nuke Road Warrior rip-off, it kinda blew my little 12 year-old mind! The fact that all this was topped off with cool David Allen stop-motion and (most surprisingly) a brief, Disney animated dragon battle, immediately made me want to track down other films by this obviously ambitious Charlie Band guy. Luckily, many of his films were released by two prominent UK video labels of the time: Entertainment in Video and Intervision. So I gorged on his back catalogue in the ensuing months and soon became a lifelong fan.”

I first heard of this book about three years ago. How long have you been working on the project and how confident were you at the start that you would find a publisher?

“Co-writer Torsten Dewi and I first entered into discussions about the book in 2003 and, after a few tentative steps towards writing it, went full-tilt into the project around 2005. At the time, the plan was to release a tome covering Band’s entire career, but both of us have a real soft spot for the Empire years so a lot of the early work was centred on this era. Torsten was equally busy knocking out screenplays for producer Harry Alan Towers (including a remake of Jess Franco’s 99 Women, which was close to going into production but stalled just before shooting commenced), so I took on the bulk of the writing in the meantime, interviewing key Band personnel and getting John Klyza on board to author a chapter on Wizard Video.

"Nathan Shumate also joined the team around this time, but he largely concentrated on Charlie’s later movies (such as the Moonbeam sub-label and the ultimately doomed Full Moon/Tempe Entertainment collaboration). The original plan was to self-publish, but the funds simply weren’t there to do it, so I suggested that we instead shop the book around a few British genre publishers. I sent a short sample to the three publishers that I had most respect for and Hemlock Books thankfully bit. However, due to the fact that Charlie Band has produced and/or distributed well over 250 films since the mid-1970s, the project had spiralled way out of control. Denis Meikle at Hemlock sensibly suggested that the work be cut in half and the first volume (covering 1973-1989) then be knocked into shape as a stand-alone title. And so, in 2011, we finally arrived at what is now known as Empire of the ‘B’s.”

It's not clear from the book which parts have been written by your credited co-authors, Torsten Dewi and my old pal Nathan Shumate. How did the three of you get together and how was the work divvied up?

“Well, if you check the contents pages of the book, it clearly marks Torsten’s and Nathan’s contributions. [Teeny, tiny little asterisks which I totally failed to spot - MJS] I did write the bulk of the reviews, conducted all of the interviews (bar Dave DeCoteau’s and Michael Cassutt’s) and also provided the introduction and afterword. Empire Pictures was my first cinematic crush, so I wanted to be as involved in the writing of this era as possible. But the second volume, covering the entire Full Moon saga, should prove far more democratic - if anything, we’ll be taking on at least one more writer so that we can actually get the book finished and out in our lifetime!

"To answer the first half of your question, Empire of the ‘B’s is quite simply a bastard love-child of the internet: I’m based in the UK, Torsten in Germany, Nathan in the US and John Klyza in Australia. Additionally, our guest contributor Cyrille Bossy lives in France and Harald Dolezal, who provided many of the book’s images, resides in Austria. I wouldn’t have even known that these people existed, let alone written a book with them, were it not for the many dedicated genre movie websites and forums scattered around the net. It’s kind of amazing when one considers that this project wouldn’t have been in any way feasible only two decades ago.”

Apart from those no longer with us, was there anyone you wanted to interview who either couldn't be tracked down or declined to comment?

“Out of those still with us, John Buechler is the most prominent Band cohort who remains missing-in-action. I approached him about being interviewed for the book and had a set of questions ready to go, but he didn’t seem too interested. That was a real shame. I almost landed screenwriter Frank Ray Perilli and talked with his agent (or maybe manager, I can’t remember), Blossom. But she insisted that it be a face-to-face interview and, factoring in an air ticket to LA, that would have been one expensive lunch date! Outside of that, it’s sobering to think of the many Band regulars that have since passed on: Albert Band, Mac Ahlberg, Cheryl Smith, Dave Allen, Michael Pataki, David Gale, Stan Winston… unfortunately, the list goes on.”

Sod's Law says that something worth including will always turn up just after a book goes to press (e.g. I now know of several additional films which could have been included in Urban Gothic). What was it in your case?

“The biggest Empire discovery of the past few years proved to be both a blessing and a curse: Pulse Pounders, the unfinished and long-lost ‘multi-sequel’ anthology directed by Charlie Band back in 1987-88, was uncovered by Band himself as a rough VHS work-print, and two of the three filmed episodes (The Evil Clergyman and Trancers: City of Lost Angels) have since been screened at festivals and released to DVD. Fantastic news though this was, I had already written extensively about Pulse Pounders as a movie likely to remain in the vaults, never to be seen. By this time, Empire of the ‘B’s was too far into the design process for what would have been an extensive re-write, so I instead added a brief note towards the end of the book explaining that the film had since been found and released. A little embarrassing for me but nobody’s complained about it so far, so hopefully I got away with it!”

Are you planning to document the rest of Band's career and, if so, how many volumes/years do you think this will take?

“As tempting as it would be to write a second book covering the Full Moon-Paramount years of 1989-1994 (believe me, there’s more than enough material there for another stand-alone title), Torsten and I are due to discuss whether we can encapsulate the full 25 years of Full Moon in the next volume without short-changing the subject. It’ll be a challenge, so I guess you’ll have to watch this space!

Finally, out of all of Charlie Band's 250+ films, which is your personal favourite and why?

“Trancers, hands down. Why? Well, if I may quote Tim Thomerson, ‘Oh man, you got Helen Hunt as your chick, a cigarette, a gun and a trenchcoat… c’mon, it doesn’t get any better, right?’”

Director: Jim Moran
Producers: Jim Moran, Tony Earnshaw
Cast: Gunnar Hansen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: VHS screener

In 2000, Gunnar 'Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Hansen and David 'Him out of Last House on the Left' Hess toured the UK with prints of these two notorious films. TCM had recently been passed 18 by the BBFC after being banned in the UK for 24 years, while LHOTL is still in fact banned to this day although UK law allows it to be shown in specific venues if local authorities give permission (Leicester and Bradford are two such places).

Tony Earnshaw, film programmer for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford (and author of Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon) invited Hansen, Hess and the movies to his venue and, in partnership with Jim Moran, recorded this 21-minute interview (Tony can be heard asking the questions, Moran was holding the camera).

This is simply Hansen, sat in front of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster in a public area of the museum, discussing the film that made him famous. Chatter and music can be heard in the background and at one point there is a brief off-screen interruption (which Hansen handles with an ironic, "Excuse me, I'm a star."); in fact this gives the impression of having taken not much longer to film than it does to watch. There are a few cutaways (possibly to cover edits) to TCM posters or stills and a brief shot of Hansen signing autographs, with Hess visible in the background. But for the most part this is a talking head, starring a big, scary, Icelandic version of Kenny Rogers.

It works because Hansen is a very erudite and eloquent speaker who doesn't fumble or hesitate and takes every question in his stride, even the ones when he has to preface his reply with "I don't know...". It goes without saying that Earnshaw knows his subject and probably already knew the answer to every question he asked - it's not like Gunnar Hansen hasn't been interviewed plenty of times before - but the two of them quickly settle into a comfortable interviewer/ee relationship that allows the anecdotes to take centre stage.

I've never met Hansen but he comes across as a genuinely nice bloke who is not only appreciative of the opportunities which his limited fame has given him (and of the fact that it is indeed limited and he is rarely recognised in public) but has also bothered to do his own research over the years into the origins and influences of his first and best-known screen role. This simple format works perfectly in allowing his memories and his opinions to be expressed simply and clearly.

Apart from a couple of screenings at small festivals, Leatherface Speaks has very rarely been seen (this tape was personally leant to me by Tony Earnshaw). A similar interview was conducted with David Hess at the same event but this has apparently never been shown anywhere. This would make a perfect extra on a DVD and should definitely be sought out as a supporting short by any cinema planning a special screening of TCM (unless of course they are lucky enough to have Hansen there in person). Perhaps Earnshaw and Moran could track down a few more horror icons (Doug Bradley? Robert Englund?) and edit four or five such informal interviews together into a feature-length documentary.

MJS rating: A

Director: Ross Boyask
Writer: Adrian Foiadelli
Producer: Phil Hobden
Cast: Glenn Salvage, Andy Prior, Adam Chapman
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener

The main problem with the otherwise generally terrific Left for Dead lies at the start of the film. Consequently I shall deal with this problem first, up front, before explaining in the rest of the review why this is very probably the best British martial arts film ever made.

We kick off with two gangs of, well, gangsters fighting each other on a patch of inner city wasteland (and in some adjacent building). Like all the fights in Left for Dead, this is brilliantly done: excellent choreography matched with peerless editing makes the many individual combats, which together make up the overall fight, some of the very best you’ll see in a modern low-budget action film.

But - and it’s a big but - that’s all we have for several minutes: fighting. Starting an action movie with a big action scene has rarely worked in any motion picture and it doesn’t work here. For a sequence like this to have any meaning beyond simply movement and sound, we have to care what happens. And that means we have to be bothered who wins. And that, in turn, means that we need to know who is doing the fighting.

Because we lurch right into this without any preamble, there is no way to know who we should be rooting for in any given scrap. Because everyone dresses the same we can’t tell who is in which gang or even how many people are involved. Whenever we see somebody killed or seriously injured, is that a good thing because it reduces the number of our heroes’ opponents or is it a bad thing because it reduces the number of his allies?

Sorry, but watching people I don’t know beat up, shoot and stab people I don’t know for some reason that I’ve not been told is simply tedious and boring, however well photographed. Jumping straight into this without explanation or introduction reduces what should be a major dramatic sequence to the level of a training video.

This drags on for a full ten minutes (including, for no apparent reason, a flashback to a different fight in which one of the protagonists is Insiders director Steve Lawson) and it is only after everyone else has been killed that we discover who are central characters are: round-faced Dylan (Kevin Akehurst, who was also ‘lighting director’), gaunt Taylor (Adrian Foiadelli, who wrote the script) and ponytailed Williams (Glenn Salvage: The Silencer), who are all working for a crime boss named Kincaid (Adam Chapman: The Penalty King).

A flashback reveals that Williams is planning to go straight after this one last job but Kincaid isn’t keen on the idea so he has asked Taylor and Dylan to take him out afterwards. However, a distraction allows Williams to escape just as his comrades pull their guns on him and, despite a massive chase by a bunch of motorcyclists who appear from nowhere, Williams gets away.

At this point it becomes apparent that the massive fight between Kincaid’s trio and the goon squad of a rival boss named Murphy, which we have just patiently sat through, has no bearing on the plot at all. Which is annoying and poor repayment for our patience. Realistically, the opening fight should have been condensed into two minutes and played under the opening titles (perhaps after a very short scene of the three men to establish them as characters in their own right, disposing of anonymous grunts). Instead, the opening titles introduce us by name to a whole bunch of similar-looking characters, some of whom we won’t meet for quite some time, long after we have forgotten what they look like.

So: grumble over. Except to note that following the above plan would have shaved ten minutes off the film’s rather extravagant 115-minute running time.

But let’s get down to business because once we get to the meat of the story,Left for Dead is, frankly, astounding. Which is to say that the plot is coherent and credible (for the genre), the characters are rounded and empathetic (for the genre) and the action is fast, tough and exciting (for a British film). I don’t want that to sound like I’m damning with feint praise. We’re all adults here, we’ve all seen action films and we all know that the genre is almost universally populated by simplistic films in which one-dimensional characters go through the motions in plots that are either childishly linear and simplistic or insanely complex and nonsensical. But the good films within this genre either manage to overcome these stereotypical failings somehow or, at least, acknowledge them and then cheerfully plough into some crazy-shit action which kicks arse both literally and metaphorically.

Sadly, most low-budget British martial arts pictures - which is to say: British martial arts pictures, for there is no other kind round these parts - can’t even manage that and although some may be enjoyable to those of us who appreciate this sort of thing, it is almost unheard of to find a British actioner which could be genuinely recommended to those who do not specifically love the genre. But - here it is.

So anyway, Williams goes on the run and ends up in the flat of a woman named Sonya (Vicki Vilas) whom he thinks he can trust - but she drugs him and calls in Kincaid’s goons. Williams then makes an extraordinarily daring, clever and entertaining escape, kicking the film up a notch.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Kincaid controls the local kickboxing scene - and the gambling which surrounds it - and instructs trainer Billy Rourke (producer Phil Hobden credited as ‘PL Hobden’) to tell hotly-tipped rising star Danny Kelso (Andy Prior) to throw his next fight. When Kelso wins the fight, Taylor has the job of breaking all ten of his fingers before banishing him from Hope City.

Setting the film in this fictional metropolis is a master-stroke on the parts of the film-makers because it allows them the freedom to step just outside reality, which is of course where all the best martial arts films exist. We don’t need to question why competitive kickboxing is so central to the criminal underworld. We don’t need to question how this many people could be killed without any law enforcement sniffing around (there is only one passing mention of the police in the entire not-quite-two-hours). We can just accept that this is the way things are in Hope City.

Kelso and Williams’ paths briefly cross when they both seek help from a dodgy back-street surgeon and they then journey separately to Metro City (shown using a neat little computer animation). Kelso’s fingers recover and he becomes the main attraction at a ‘pit’ run by the apparently relatively honest Markus (Jeremy Bailey). Another of Markus’ employees is Loader (Adam Hawkins), a ‘gentle giant’ who is kept out of the ring because if he is allowed to fight he never loses (not good for betting scams) and rarely lets his opponent leave the ring alive (not good generally).

Eventually, Williams and Kelso team up (somewhat warily) and head back to Hope City. Williams wants to take out Kincaid and his whole empire, Kelso just wants revenge on Taylor. Other than that, they have little in common. Loader tags along for the ride too. And the last twenty minutes or so is pretty much non-stop action as they kick, punch, throw and slap their way through Kincaid’s army of goons - including Taylor and Dylan.

It’s a simple story but it makes sense in terms of character motivation. The characters themselves, both major and minor, have personalities and the acting is generally good. None of it is outstandingly brilliant but none of it is embarrassingly awful either - which is unusual in itself. To be honest, none of the actors are ever expected to go outside of the emotions of ‘angry’ or ‘sarcastic’ but there is some choice dialogue and it is nicely delivered.

Still, it’s the fights we’re here to see and they really are something special. They strike the right balance between gritty and over-the-top. People get hurt, people get bloodied, in fact this is so gory in places it almost qualifies as a horror movie. But people also manage to stay alive and kicking (literally) long after any normal human would have been reduced to a quivering pulp on the verge of death. Which is what we look for in a good actioner. It’s what separates an ‘action movie’ from a violent drama.

The fight choreography is good, the acting and movement is good, the foley work is good and the editing is absolutely world class. Because it’s all in the editing. It’s the editor that makes a good fight sequence. You can have the best stuntmen in the world giving it their all but if the editor gets it wrong (or the director’s instructions to the editor are misjudged) you can end up with a mess. Actually, it’s amazing how often Hollywood gets this wrong; Quantum of Solace is a fine recent example. We have to clearly see what people are doing. We have to see sequences of two or three consecutive moves in a single shot. Yes, fast editing - cut-cut-cut! - can make a sequence exciting but in a fast-paced fight it has the opposite effect.

Anyone making low-budget action films - or, for that matter, big budget ones - should watch Left for Dead as an example of How It’s Done. It doesn’t take money (this whole movie was shot for about £8,000) and it doesn’t take the world’s greatest stuntmen. It just takes a director who knows what he’s doing, properly trained actors/stuntmen who know what they doing and an editor who understands the difference between a good actioner and a bad one.

Ironically, the weakest fights in the film are in that redundant opening sequence where far too many moments require somebody who is in a perfect position to shoot, stab or punch someone to stand still for a moment so that the intended victim can shoot, stab or punch them first. By the time that we reach the climactic showdown, that is long forgotten (together with the rather silly motorbike sequence). Kincaid’s goons are really, genuinely trying their damnedest to kill Williams, Kelso and Loader, who are doing their damnedest to incapacitate every human being in the building until they reach the boss-man himself.

Left for Dead is certainly too long but that’s about the only major criticism one can lay against it and opposed to that must be the fact that it is better written, better directed, better edited, better sound-mixed, better photographed and all-round just better than any other British martial arts films that I’ve ever seen. It raises the bar enormously. Yes, there have been some decent little movies and it’s true that the really bad shit like Intergalactic Combat is, fortunately, the exception. But Left for Dead just shows what can be done. The subgenre that is the British actioner is not limited, it’s not restricted, it can work.

Many of the cast and crew have worked with director Ross Boyask and producer Phil Hobden previously on films such as Fixing to Blow, Lone Wolf 1 and 2, fIXers (sic) and Pure Vengeance. Salvage and Hobden worked together as far back as Project: Assassin. John Rackham, director of Bloodmyth, has a small role as another mob boss and also provides narration which is so infrequently deployed as to be rendered not just ineffective but actually slightly annoying.

Cecily Fay appears briefly for one fight scene at the end in a bright blonde bob wig and is worth a paragraph to herself. A former international ballet star, her fascinatingly diverse CV includes motion capture work for a Narnia computer game, stunt-doubling characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and wearing a big foam costume in the title role of pre-school kids show JimJam and Sunny, together with three of the worst pieces of science fiction ever filmed in this country. That’s Ray Brady’s hilariously bad Intergalactic Combat, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which had a budget about 10,000 times that of Brady’s film but was only marginally better) and non-broadcast wannabe-sitcom embarrassment Star Hyke. Anyone who is as big a Hitchhiker’s nerd as I used to be will be interested to learn that it was Fay who donned the TV series’ Marvin costume for its gag cameo in the Disney movie. Finally, and somewhat bizarrely, she was the 1996 European champion in the Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat (the one that Gareth Evans is now making a film about).

Meanwhile, back at the film review:

Other cast members include Joey Ansah (The Bourne Ultimatum, Underground), Dean Alexandrou (who was in a terrific-looking Thai flick called Hanuman Klook Foon), Andy Taylor (Soul Searcher), Brendan Carr (who was in something called Jesus the Curry King!), Nic Main (who played a Roman soldier in both big budget epic Gladiator and low-budget distaff spoof Gladiatress), Thomas Rooke (RocknRolla) and Silencer/Insiders co-director Simon Wyndham. Steve Hayes created the title sequence and visual effects, make-up effects are credited to Mondo FX, and Pinda Dhanoya provided the original music. ‘First Strike Action Team’ are credited with the fight choreography. But the bulk of the credit for the film’s success must rest with director/cinematographer/editor Boyask whose judgement of both action and plot is spot on.

