LovecraCked! The Movie

February 22, 2014, 4:47 am

≪ Previous: The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

Director: various
Writer: various
Producer: various
Cast: um, various
Country: USA/UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.biffjuggernaut.com/lovecrackedthemovie

LovecraCked! The Movie surprised me because it’s not what I expected. With its Gilliam-esque cover design, zany title and obligatory Lloyd Kaufman cameo (boy, he gets around!) I thought this would be some sort of Airplane-style gagfest spoofing the work of HP Lovecraft. In fact, it turns out to be an anthology of short, Lovecraft-inspired movies, most of which are actually fairly serious.

Linking these shorts is a spoof documentary of a TV reporter trying to find out the truth about Lovecraft. These segments, including one where Uncle Lloydy answers every Lovecraft question with a plug for Troma, are enjoyably silly, helped greatly by a straight-faced performance from Elias, the unimonickered director of the links who conceived and co-ordinated this project, as the reporter.

This all sounds like a weird mixture of stuff - dumb and serious in equal measure - which shouldn’t work, but somehow it does, sort of. Without the comedy linkage, the HPL shorts would all get a bit much, and a whole 90 minutes of low-budget Lovecraftian lampoonery would be, I think, more than most people could stand.

The shorts themselves vary enormously. The weakest is Justin Powers’ (Pot Zombies) History of the Lurkers which contrasts a punk guitarist and his nerdy flatmate in a nothing of a story based solely on the weak pun that ‘lurker’ could also be used to describe someone who ‘lurks’ in porno bookstores. At the other end of the spectrum is Tomas Almgren’s Bugboy (co-written with Rebecca Finley), artfully shot silent in black and white, about a young man who wraps himself in a cocoon - although this seemed to me to be more Kafka-esque than Lovecraft-ian. Also unnerving is Ashley Thorpe’s Remain, a stop-motion animation about a painter.

Probably the most professional, apart from BugBoy, is Witch’s Spring, about a young man whose date has unusual interests. This segment of the film, originally produced in 2004, is actually British (as is Remain). Actors Tom Wontner (TrashHouse) and Gillian MacGregor - who were both in a Jack the Ripper feature I hadn’t heard of: Jack, the Last Victim - are also credited as co-writers, alongside director Brian Barnes.

Re-Penetrator is, as one might expect, a porn spoof of Re-Animator written and directed by Doug Sakmann (cinematographer, FX assistant, co-producer and actor in Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker). This version isn’t actually hardcore although it is very close so it might be an edited version of an actual XXX short. It’s well made, well-lit and certainly the goriest thing on show here.

Elsewhere we have Jane Rose’s The Statement of Randolph Carter which is suitably Lovecraftian but never really goes anywhere; Grady Granros’ Chaos of Flesh (written by Tomas Almgren) which is short and complete but with an obvious twist; Simon Ruben’s atmospheric marionette short Alecto (co-written with Robbie Simons, featuring Nancy Kwok from Dead Wood); and Brian A Bernhard’s zany Flash animation And This was on a Good Day.

The anthology format has its advantages and its disadvantages. Where a short doesn’t work, there will at least be another one along in a few minutes, but the ones that do fail bring down the average quality of the feature. There’s very little to remember about LovecraCked, beyond the jokey linking sequences, so shorts which might have stood out on their own get lost in the jumbled memory of the whole film.

Surprisingly, they also vary from obviously Lovecraft-inspired to remind-me-what-this-has-to-do-with-Lovecraft-again. On the other hand, one thing that does work, in a sense, is placing the shorts within a humorous framing story as that provides a cleaning of the cinematic palate between each tale.

Taken as a sampler of short vaguely Lovecraftian films, LovecraCked! The Movie is exactly the sort of mixed bag that one would expect. If it doesn’t completely succeed, that’s mainly because it’s not clear precisely what it was trying to achieve. Still, at least it’s something slightly different in the never-ending stream of HPL-based movies.

But I’m still waiting for an Airplane-style Lovecraft comedy.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 16th October 2006

↧

Low

February 22, 2014, 4:58 am

≫ Next: Lub Lae

≪ Previous: LovecraCked! The Movie

Director: Ross Shepherd
Writer: Jamie Tighe
Producers: Jamie Tighe, Ross Shepherd
Cast: Amy Comper, David Keyes, Darran Cockrill
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.lowmovie.com

Trailers can be very deceptive. For example, the trailer for Prometheus suggested that it was an intelligent, serious, thought-provoking science fiction film. The trailer for The Dark Knight Rises suggested it was going to be about Batman (and not basically two-hours of Commissioner Gordon: The Movie). The trailer for The Blair Witch Project suggested it was going to be scary. You get the picture. Trailers hype, trailers disappoint.