‘Left for Dead’ is one of those generic titles, like ‘Broken’, which has proved remarkably popular in recent years. The Inaccurate Movie Database lists seven films of this title since 2002 including a western directed by Albert Pyun, a Canadian horror feature starring Halloween’s Danielle Harris, a short, serious drama from 2005, a thriller from 2006, a biopic of an American Civil War soldier and an in-production indie horror.

The two-year odyssey that was the production of Left for Dead was documented in the feature-length Making Of 10,000 Cigarettes. Boyask, Hobden and many of the others involved went on to make Ten Dead Men, which I shall review shortly...

MJS rating: A

Director: David A Lloyd
Writers: Norm Scanlon, David A Lloyd
Producer: Norm Scanlon
Cast: Tina Michaud, Donna Henry, MJ Tedford
Country: Canada
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.thecousincompany.ca/vipershill.htm

The problem with The Legend of Viper’s Hill is that, having watched it – and enjoyed it – I’m still not sure what the actual legend is. As a ghost movie, it’s a commendable effort with some frights and some action, but the basic premise is confused and unclear.

Donna Henry stars as Meredith Baron, who has inherited an old family home in the small town of Viper’s Hill on the death of her mother. Seventy years earlier, Meredith’s grandmother hanged herself after a brutal rape and the house has since then witnessed two further suicides: Cedric Plume blasted his wife and kids with a shotgun before shooting himself, and Michelle King (MJ Tedford - any film with someone called MJ in it has to be good!) sliced her own throat from ear to ear. All these incidents are seen in flashbacks and the protagonists also appear as ghosts.

Meredith travels to Viper’s Hill to view the property, accompanied by slimy family lawyer Larry Cline (David Rusk) who acted as landlord on behalf of her mother, and there they meet local handyman Clifford (Tom Griffin) who manages the day-to-day running of the place. It’s not really clear whether anyone else has ever lived there or whether the Plumes and King were the only residents in the last seven decades. What is clear is that the locals don’t like the place and its gruesome history.

Also travelling up to Viper’s Hill to view the Baron house is investigative reporter Jackie Coulter (Tina Michaud), who has received an anonymous tip-off that a descendent of Rosie Baron will be returning to the scene of the crime.

The foursome settle in for the night and various ghostly things then start happening, resulting in the deaths, somehow, of Cline and Clifford. The key words here are ‘various’ and ‘somehow’ because there doesn’t seem to be any rationale to the ghostly goings-on. Rosie Baron fades in and out of various scenes while Plume and King both appear in more corporeal form, a ghostly voice whispers people’s names, the power cuts off, scary faces or bloodied hands lunge at people. It all builds to a frantic chase round the building by Meredith and Jackie, searching for a way out, with Plume, King, Cline and Clifford appearing behind various doors. Are the lawyer and handyman now ghosts like the other two, or are those their bloodied, still-standing corpses? There is some talk of ‘Rosie’s revenge’ but revenge on whom? How and why does she kill Cline and Clifford? Why did she kill King and the Plume family? What is the ghost trying to achieve?

Down in the basement (not a good place to escape to, I wouldn’t have thought), Jackie and Meredith find the grave of Theodore Brick, Rosie’s rapist, who lurches up from his resting place, complete with scary monster face and big, rubber hands. This just makes the confusing plot even more confusing and seems to be an excuse for assorted fright/fight scenes. There is no explanation as to why he has become this deformed monster nor why the rapist is now apparently joining in with the rape victim in wreaking supernatural revenge (of some sort, for some reason) from beyond the grave.

The whole story is intermittently (and rather irritatingly) narrated by a psychiatrist and an epilogue finds him living in the house where all these events took place. But then he falls victim to yet another completely different slice of supernatural weirdness (involving his television) and the film ends with the house blowing up!

For a haunted house movie to work, it needs to be structured as a mystery story. There must be some consistency to the phenomena and an understanding in the final act – for both the characters and the audience – as to why these things are happening. Some recent indie ghost films that I have watched, such as Savage Spirit and In Memorium, have achieved this but unfortunately we get neither of these in The Legend of Viper’s Hill so we’re left with a sort of random selection of unconnected spookiness and scares. It’s spooky and scary in the right places – and if that’s what you want from a horror movie, all well and good - but the story, such as there is, simply doesn’t make much sense. Nor is there really anything by way of character development, with much of the dialogue limited to Clifford and Jackie explaining the history of the house to Meredith. (There’s one especially odd scene, when the power is off, with Jackie saying she is going to fill in the time by taking photographs of the house – while it is in pitch blackness. That left me scratching my head.) Overall the film needed some serious script revisions - and it’s a real shame that the script lets the film down in this way because production wise it’s a good little indie movie, using its limited budget well and scoring highly in terms of direction, acting, photography and sound.

The other problem is simply that the house used looks like something built in the 1970s rather than the 1930s, so it’s difficult to see how anything could have happened there seventy years ago. That’s actually a fairly big problem because almost all of the film is set within the house. The music (by Dennis Williams) isn’t great either, truth be told, emphasising scares which would work fine on their own.

Horror film-makers need to understand that an unexplained movement in the background is much, much scarier if we are left wondering whether we actually saw anything or not. If it is accompanied by a music stab, we know we saw something and that, naturally, makes it less scary. Too many films, both big and small, use their score to tell us what is happening on screen when we can see what is happening, thank you very much.

If it sounds like I’m being unduly harsh on The Legend of Viper’s Hill, I don’t mean to be. This debut feature from Canadian indie outfit The Cousin Company (director David A Lloyd and producer Norm Scanlon are the cousins in question) is a commendable achievement. Hopefully the cousins can learn from this movie and do something really impressive with their second feature.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Alvin Ecarma
Writer: Alvin Ecarma
Producer: Alvin Ecarma
Cast: ‘Cash Flagg Jr’, Frank Prather, Andrew Hewitt
Country: USA
Year of release: 2002
Reviewed from: US DVD (Unearthed Films)
Website: www.divergentthinking.net

I approached Lethal Force with a completely open mind and before it was halfway through I was almost falling out of my chair with laughter. What I expected to be a low-budget martial arts actioner turns out to be one of the funniest action comedies I have watched for, ooh, ages.

Low budget comedy is very, very difficult to do and most of those who attempt it, especially when mixing it up with action and/or horror (there are copious quantities of fake blood on display here) go for the over-the-top route. But Lethal Force derives its humour from action, dialogue, characters and situations - in other words it’s a funny script, well directed.

The plot is wafer-thin. Writer/director/producer Alvin Ecarma stars as hitman Savitch (which I assumed was spelled ‘Savage’ until the end credits) under the screen name Cash Flagg Jr, an obvious homage to Ray Dennis Steckler. A rather amusing IMDB biography for ‘Cash Flagg Jr’ claims that his real name is Cassius Flagarsky and that his heritage is a mixture of Dutch, Nigerian, Hawaiian, Latvian and Scottish. He certainly has an international look to him which is impossible to put one’s finger on. If there is ever a big budget remake of Lethal Force, I expect Savitch to be played by Keanu Reeves.

Savitch had previously taken out local crime lord Mal Locke (Andrew Hewitt; John Malkovich would play him in the remake) but in fact Locke was only paralysed and now, confined to a wheelchair and surrounded by black-clad goons in white face-masks, he seeks revenge on Savitch. (No explanation is given for the goons all wearing masks but of course from a film-making point of view it means all you need are a few stuntmen who can be killed off time and time again.)

So Mal Locke blackmails Savitch’s friend Jack Carter (Frank Prather; Ben Stiller in the remake) into helping him catch Savitch by kidnapping Jack’s wife (Lori Boyd) and son (J Patrick Collins Jr). After seeing his wife murdered, Jack agrees to help trap Savitch in order to save his son. Assisting him in this deception is nightclub-owning lesbian gangster Big Bertha (Allison Jacobson; Rosie O’Donnell in the remake) who wears a suit and tie and the largest fez I have ever seen. Meanwhile Patrick is befriended and defended by Mal Locke’s moll, a tall black woman with long blonde hair named Rita (Patricia Williams; Angela Bassett in the remake).

There are a few other peripheral characters including the obligatory tall, black dude with an enormous afro and a balding, shades-wearing character named Psycho Bowtie (Eric Thornett), dressed all in black apart from his red dickie-bow. I don’t know whose side he’s on but he’s involved in a couple of cool fights and it’s very much like watching a kung fu Elvis Costello. Mention must also be made of Jen Dunkelberger as Suzy, an aspiring lapdancer at Bertha’s club whose method of fighting is to pause every so often to remove another item of clothing. She will be played in the remake by Jen Dunkelberger.

The fights are actually really well choreographed and shot, much better than most British martial arts indies, it must be said. There’s a touch of humour to them which you find in the best Hong Kong fights but is usually missing from the oh-so-serious kickboxing features that this country produces.

Ecarma cleverly picks some remarkable locations for his talkier scenes including an extraordinary statue of a giant buried under the ground. And Danny Fielding provides some excellent special effects involving knives through hands and power drills through heads. Possibly the funniest thing of all, in a movie which is packed with laugh-out-loud comedy, is the homoerotic relationship between Savitch and Jack which manages to be both subtle and desperately unsubtle at the same time. There’s a wonderful flashback to the two of them in 'Nam (or wherever), blasting away at stock footage of people being blown up.

I had an absolute ball watching Lethal Force, and then even more fun with the extras. There’s no Making Of but there is a hefty gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and a hilarious gallery of fake action figures, plus a selection of the director’s short films. The downside, if there was one, was that the whole movie was post-synched and this gave it an air of unreality sometimes - but after I realised quite how silly it was all meant to be and how carefully crafted it was (including colour-drenched cinematography courtesy of Declan McManus lookalike Eric Thornett), I stopped worrying and just enjoyed a terrific film.

(The DVD includes three very short (less than five minutes each) films by Ecarma. Me! (2K3 Remix) is Ecarma miming to the narration on an OTT trailer for blaxploitation hoopla Ghetto Freaks; A Conversation is an interesting contrast between a peacenik busker and a superhero on the rights and wrongs of violence; and My Dog has a Cyst wouldn't play on my copy.)

MJS rating: A-

Director: Shaun Mechen
Writer: Shaun Mechen
Producer: Penny Linfield, Adam Robertson
Cast: Scott Appleton, Shaun Mechen, Simon Ellis
Year of release: 2001
Country: UK
Reviewed from: festival screening (Can Festival, Leicester)

Very simply, this is one of the funniest science fiction films ever made. Psht, you cry, typical Simpson hyperbole! But how many truly great, consistently funny SF comedy movies have there been? Very few: Sleeper, Galaxy Quest, Sex Mission perhaps.

Of course, Life’s a Blast has the advantage of brevity, being only ten minutes long.

Appleton, Ellis and writer-director Mechen play three idiots, out camping in the countryside. Not annoying Dumb and Dumber style idiots but three good, traditional British idiots; three ordinary lads who are clearly not the sharpest tools in the workshop but are likeable nonetheless.

High above their heads, a damaged spaceship is heading toward Earth. It crashes near where our heroes are larking about and they go to investigate.

It’s a very small spaceship, and the occupant is a small, dead alien. But instead of being fascinated by this first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation, the lads are excited at the wide range of interesting weapons aboard and take turns shooting them at each other. Until a second alien turns up, looking for its dead relative.

Written and directed with a deft touch, Life’s a Blast is a perfect ten-minute film. The acting and camerawork is excellent and supports hilarious underplayed performances and a tight script. The digital effects - spaceships, ray-gun blasts, explosions - are superb, a real testament to how professional standard effects can now be created at a low-budget level. (The film was created for the Carlton TV ‘First Cut’ scheme which means it had a budget of £10,000, including - a requirement of the scheme - cast and crew fees at standard rates.) The excellent production design on the alien technology also adds to the professional appearance of the film.

Life’s a Blast has been shown at various festivals around the UK, as well a TV screening as part of ‘First Cut’, and never fails to be a smash hit. Do not pass up a chance to see this terrific film.

MJS rating: A+
review originally posted 2nd March 2005

The first time I interviewed Andrew Parkinson was at the 9th Festival of Fantastic Films in September 1998 where he had just shown his debut feature, the extraordinary I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain.

How long has it taken you to make this film?
"I actually wrote the title and the opening paragraph for the film ten years ago. I then put it in a shoebox with about 25-30 other half-finished ideas. It sat around and vegetated away. I then spent the next six years making short super-8 films, the occasional pop video, the odd corporate film, then thought, 'Right, it's time to do a feature film. What have we got?' And I went through the old shoebox. It had been niggling away for some time, so I pulled it out and expanded the script into what became the shooting script. We started shooting that about four years ago."

Was that four years of shooting?
"What I did: I promised all the cast and crew it would take six months to make the film, which was my first lie. So we sat down, we shot the film, which took six months to shoot - like I said. I then spent another six, eight months editing the flm and putting the soundtrack on it. I looked at the film and I thought, 'This isn't quite working. It's not what I want it to be.' It was interesting, and most of the important points that are in the final film were all in there, but the structure wasn't there and it didn't pull the viewer in.

"We had a quick premiere of that film with a few of the people who worked on it. At the end they all sat there silently and made a few kind comments, then went home. I just went home and sat down and I just couldn't look at it for about two months. Then I thought, 'No, I spent all my money and all this time. We really have to pick this up by doing it again.' We'd probably lost about 18 months by this point, then we spent another year rewriting, reshooting and re-editing, by which point it was looking fairly reasonable. I was a lot more comfortable with what we'd got."

Was it tricky shooting new stuff so much later?
"It was a nightmare. But fortunately, the film itself was set over a two-year period. Had it been a film that takes place in a week or a day, I would have given up and left it. But fortunately that structure entitled us to go back and reshoot. In fact, if you watch the film, Ellen Softley the lead lady has about ten different hairdos throughout the film, most of them quite drastically different, but it doesn't jar at all when you watch it because of the structure. During that reshooting period, most of the stuff I put in balanced the zombie story up with Ellen's story. So you've got his story of how he has got worse and worse as a zombie, and her story of how she picks herself up and carries on with her life. They sort of intertwine a little bit, but not very much. It's just how they both resolve their own situations. At the end she's got over him, and at the end he's still living dead, lying in bed, can barely move."

Having spent so long on it, at what stage did you decide it was finished?
"Right. I think we got to a point where I was starting to lose people a little bit. This was probably around the three-year point! Which I think is quite fair and they were all entitled to be slightly unhappy with me, really. At which point I was working on a film for Dean Sipling who's also in the film. He's directing his own film now, called Think of England. It's a drama, a non-genre film, but what the hell. I was doing the camerawork on this film, and I'd had the idea of shooting some talking heads, just to pop in at various points in the film. After a day's shooting with him, I said, 'Okay, I know we're not shooting any more for I, Zombie, but just give me an hour of your time everybody.' And we shot those. I made a list of points that people had to discuss when they were interviewed, but that was it; it wasn't scripted. It was vaguely written, they read it once, and I said, 'Okay, tell me. It's been six months since you saw Mark. What's happened?' So you've got all these people trying to think of things to say and all these awkward pauses."

That worked very well.
"I can't say it was a clever move; it was a last desperate attempt. It's something Woody Allen seems to do quite a lot. There's a lot of his films where the story stops and you'll get one character interviewed, and then you're back into the story. I've seen this quite a few times I've thought, 'I wonder if he's trying to salvage this film here…' But when I cut those final bits in I just had this great sense of relief. They picked the film up at the various points where I thought it was dragging and dipping and wasn't working. At that point I knew it was finished and I thought, 'Okay.' Then I started to rewrite the score and to work on it with Tudor Davies who was the music producer on it. He also played all the keyboards. We then spent about six months working on the score and polishing it, and we spent about two months, on and off, mixing the final soundtrack.

"We had a friend who, while we were making the film, was actually building a broadcast quality dubbing studio in his double garage! He's since packed his day job in and runs it as a going concern. It's an extremely good dubbing suite. This was his first project. We had this sort of friendly rivalry. He said, 'Okay, you get your first dub free, and I won't know whether anything will work, so it doesn't matter. Here's the deal. If you come in and it breaks down after 12 hours and we lose everything, that's fine.' So we helped each other out there. We went back far more times than we should have done really, just polishing it, and we all became a bit perfectionist about the final mix. So after about six months on that, that was it. That was the finished tape. And that's the tape I started sending off to people."

You shot on 16?
"We shot on 16mm, transferred the 16mm onto Beta video, which is the current practice these days. Very few people cut on film. That gives you a reasonably good-looking cutting copy to work with on tape, which is far more convenient for showing people and sending things off. So that was what I did. I then took that final tape, and you can tape-grade these days. So the tape was repaired and some of the stuff was retransferred that I wasn't quite happy with. In fact I'm still going through the process, looking at the American release. I'm remastering the whole thing. But that was the final tape that we saw last night."

And that's what Screen Edge are putting out?
"An absolutely huge release. It's funny. When I started making it, I dreamt of a few underground festivals showing it and perhaps the odd tape changing hands at a place such as this, but I never really thought it would get a release. There's a fairly underground-ish feel to it, for a horror film. For me it doesn't work as a mainstream horror film, so I was going for an edgy, sort of marginal feel to it."

Are you pitching it as a horror film? It's more of a character study.
"In fact a lot of the really good responses I've had from people who have watched it have been from women who say, 'What a great love story.' You've got a proper woman character in there and a normal bloke. He's a bit of a dork, and he's a student although he's too old to be student; he's disorganised and he's a bit of a prat, but at the end he's fundamentally a decent guy. And it's how he deals with all these things going wrong in his life. So for me, it's a study of isolation. It's a study of this guy going through some very strange changes in his life and how he copes with them."

What I liked was that the zombification was a necrotic disease, but not really supernatural.