Occasionally trailers deceive in the opposite direction. Case in point: Low, the second feature from Ross Shepherd (Heathen, The Kingdom of Shadows). Both the teasers and the main trailer give the impression that this is basically a film about a psycho who kidnaps and abuses a young woman in the leafy countryside. Let’s face it, that’s a ‘plot’ we’ve all seen a hundred times - and avoided seeing even more frequently because we know it’s going to be shit and don’t even bother watching the damn thing.

Now, were Ross Shepherd to make his variant of that well-trodden path I have no doubt it would be one of the better examples of the genre. But this isn’t it. This is something altogether different . Something clever, original, disturbing and genuinely horrific. This is one of the most upsetting, shocking, bleak, depressing, grim and downright horrible films you’ll see all year. I loved it.

What I can’t do in any detail is tell you why it’s so good, because although it does start with a young woman, Alice (Amy Comper: Death) alone in the leafy countryside, and although she meets an odd-looking, oddly behaved bloke, Edward (David Keyes: 102 Dalmatians, Theatre of Souls), and although he forces her to come with him, nevertheless this is not standard psycho territory by any means.

Through clever use of flashbacks - some momentary, some extended - to both their lives, we learn more about both characters. These flashbacks are not presented chronologically and some of them change their significance later in the film. And on a purely technical level, they are all clearly identifiable as flashbacks because they have been photographed differently to the main story. It’s amazing how many aspiring directors miss out that obvious, crucial step. I watched a British indie recently (no names, no pack drill - I didn’t review it) which was packed with flashbacks or flash-forwards or hallucinations or alternative timelines or I don’t know what. And they were all photographed the same as each other and the same as the main story - rendering the film a massive hodgepodge of unconnected scenes that was literally completely impossible to follow. Anyway, back to Low...

Two-handers like this (there are a couple of other minor, albeit important, characters) often fail because one or both characters are essentially characterless. Some films have a bland victim attacked, some have a bland attacker, some don’t bother creating a character for either, relying solely on the artificially engineered, simplistic clash between the two. What is very noticeable about Low is that both Edward and Alice are sufficiently fascinating characters that either could have carried the film alone without the other. I mean, it would have had to have a completely different plot, obviously, but neither character is a simple cypher.

Edward has a background, an immediate past and a long-term past, which makes him who he is. But Alice also has secrets which make her who she is - and she’s not who or what we think she is at the start of the film. Jamie Tighe’s script cleverly swings our sympathies between the two, in fact he brings them together before pushing them apart again in a perfect three-act structure. The twists and turns in the script are genuinely shocking and alarming and best experienced with as little expectation as possible, which is why I’m going to tell you nothing more and I advise you to be careful about reading too many other reviews in advance. That said, I am in no doubt that a little foreknowledge will not significantly spoil the film and it is sufficiently engrossing that you will swiftly forget what you know and still be shocked when it happens.

Shot on a tiny, tiny microbudget, the entire production crew consisted of Shepherd, shooting on a DVLR camera; soundman Tom Bartlett (The Last Dream, The Switch) who does a magnificent job, especially given that most of the film was shot in the open with birds, traffic and other noises to deal with; and Tighe, doing everything else basically. Shepherd edited, Shepherd and Tighe produced and Scott Mungin (Bystander) provided the music. That’s pretty much it.

Hugely impressive though the microbudget production is, and jaw-dropping good as the script is, the whole thing would collapse without two absolutely superb performances at the heart of the film. And Comper and Keyes (who coincidentally both had tiny roles in The Wolfman) deliver in spades. Keyes has a tough job as Edward, who starts out initially as just odd and socially awkward but later develops in both negative and positive ways, eliciting both our hatred and our pity. He could so easily have gone over-the-top but he is beautifully restrained, yet never in a clichéed or unbelievable way.

Meanwhile Comper’s Alice develops equally magnificently from a wrong-time-wrong-place innocent into a complex, multilayered character for whom we feel a mix of sympathy and scorn. There is one moment, when she could escape but goes back, that just seems to be a lazy cliché: what could possibly be worth returning to danger for when a busy road full of potential saviours is literally yards away? It is a measure of the strength of Tighe’s script and Comper’s acting (not forgetting Shepherd’s direction) that we shortly find out why Alice turned around - and the rationale is utterly believable and realistic. We would all do the same in the circumstances.