"I wanted to stay away from all the supernatural stuff. In fact I wanted to stay away from trying to explain what he'd got too much. I didn't want, like in '50s movies, to say, 'Well, there's a been a bit of radiation about. Look at these zombies.' Or fertiliser that's brought the zombies out. I always felt that those scenes really let the films down, and I was more interested in what the characters were doing. He's a zombie, but he could well have any other disease that he couldn't have shown himself in public with. He could have AIDS or a very bad skin cancer or anything like that. But at the same time, I've always loved horror films; I like exploitation film; my heart is firmly in the gutter. So I wanted to make something that was a horror/exploitation film that also aspired to being a little bit more serious. A lot of films that I've liked that I've seen over the past five or six years have had that tone about them. That's what I was looking for."

Where did you find your cast?
"Most of the people involved with the film… shall I say we worked for the BBC? And we all came down to London at pretty much the same time from different parts of the country. We got to know each other. I'd been making short films for about ten years, which I carried on doing. Dean Sipling, who's an executive producer on the film and also in it, at the time came down and started running a drama group as well. Drama was something he'd always done. Tudor Davies, who was the sound recordist, who was also my flatmate - we shared the flat where the film was shot - the set! - he got involved with the film. But we all came along slowly as a film-making crew. I was going out and helping Dean out by doing lighting and production work on the plays, got to know Geoff, got to know Giles and Ellen. And in fact most of the other people who turn up in the film are from that drama group.

"It's a really nice way of working because you can get to know people over a six-month period and you don't have to give them some sort of crushing interview where you get them to do something stupid and ask them to leave and you don't give them the job. You know what people are capable of and what they're good at. So I thought, 'Yes, you'll do for this, you'll do for that, you'll do for that.' And they were all keen to get involved. Most people who work in semi-serious theatre love the thought of doing a bit of film. In fact London is a wonderful place to be to meet people like that; you're just overwhelmed with people wanting to get involved."

The film rests a lot on the lead, Giles.
"He was great. It's a funny role because he really doesn't speak very much. I think he's got about twenty lines of dialogue in the whole thing. The rest of the time he's either writhing around on the floor or eating people or staring mournfully into space."

Or having a sherman.
"Like you do! But yes, I'd made a short film just before I did I, Zombie with both Giles and Dean which worked really well and I thought, 'I like this guy'. It's a film called Reunion and it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where there are no women. Dean is this madman who waits for this delivery man who comes along with a case. Leaves the case, takes the money off him. Then we cut to him, with this inflatable doll that he's pulled out of the case. And he just has a quick session with the doll, and we leave him. Giles was the doll delivery man. There were very few of these dolls left. Strange film! Strange but I like it.

"So from working with him there and watching him work in the theatre, I thought, 'This guy's probably got what it takes.' When we started I was a little bit worried. But some of the first stuff that we filmed were some of the fits that he had on the floor at the start of the film. On a very, very rough carpet as well. And he just went for it 100%. I said, 'Okay. Well, you fall over and you have a fit then you get up and you eat somebody.''Okay, we'll give it a go.' And he just went for it and he was just fantastic."

Did you or he do any medical research into fits?
"Before I worked for the BBC I was a radiographer and I worked in the health service for ten years, so biology, physiology is something that absolutely fascinated me and still does. So I didn't really need to do any research. I had a pretty good background in looking at unpleasant diseases. I knew that I wanted his condition to look like something that could possibly happen. I didn't want him to go for a sort of distorted, Romero-esque zombie with the big forehead and all the rest of it. In fact, there's a scene in the film, a dream sequence where he's attacked by a zombie in the woods. A long-haired, really rotting-faced zombie. that was the original attack sequence that we used at the start of the film. I looked at it and I thought, 'It's too stylised, too over the top. We need to bring it down for it to be credible.' That ended up on the cutting room floor until late in the day when I thought, 'We could just do with something to end this dream scene. Oh yeah!' So it ended up back in the cut, which I was happy to see, after we shot it."

The make-up was also important.
"The make-up was really central to it for me. I've always loved horror films, the ones with good make-up and good effects, particularly good latex. I'm not really into digital effects; I really like a bit of latex and gore on the set. Even if it's badly done, to me it just looks wonderful! I was very lucky to get an 18-year old make-up guy called Paul Hyett who worked incredibly hard on the film, was very committed to it, on a minute budget. The proper cast effect, with moulded heads. He worked on it, he sculpted it, made the latex masks, put on the body parts, coloured them, put on the contact lenses. We did the whole works, and it was great. But in fact he looks at the film now and he cringes at various moments. He's distancing himself a little bit; he's now working in adverts and doing features and stuff. So he sees this occasionally ropy looking film that he worked on four years ago. But he was great."

So what next for you?
"At the moment I'm just writing a couple of films. I was thinking of starting one not many months away. I was going to leave it until after the Screen Edge release, just to get a bit more publicity, a bit more kudos. Some of the money's already in place. It'll be another little cheapy. I, Zombie was on 16mm; we might shoot it on super-16 which gives it slightly more sales potential in terms of blowing up to 35mm. But I'm happy to make another small scale film. I'm not interested in making any big jumps and going to LA and all the rest of it. I know the territory I'm comfortable with and we've just got to build on it. I've got some nice people interested again."

Are you taking I, Zombie around festivals?
"The problem with I, Zombie is I don't have a print of it which makes it a bit difficult for festivals. This is its first screening. There are one or two fantasy film festivals around the world that I'll be sending tapes off to as the year progresses. But it's one of those things where you start slowly and your PR starts working for you. The PR that Darrell did in Samhain really helped. It got people writing to me, which gives you a tremendous advantage really. As opposed to sending off a begging letter and a tape. So yes, it will be getting into more festivals and getting more publicity as the year goes on, hopefully."

This second interview with Andrew Parkinson about I, Zombie was conducted over the phone in May 1999 on behalf of Fangoria, who had picked up the film and wanted some additional material in their coverage.

How did you get in touch with Fango?
"Well, I didn’t. The whole thing snowballed from an article that appeared in Samhain which was written by Darrell Buxton, which was really an interview ith me. This was just before it was released by Screen Edge. That copy of Samhain then travelled to America because they sell a few copies there. An American film-maker called Kevin Lindenmuth saw it and he got in touch with me and said, ‘Send us a copy of your film and I’ll do a review for an American magazine and I’ll send you a copy of mine.’ He’s writing a book, too, about making low-budget films in different parts of the world so I wrote a chapter for that for him. We corresponded backwards and forwards for a little bit, very pleasant. He watched the film with one of his mates called Michael Gingold who’s the deputy editor of Fangoria. He then showed it to Tony Timpone, and I had this phone call in the afternoon saying, ‘Hi, I’m Tony Timpone, the editor of Fangoria magazine. We really like your film.’ I thought it was Jeremy Beadle!

"He says, ‘I’m coming over to London next week,’ because he was coming over to visit the set of The Mummy at Shepperton, a $30 million production. So he said, ‘Do you want to meet up?’ which I thought was highly amusing: he was coming over to cover this huge movie and wanted to talk about this £7,000 film. So we met up, had a little chat and talked about it vaguely and he filled me in about what was happening. They were starting their own label for independent horrors. That was about it really. He said, ‘We’ll be in touch, good to meet you, blah blah blah.’ Nothing really happened then for about a month or so, then they got back in touch with me.

"They were umming and ahing about whether or not to put it out as their first release, because I think they were looking for something a little more American. But anyway, he got back in touch with me about six weeks after that; a very nerve-racking six weeks, I can tell you, because you always think these things will fall through. Then we had a conference phone call with a guy called Steve Mackler who’s the video production guy at Bedford Entertainment, the company that are putting it out in association with Fangoria. It just carried on from there. We started with a few contracts, got a lawyer which did the business and it all worked out."

Between Screen Edge and his, has the film paid for itself?
"It hasn’t paid for anything yet! Maybe one day it will. It’s paid for itself in good value, I think, and just the fun I’ve had doing it, but financially it hasn’t paid for itself yet, no. I think perhaps we’ll probably break even about the middle of next year."

Do you know how well it’s sold on Screen Edge?
"I don’t know yet. We’re coming up to the six month mark, so it will be interesting to see. I think they do their accounts every six months and take a tally of what’s gone out there, so we should find out over the next month or two."

Has it been released anywhere apart from the UK and US?
"No, it’s just those two."

Have you shown it at any festivals?
"My biggest problem with it is I don’t have a print, and really given the cost of a 35mm print, I’m not likely to get one really. Unless somebody stumps up the cash. I’ve got a pool of money ready, but I’m going to use that either making a print or making another film. And a film is calling to me! I think that’s probably the way to go."

Capitalise on the publicity from this one.
"I think the best publicity for I, Zombie is for me to be making another film, publicise both at the same time. Certainly when I’ve spoken to anybody about it from distribution companies, the first thing they say is: ‘Have you got any more films? What else have you done?’ So with I, Zombie, I can only say, ‘Well, I’ve just done this.’ But I’m not rushing out trying to flog it anywhere. It will develop a value, if you like, over the next year or two if I can develop a small body of half-decent work. Then it becomes interesting, I think."

Is there anything extra on the DVD?
"There is. It’s quite amusing because Steve Mackler, the guy at Bedford, mentioned at the time when I sent him the VHS master, ‘Oh, we might do DVD as well.’ I thought ‘Oh yes, that will be brilliant!’ Then about two months later, he rang me up and said, ‘We need some extras for the DVD. What have you got?’ I was about to go on holiday for a week, so I had one week to get all the extras together. So we did a commentary with the lead actor, myself and the guy who did most of the sound work on the film. Extremely fortunately, we did have a small Making Of film that somebody had shot - a little Hi-8 thing, about seven minutes long - so that went in. I had a couple of scenes that I’d taken out of the released version just because it was a bit too long - stuff that was slightly interesting - so that went in. And a trailer, a pre-production trailer which we shot before we actually started shooting the film, just to shoot some 16mm and see how it felt. We shot an imaginary trailer for the unshot film. I don’t know if they’re going to use all that, but that’s what I sent to them."

Is the version in America the same as the one over here?
"Unless they cut it, yes. It’s uncut in his country. Certainly for the VHS market, they need it to be R-rated so it can get into the Blockbusters, which I think is a fairly sizable chunk of the market. I know they have submitted it for certification, but I don’t know what the outcome of that is yet. So it’s fingers crossed."

Are you going over there to promote it?
"They haven’t invited me yet! But I’ve got my fingers crossed. I’d love to."

If you’d known this was going to be given a decent US release, would you have made it different at all?
"That’s a good question. I would have made it different in the fact that I would have sorted the script out more than I did, so it wouldn’t have taken so long. But stuck back there with no money, you do what you can do really, trying to be as resourceful as possible which we did to the best of our abilities. So I probably wouldn’t. I think it’s the strange quirkiness that’s making it attractive to people. So I wouldn’t have put in any concessions, like an American leading man or love interest or something like that!"

What can you say about your next film?
"Originally I wantd to do something that was nothing to do with zombies, but just another horror film, but I’d written two or three treatments and the one that looked most promising was for another zombie film. So I’m going to stay with that. It’s the same universe but different characters. This time it’s about a group of girls who live together, sharing a flat in London, and of course they’re all a bit undead. It’s their misadventures, so something a bit more commercial without being too much."

If this becomes a big underground hit and a major studio says we want to remake this for $20 million with Tom Cruise in the lead, would you take the money and run?
"Course I would! Ha ha ha! Let me think about that. I’ve done my version of it, so if anybody else wants to do their version I’d be absolutely delighted and it would be enormously flattering. I’m sick of being broke."

Do you still have your day job at the BBC.
"I do, yes."

Do they know you’ve made this film?
"Some of them do. I’ve been pretty discreet about it, really."

In case they ask you where you got your editing facilities?
"Actually I’m pretty legitimate on that front because I run a film-making workshop there. We’ve got a club, so that’s the equipment I’ve used, which is a cobbled together room full of half-working bits of equipment. But I keep my day job and my nocturnal activities seperate."

With this and Demagogue, it’s really looking good for low-budget British horror.
"It’s about time, isn’t it, really? Hopefully it will encourage more people to have a crack. I think also the DV kit is giving people the opportunity of doing something of a quality that they couldn’t normally manage, so that’s spurring people on a bit. I know quite a few people who are starting projects off and trying. It’s very encouraging, very healthy."

Have you seen the new sleeve they’ve done?
"I saw one version of it, I saw an early version. I haven’t seen the final one that they went with."

Do you prefer the US or UK sleeve?
"I like them both really. It’s really nice to have two different takes on it. It’s also nice to just hand your stuff over and let them do their thing with it, see what they make of it. The British one is fairly like one we did for ourselves, our own little promotional one, but they really jazzed it up colourwise. But the American one’s completely different."

In 2001, as Fangoria prepared to release Andrew Parkinson’s second film Dead Creatures, I was asked to once again write the accompanying magazine feature. This was my third interview with Andy, this time by email.

The movie is called Dead Creatures - but they're not actually dead, are they? So why the title?
“The idea was that when you become a zombie, a large part of you dies and any contact with your old life dies. Strictly speaking it should be called Partially Dead Creatures, which doesn't work for me!”

To what extent is this a sequel to I, Zombie?
“It's not really a sequel. Same territory, different characters. Actually, I really wanted to do a different story but as I was working on other ideas this one came along and wouldn't go away, so here it is.”

The impression I get is that I, Zombie is equivalent to Night of the Living Dead in being an isolated incident; whereas this is the same premise but expanded to involve more people and show the zombie-ism as a more widespread problem - a bit like Dawn of the Dead. Would you agree with this?
“Dead right. I was interested in a community of people living in this damaged world. It's how they function and interact that interested me. It's a story of a girl becoming a zombie and being nurtured by the zombie community. There is also a man driven insane by the thought that his missing daughter might be a zombie. I should also say that Dawn is the main reason I'm making 'alternative' zombie films. I don't think anyone will ever better it as far as the 'traditional' zombie film goes.”

And if so - here comes the obvious question - are you planning to shoot an equivalent to Day of the Dead? Where the zombie-ism has become a recognised problem that people are trying to do something about?
“The law of the zombie movie states that one is good, two is better, but three.... three is a boxed set. When I was writing DC the script could have gone two ways. The alternative script was called Paranoid Zombie. Its a parallel story to DC where one of the characters 'Mike' is a zombie who is aware of the growing community of zombie hunters and is fighting his own war. It's like the zombie state is the natural way to be and he is looking for a zombie way forward. I'm planning to do a non-zombie film next though.”

The other parallel that I can see (rightly or wrongly) is that where I, Zombie could be seen as an allegory for AIDS, Dead Creatures can be seen as an allegory for drug addiction. (It seems to concentrate more on what these people do to survive and their pragmatically blasé attitude to the horrors involved, as opposed to IZ’s examination of social alienation.)
“Well....... IZ was about isolation and DC is about community and survival. The blasé attitude to killing is a necessary evil if you are going to survive in this world. They smoke cannabis to escape from their reality for a while and relax. Also I like the idea that cannabis could have a medical use for the alleviation of zombie symptoms.”

Cripes, wasn’t that last question pretentious?
“Mike, it's time to stop reading those 1,000 page SF epics and watch a few more B movies!”

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Give me some details of how this film was shot: schedule, budget, format, etc.
“I wrote the script over about a year. It had to be right so I just kept banging away for about 15 drafts. When I felt it was ready I took a month's leave from work for the shoot. This was July 1999 and my work would only give me the August off and so pre-production was fairly manic. I needed a cast, crew and location. One month later we were ready to roll. I had a pile of 16mm, a super-16 camera, a rented beaten up house in West London, a great but slightly confused cast and a crew of IZ veterans and new recruits. The film went 35mm the day before we were due to start shooting when Jason Shepherd (the DP) decided that the bigger format would make it more commercial. This was really exciting until I discovered that the camera was noisy and heavy and our stash of film stock was a little compromised.

"Still, too late to worry and three weeks later the film was 80% in the can. I spent the Autumn cutting the film together and working out the holes in the puzzle. Then in Feb 2000 we shot exteriors and pickups for a week. From then on it was a case of cutting and re-cutting, then putting a score together. Tudor Davies (the Dubbing Mixer) and I spent a couple of months putting the sound together, with lots of post synching and sound fx which nearly drove us insane. Since then we've been getting a 35mm print made for the festivals, which brings us to were we are now.”

How was the movie financed?
“The film started out small and grew. I put up the initial money for a 16mm micro epic, a pile of money arrived from the IZ release and the production grew, then Jason Shepherd my DP decided that a 16mm camera wasn't big enough and he banked it up to 35mm. We haven't quite worked out what it cost yet. A print is on the way from the lab, and with it a pile of bills. We probably made the film for around £50,000, but there is a pile of deferments as long as your arm so its more like £100,000. Pretty cheap for 35mm though.”

Where did you find your cast?
“I advertised the film in a casting magazine. Received about 450 applications, and spent two weeks auditioning. Very manic but they turned out really well.”

Have you used many of the same crew as before?
“I'm happy to say the key crew were IZ veterans . Jason Shepherd, who did a few days as 2nd unit camera on IZ, came onboard as DP for Creatures. Tudor Davies retired from the set as sound recordist but still handled the sound mix. The rest of the crew came from various walks of life. They were a joy, and kept me going through the insanity of the shoot.”

Who created the make-up and effects? And how pleased are you with the result?
“Paul Hyett did the FX and I'm thrilled with the results. I love shooting fx, and Paul is a great collaborator. He doesn't just think about the FX, he also works out ways of shooting them. Everything relates to how it will look when seen from a particular angle. I wanted a few full on Romero/Fulci moments and Paul worked them out pretty well considering our budget. I, Zombie was Paul's first film as well as mine so it was good to get together and push the boundaries of taste once again. We've both moved on a little.”

Is there any reason why nearly all the lead characters this time round are female?
“Yes, after IZ which was about a single male, I wanted to do a film about a community of women. They are all strong characters who get on with life in spite of their condition. In fact all the male characters in the film are isolated and dysfunctional when compared to the women.“

For a significant part of the movie there are three unconnected strands, which only come together near the end: what problems does a structure like this present to a writer?
“The main problem is keeping the stories moving along at a similar pace and getting them all to come together at the end. So to an extent the film was written backwards from the end. As always, beginning and ends are easy, it's the middle hour that kills ya. Still, after the struggle with making IZ, I learned the importance of a re-re-re-written script the hard way.”

How has I, Zombie been received around the world? And how did US distribution on the Fangoria label help it?
“For such a small scale personal film it found a much wider audience than I ever imagined. Fortunately it found it's way through to Fangoria via film maker Kevin Lindenmuth at a time when they were looking at starting their label. So Fango meant we reached a huge audience, compared to the underground festival audience I originally anticipated. I have to say I was freaked out, but in a good way. It's also been to several major festivals and plays on TV in France.”

What did you learn from IZ that you were able to bring to DC?
“The most important lesson I learned was to get the script right before switching the camera on. There is no way of over-emphasising that enough for any new film makers out there. Also during a shoot, a huge amount of time and energy is spent setting up shots, then moving from location to location. So the other thing we did differently was to shoot for three weeks solidly inside the same location. Because the house was pretty big, we set up different rooms as different locations. Switching rooms was pretty easy, compared to loading the van, driving around, unloading the van, etc, etc.“

Tony Timpone at Fango considers your work a cross between George Romero and Ken Loach. What are your thoughts on that?
“Pretty close, although I've always enjoyed the Romero films more... I am really interested in films that combine horror film scenarios with social realism. Romero and Cronenberg are at the top of the tree, but there are many other interesting films out there such as Possession and Daughters of Darkness. Grim, realistic films that are not afraid to take their subject matter seriously. I'm great fun at parties.”

Of course, most Romero fans would have no interest in a movie by Loach, and vice versa - so who is your audience for a film like this?
“I don't think the audience for these films is massive, but there are enough people out there who are tired of horror comedies, and clever post-modern horror. They are looking for something a little different and willing to give it a go.”

Are you still holding down a day-job in TV? Have they cottoned on to what you do yet?
“I still have the day job in TV post production, which I have to say I enjoy. My colleagues think I'm a little wierd, but you should meet them!”

Where will the movie be shown/distributed?
“As soon as the print is out of the lab, we are off to Fantasia for the world premiere, then it's a September video release with Fango in the States. After that it's off around the genre festivals, hopefully picking up releases and my sanity on the way.”

What are your plans for your next film?
“Once Dead Creatures is out of my hair, I'm looking forward to relaxing and kicking a few ideas around. I'll have to see how it goes from there really. I've written a couple of treatments for films that are so grotesque I'd be embarrassed filming them, so I'll have to see if I can make the ideas a little more palatable. Either that or a romantic comedy.”

Eight years after I first interviewed Andrew Parkinson at the Festival of Fantastic Films, we were both back in Manchester. In 2007 he was there to screen his third featureVenus Drowningso I cornered him in the bar for a quick fourth interview. Unfortunately it seems that I only ever transcribed the start. Or maybe we got distracted by something and ever finished the interview. No matter, because in January 2014 - with Venus Drowning set for a belated DVD release through Julian Richards' Jinga Films, Andrew answered a few more questions by email.

Take us through from finishing Dead Creatures to starting work on Venus Drowning.
"After finishing Dead Creatures I spent probably a year, 18 months playing film festivals with it. Which sucked up all my free time and left me quite drained. It was good fun though. Dead Creatures had been quite a tough film to make. Both financially it was quite ambitious for what money we had and it just left me feeling kind of knackered and slightly demoralised, I have to say. But the urge to make another film slowly crept back in and I thought, ‘Let’s do something a little more commercial this time, a little more mainstream, a little more accessible.’

"So I sat down and I wrote a script which I think was all those three things. While I was writing it, the script that I really wanted to write was going on in the back of my head and that turned out to be Venus Drowning. After writing it, I looked at it and thought no, I can’t make this, this is ludicrous. But I had to. It wouldn’t go away. So I started making it and it should have been fairly straightforward but of course life’s never that simple. I probably spent about 18 months shooting and editing the film. I stupidly went straight from my edit suite onto one of the screens in Cannes.

"Screened the film to quite a full audience - and there are chunks of it which really didn’t work, really didn’t gel terribly well. Some of the special effects, they were good effects but we’d filmed them wrongly so they didn’t work that well. So I came away from Cannes thinking, ‘My God, what am I going to do with this?’ Sat down, had a long, hard think about it, took a couple of months off and then reshot all the problem scenes. Same actors, same special effects, same models, same locations. Just reshot them in a slightly different style and it came good."

Do you think you needed to have that Cannes screening to see what was wrong or should you, with hindsight, have been able to spot that when you were making it?
"As somebody who writes and directs and edits, I was pretty punchdrunk with the material by the end of that. What I really should have done was have two or three screenings with people who were going to be critical enough to put me against the wall and say, ‘Look, mate...’ The first time you see your film with an audience, you learn an awful lot about it. You sit there in a heightened state of nervousness anyway but that’s what makes you really critical about it and you suddenly realise that things that nearly bothered you a little bit in the edit but you couldn’t put your finger on what was wrong - it all becomes far cleare. And I tell you, sitting at Cannes, it was very clear. It was a really tough, demoralising experience. But you’ve got to live and learn and move on. Don’t beat yourself up too much. But the film’s come good so we got there in the end."

Why did you decide to make Venus Drowning rather than complete a zombie trilogy, and did you consider any other projects?
"I was a bit zombie-d out after two films and Venus Drowning really appealed as a very different type of project. There were other projects, but VD was the most developed script I had and it became an irrational obsession, like these things do!"

Were you surprised or concerned that Venus Drowning failed to find a distributor, and why do you think that was?
"VD took far longer to make than I'd anticipated and by the time it was finished I'd run out of steam and time, so promoting the film myself was difficult. The distributors who'd released the zombie films took a look, and thought it was too arty and difficult to market to their target audience. I was disappointed at the time, but of course most distributors are not looking for the next 'difficult' film to release. I don't regret it though, and it's great that it's finally getting an airing."

I recently spotted your credit as 'colourist' on Julian Richards'The Last Horror Movie. Are there any other British horror movies you've helped out with which have similarly eluded the IMDB elves?
"A few - I graded Julian's Summer Scars after TLHM. Last year I graded Sean Hogan's The Devil's Business, and before that Little Deaths. And my own films."

As someone who was there right at the start of the 'British Horror Revival', what is your take on the way that things have changed over the past decade and a half?
"The technological developments have made film-making more accessible, so there are films from a more diverse pool of people, which is all good. It's still demanding to produce films, and probably harder to get them seen. Audiences seem to be getting less of more. Most of all, I think, 'Where did the time go?'"

How did the three-way collaboration of Little Deaths come about, and why do you think there has been this mini-revival of horror anthologies in the last couple of years?
"I'd had a few drunken nights out with UK horror journo Jay Slater, who I've known for years. Jay introduced me to Sean - they both claim it was their idea! It wasn't mine, but I was looking for a fairly low maintenance project, so I got involved. The damn thing turned out to be anything but low maintenance! Anthologies seem to be a horror phenomenon. There is a perception that making several shorts is easier than a feature, at least from a production angle. Not always true, the numbers of cast members and locations can easily rack up causing loads of headaches. Shudder..."

Why are your three features getting re/released now, and have you done anything new for these discs of IZ and DC?
"I, Zombie is a complete remaster from the 16mm neg in a widescreen framing - something I couldn't afford to do originally. It looks pretty damn good. I'm not sure what will be on the disks, but I supplied the usual commentaries and 'making of' material."

Have you seen Marc Price's Colin, which treads similar ground to IZ but in a very different way, and what did you think of it?
"I did see it and enjoyed it. It took me a while to adjust to the visual aesthetic, but once I was into it I thought there were some smart and ambitious twists. And it was a masterful ad campaign."

Can we expect your next film before 2016, and what might it be?
"Last week I'd have said no, yesterday I had a meeting with a producer... So I'm really not sure. I have more family responsibilities than I used to, so I have to think twice before engaging with another reckless film project. I have a few pet projects I keep mulling over, some of which are fairly abstract. One is a silent film, a hoodie horror, and another zombie film."

Director: We-e-ell, that’s kind of arguable
Writer: This also is a contentious topic
Producers: Hmmm, not clear, to be honest
Cast: Aha! Robert Englund, Adele Silva, Billy Murray
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: DVD 

At some point, I was going to have to watch and review this film. And as I seem to be on something of a werewolf kick at the moment, why not now? But this may prove a tricky piece to write because Strippers vs Werewolves was a troubled production. There was - shall we say? - tension between the film’s three prime movers: the writer, the director and the producer. Now, being well-connected in the world of dodgy low-budget British horror films, I know all three gentlemen personally and I don’t want to upset anyone by apportioning blame. I’m not trying to write some sort of exposé here, not trying to dish the dirt. This website isn’t the place for crusading journalism. If I wanted to write crusading journalism I’d write about things that actually matter, like political corruption, or the environment, or where to bury Richard III. But I write about films. And not even multi-million dollar epics but little efforts with words in the title like ‘strippers’ and ‘werewolves’ and, well, ‘vs’. Who cares?

All I ever try to do here is write entertaining and informative stuff about the fringes of the cinema industry, pointing my own tiny spotlight at the stuff that gets missed by all the fat mainstream journos on their junkets to promote that multi-million dollar crap.

So I’m not here to praise or bury SvW but to take a look at it, see what works, see what doesn’t. In a sense, that should be all that matters. If it ain’t on screen it ain’t in the scene and it ain’t been seen, as the saying goes. That said, I’m certainly interested - as you may also be - in why things are the way they are. Why this works and that doesn’t. What I’m not looking to do is appoint personal blame for ‘ruining’ or ‘destroying’ this film (that’s assuming it turns out to be a bit rubbish; we’ll get to that in a bit, but you may have got that impression from general internet scuttlebutt). Because even if one or more individuals are responsible, who cares? A silly little film that doesn’t matter turns out to be not as good as it could have been. And in other news, people are homeless, politicians are corrupt, the environment is going to shit and I’ve got a painful boil on my toe. Now here’s Andy with sports...

The plot, such as there is, can be summed up by the title. There are some strippers, there are some werewolves. They spend an hour antagonising each other and in the final act it all kicks off. The tin, what it says thereupon, that it surely does.

The ubiquitous Billy Murray (Airborne, Stalker, Dead Cert, Just for the Record, Doghouse) - who was dozily miscredited as ‘Bill Murray’ on the US poster! - is the leader of a small group of werewolf gangsters. There’s a comedy fat one. There’s a cocky Scottish prick-weasel who really, really should be punched in the mouth every time he appears on screen. There’s a half-heartedly psychotic one who wears a black and red jumper - presumably as homage to Freddy Krueger and/or Dennis the Menace - and has a silly haircut which implies that he wants to be a punk but daren’t. And there’s one or two others without even that shallow level of characterisation.

Ursa herself, Sarah Douglas is Jeanette, the owner of a gentlemen’s establishment called Vixens where she employs various young ladies. There’s a blonde one. There’s one with long, straight hair and a thick East European accent who delivers some of her lines so woodenly that I’d swear she is reading off idiot cards. There’s a brunette with angel wings on her back. There may be another blonde one, or another brunette, or something. The only one who seems to have any clear, identifiable character is ‘Justice’ (Adele Silva: Emmerdale, Doghouse) who dresses like a ‘naughty schoolgirl’ and is sensible enough that Jeanette wants to mentor her and eventually pass on the establishment. As with the werewolves, characterisation is on scant show in the strip club. And although each of the main characters is introduced with a name caption near the start, I couldn’t actually tell you what any of them are called except Justice and Jeanette. (Incidentally, Superman films aside, Douglas has a terrific genre CV which includes the Dan Curtis Dracula, The People That Time Forgot, Beastmaster 2, The Return of Swamp Thing, Puppet Master 3, Mirror Mirror 2, Frankenstein Sings, The Stepford Husbands, Attack of the Gryphon plus episodes of Babylon 5, V, Space: 1999, Stargate SG-1... the list goes on and on.)

One curious aspect of the whole set-up is that, the film title notwithstanding, none of the actual ‘strippers’ seem to be strippers. They wear skimpy outfits and occasionally do a bit of half-hearted pole-dancing, but there is not one shot anywhere in the film of any of them removing an item of clothing. What little nudity exists is limited to one or two background extras with their norks out in establishing shots. Also of note is that the scene which introduces Jeanette and co starts with a caption reading ‘The Strippers’ but the first two characters we meet are Jeanette herself and the barman, played by Alan Ford (who made this the same year he was in Cockneys vs Zombies). So that’s confusing.

There are two other people working at the club. A bouncer named Franklyn (Nick Nevern: Outpost II, Demons Never Die, The Tapes) and, for some reason, a female table magician played by Charlie Bond. Franklyn is actually a significant character - he provides the link which enables the werewolves to track down the strippers - but the magician has no narrative function whatsoever that I can determine and seems to be entirely extraneous.

The flashpoint for the story is Justice doing some bump and grind behind a curtain for an oleaginous businessman played by Martin Kemp (still the only actor, apart from Udo Kier, to have portrayed both Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula on screen, as far as I know). He gets excited and sprouts fur and fangs so she stabs him in the eye with a silver pen. Jeanette assigns Franklyn to get rid of the body. Kemp was part of Murray’s gang so they are out to avenge whoever offed him. Slightly complicating the matter is that Justice and the Scottish twat are an item. She tells him she works nights at the local PDSA clinic; he tells her he is a nocturnal estate agent. Trouble surely lies ahead.

Everything builds, in a manner that is neither interesting nor entertaining, until the werewolves head for the club, wherein they have determined are the strippers responsible for killing their pal from Albert Square. But Jeanette has experience of dealing with werewolves, having blown up her previous club in 1984 to rid herself of an ‘infestation’ of the things. The various strippers set about preparing for the approaching danger although the only actual notable thing they do is to make some silver stiletto heels. Because obviously this is one of those clubs that has silver smelting equipment and a well-fitted heel-bar on site.

The final battle is just awful. Utterly devoid of tension or excitement, more of the third act is taken up with people standing around talking than with actual fighting. There are four strippers at the start, two get killed and there seem to still be four at the end. The final twist makes no sense whatsoever, apparently setting the story up for a sequel from which we will be, I have no doubt, mercifully spared. (A poster for Strippers vs Vampires'from the makers of SvW' can be found by judicious googling but it got no further than that.)

A movie with a title like Strippers vs Werewolves ought to be at least one of the following, preferably two and ideally all three: funny, scary, sexy. The actual movie entitled Strippers vs Werewolves is none of these. It is utterly devoid of any actual horror, not one of the ‘jokes’ is even slightly funny, and despite the actresses pouting and posing for publicity shots, there’s nothing sexy on show here. Not classy sexy, not sleazy sexy. SvW will not raise the hair on the back of your neck, the corners of your mouth, or indeed any other part of your body.

One of the film’s biggest problems is the absolutely awful werewolf design. The big challenge with werewolves as a monster, as I have observed elsewhere, is the complexity of the make-up. Couple of pointy teeth - that’s a vampire. Pale complexion and blood-spattered clothes - you’ve got yourself a zombie. Double exposure - hey presto, one ghost. Chainsaw - maniac, sorted. But a werewolf? That takes time and effort. Now imagine that you have to do make-up for half a dozen werewolves, who are in about half of the movie’s running time, and your entire budget is not quite enough to buy a decent Chinese meal for two. What are you gonna do?

Well, apparently you’re going to come up with a risible design which wouldn’t even be identifiable as a werewolf if that wasn’t a word on the poster. The lycanthropic transformation involves three things: (1) big hairy sideburns, (2) joke-shop vampire fangs, (3) big floppy elf-ears. Actually I say ‘transformation’ but of course we never see anyone actually change from human to werewolf or back, as that would cost more money. Despite this, there seems to be a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing between states, without any indication of cause or method.

Frankly, the whole idea of ‘werewolves’ seems to have been tossed out of the window. These transformations are not triggered by the full Moon; they happen at any time when the plot deems it convenient, to one or more of the werewolves. More problematically, there is no sense of suffering. A werewolf suffers - that’s the essence of this particular monster. Even when the werewolf is an external threat, as in Dog Soldiers or director Jonathan Glendening’s own vastly superior 13hrs, the individual in question is a victim of a curse, forced to become this vicious beast against their will. But these so-called werewolves, who look nothing like werewolves and don’t behave like werewolves (they just rip into people’s necks like vampires) also have none of the psychological/emotional baggage that comes with being a werewolf. They’re not bothered by it. So they are in effect just run-of-the-mill geezer gangsters who occasionally sprout hair and fangs for no obvious reason and to no particular effect before killing people they would probably have killed anyway.

Also not helping matters is the way the werewolves move, which largely consists of holding out their hands, crouching slightly and pulling a scary face like they’re chasing children at a family picnic. They never seem to growl and apart from one off-screen sound effect right at the start, I don’t think there’s a proper howl anywhere in the movie.

These ‘Lycans’ (a term used once, presumably to claim some unofficial connection with the Underworld series) can only be despatched by silver bullets or other silver weaponry, which means that all other injuries have no effect whatsoever and heal almost instantaneously. Combined with the sideburns, that almost makes these guys a sort of Happy Shopper Wolverine, although the effects shots which would have established this ability in the first act never made the final edit, meaning it just pops up from nowhere towards the end. There is also a sequence with three of the strippers in werewolf make-up (I won’t spoil things by saying when/where/how/why this occurs, although a publicity still was circulated) and if anything it looks even worse on the ladies. Their fangs are clearly too big for their mouths, making three reasonably attractive women look like buck-toothed, inbred crack whores. It’s a photo which these particular actresses will hope doesn’t resurface too often during their careers.

In summary, these werewolves are - and I say this within a fortnight of having watched Wolfpeople - strong contenders for the crappiest werewolves ever shown on screen. But I suppose that, since we only know that the women are strippers because we’re told so, it makes sense that the same should be true of the werewolves.

In amongst all this crap, which just gets worse and worse the more I think about it, is one glimmer of characterisation and indeed entertainment. Simon Phillips, a man even more ubiquitous than Billy Murray (his other cinematic face-off was Jesus vs the Messiah), turns in a terrific performance as Sinclair, a jobbing vampire hunter who is dating the wooden, East European woman. At a phone call’s remove, he is her source for authoritative information on the occult which he does his best to provide, even while fending off ravenous female bloodsuckers. Phillips shows a real flare for comedy in his scenes despite - actually probably because of - not actually sharing the screen with any of the other characters until the very final shot. One can’t help feeling that the film would have been far more enjoyable - scarier, funnier, sexier - if it had concentrated on his end of the phone conversations and left the not-really-strippers and not-at-all-werewolves off-screen.