Comper, as Alice, is also called on, in one of the flashbacks, to react to something utterly horrifying and repellant. Not in a cheesy, horror-movie sense but something that can and does happen in real life but should never happen to anyone ever. That Comper is able to pull off this scene is testament to a rare acting talent.

Darran Cockrill (also in Shepherd’s short Inside) and Jamie Tighe’s dad Stewart play the other two characters while Amber Coombs (recently seen in Steve Balderson’s Culture Shock) has a couple of lines as a doctor.

That’s almost all I’ve really got to say about Low. The tiniest of quibbles are that the introduction of a shotgun towards the end seemed slightly arbitrary and the very, very end, a montage of newspaper clippings and radio voices, was a jarring infodump which I’m not convinced was necessary, although we do learn something from the very last line which slightly changes our understanding of matters.

Watch Low if you get the chance. It’s not cheery, it’s bleak and grim and in places quite savage and heartless, but it is also a tale of hope, redemption, loss, power, weakness, compassion, horror and, above all, family.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 22nd September 2012

↧

Lub Lae

February 22, 2014, 5:03 am

≫ Next: interview: Joe R Lansdale

≪ Previous: Low

Director: Don’t know
Writer: Don’t know
Producer: Don’t know that either
Cast: Jutharat Uttakorn, Nattanun Khunwat, Anchisa Liewpairoj
Country: Thailand
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

Why is is that the films without subtitles are always the talkiest? Ah well...

This recent Thai horror/fantasy starts with a gang of crooks shooting it out with the cops as they try to escape through the jungle. Suddenly a sort of magical portal thing opens up, sucks them through and then vanishes.

The quartet - whom, for the sake of argument, we will call John, Paul, George and Ringo - find themselves somewhere else, in the open countryside near some mountains. Obviously I can’t determine to what extent they debate the bizarre metaphysical phenomenon that has delivered them there, safe from the cops’ guns, but anyway they set out in search of civilisation. And they find it: a village which is populated entirely by women.

Although many of the inhabitants are beautiful young things, as is traditional, I must give this film credit for also including old women, fat women and little girls, suggesting a functioning society. The ladies seem pleasantly surprised by the arrival of four young chaps and clearly understand what men are and how they should relate to them. But if there is any explanation of how this all-female society exists in perpetuity - or indeed, just where they are - then obviously that passed me by.

In flashbacks we see that Paul is not in fact a crook but became involved by accident. In a bar, he bumped into his old friend John and they had some drinks then went back to Paul’s place. When a drunken neighbour barged in and threatened Paul, John took it on himself to brain the guy with a handy trophy; Paul was shocked but helped to put the body in a cupboard. Cops later discovered the body and arrested Paul but he was sprung from a police van by John and two buddies (George and Ringo) posing as cops. By this sequence of events, he found himself party to murder and directly involved in a bank heist.

The four lads are offered sumptuous food and then John, George and Ringo all head off for nights of wild passion with their designated lovelies. Paul, however, politely declines both the offered booze and the attentions of his companion (whom we’ll call Linda). The two get to talking and eventually fall in love.

Meanwhile, Ringo has discovered that the village has a plentiful supply of gold nuggets, stored in a hut guarded by two heavy ladies armed with axes. The next night, while John entertains the ladies, Ringo and George sneak down to the hut, club the guards to death and take two sacks of gold, which they bury in the woods (watched by an unseen Paul and Linda). The two villains return to the table where John continues to hold court but the two guards turn up, blood on their faces but very much alive. The assembled women advance on the three men who find that their guns have no effect: whenever they fire a bullet it is absorbed by a sort of magical vortex that appears in front of the intended victim.

The ladies’ weapons of choice are a sort of wooden trident, looking not unlike a deadly rake, which they use to impale each of the men through the midriff. George suffers a particularly nasty fate when he falls into a pit and a trident-thing drops from above. In a smooth piece of editing which makes this appear as single shot, the camera then dollies forward and tilts down to look into the pit where we see George impaled. There is also a gruesome (but very dark) shot of one of the trio being physically ripped in half by the women, and John gets decapitated into the bargain.