Also among the large cast are Martin Compston (Freakdog, Wild Country, When the Lights Went Out, The Disappearance of Alice Creed) as the annoying fake estate agent; The Bill’s Ali Bastian as the blonde stripper; Barbara Scrabbleboard from Hostel as the East European (she was also in The Hike, Isle of Dogs and the recent Children of the Corn prequel that no-one was waiting for); Simon Phillips’ missus Rita Ramnani (Airborne, The Last Seven, Umbrage: The First Vampire) as the stripper wearing angel wings; Joe Egan (Killer Bitch, Just for the Record, Ra.One, Deadtime) as, I think, the fat werewolf; Nick Onsloe (Dead Cert, Cut) as a prison guard; Coralie Rose (Dead Cert, The Prisoner remake, Sea of Souls) as a stripper (probably); UFO/Cut/Airborne director Dominic Burns as (I think) a fake record executive, Les Allen (The Reverend, Ten Dead Men) as a gangster; and Jazz Lintott (UFO, Devil’s Tower) as a gangster’s victim.

Plus, in various roles, Marc Baylis (Corrie, When Evil Calls), stuntmen Dean Williams (Soul Searcher, Lycanthropy, The Silencer, Stag Night of the Dead, Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit?) and Jude Poyer (lots of Hong Kong stuff), Alex Esmail (Attack the Block), Jeremy Oliver (who was a clown zombie in a short called Fright of the Dead), Lee Asquith-Coe (Kill Keith, The Eschatrilogy, World War Z), Mo Idriss (A Fantastic Fear of Everything, Devil’s Playground, Witch) and Shaun Lucas (The Dead Inside, The Haunting of Harry Payne, The Seasoning House). So quite a treat for spotters of players from other BHR movies then.

Ticking the box marked ‘stunt casting’ are Lysette Anthony (Talos the Mummy, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Krull) in the epilogue; Steven Berkoff giving one of his best BHR performances in a cameo as a gangster; men’s mag bimbo Lucy Pinder as the vampire who confronts Simon Phillips (credited as ‘Carmilla’!); and horror icon Robert Englund. Making what is technically his second British frightfilm (if you count the Anglo-Spanish Killer Tongue), Freddy the K has a completely irrelevant and gratuitous role as the leader of the werewolf gang who attacked Jeanette’s previous club, now languishing in a prison cell which appears to have changed little since the late 19th century. Billy Murray goes to see him - and nothing comes of that whatsoever.

Pinder and Charlie Bond get “and introducing” in the title sequence and credit block. Anthony, Berkoff, Kemp and Englund get “Guest appearances by”. Silva, Bastian, Scrabbleboard, Pinder, Berkoff and Englund have their names on the top of the poster/DVD sleeve - which features a publicity shot of Silva, Scrabbleboard and Bastian that bears no relation whatsoever to any scene in the film (they never wear those outfits and there are neither axes nor automatic rifles anywhere).

Stylistically, SvW is a mess. Every so often it tries to turn into a comic-book on screen, with a handful of ‘Meanwhile...’ captions and some static images polarised to look like comic-book frames. There is a constant jumping around between scenes, sometimes cutting after every other line. For example Billy Murray’s meeting with Freddy Krueger, despite having no real narrative purpose, was at least originally an oppressively nasty meeting of two amoral monsters, playing on Englund’s talent for oozing evil. As it stands, the scene just cuts every ten seconds to a presumably simultaneous sequence in the club of Jeanette rallying her troops. This completely diffuses every iota of menace from the prison scene.

It’s like there’s just so much in this film that it’s falling over itself to cram everything into its 90-minute running time, to the extent of frequent split-screen shots giving us two, three or even four different images. And yet, this is not some massively complex Tarantino-esque story. It’s just a bunch of ‘werewolves’ tracking down the person who killed their pal and then attacking a night-club. Admittedly it has more of a narrative - Blondie fancies Franklyn, the Montagu/Capulet thing with Justice and the estate agent, Simon Phillips’ subplot - than the thematically similar Dead Cert. But only just. All the over-the-top cutting and jumping, often done via cut-outs of werewolf clawmarks or a silhouette of a stripper, just gets in the way of what little story and even littler characterisation is on show. It’s a distraction, albeit one could argue a welcome one.

Having considered what the film is about, what it’s like and who’s in it, that raises the question of who made it, a thorny problem not helped by contradictions among the various credit lists. For example, there are six producers: Simon Phillips, Billy Murray, brothers Gareth and Ciaran Mullaney of post-production house The Mews (also credited on Elfie Hopkins and Stalker), Patricia Rybarczyk (Jack Said, Jack Falls, Airborne, UFO) and of course stylish man about town Jonathan Sothcott, a man equally at home in the pages of Screen International and Axolotl Breeder’s Gazette. These six names are in the credit block and the opening titles, but the closing credits begin with a stand-alone card reading ‘produced by Billy Murray, Simon Phillips and Jonathan Sothcott’ before proceeding to the cast list and those six credited producers. (Rybarczyk is interesting. Despite her producer credits, her real dream is apparently to act. However to date her only credit outside of movies she herself produced was in Stuart Brennan’s 2006 micro-budget war story The Lost, which was also her only role with a name. In SvW she plays ‘greasy chav’.)

The executive producers are equally confused about who they are. The credit block lists Spencer Pollard, Adam Sutherland, Wayne Marc Godfrey and Robert Jones. The titles replace Sutherland with Martin Kemp while the end credits list all five gentlemen (along with nine associate producers - and we all know the definition of an associate producer). Even the production companies aren’t clear. “Kaleidoscope Film Distribution presents,” say the titles, “in association with The Fyzz Facility, a Black and Blue Films production.” This follows the logos for Kaleidoscope, Black and Blue, The Mews and The Fyzz Facility. But the credit block reads “Kaleidoscope Film Distribution presents a Phillips/Sothcott Production in association with The Fyzz and The Mews,” I know none of this really matters but it provides context for the really contentious credits. Who wrote this thing? And who directed it?

(A caveat should be made here. The following is to some extent conjecture based on the available evidence. None of the principal interested parties is prepared to discuss the creation of this film in any detail, at least not on the record. And once you’ve seen it you’ll understand why.)

Our story starts with a person who isn’t credited anywhere on SvW, not even among the thank-yous, and that’s Eleanor James. Back in 2010, Ella had a small role in Dead Cert, during the shooting of which she mentioned to Jonathan Sothcott that her pal Pat Higgins (with whom she had made HellBride and The Devil’s Music) had a script knocking around called Strippers vs Werewolves. This was an idea that Pat had been cobbling together since at least 2008, and it piqued Jonathan’s interest.

Pat is a writer-director and might have been expected to helm SvW himself, but Pat and Jonathan work at slightly different levels. Though Sothcott’s films have pretty tiny budgets, they are still a good extra zero or two above what Higgins works with. Sothcott is a producer who pulls in funding from industry mates and casts name soap actors alongside his regular stock company of B-listers. Higgins funds his own work from whatever he made on the last one and has his own stock company of actors who mean something to me and thee but not to readers of the Daily Star. There have been some indirect connections between these two men - for example, Jonathan frequently works, as here, with Simon Phillips, who starred in Jesus vs the Messiah for Al Ronald, who DPs Pat’s movies - but in general JS and PH move in different worlds.

It seems that the various backers weren’t keen on letting Pat direct - but no problem because Sothcott hired Jonathan Glendening, fresh off the back of 13hrs. However, what got shot wasn’t Pat’s script, it was a rewrite by Phillip Barron. Now, I’m no fan of Barron’s work and I really don’t understand how he has built a career as some sort of go-to guy for horror films. Actually, his credits are pretty sparse. He got ‘screen story’ on Stalker (which was okay) for suggesting a way of reworking the original Exposé tale; he was ‘script editor’ on Night Junkies (which was not bad) but by his own admission he didn’t really have anything to do with writing those two films. And many years ago he was one of the guys behind the chaotic but surprisingly not-the-worst-thing-ever Troma pick-up The Evolved Part 1. Which means that before SvW the only real film he’d actually written was Just for the Record, far and away the worst British film of the 21st century not actually directed by Richard Driscoll.

Barron also wrote staggeringly unfunny ‘comedy sketches’ for some staggeringly unfunny BBC3 ‘comedy shows’. Pat Higgins on the other hand wrote The Devil’s Music. And KillerKiller. And one third of Bordello Death Tales. I’m not saying that a Pat Higgins script could never be improved. All scripts have potential for improvement. But the idea that Phillip Barron could improve it is not something I can get my head around. I haven’t seen Pat’s original script, but even if he was having an off-day I can’t imagine it’s worse than what got made.

The frankly bizarre citation in the SvW credit block is "Written by Pat Higgins; Screenplay by Pat Higgins and Phill Barron”. How does that work? How was part of the screenplay written by somebody who didn’t write the film (but who also didn’t write the original, first draft screenplay)? How did somebody write the whole film but only part of the screenplay? The titles make things even more confusing: “Based on Strippers Versus Werewolves; Written by Pat Higgins; Screenplay by Phillip Baron” (sic). So now Pat didn’t contribute to the screenplay at all. And how on Earth is the film based on itself? I’m thinking maybe there is something in that use of ‘versus’ - absolutely everywhere else uses ‘vs’ - to distinguish Pat’s original screenplay from the actual film. In Hollywood of course the WGA would step in and arbitrate on such matters, but here it’s just a question of what it says in people’s contracts and sometimes not even that. (One of my few paying scriptwriting gigs was with an extremely famous producer, who flat out refused to honour a signed contract until I threatened to take the arrogant, bald twat to court.) The end credits of SvW seem to agree with the credit block: “Writer Pat Higgins; Screenplay Phillip Barron and Pat Higgins.” Which does at least mean that one of the three gets Phillip Barron’s name right.

Jonathan Glendening also gets shoddily treated by the accuracy elves: his name is correct in the titles but the end credits and credit block both spell it ‘Glendenning’. There’s got to be something wrong somewhere when a film can’t spell the name of its own director. And indeed there clearly was something wrong somewhere, as summed up by young Mr Sothcott in an interview with SciFi Pulse: “The whole bloody film was a living nightmare. Everyone fell out, the money was late, the creative core was pulling in completely different directions, one of the actors was incredibly badly behaved. I fired more people on that film than on all my others put together. We needed another dressing room just to contain all the egos.”

Glendening’s original cut of the film was evidently very different to what is on my DVD. It was darker, more of a horror film, with genuine menace and threats and shocks. But it seems that the producers wanted SvW to be more of an action-comedy. Or, to be specific, a comic-book movie, almost a cinematic comic-book. Sothcott mentioned Kick-Ass in interviews; Scott Pilgrim vs the World was also released in 2010. So all these on-screen captions, the polarised faux comic-book panels, the split-screen, the fast editing, the stripper-silhouette iris wipes - in other words, all of the stuff that renders Strippers vs Werewolves shallow and disposable (or more shallow and disposable than it was to start with) - none of that is Glendening’s doing.

Jonathan Sothcott and Martin Kemp are both credited as ‘2nd unit directors’ (the former also gets ‘ADR director’). But there was no second unit so far as I can tell. If there was, there would be a 2nd unit DP and other 2nd unit crew. To my mind this suggests that Jonathan and Martin are responsible for the film as it stands, the ‘2nd unit’ credit referring to work carried out subsequent to principal photography rather than simultaneously with it. This would make sense as Sothcott and Kemp are, well, some percentage of the producers, depending on what credit list you look at. Kemp previously directed Stalker (for Sothcott), and not a bad job he made of it, although Sothcott himself has never directed anything, even second unit, outside of the odd DVD extra.

So, unless I receive evidence otherwise, this is what I surmise to be the bare bones of the creation of Strippers vs Werewolves. The film was written by Pat Higgins, re-written by Phillip Barron, directed by Jonathan Glendening, then ‘re-directed’ by Jonathan Sothcott (with a bit of a hand from Martin Kemp). This is the film as released. (Jonathan Glendening on his website refers to it as ‘The Producers Cut’.)

And that, I submit, is why it’s the messy failure that it is. Not because of any individual’s direct contribution - Pat can write, Martin and Jonathan G can both direct, Jonathan S is easily the most successful British indie producer of recent years (admittedly I have yet to see any evidence that Phillip Barron knows what a joke is) - but because of too many people pulling in too many directions. At some point, all involved (I’m including here that small army of executive producers and associate producers) must have thought this was a viable, ‘go’ project. No-one ever expected it to be a masterpiece; or if they did, they were an idiot. I mean, it’s called Strippers vs Werewolves for Christ’s sake. But it could have been better than it is.

Would it have worked if the whole thing was A Pat Higgins Joint? Probably. Pat’s hit-rate isn’t 100% but even when he doesn’t score a bulls-eye he creates something original and entertaining. Ironically, a tinier budget might well have benefited this project because the actual depictions of the werewolves would perforce have been more creative. Plus, call me iconoclastic but I’d rather watch Pat’s address book of his stand-up comedy mates than Jonathan’s filofax of soap stars and page 3 girls. (Tonto fans of British horror may spot that Simon Phillips' Sinclair is the same character that Cy Henty played in HellBride, and presumably would have been played by Henty here if Pat had directed.) And it must be said that Eleanor James (now sadly retired from acting) is considerably sexier than any of the actresses on show here.

What if we had Jonathan Glendening’s version of a Higgins script? I’d pay to see that. The evidence I have seen suggests that it would have been a dark, twisted and fascinating movie.

On the other hand, what if Jonathan Sothcott had been able to pursue his vision of the film from the start? What if Pat had simply sold Mr S the title and concept, taken the money and run off to make Squid-Slayer? And if Jonathan had asked one of his mates to direct it - Mr Kemp or Mr Phillips, perhaps? Well, yes that could have worked (as long as he got somebody decent to write the script). There’s nothing intrinsically flawed in trying to make a sub-Kick-Ass comic-book-style movie - so long as that’s what you set out to make from the start. But imposing that style on a movie which has already been written and directed as something else: that’s never, ever going to work. But, if you’re the producer, and you’ve got the film (or most of it) in the can, and you don’t think it’s workable, you have to do something with it. Which will most likely mean getting one of your mates in to re-shoot and/or re-cut it into a form which will at least minimise your losses.

I don’t know how well Strippers vs Werewolves did commercially. The Sun ran a story about how it took only £38 at the box office but, just like a more recent hoopla about Storage 24 taking only $72, that was based on a complete (and quite possibly deliberate) misrepresentation of how low-budget film distribution works. Phillip Barron has discussed this at length on his blog if you want to take a look. Jonathan Sothcott released three horror films in 2012: this in May, Airborne (which is actually mentioned in this film’s dialogue) in July and Elfie Hopkins in August. And those were his last forays to date into the horror genre. Since then he has been concentrating on the evidently more profitable (and presumably less problematic) subgenres of geezer gangsters and football thugs, untroubled by vampires, werewolves or any other denizens of the dark side.

Since SvW, Jonathan Glendening has been developing new projects and working as an editor, mostly on TV gigs like Sports Personality of the Year. Pat Higgins directed one third of Battlefield Death Tales and now gives entertaining talks about his experiences in the world of low-budget horror (Strippers vs Werewolves notwithstanding). Martin Kemp directed gangster thriller Top Dog for Jonathan Sothcott. Phillip Barron made 78 episodes of something called Persona which is some sort of dramatised app, or something. This is all getting a bit National Lampoon’s Animal House, isn’t it?

Billy Murray starred in a sci-fi short called Drifter. Barbara Scrabbleboard had a bit part as a ‘Scream Queen’ in Anglo-American comedy-horror LA Slasher. Adele Silva chose Roald Dahl as her specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind. Steven Berkoff was in The Borgias and a particularly poor episode of Doctor Who. Robert Englund appeared in Zombie Mutation, yet another Lake Placid sequel and a bunch of other stuff. Simon Phillips starred in and produced three White Collar Hooligan films and directed a sci-fi feature, The Last Scout. And I’m on the lookout for a proper transformer...

Now a quick run-down of some of the less confusing, less contentious credits, because everyone who works on a film does their best (with what they’re given) and deserves credit where credit is due. Dave Meadows (now shooting Top Gear) was the DP; Richard Colton (UFO, Kill Keith) was the editor; Sophie Wyatt (Devil’s Playground, Just for the Record, Cut) was the production designer (the IMDB reckons it was Felix Coles but he was actually one of three ‘art dept assistants’); Millie Sloan (Stalker, Devil’s Playground, Zombie Diaries 2) designed the costumes; Tower Block director James Nunn was 1st AD.

Kristyan Mallett was ‘special make-up and prosthetics designer’ which probably means, alas, that he must take credit for the awful werewolf make-up. Still, having also worked on various Harry Potters, Little Britain, Hogfather, The Cottage, Doomsday, Mutant Chronicles, Eden Lake, Sherlock, Misfits, Merlin and The Inbetweeners Movie, he’s probably not too bothered. Marcus Millichope was visual FX supervisor while Barry O’Brien was SFX supervisor. Neil ‘Lon’ Chaney wrote the original music; the version of ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ which plays over the titles is credited to ‘Wild Moon’. Bob Komar, who co-directed Jack Says with Simon Phillips, is listed as ‘standby DOP (dailies)’, whatever that means.

Strippers vs Werewolves is neither good enough to be worth watching nor bad enough to be worth watching. It’s just an unfortunate experience which left a number of the people who made it sadder and wiser (and now has a similar effect on its audience). And here’s one final twist. Despite the fact that Jonathan Sothcott is credited as producer on the sleeve, in the titles and twice in the end credits, this film isn’t on his IMDB page. Well, it is, but only for his work as ‘casting director’ (which I have no doubt he had a hand in, but for which there is ironically no actual on-screen credit). I can see why Jonathan would want to distance himself from the thing, but given how many interviews he did plugging the film when it was released, I fear he is not going to shake it off that easily.

MJS rating: D

In February 2014, Christian James and Dan Palmer were kind enough to answer a few questions by email about their brilliant zombie comedy Stalled.