Of course, the woman also want John but Linda wants to save him and a stand-off develops between Linda’s mother (who is probably some sort of old wise woman) and the village leader (the young lady depicted, axe in hand, on the DVD sleeve). At that moment, the magical portal from the start of the film opens up behind Paul and Linda and they fall through it, rendering the point moot. The film ends with the cops surrounding Paul as he lies, crying, at the foot of a tree, cradling Linda who has become a skeleton. Somehow. A brief epilogue shows another gang of crooks going through the portal.

Once it gets going, this is a gruesome and effective horror film - but it doesn’t get going until very near the end. We could have a had a whole third act of the women hunting the men, picking them off one by one, but instead from the moment the two guard’s heads get bludgeoned to the mother-vs-leader stand-off is about five minutes, if that. It may be that the characterisation and plot development throughout the movie is enough to carry it if you speak Thai, but for those of us looking to enjoy a horror film, this delivers too little too late.

As usual with modern Thai horrors, the production values seem good, the effects are credible and the cinematography is top-notch. This is a well-directed film and probably well-acted though it’s always difficult to tell when one doesn’t understand a word of the language. So Lub Lae is okay for what it is, but what it is is not what it’s advertised as. I don’t think that a fantasy romantic crime drama can be classed as a horror film just because its has five minutes of horror at the end.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 13th January 2007

↧

interview: Joe R Lansdale

February 22, 2014, 7:30 am

≫ Next: interview: Steve Lawson

≪ Previous: Lub Lae

I first interviewed Joe R Lansdale by post for Tales from the Broken Drum, the fanzine of Octarine (the SF/Fantasy Humour Society) when his incredible book The Drive-In was published in UK paperback in the early 1990s. Joe rapidly became one of my favourite authors and I was delighted to have the chance to meet him for a proper interview in 1996 when Mucho Mojo was published. A heavily edited version of this was published in SFX. This full transcript was published in The Brentford Mercury, the newsletter of Sproutlore (the Official Robert Rankin Appreciation Society).

I read that you wrote some novels before Act of Love under pseudonyms or as a ghost writer.
"The ghosts will remain ghosts. I wrote a book as Ray Slater. It was a western. It came out over here in hardback. It was called Texas Nightriders. That was the first novel that I sold. And then I did ones that are known. I did The MIA Hunters based on an outline by Steven Merson, who created the characters. He went in and did some re-writing on it. But I certainly did the first draft on that. These were jobs that came my way: allowed me to eat; allowed me to write The Magic Wagon and whatever else I was working on."

The new one, Mucho Mojo, seems to be a sequel to Savage Season.
"I think of it more as a series than a sequel because each book stands by itself. It's not like The Drive-In."

So did you sit down and write it as a new story about Hap and Leonard, or did you have the idea for the story and think, 'This'll fit these characters'?
"It's quite interesting. I never intended to write a series at all. When I wrote Savage Season I was pretty pleased with it. I liked that book and I liked the characters. I tried to write another book and those damn characters wouldn't leave me alone. I eventually did write another book, which I was unhappy with. And I told my publisher when I turned it in, 'I'll tell you the truth, I worked and I worked and I worked, and it's not the book I wanted to write. And I'd like to withdraw it.' He said, 'Sure - go home and revise it, and be happy with it.' So I did, I went home, put it in a box, and wrote a completely new book. They were happy with it; I was happy with it: it was Mucho Mojo. I have a new one written about those characters, called The Two-Bear Mambo, which comes out here next year - it's out in the States next month. So I enjoy the characters. I don't intend to write about them exclusively but I certainly do like writing about them."

With these new books you're moving more into psychological thriller territory and away from zombies and the supernatural.
"Actually, if you look through By Bizarre Hands, you have stories like 'The Pit' and 'Night They Missed the Horror Show' and the title story; those are all actually dark crime stories. Throughout that book there are several stories of that ilk, and I think I've actually been going that way for a long time. The first novel under my name was of course a crime novel, Act of Love. I wrote it as a crime novel, but it was published as horror. I love supernatural horror, and I've written a lot of it, but I've always had more of an inclination towards dark crime. When I extend that into novels, I think the vision's just a bit less dark than the short stories. You can only do something so long before you do something different."

Are you going to go back to doing supernatural stuff?
"I never say never. I don't believe in that because I like to follow my whims. I'm contemplating a supernatural short story right now, and last year I wrote 'Bubba Ho-Tep', a supernatural novella, which was up for the Bram Stoker Award this year. The right thing won: Bob Bloch. I also did a collection called Writer of the Purple Rage which contained an offbeat Godzilla story called 'Godzilla's Twelve Step Program'. I don't know that I ever really change completely. It's just that I vary my emphasis at times. I think with novels I'm much more comfortable with non-supernatural subjects."

Are you still doing a lot of short stories?
"There's three I can think of in the last two years. There's a novella called 'The Big Blow' in a book called Millennium that's being done in the States with a number of other writers. Each one of us has a period in time; I did 1900 to 1910. I did one called 'Mr Weed-Eater' not that long ago which I think is one of the very best stories I've ever written, which is also in Writer of the Purple Rage."

These are all scattered around various anthologies, most of which don't come out over here.
"Writer of the Purple Rage has collected a large percentage of my stories and also one play."

Is that going to come out over here?
"I don't know, I really haven't pushed it that much, I've been concentrating on the novels. Short stories are often harder to sell, but I certainly would like that to happen. There's another book coming out next year called A Fistful of Stories that covers a lot of them, including very old ones and more modern ones. And there's one which is going to be really early stuff. It's not great stuff but it's mainly from small press. The main thrust of the book is going to be autobiographical stuff about the stories. Not necessarily my autobiography - 'I was born in a log cabin' or whatever - but it tells a little bit about the stories and the climate of horror when I started writing. Because unfortunately I've got old enough now that I'm looking back on the Golden Age. Or our Golden Age; each group of writers has its own Golden Age."

Has the stage version of 'Drive-In Date' been performed anywhere yet?
"No. What happened was that 'Drive-In Date' and also 'By Bizarre Hands' - which is the play that is in Writer of the Purple Rage - were written for some people who had plans for an off-Broadway production. They contacted me and Neil Barratt, Nancy Collins and Richard Christian Matheson, a whole load of us. They said, 'We're going to do this Grand Guignole, and we want you to write plays.' So I wrote two plays. Everything was going well, they paid us and everything, but they didn't have money to do the production because whoever was there pulled out. I've heard that it was because it was the time of the Gulf War and a lot of people were worried about investments, but I also heard that my play 'Drive-In Date' upset them, so I don't know what the true story on that is. None of the plays were performed. I'd like to do some other plays of a totally different nature - mystery plays. I love theatre."

What about movies?
"I've sold numerous things to film. I've done screenplays. I did a screenplay for Cold in July about eight years ago, and I've done four drafts since, but they're still messing around. I heard yesterday that they want me to do some work on it which I'm not going to do because I disagree with it totally. I did a screenplay for Dead in the West which has been bought continuously ever since I did it back in the early '80s. I'm currently writing - for David Lynch at Propaganda - one called The Two-Bear Mambo, based on my new book. David Lynch is 'attached to the property' which is one of those curious terms which means that they can use him for promotion, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else directs it, if it happens. Then I've had a number of short stories - 'Bubba Ho-Tep' and 'Night They Missed the Horror Show' and 'Fish Night' and numerous things - accepted for film, and paid for, although I didn't do any screenplays on any of those."[In 2002, Bubba Ho-Tep was filmed by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell - MJS]

You've done some Batman stuff.
"I did three television shows - Batman: The Animated Series - and the third one which hasn't come out has Jonah Hex in it. It's really more of a Jonah Hex story that's framed by Batman and Robin, and it's called 'Showdown'. I did one with the Mad Hatter called 'Perchance to Dream' which I think is the best one I did, and I did one called 'Read My Lips' with the Ventriloquist. Plus I wrote a Batman novel called Captured By the Engines, which I think is a unique book and I had a lot of fun doing it. And I did a children's book, Terror on the High Skies. I grew up on Batman, so I was a fan to begin with. Brian Thomson, who was at Warner at that time, called me and asked me if I wanted to do them. I thought the money stunk and I said no. But they eventually came up with the money. I wanted to do them anyway, but I didn't want them to know that I wanted to do them. People would say, 'Oh man, your career's going so good; why would you want to go and do a Batman novel?' I said, 'Look, I became a writer because I love writing. I love writing all kinds of things and I certainly don't want to be tied to any one thing.'"