Why has it taken eight years for you to follow up Freak Out? What have you been doing all that time?
DP: “Good question. I have been asking myself that! I think that is a question for the British film industry. We had a lot of positive reviews and, considering that the film was a home-made 16mm affair made by a bunch of inexperienced film students, it garnered impressive distribution via Anchor Bay/Starz in both the States and the UK. Alas varying factors worked against us. Firstly; the head of Anchor Bay Mo Claridge, a wonderful guy who ultimately gave the film the thumbs up after Martin Myers had brought it to him, passed away. He was championing us and wanted our next project to be with them; when he died the change of guard were not as supportive. Other companies just saw the film at face value and didn't have the same mind-set as festival goers and those that were reviewing us - 'Imagine what these guys can do with a budget!'

CJ: “We have been trying, honest. After Freak Out we plugged away with a follow-up but we never found a decent producer to be the all important third leg of the tripod.”

DP: “Somewhere in that time line I had a TV show with Vic and Bob's company and was asked to constantly re-write it for 18 months until it was dumped... and I didn't get paid a dime. We wasted a lot of time with a few fair-weather producers and various feature projects almost got on their feet but ultimately collapsed. Most notably a tongue-in-cheek monster movie that was prepped, cast, story-boarded and location scouted. For reasons I am still not sure of, it went belly-up at the eleventh hour. The silver lining was we met Richard Kerrigan and Daniel Pickering via that production who ultimately read the Stalled screenplay, loved it and got it up and running.”

Why did you choose to make a zombie comedy given that (a) comedy is notoriously difficult to do on a low-budget, and (b) the world is not exactly short of zombie films?
CJ: “Two very good points. I didn’t want to make a zombie movie. Going back several years, I thought that the zombie genre was saturated enough. Walking Dead hadn’t even aired at that point, little did I know that the flood gates were still opening. Dan and I had been kicking around a few ideas, I was favouring something simple, high concept but we just weren’t settling on anything. A bolt of inspiration took a hold of Dan and he spat out a first draft of Stalled rather quickly. Threw it my way with no set-up, no pre-amble. Just said ‘read this’. So it read like a containment comedy/horror that happened to have zombies as an ingredient... and that’s how it feels to me. Naturally, everyone is selling it as an out and out undead fest.”

DP: “It wasn't so much a choice as a constantly evolving idea that had popped into my brainium from when I was a kid watching Day of the Dead for the first time. Wondering why Steel doesn't hide in a closet at the end of the film? Then I realised if he did that, he would be trapped in a makeshift coffin surrounded by a sea of zombies! That idea bubbled back up when I was now a self-proclaimed writer and it just seemed too delicious to ignore.”

CJ: “Point B - yeah, to me, zombie movies had become about head shots and crazy ways to rip apart your characters. A great zombie movie has very little to do with zombies in my opinion. They effect the narrative, drive it forward, forcing it down a path, but it’s about the characters on that path not the undead in pursuit. In reality, I didn’t see it as a zombie movie. I knew it would be a selling point that could be latched onto, but I saw it as more of a quirky, containment comedy/thriller. And I think that still holds. Zombies are just another ingredient in this odd, indie thriller.”

DP: “We did have that conversation; can it be anything else but zombies? But it really couldn't. We understand that there are a lot of zombie flicks out there at the moment, but most of them exist solely because it is a quick buck. Stalled comes from a genuine place with a genuine love of the subject matter and I think audiences have acknowledged that.”

CJ: “Comedy? Yeah, it’s really quite hard to do comedy, it’s especially hard to do it with someone who doesn’t understand the importance of timing. Fortunately, Dan is all over that shit - he digs Rick Moranis as much as Rick Baker, he swings both ways. In my day job (directing commercials and purse snatching) I often work with actors who ‘try’ comedy and it’s always painful. You have to have it intuitively and often times, acting funny doesn’t mean it’s funny on set. Dan and I had more serious discussions about a ‘gag’ than we did anything else. You analyse what’s funny, dissect it until it isn’t funny, then shoot it! Anyhoo, I haven’t answered your question... er, why! Well I guess we just get fired up by it. Although, again, I didn’t see Stalled as much of a comedy. I felt it had a healthy dose of laughs in there but it was just a weird, indie, horror, thriller thing. But I think when we get on shoot we tend to root out the funny bone a little.”

Can you describe the practicalities of shooting a film on one small set?
CJ: “Well it’s quite practical in that all your props, costumes, catering etc just need to be sent to one place. There are no location changes so, after Day 2, no-one can be excused for getting lost on the way to set. The downside is that you go a little crazy spending 14-hour days in a tiny box for three weeks. Your mind starts to play tricks on you, days all blend into one. Storyboarding like crazy is a big must. Just follow those, have faith in your planning and everything will work out... or at least, just keep telling yourself that whilst you shoot... and know that sound and music will disguise a multitude of sins.”

How has Stalled been received so far, and what are your plans for distribution?
CJ: “It was a slow start. We finished the movie late 2012. Had a cast and crew screening in November at Bafta. This seemed to go down well, but 90% of those cats worked on the movie so they’re attached in some way. So late November/early December we started invited UK industry types to private screenings. Barely anyone turned up – those good ol’ forward thinkers! So, undeterred, we continued. Posting our trailer online, Slashfilm.com got wind of our high concept and gave us a mention, this turned into a healthy amount of hits and got us under the nose of a forward thinking Australian sales agent. They snapped up Worldwide rights and took it to Cannes. Got it into every major festival and distribution deals in the UK, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Canada and America to name a few. Some of those territories even enjoyed a small theatrical outing too. The festival reception was fantastic, capped off with three sell-out screenings at Frightfest and winning the Melies d’Argent at LIFF (Sweden). It should be on Blu Ray, DVD and VOD pretty much everywhere in the next couple of months.”

DP: “It will be released in the UK via Matchbox Films on Blu-Ray and DVD on February 24th, you can order it on Amazon and all the usual places. It is out in the States via Phase4 Films on March 4th and also widely available on VOD. The response has been over-whelmingly positive. Festival audiences have been amazing and the reviews have been brilliant; Kim Newman, Alan Jones, Ain't It Cool, Twitch Film... and of course MJ Simpson... whoever that is!”

What are your views on the 21st century British Horror Revival, and your part in it?
CJ: “Crumbs, er... there is one? And I’m a part of it??? Well I’m just doing my thing with my fellow filmmaking buddies. We always operate outside of the UK industry - we don’t want to cast East End gangsters in our movies and we like to maintain good relationships with our crews. I suppose time will tell if we’re a part of that revival, I hope it inspires others to get out there and do the same.”

What are you planning to make next and might we see that a bit sooner?
CJ: “Well I recently directed a short little film/sketch starring Holiday Grainger and David Oaks. That should be popping up online shortly, all for a good cause too! Dan and I have several projects in development. One or two have people/deals in place but a lot don’t. The beauty of having such a gap between our first and second films is that we’ve been developing so much material, all of which I love. It’s just a case of pairing it up with the right people. Onwards and upwards I hope.”

Director: Jean Rollin
Writers: Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin
Cast: Jean-Loup Philippe, Anni Belle, Nathalie Perrey
Year of release: 1975
Country: France
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

Think of the Redemption video label and you think of lesbian vampires. Think of lesbian vampires and you think of ever-so-slightly obsessed French director Jean Rollin (Le Viol du Vampire, Lost in New York etc). So it seems entirely appropriate that Redemption should kick off their long-awaited rebirth with Rollin's Levres de Sang. Having said that, although there are girlie vampires in this film and there is a hint of lesbo action via a bisexual female photographer and her naked subject, there are no actual lesbian vampires (unless they're in a stronger edit somewhere).

In the manner of 1970s European horror films, this is enjoyable nonsense from the first shot in which a woman wearing what appears to be Edwardian garb gets out of the back of a minibus. With a couple of blokes, she carts a pair of coffins down to a crypt where a tiny wooden cross in the doorway will keep their occupants constrained. It's a surprisingly well-lit crypt with sunlight streaming through a window even though it's night-time outside.

Our main story concerns a young chap (co-writer Jean-Loup Philippe: Pussy Talk) who has memories of having spent a night in a ruined castle as a boy with a young woman (Anni Belle: House on the Edge of the Park, Anthropophagous 2). His mother has always denied that this happened, but when he sees a photo of the castle he recognises it and sets out to investigate.

After that it all get a bit bonkers. He meets the young woman again, unchanged, but also an older version of her who may be the real one. The tiny wee cross gets kicked over and four young blonde vampiresses in various states of diaphanous undress emerge from the two coffins and start overacting madly. The man's mother has him drugged and kidnapped, not unlike the opening title sequence of The Prisoner. It's yer typical Euro-horror schlock.

Like most Rollin films, the movie makes up for in stylistic touches what it lacks in sensible storyline, good acting or decent production budget, not least because of some classy cinematography by Jean-Francois Robin (Belphegor: Phantom of the Louvre and - blimey! - Betty Blue!). Several of the cast were in other 'Rollinades': Paul Bisciglia (The Nude Vampire, Requiem for a Vampire), Nathalie Perrey (Two Orphan Vampires) and twins Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel (The Nude Vampire).

A special mention must be made of the vampire fangs which really look like they were bought for a couple of Francs down the local joke-shop.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Art Camacho
Writer: Richard Preston Jr
Producer: Raymon Khoury
Cast: Stephen Furst, Steve Eastin, Tom Bosley
Country: USA
Year of release: 1997
Reviewed from: R2 DVD

Stephen Furst from Babylon 5 and National Lampoon’s Animal House toplines this kiddie stravisnut as a divorced dad taking his son, daughter and son’s friend on a camping trip. Playing the character as what might reasonably be called ‘Woody Allen lite’, he is lumbered with dialogue exchanges like: “There is a dangerous wild animal loose in this area.” “My ex-wife is here?”

The story is hardly complex and, so far as I can tell, has no direct connection with the first Little Bigfoot film apart from the same costume and the same midget actor/stuntman inside it (Joseph S Griffo: Phantasm III, Magic Kid I and II, Freaked, T-Force, Monkeybone etc). Dad and kids go camping where the kids encounter an abandoned baby sasquatch (a prologue shows the little’un being separated from its parents by hunters), which they successfully hide from their father, even when they pack up camp and move into a motel. In a sequence obviously inspired by ET, Little Bigfoot (as they call their new friend) is dressed up and taken into town without anyone noticing.

The bad guy in all this is Cavendish (Steve Eastin: Night Warning, The Hidden I and II, Robot Wars, the When a Stranger Calls remake) who not only wants to catch himself a bigfoot but also owns land which rightfully belongs to a local Indian tribe but which cannot be claimed as long as there is no evidence of prior Native American settlement (so any Indian pottery found is smashed). He’s a thorough wrong’un with a squad of hunters/trackers whom he constantly berates and a tall Native American tracker who can sniff out a sasquatch at fifty paces.

Despite being subtitled The Journey Home, this is no road movie with only the final act fitting that concept, when the kids let their dad in on the secret and they work together to return Little Bigfoot from whence he came - although this involves little more than driving him from the motel back to the campsite. Cavendish’s tracker refuses to shoot the little creature in a stand-off for which the adjective ‘climactic’ seems a little overgenerous. Instead, the Indian uses some mumbo-jumbo magic to revive the injured creature which is subsequently seen, without any real explanation, rejoining its pack/tribe/herd/flock - what is the collective noun for these things? Oh, and the bigfoot’s cave contains some pre-Columbian cave paintings which establish the true ownership of the land.

There is an enormous amount of tree-hugging nonsense in this film about how the Chinook ways were the best and they were at one with nature yada yada yada - the sort of stuff that will only mislead and confuse kids old enough to understand it, rather than pointing them towards a real understanding of ecology and social history.

The three child actors are okay - not great but I’ve seen far worse and two of them were already established TV stars when they made this film. Thirteen-year-old Taran Noah Smith was one of the kids on Home Improvement and played Tiny Tim in a 1995 modern day version of A Christmas Carol entitled Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story. The best friend is played by Michael Fishman who was DJ in Roseanne. However Melody Clarke, who plays the deliberately infuriating, vegetarian kid sister, seems to have rapidly disappeared from acting after an episode of Baywatch and a sitcom called Unhappily Ever After.

Happy Days’ Tom Bosley (the voice of Gepetto in Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night) plays the kindly local ranger but doesn’t have much to do except warn Cavendish not to overstep the mark. Stephen Furst’s other genre credits include The Unseen and both Magic Kid movies. He was also, of course, the voice of Fanboy in Freakazoid! and Booster in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Director and associate producer Art Camacho is, oddly, a fight choreographer with credits that range from The Master Demon in 1991, through Cyber-Tracker, Hologram Man and the Magic Kid movies, to Stephen Seagal’s 2002 opus Half Past Dead. Quite why he would have launched his own directorial career with a pair of kiddie monster movies - presumably shot back-to-back, as they were released within a few months of each other - is a mystery. Most of his other films are more likely fair including Soft Target, 13 Dead Men and Sci-Fighter.

Screenwriter Richard Preston Jr has left his name attached to some pretty dreadful straight-to-video movies including Dark Breed and Cyber-Tracker 2, as well as that swiftly forgotten fantasy series Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. This appears to be a sole cinematography credit for Jeffrey A Cook whom the Inaccurate Movie Database says is otherwise usually employed as a sparks or gaffer on films like Charlie’s Angels and The Ring 2.

Special effects are credited to John Criswell (Project Vampire, Creepozoids) and Larry Finch. The bigfoot suit itself is little more than a black furry costume with a fairly immobile ape-like mask; curiously, it has black skin whereas the one on the sleeve is pink-skinned. Make-up artist Rela Martine has gone on to work on big TV shows such as The West Wing and CSI: New York, while second unit director Jerry P Jacobs also directed episodes of LA Heat and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

TF Simpson enjoyed Little Bigfoot 2 (which he calls Big Littlefoot) so if the intended audience was pre-schoolers then I suppose the film works. But despite Furst’s exasperated divorcee schtick, there’s nothing here for grown-ups.

MJS rating: C

Director: Robert Pratten
Writer: Robert Pratten
Producer: Robert Pratten
Cast: Doug Cockle, Sara Stewart, Trisha Mortimer
Year of release: 2003
Country: UK
Reviewed from: screener VHS
Official website: www.londonvoodoo.com

The British horror revival continues apace with this well-produced, stylish, unnerving supernatural thriller. And though its tale of African voodoo in the streets of London may seem fanciful, don’t forget that this was produced the same year that the Metropolitan police recovered an unidentified black child’s limbless body from the Thames, identified as the victim of a ritual murder.

Lincoln and Sarah Mathers (Doug Cockle: Reign of Fire, The Second Coming; and Sara Stewart: Mrs Brown, Drop the Dead Donkey) are an American couple who relocate from New York to Greenwich with their two-year-old Beth (Grace Sprott). Lincoln works for some hideous faceless corporation in Docklands, burning the midnight oil to put together a project for a Swedish client. Former auctioneer Sarah (it’s not relevant but it is mentioned!) lives at home in their expensive townhouse with Beth and a nanny, Halle Berry lookalike Kelly (Vonda Barnes from girl group Madasun).

In the basement, workmen uncover a stone slab, and when Sarah cracks it open she finds two mummified corpses and a variety of religious artefacts - and we briefly see something possess her. Houseboat-dwelling local history buff Fiona (Trisha Mortimer: Frightmare, Schizo) reveals that a couple were believed killed in a house fire at the address in 1902, and her friends, voodoo practitioners Ray and Ruth (David Webber: 51st State, the Uma Thurman Avengers movie; and Jacqueline Boatswain, a stage/TV actress who was one of the dancers in the video for Red Dwarf spin-off hit single ‘Tongue-Tied’!) try to help the Mathers but are rejected.

Gradually, strange things start happening, and gradually they build. Sarah is forgetting things, and then starts behaving provocatively towards the workmen, while also creating concentric heart-shapes in sugar and flour. Or is this really happening? Kelly has her own agenda which involves self-mutilation, steering Beth away from her mother, and a growing obsession with Lincoln - is this related to what else is going on in the house, or is it just one more thing for the couple to worry about? How much of Sarah’s behaviour can be blamed on Lincoln’s workaholic approach? (This is the only horror film in history where a fax machine assumes the status of evil icon!) How much on Kelly’s attempts to undermine her? And how much on whatever escaped from that hidden grave?

When Sarah starts speaking French and becoming violent, even Lincoln starts to realise that something supernatural is going on, and seeks help from Fiona and her associates. The film culminates in full-on voodoo weirdness as Lincoln struggles to release his wife from the restless spirit of a 19th century Beninese warrior which possesses her. Corking stuff!

London Voodoo is an unusual and thoroughly enjoyable movie: slickly directed, nicely designed and exhibiting a bunch of terrific performances (especially from Sara Stewart). This is a genuinely gripping horror flick, using the subtleties of growing menace rather than special effects (such as they are, these are provided by Bob Smoke: Love is the Devil). Voodoo is accurately depicted as a working minority religion - albeit with mystical powers - not just supernatural hocus-pocus. There are also, it should be stressed, no zombies of any sort. This isn’t that kind of voodoo. It is also, somewhat unusually for these days, deadly serious. The closest thing to humour are the meeting scenes at Lincoln’s company; his presentations to the Scandinavian clients (Swedish megastars Sven-Bertil Taube - The Eagle Has Landed - and Michael Nyqvist, recently voted the sexiest man in Sweden!) are full of corporate bollockspeak which is as scarily accurate as it is utterly meaningless.

Exhibiting a deft directorial hand, writer-director Pratten ensures that the growing tension never flags. For 98 minutes I couldn’t tear myself away from this film because I had to know what was going on. What was Fiona up to? Or Kelly? Or Ray and Ruth? There are a lot of agendas at work among these characters, and though I’m not sure everything is resolved by the end, nevertheless there is an effective climax as good and evil battle for possession of Sarah’s body.

Pratten is a mature graduate of the London Film School with seven short films under his belt, including Army of Clowns (which may or may not be the same as Clown But Not Out aka Rediscovery...) and Waste Disposal (“an Avengers-style film about the end of an affair between a hitman and a hitwoman”). Swedish cinematographer Patrick Jackson also studied at the LFS and here makes the transition from directing shorts (Before It All Ends, Vigilante) to photographing features. Shot on super-16 over seven weeks in February and March 2003 on an unspecified (but clearly low-ish) budget, London Voodoo is a very promising debut feature and well worth checking out.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Roger Christian
Writer: Roger Christian, Matthew Jacobs
Producer: Michael Guest
Cast: John Tarrant, Donogh Rees, Deep Roy
Country: UK/Australia
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Dear Lord, this is poor. This is really, really bad. What’s worse, it’s British. Oh, the national shame. A pisspoor, sub-sub-Star Wars piece of semi-juvenile rubbish which is nothing more than a scrappily assembled mishmash of clichés and lazy film-making.

I didn’t enjoy it. No, sir.

Right from the start, we know we’re in trouble because the very first shot is of a communications satellite which has the words ‘Communications Satellite’ painted in big red letters on the side. A caption tells us this is ‘El Jadida - The 21st Century’ but what is El Jadida? One would naturally assume, since we are looking at a planet, that it is the name of said planet.

However, we then get a very brief aerial shot of a settlement at night and another caption: ‘A mining station on the planet Ordessa.’ So if the planet is called Ordessa, what is El Jadida? Is it the town? Why have we got a caption telling us the town’s name on a shot of the planet and a caption of the planet’s name on a shot of the town?

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

Despite the word being plainly spelled ‘Ordessa’ with an R, an incoming spaceship which identifies itself in a voice-over radio communication as ‘Police Transport Zebra’ speaks to a ground controller called ‘Odessa 5.’ So is it Odessa or Ordessa? Who knows? Who cares? What is more interesting is that the spaceship looks very much like the one from Nightflyers. I don’t know if it’s the same model or a revamped model or just my memory playing tricks, but it doesn’t half look similar.

Captain Jowitt (Ralph Cotterill, one of the few British actors in the cast, though he has evidently been based in Australia for some time, where he has appeared in the Australian Ultraman series and Howling III: The Marsupials) has come to quash a rebellion on behalf of the ‘Droid Government’ using squads of robot soldiers or ‘droids’, one of whom asks another what Jowitt is like and is told: “He’s more like one of us than human.”

El Jadida, if that is the town’s name, is represented by various graffiti-covered alleys down which wander a lot of extras in awful 1980s fashions. Someone with a loudhailer starts chanting pro-human, anti-droid slogans and this is taken up by the crowd, led by a young blonde lady who is named, we shall discover, Abbie (Donogh Rees, who played three different roles in various episodes of Xena and Hercules). Lorca himself is a young chap who isn’t actually blonde, he just has blonde highlights in his hair - so it’s good to know that this remote mining colony still has functioning hair salons. He is woodenly played by the astoundingly uncharismatic John Tarrant from Aussie soap A Country Practice.

Beyond the basic principle of ‘human rebels’ there is very little attempt to explain what is actually going on, either politically or personally. There is no indication of whether this ‘rebellion’ is some sort of organised movement or just a simmering discontent. If there is actually a rebel organisation, where do Lorca and Abbie fit into it? How do they know each other? Do the authorities know about them? In what way are humans actually being oppressed? Who or what is the Droid Government? Where does Ordessa fit into the galactic economy? Who is Captain Jowitt? None of this is explained, none of these basic questions are answered.

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

This is a chaotic and inept movie which seems to think that in a science fiction film it’s enough to say people are ‘rebels’ without indicating what they are rebelling against. Badly lit scenes are cobbled together in an almost random order and we never learn anything at all about our protagonists or their situation. For example, early on there is a scene in which ‘the children’ are hidden anyway. But who are these children (and whose are these children) and why must they be hidden? Where are they hidden? Why are they never seen or referred to again?

The children are being told stories about Earth by a short robot named Grid, played by Indian midget actor Deep Roy. He is Lorca’s sidekick though it is puzzling quite what use a midget robot would be to anyone - Lorca is constantly having to lift him up to reach things. Roy occasionally remembers to exhibit a slight stiffness to his movements but for the most part he just looks like a midget in a helmet.

Let me pause here to describe the expensive special effects techniques which are used to bring both Grid and the Droid Police to life. Each of the police wears a jumpsuit and a crash helmet and has, over his face, an immobile human mask, a creepy black metal mask apparently modelled on a black man (which gives the film an intriguing subtext). They look like dolls, frankly - Grid even more so since his mask is more cherubic and hence more creepy. Aside from their immobile faces, no attempt at all is made to give them any sort of robotic appearance. They don’t even carry ray guns, being armed instead with M16 automatic rifles, which are obviously still a popular weapon in the spacefaring 21st century.

I’m not saying that these are the crappiest, cheapest, stupidest robots in cinematic history. But they certainly rank up there with the worst.

Anyway, stuff happens but it is impossible to tell what or why, partly because everything is really badly lit but mostly because this was obviously made from a script where a lot of explanation was in the stage directions, leaving those of us with nothing to go on except dialogue and action scratching our heads. About half an hour in I wondered whether it was just me. Was I being thick and not following a simple plot? No, it really was a nonsensical jumble of ideas and scenes. I challenge anyone to work out what is happening without first reading a plot synopsis. (I didn’t even read the back of the video box - I wanted to come to this story with an open mind.)

Somehow - don’t ask me how - Lorca and Grid end up at a big open-cast mine with giant lorries, the sort that have tyres 20 feet in diameter. This futuristic setting with its futuristic vehicles is represented by a big open-cast mine with giant lorries, the sort that have tyres 20 feet in diameter. There is no attempt whatsoever to disguise this cool but badly-used location.

For some reason, Lorca’s mother is here. How? Why? Christ only knows. There has been some talk of Lorca’s father who may have been a rebel leader or something. Anyway, from behind a giant lorry Lorca sees some Droid Police shoot his mother. He responds by lobbing a hand grenade. The resulting explosion very impressively reduces to neat piles of cloth and metal about a dozen droids standing around over an area of 40 or 50 square metres, while leaving his mother’s body entirely untouched. Lorca puts his mother - and another body, whose identity escaped me - into the back of a normal-sized truck and takes them into the desert where he buries them.

On returning, he is captured by Danny (Hugh Keays-Byrne: Mad Max, Les Patterson Saves the World, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars and the 1999 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth), a grimacing, unkempt bounty hunter employed by Captain Jowitt (tick another cliché box, folks; heck, tick a bunch of them) who has already captured Grid and uses him as bait. The two rebels are thrown into the back of a giant truck with a single droid guard who is easily overcome. There follows a deeply unthrilling ‘fight’ between Lorca and Danny which ends with the truck rolling gently into a wall of earth with a small explosion to suggest that it has crashed in some way (they couldn’t actually damage the thing of course, on account of how much those trucks cost). Danny is thrown into the earthbank but we later see his hand emerge so he’s - gasp - not dead. Lorca repairs Grid, whose head has come off.

Back in El Jadida, Abbie (whom Lorca believes to be dead, for some reason) has hooked up with a cute brunette room-mate named Suzi (Home and Away actress Cassandra Webb, who gets an ‘And introducing’ credit). After the sequence in the open-cast mine, which was rubbish but at least could be followed, the scenes back in the township plunge us once again into random actions by unidentified characters. Lorca and Grid come back to town, Lorca meets Suzi who hides him by stripping to her undies and pretending to snog him in some sort of sex cubicle when the Droid Police come looking for him. There is also a girl with very blonde hair (blonder than Abbie) and a red leather jacket who is a friend or comrade of Abbie and/or Suzi but I don't know who she is or what she does.

For some reason, Abbie and co have to get aboard a spaceship called the Redwing which looks like the one from the start of the film (Police Transport Zebra) but that may just be the production saving on effects footage. This used to belong to Lorca’s father (I think) but the significance of this ship, though clearly important, is never explained.

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

Grid has his own little adventures, frequently being referred to as a ‘Nissan model’ (well, that’s what it sounds like) and we learn very late in the day that he is an SDU, a Sentinel Defence Unit, designed to protect a spaceship while the pilot is away doing other stuff.

Lorca, Abbie, Grid and Suzi somehow get aboard the Redwing, although Suzi isn’t in the actual boarding scenes, she just magically appears when they’re on the bridge. Then it turns out that there is another SDU aboard, also played by Roy, who kills Abbie. Let me stress that everything I’m writing here should be taken with a great big dose of ‘I think this is it but I can’t tell.’ Abbie’s death scene is not shown, only Suzi screaming from behind a window in a door, which she makes no attempt to open, and frankly it looks at first like it’s Suzi being attacked.

Grid stands over Abbie’s body, covered in blood, while the other SDU seems to be completely spotless - which is confusing. but no more confusing than anything else in this plotless, sci-fi-by-numbers mess - and he begs Suzi to activate his attack mode. This evidently involves tapping a five-digit code into a previously unmentioned keypad on the side of his head. We then have the extraordinary spectacle of two midgets in crash helmets and doll masks throwing each other around a spaceship corridor. In fact, they throw each other through various walls, which are clearly made from painted sheets of expanded polystyrene and then they throw each other through the floor! What sort of spaceship has walls and floors that flimsy?

A spaceship in a film which is a big stinking pile of crap.

The massive overhead doors of the docking bay where the Redwing was parked are locked, but Lorca and friends break out by repeatedly banging their spaceship against the doors until they break open. They then fly off, just as another spaceship is coming in. Some sort of bomb is activated and there is a series of explosions, culminating in aerial shots of mining blasts at the previously seen open cast mine. Wait a minute, are we expected to think that blasts in an open cast mine are actually a township, complete with massive spaceship docking bays, blowing up? Quite possibly. Nothing about this piece of crap can surprise me any more.

Grid tells Lorca and Suzi that Abbie did not die in vain and a radio voice from somewhere says that Abbie’s mission has been accomplished and all that is needed now is a transport, but it looks like the inhabitants of El Jadida - if any of them survived those explosions - are out of luck because the Redwing is heading off into space.

I don’t think I have ever been so relieved to see the words ‘The End’ appear.

So who was responsible for this pile of dross which is badly directed and staggeringly badly written with pathetic production design and laughable special effects (although the spaceship shots aren’t bad)? Step forward, Roger Christian. This chap is sometimes referred to as ‘Academy Award winner Roger Christian' but don’t let that fool you. He was part of the team which received the Oscar for Best Set Design for Star Wars; he hasn’t won any awards for his direction apart from a big fat Razzie which he won for Battlefield Earth. Oh yes, it’s that Roger Christian. (There is another one, a musician, who released a few records in the early 1990s. He was the brother of the guys who were actually in The Christians.) This Roger Christian also directed Second Unit on The Phantom Menace, which possibly says even more about him than Battlefield Earth.

Co-writer Matthew Jacobs hasn’t got much to be proud of either, his greatest hit being the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, which he also co-produced. To be fair, he also wrote Paperhouse, the enjoyable Jim Henson TV special Monster Maker, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove and a number of episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. But let’s face it, if somebody asked you to imagine a sci-fi movie directed by the guy who made Battlefield Earth, written by the guy who wrote the Paul McGann Doctor Who movie, what sort of film would you conjure up?

A big stinking pile of crap?

Also in the cast are Rod Zuanic (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) as ‘Lorca’s friend’, Tylor Copin (Mad Max 2, Peter Benchley’s The Beast) as a ‘Detective Droid’, Rebekah Elamaloglou (Home and Away, Paradise Beach, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) as one of the children and John Rees (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sky Bandits) as a holographic priest. But among all the soap actors and Mad Max bit parts the only interesting member of the cast is Deep Roy.

Roy is one of those incredibly busy short actors, like Warwick Davis or Phil Fondacaro, who seems to turn up everywhere. He was Droopy McCool in Return of the Jedi, the Tin Man in Return to Oz, Princess Aura’s pet in Flash Gordon and all the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In fact he has become part of Tim Burton’s rep company, appearing in Big Fish and the dire Planet of the Apes remake and even lending his voice to one of the characters in Corpse Bride. He has also acted, or performed stunts, in Freaked, The Grinch, Howling VI, Alien from LA, Greystoke, The Dark Crystal, Poltergeist II, Van Helsing,Matilda, the brilliant Retroactive, Hook and Leprechaun. He is certainly not the only person to have appeared in both Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 but he could well be the only person to have done both those shows andThe X-Files.

Reading this review back, I may have been unfairly harsh to a relatively harmless little film, but the hell with it. This is an inept piece of movie-making and if Roger Christian’s career had been nipped in the bud he would never have inflicted Battlefield Earth on us. There’s a lesson there for us all. It’s not even clear who this is aimed at. The packaging makes it look like a kids’ film but there’s no entertainment value to it that might interest kids: no whooshing spaceships, no zapping ray-guns, no chases and only one really, really crap fight (between two doll-faced midgets surrounded by polystyrene walls).

I really doubt that producer Michael Guest is the actor from the 1960s and 1970s who appeared in Doctor Who, Dixon of Dock Green and Pathfinders in Space, but I suppose he could be. He has produced a few other films including Codename: Kyril and recent British horror flick The Toybox. Effects man John Cox, now the creator of animatronic monsters for films like The Host, Pitch Black and Rogue, worked on this film when he was just starting out.

Many sites list Tony Banks (from Genesis) as composer of the score for this film. Although Banks did contribute some music, the main composer is actually Craig Huxley, who started out as a child actor - he was in two episodes of Star Trek - before becoming a composer (he invented a massive musical device called the Blaster Beam which allegedly caused women in the audience to have spontaneous orgasms and which was used for the sound of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture). But the score by a Star Trek child actor who gave women orgasms with a musical instrument isn't the oddest thing about this film's soundtrack. The oddest thing is a holographic music video machine on the street of El Jadida; at one point this plays a Peter Gabriel video and on another occasion a Toyah video is briefly seen. Wow, their careers must have really taken off over the decades...

(Apparently, Banks did indeed record a soundtrack for this film, using music from his rejected score from 2010. The Lorca music and his score for another film called Quicksilver were released on an album imaginatively titled Soundtracks. The odd nature of the film credits here would suggest that Banks' music was removed at a very late stage. My thanks to Insiders director Steve Lawson for this information.)

This pile of tosh is also variously known as 2084 and Starship. Quite hilariously, the movie’s page at the Inaccurate Movie Database is illustrated with a video sleeve featuring the rock band Starship! However, even the IMDB cannot be blamed for the extraordinary cock-up in the film credits, where the character of Grid is listed as ‘Kid’ (or possibly Xid, as the video transfer is abysmal - no, I think it’s ‘Kid’).

That sums up perfectly, for me, this awful piece of junk. There really is almost nothing to recommend here. I’ll try, I really will. The spaceship effects aren’t bad and Cassandra Webb is quite cute (and can act, which is a rarity among this cast). But these plus points are not enough to make up for one of the most amateurish, hopeless scripts ever filmed, awful direction, crappy production design, those staggeringly rubbish robots and a wooden leading man. And frankly the inclusion of a Peter Gabriel music video is the final nail in the coffin.

MJS rating: D-

Director: Amando De Ossorio
Writer: Amando De Ossorio
Producer: Jose A Perez Giner
Cast: Tony Kendal, Helga Line, Silvia Tortosa
Year of release: 1973
Country: Spain
Reviewed from: UK VHS (VPD)

In these days of DVD ubiquity, there are few VHS tapes that will make me stop and look, but when I saw this for a couple of quid on a market stall, I knew that I had to have it. Amando De Ossorio of course was the mad Spaniard behind the infamous ‘Blind Dead’ films about zombie Knights Templar, but he made a few other horrors too, including Malenka/Fangs of the Living Dead, Night of the Sorcerers, Hydra: Monster of the Deep - and this obscurity.

In a small German town on the banks of the Rhine, a young woman prepares for her wedding day tomorrow, when suddenly the window smashes open and into the room comes a snarly, scaly monster, all claws and teeth. We don’t get a good look at it - in fact though it reappears several times, De Ossorio very sensibly keeps the complete beast from sight, hiding it in shadows. Mostly we see only a scaly, green, five-fingered claw, and sometimes we only see the shadow of that.

The townsfolk wonder if it was a bear that killed the woman (German bears must be very agile because it got in through a first floor window!) but a young, blind street violinist who has lived there all his life (though he is later identified as Hungarian) says that the killer was Loreley, much to the amusement of everyone else. Actually he says, “According to the tradition of the seven full moons, Loreley will be transformed into an obscene beast...” - so you can see why they all laugh.

Loreley, we gradually learn, was an ancient German siren who lured sailors to their doom. It’s a legend which is all tied up with the whole ‘ring of the Nibelung’ saga, familiar to fans of Richard Wagner. In these enlightened times, of course, no-one believes a word of it. (Interestingly, the monster is referred to as ‘Loreley’ throughout, never ‘the Loreley.’) Actually I say ‘these enlightened times’ but this is one of those movies where, despite mostly modern costumes and settings, some people still dress like they’ve stepped out of the mid-19th century, just to emphasise that this is backwards mittel-Europe.

Near the town is a girls’ boarding school; we never see any hint of educational activity though we do frequently see the girls in bikinis frolicking in the school pool. There are only about eight or nine of them and they are all in their early 20s, as is their stick-up-her-arse professor Elke (Silvia Tortosa: Horror Express), though the school principal (Josefina Jartin) is a bit older and more relaxed. The town mayor assigns an experienced hunter, Sirgurd, to guard the school from the wild beast and the ‘girls’ are delighted when he turns out to not be a crotchety old git but is actually hunky Tony Kendal (Three Fantastic Supermen, Return of the Blind Dead) in white flares and sunglasses, astride a motorbike.

The killings continue in the town. Another young woman and then the blind violinist. There are several references to the bodies having their hearts ripped out but none of the ones we see have anything more than clawmarks across the face and chest. And who is the mysterious, pale-faced young woman (Helga Line, whose truly amazing career includes Exorcism’s Daughter, Saga of the Draculas, Horror Express, Horror Rises from the Tomb, The Vampire’s Night Orgy plus pepla, westerns, Bond rip-offs and even a Santo film) who watches each funeral from her horse-drawn carriage (driven by a beardy guy in a sort of monk’s cowl)?

Sirgurd goes investigating and comes across cravat-wearing Professor Van Lander (Angel Melendez: Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, Hunchback of the Morgue, Ceremonia Sangrienta), the only person (apart from the late violinist) who believes that Loreley is more than a legend. He takes Sirgurd to his laboratory, saying, “Here I have carried out experiments which science would consider fantastic and of course against all the principles of biology as it is understood today.” The Prof’s theory is that Loreley transforms from a beautiful young woman to a hideous scaly monster because she is regressing through thousands of years of evolution. Who would have thought it: The Loreley’s Grasp is, at heart, a remake of The She-Creature!

Van Lander has a detached human hand which he has acquired from the local hospital, and demonstrates how it becomes green and scaly when bathed in a ray of artificial moonlight (this is where the film gets seriously bonkers). His solution to the problem is, naturlich, the Sword of Siegfried! There is no explanation of where he obtained this, or indeed whether it’s the real thing, which is doubtful as it is only about nine inches long. “It has radioactivity,” explains the loony scientist. “It can destroy the cellular mutation of Loreley and send her back into the legendary night from which she has come.”

But who is Loreley? The mystery is about as unmysterious as The Gorgon, the Hammer film which famously pondered who the snake-headed woman could be, even though there was only one female member in the cast. Sirgurd eventually corners the pale-faced woman from the coach in a derelict house beside the river and she does everything except show him her birth certificate. She says she has been around for a long, long time - and indeed that her name is Loreley, which has to be a pretty big clue - and after she and Sirgurd have made love the beardy bloke, Alberic (the great Luis Barboo from Dracula - Prisoner of Frankenstein, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, Satan's Blood, The Bare Breasted Countess, etc), appears and carries her off into the river, disappearing below the surface with barely a ripple.

To pass up a clue like that you have to be either the über-sceptic or phenomenally stupid.

Sirgurd however has his eye on the frosty-but-softening Elke who is coming round to believing in Loreley, telling him, “Many serious witnesses have spoken of creatures never classified by Linnaeus...” - this movie is just a treasure trove of such brilliantly clunky lines. Meanwhile, the Professor is visited by Alberic and Loreley - “Good evening, Professor. I am Alberic.” “Any relation to the Nibelung?” - who leave him for dead and destroy his notes.

The film climaxes with Sirgurd scuba-diving into the river where he finds Loreley’s cave, complete with a horde of treasure left her by her father Wotan, and three scantily clad babes who allow him to escape while they are cat-fighting over who gets to shag him first.

What an extraordinary film. It’s not bad actually if you like 1970s Euro-horror: the acting’s passable (though the dubbing is risible) and the direction, as much as can be seen from this overly dark print, is competent. The storyline is enjoyably daft and at least it’s original, rather than being yet another damn vampire/werewolf/mummy/horde of zombies. The monster is monstrous, the deaths are violent and bloody, and the pseudo-scientific explanation is complete hogwash of the highest order. Top stuff.

As well as those mentioned above, the frankly all-star cast includes Lolita Tovar (Curse of the Vampire), Joseph Thelman (Tombs of the Blind Dead), Luis Induni (The Werewolf and the Yeti, Dr Jekyll Vs the Werewolf, The Horrible Sexy Vampire), Sergio Mendizabal (For a Few Dollars More), Mary Sol Delgado (Return of the Blind Dead), Javier de Rivera (Night of the Seagulls, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, The Awful Dr Orloff), Antonio Orengo (Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Scarab) and Betsabe Ruiz (Werewolf Shadow, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Autopsy).

Make-up artist Lolita Merlo seems to have plenty of credits though no others in the horror/fantasy genre (although her assistant Jose Morales worked on Werewolf Shadow), while special effects man Alfredo Segoviano did duty on The Werewolf and the Yeti and Exorcismo. Cinematographer Miguel F Mila worked on five De Ossorio films including Return of the Blind Dead (which shares so many cast and crew with this that it may even have been shot back to back) as well as A Dragonfly for Each Corpse and Blade of the Ripper.

One curious aspect of this film is that what few references I have found to it in my archives and on-line almost all spell the title The Lorelei’s Grasp, presumably because they are just translating the Spanish title Las Garras de Lorelei, but the on-screen title of this print is clearly spelt with a Y. This heavily cropped full-frame version, which loses a good part of both the image and the credits, is evidently an original British print as it carries a BBFC certificate at the start (with the odd title Loreley Grasp). The sleeve of the undated ex-rental video (mid/late-1980s at a guess) titles the film The Loreley’s Grasp but manages to misspell the monster’s name (twice) in the rear blurb as ‘the Lorelie’.

In America such complications were avoided because this was released as When the Screaming Stops. Apparently the US distributor added a William Castle-esque flashing red light before each attack.

At the moment this film seems to be commercially unavailable on either VHS or DVD, so if you see it on a market stall for a couple of quid/bucks, grab it quickly!

MJS rating: B

Director: Jean Rollin
Writer: Jean Rollin
Producer: Jean Rollin
Cast: Catherine Herengt, Catherine Lesret, Nathalie Perrey
Country: France
Year of release: 1989
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

Dear God, I’ve sat through some bollocks in my time but Perdue Dans New York takes the biscuit. It’s a pretentious, arty, plotless, amateurish collection of largely random ideas which is as boring as it is incomprehensible. The best thing you can say about it is that’s it’s only 52 minutes long.

Of course, if you’re a big fan of Jean Rollin and his somewhat, erm, distinctive approach to film-making (Requiem for a Vampire, Lips of Blood etc), this rarity will be high on your must-see list and nothing I can say will dissuade you, especially as two ultra-rare early Rollin shorts are included as extras on the UK disc. But I should warn you: there’s only one vampire and no lesbians.

A young black woman, naked under an overcoat, wanders up a European street and sits down. An old widow wanders along the same street holding a carved African statuette which she calls a ‘Moon Goddess’ and around which she spins a flashback memory of when she was (by the looks of it) nine or ten. In a presbytery garden she meets a younger girl, Marie (the older girl is called Michele) who shows her the Moon Goddess statue.

The two girls climb up some steps to a wooden balcony where they find a bound volume of pre-War pulp fiction stories (referred to in the voice-over as a ‘travel magazine’). A montage of early pulp illustrations is accompanied by Michele listing lot of different cinematic (and occasionally literary) characters and elements which they could explore through the book. Films specifically mentioned include King Kong, Les Yeux Sans Visage, Modern Times, Citizen Kane and, rather cheekily, several of Jean Rollin’s own films - this was the only interesting or entertaining moment in the whole film.

They decide to use the Moon Goddess to send themselves to New York, aged 23 but they arrive (with a comedy sproing! sound effect) at different locations and spend the bulk of this short feature searching for each other around Manhattan while a male voice (Rollin himself?) provides obtuse narration.

One of the girls goes up to a rooftop where she has a tussle with a girl armed with a flick-knife. There is a sequence set at an abandoned amusement park and there is, as one must always expect with a Jean Rollin film, a female vampire although she doesn’t do much. Eventually the girls meet up on a bridge and spend about five minutes dancing round in circles.

Back in France, the widow witters on about the statue some more and throws it on the ground whereupon the black chick (remember her?) jumps up, acquires a new hairdo and some tribal make-up and starts a naked quasi-African dance which continues in on-and-off cutaways to the end of the picture. The widow wanders down to a beach (near Dieppe, I believe) where she meets another old lady who is the other girl equally aged. They then head off into a cave in the cliffs.

The cast includes Catherine Herengt and Sophie Maret (first AD and wardrobe mistress respectively on Emanuelle 6, which Rollin scripted around this time) and Nathalie Perrey and Marie-Laurence (both in Rollin's Two Orphan Vampires and La Fiancée de Dracula). Max Monteillet (Oasis of the Zombies, Lake of the Living Dead) is credited with cinematography; Janette Kronegger (The Living Dead Girl, La Fiancée de Dracula) was the editor; Philippe d’Aram (Fascination, The Living Dead Girl) provided the music.

Reviews of this film, and indeed Rollin’s oeuvre as a whole, tend to use terms like ‘poetic’ and ‘dreamlike’ but ‘random’ and ‘haphazard’ might be better adjectives. There are lots of lengthy shots of people standing still in various places and often, for no apparent reason, characters wear expressionless white masks. Both dialogue and narration is full of portentous, pretentious quasi-poetry and the whole thing makes not one lick of sense. Let me be clear: I don’t mind films that make no sense if they’re enjoyable but this is simply bloody tedious, even at less than an hour.

It’s also remarkably technically poor, with lighting in shot/reverse-shots often not matching. What happened, apparently, was that young Monsieur Rollin suddenly found himself with the time and money to go to New York with two actresses and a camera. Once there, he shot lots of footage of the actresses walking, running, standing still and eventually meeting up. Then he came back to France and worked out how he could use this footage. He shot some scenes with the two little girls and some scenes with the old ladies - not forgetting the naked black chick. Then he cobbled the whole thing together and flogged it to French TV, who put some startling video-generated end credits on the film.

Quite apart from the artistic quality, Redemption’s print is very scratchy at reel ends, despite being “remastered from the original negative”. Still, despite the film being bobbins, they have come up trumps with the extras. There’s the usual selection of trailers (99 Women, Venus in Furs and City of the Dead) and tracks from Redemption CDs, plus ten stills. But what makes this package worthwhile - for Rollin completists at least - is the inclusion of two ultra-rare early shorts from the director.

Les Amours Jaunes (1958) is a ten-minute, black-and-white visualisation of a poem of that title, written by an obscure 19th century French poet named Tristan Corbiere. Corbiere died when he was thirty, completely unknown, but his work was discovered several years later and Les Amour Jaunes (literally The Yellow Loves but translated here as These Jaundiced Loves) is his best known poem. I’m no great aficionado of old French poetry but my limited knowledge of the language suggests that it’s really rather good. Unfortunately, the subtitles translate the poem’s lines literally without any attempt at poetry so you really need to know a smattering of French to appreciate it.

The images consist mostly of a bloke wandering aimlessly around a beach (possibly the same Dieppe beach that was used for Lost in New York thirty years later). At one point he chases two children away and about three quarters of the way through there is a succession of Picasso-like drawings for no apparent reason.

Les Amours Jaunes was Rollin’s first ever film. He followed it with Ciel de Civre, L’Itineraire Marin and Vivre en Espagne then Les Pays Loins (The Unknown Country) in 1965 which was his last short before his first feature-length production, Le Viol du Vampire. From there it was lesbian bloodsuckers pretty much all the way to the present day.

Les Pays Loins (the Inaccurate Movie Database can’t even get the title right) is a more conventional narrative, runs 15 minutes and is also in black and white (both short prints are in much better condition than the main feature, ironically). In this film a young man wanders through alleyways and passages until he eventually finds his way onto a street, accompanied by a young woman whom he doesn’t know but who is equally lost. Neither is sure where they are or how they got there and all the locals speak an unsubtitled, incomprehensible language (there are some German words but they’re not speaking German).

At one point, the man spots the house of a friend (who speaks French) but his pal is in a hurry to get to the airport and doesn’t even tell him the name of the town. At another point, the couple wander into a bar where a group of black men are playing, and dancing to, some cool jazz. The whole film, in fact, has a very beatnik, bongo-laced jazz soundtrack. After a quarter off an hour it all just sort of ends.

The cast of Les Pays Loins includes Ben Zimet (Les Demoniaques), Pascal Fardoulis (The Naked Vampire) and Bernard Papineu (who was in some Claude Chabrol films including Bluebeard and a crime thriller called Marie-Chantal contre le Docteur Khan).

Redemption’s DVD extras are often disappointing so it’s a delight to be able to heartily recommend their inclusion of these two very important early works by a well-known director. However, one’s appreciation of them does depend on understanding and liking Rollin’s work in general, to the extent of even enjoying Lost in New York - which I, sadly, thought was crap.

MJS rating: D

Director: Larry Blamire
Writer: Larry Blamire
Producer: F Miguel Valenti
Cast: Larry Blamire, Fay Masterson, Jennifer Blaire
Country: USA
Year of release: 2001
Reviewed from: UK screener (4Digital)
Website: www.bantamstreet.com

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a note-perfect recreation of a bad 1950s sci-fi B-movie. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this film is a note-perfect recreation of a bad 1950s sci-fi B-movie. In other words, it’s too exact, too precise, to its own detriment. In recreating the feel, tone, style, approach and attitude of its subject matter, Lost Skeleton has also recreated its entertainment value, which is limited.

Dodgy 1950s B-movies are rarely as good as you expect - or remember. The concepts are often brilliantly daft, the trailers warmly nostalgic, the posters insane - and YouTube-friendly, bite-sized clips can be uproarious. But sitting through the full 72 minutes or so can be a chore. I watched The Killer Shrews the other week and I had to work at it - and honestly that’s one of the more watchable films in this subgenre.

Larry Blamire is the man behind The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. A bit-part actor who was in oddities like a docu-drama about the Mary Celeste and an episode of Cheers, Blamire wrote and directed this movie and also stars as Dr Paul Armstrong, a serious minded scientist wearing trousers so baggy that you keep expecting him to shout, “Hammer time!” Lost Skeleton proved a tremendous hit among ‘monster kids’ with the same cultural touchstones as Blamire and kicked off a mini-industry. His subsequent works include Trail of the Screaming Forehead, The Lost Skeleton Returns Again and Dark and Stormy Night.

I have seen the last of these at a festival and it is markedly superior to The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. The question is: is that because Blamire has got better at the subtleties of his chosen craft, or just because the target - 1930s old dark house pictures - offers more opportunities for good gags and interesting characters?

Armstrong is married to perky blonde Betty (British actress Fay Masterson who was in Jupiter Moon!) and the two are looking for a meteorite containing the rare element atmospherium which may hold the key to something. In their isolated cabin, they encounter two other strange couples. ‘Bamin Taylor’ (Andrew Parks, who started as a child actor in the 1960s and was in episodes of M*A*S*H, Kojak, Murder She Wrote and Angel) and his wife ‘Tergasso’ (Susan McConnell) are actually Kro-Bar and Lattis, two aliens who need the same meteorite to repair their crashed spaceship.

On the other hand, Dr Roger Fleming (Brian Howe: Spy Hard, Evan Almighty, I am Number Four) is a rival scientist and a wrong-’un, seeking that same meteorite because it holds the key to reanimating the eponymous lost skeleton, a telepathic bag of bones which exists in a nearby cave and has plans to conquer the world. Somehow. Adopting the pseudonym Rudolf Yaeger, Fleming is accompanied by ‘Betty’, a sexy beatnik chick passed off as his wife who is actually Animala (Jennifer Blaire), an artificial woman constructed from woodland creatures.

These are nicely drawn characters with recognisable motivations and the plot is coherent. It’s just, well, not that funny. The humour comes from forced hesitation, slight incongruity and repetitive non-sequiturs. All hallmarks of a dodgy film, faithfully recreated with care and deliberation. I just wish there were a few more actual gags.

A goofy mutant turns up later on which would not look out of place in some of Roger Corman’s earlier efforts. Where the film does fall down however, atypically, is in the ‘special effects’ shots of the alien spaceship, which are (deliberately) cheap and wobbly and amateurish beyond anything that might be seen in even the dodgiest 1950s B-movie. I can’t help thinking of the superimposed V2 test-firing footage used in Missile to the Moon. Independent cheapo film-makers of this era were inventive, making do with what they had. But the spaceship in Lost Skeleton looks like something from a kids TV show spoofing Thunderbirds, not like the sort of cut-price effects that graced the films that this movie lampoons.

The acting seems fine inasmuch as we can tell behind the deliberately stiff performances, which all feel too restrained. Animala is the only character to really let rip, unfettered as she is by the straitjacket of pseudo-wooden performance. Look, the truth has to be told: there’s nothing intrinsically funny in watching people pretend to act not very well. Over-the-top awfulness can work, especially if it’s combined with an insight into the character behind the character, a pompous or foolish wannabe actor. But just acting stiffly like someone who’s not a particularly good actor pales very quickly and soon overstays its welcome.

Speaking of overstaying its welcome, the most inexplicable thing about this mostly spot-on spoof is that it is significantly too long. Look, here’s the 1950s B-movies reviewed on this site:

• Attack of the Giant Leeches, 62 minutes
• War of the Colossal Beast, 69 minutes
• Earth vs the Spider, 73 minutes
• How to Make a Monster, 73 minutes
• Missile to the Moon, 78 minutes
• Day the World Ended, 79 minutes

Nothing over 80 minutes and an average of 72, which as everyone knows is the standard length of a rubbish 1950s film. Even by the 1980s, the standard length of rubbish films had only stretched as far as 85 minutes. So what on earth is Lost Skeleton of Cadavra doing running to a full 90 minutes. Knocking 18 minutes of the film would not only have resolved this one anachronistic inconsistency, it might also have tightened things up a bit and injected a bit of pace into the proceedings.

As it is, the film sadly drags in far too many places. Which is what real 1950s B-movies often did, but that just brings me back to my original point that this is too accurate a copy. Spoof B-movies aren’t in short supply but the reason why something like Monster from Bikini Beach or The Pink Chiquitas or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes works is because they take their ideas to extremes. Lost Skeleton holds back and never seems to have the courage of its convictions. Maybe it’s too reverential, not savage enough. Maybe it’s too po-faced, not silly enough. Whatever, it’s sadly too long and unfortunately not funny enough.

I can imagine this going down a blast at conventions and festivals with the right sort of audience in the right mood, hooting and hollering at every pitch-perfect recreation of half-century-old incomprehensibility. But for a punter sat alone in front of the telly, there’s the curious situation whereby one can really, really appreciate the artistic and technical skill which has gone into this film - not to mention the love, passion and hard work - while just not finding it very entertaining.

All the main cast were in the sequel and in Blamire’s subsequent movies, as were Robert Deveau and Dan Conroy, who have small roles as a ranger and a farmer. Producer F Miguel Valenti produced both Lost Skeleton movies as well as corporate vampire comedy Netherbeast Incorporated and a couple of more recent, straight horror pictures: Eyes of the Woods and The Graves.

I feel bad for not liking Lost Skeleton more when others have raved over it but I suspect it’s a victim of its success. Having read laudatory review after laudatory review for several years and seen Blamire praised as the Messiah of monster kids, the actual film had a lot to live up to. The nub of it is: I’m this film’s target audience and I didn’t laugh out loud while watching it, I just smiled - and even my smile was wearing thin as we entered the 73rd minute with no sign of the end.

I’m going to give this a good rating which reflects the fact that it is very obviously a good film, it’s just not as good as it could or should be because the focus is too much on accuracy and not enough on, you know, jokes.

MJS rating: B+