What about your Jonah Hex comics?
"I did two series of Jonah Hex. The first one was 'Two-Gun Mojo', the second is 'Riders of the Worm and Such'. It's interesting and it's a lot of fun. The Lone Ranger also came out last year through Topps. I have a new series, a kung fu Lone Ranger story set in Chinatown in San Francisco that is coming out with a new artist who I think is just wonderful. He has a totally different outlook and a different take on the Lone Ranger, so I'm going to be curious to see a final product on that. Also Mark Nelson and I collaborated on Blood and Shadows which should come out this fall or early next spring in the States through Vertigo. It's a horror comic that travels through time; it's science-fictional, it's a western. I think it's quite good. There's lots of things that I've been asked to do that I don't have the time to do, or the inclination to do in some cases. I like to keep moving. I may not write any more comics. Right now I'm moving in other directions."

Can you pick and choose nowadays what you do?
"I've been able to do that for quite a few years now and I really like that."

Tell me about popcorn dreams.
"I don't get them so much anymore because I have to watch my diet more and more and work out more and more. See, it used to be that when I didn't have an idea and couldn't come up with a story my wife would brew up some popcorn. 'Brew' is the word I use; it doesn't sound right for popcorn, but when it's hers I think it's correct. It's a special blend that she would put together and it would give me bad dreams. And I would get up in the night and remember them and the next morning I would write them down and I sold them! A lot of the stories I have written are based on dreams I have had through over-indulgence in popcorn."

I get the impression that some of your stories come to you in a flash of inspiration.
"A lot of the stories in Bestsellers Guaranteed did. Those stories came in a flash, and certainly a few others have come that way. Most have not come quite that fast; they have taken a little more time and gestation. Some have been with me for years and I couldn't find a handle on which to hang the story. I just had the germ of the idea. And with some I would just go to bed, have a popcorn dream, wake up - there it was - and I would sit down and right it."

What about the novels?
"Something will strike me that I like - a scene or an idea or a concept - and out of that the ending will come, and the beginning will come, and maybe I'll have some idea of something in the middle. I let things free-flow, I always have. I think that's mostly good for me. I've only painted myself into a corner two or three times. Usually I find that my subconscious is working very heavily on it."

Do you re-write?
"No, I don't. First draft is usually damn close. What I do is I tell myself that if I have the opportunity to go back and re-write then I won't write as well as I did the first time. So I'll write three to five pages a day, very slowly, very carefully, tell myself I won't have any opportunity to re-write it. But when I get through I cheat, I give myself one more time to go through it, but it doesn't make a lot of difference. It's more like polishing."

Do you still have Bob the dinosaur?
"Bob's sick. He's been leaking air, he's lying on my floor. I've been thinking about folding him up, sending him out to David Skal, let him give him a burial out in the desert."

Was he part of the inspiration for The Drive-In?
"No, but he was certainly the inspiration for 'Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland'. That's really the only thing he was an inspiration for. The Drive-In was a popcorn dream. It kept coming to me and coming to me, and I wrote an article about it for Twilight Zone magazine, one of the first non-fiction pieces they did. It's called 'Hell Through a Windshield', which is in By Bizarre Hands, and that developed into the novel. What happened is Pat LoBruto read that article and said, 'Boy, that would make a great novel.' I said, 'Sure, I'll give it to you.' He said, 'Go ahead, send me a proposal.'"

It's a very odd pair of books.
"They don't even fit together in a strict way. There's a third one in progress. It'll be done by a limited press if I can get the damn thing finished. But time has been a real constraint because I have so many things I have to do that I enjoy doing just as well but are considerably more profitable."

Your dialogue and narrative comes across in this Texas drawl. Is that deliberate?
"That's naturally the way I write. When I first started out, if you look back through some of the stories in Bestsellers Guaranteed, some of those are not Texas-sounding. I think that's because I was learning to write and I wasn't aware of my own voice. And as I began to write, I began to have more success when I wrote about East Texas and in an East Texas voice. It was not as painful to do, and yet the result was considerably better. When I first started out I was a tremendously affected mimic. I could write like anybody. If I could read it I could write like it, which is not always a good thing, but it's the way you learn. Most of those stories I wrote I tossed away, but I could also retain the echoes of certain writers. As time went on I found my own voice and I stuck with that, of course."

Are there any books out there that you think, 'Goddam, I wish I'd written that'?
"Everything James Lee Burke has written! Everything Neil Barrett Jr has written!"

How much say do you have in your covers?
"I have a lot more say than I used to. Bestsellers Guaranteed was sold to the publishers. I talked to them about the cover, my agent talked to them about the cover, they didn't do a thing about it. Since that time I've been considerably more adamant about having say-so in the cover. I can't demand a certain cover, but they're going to pay more attention to me. I love the covers in the States on the Mysterious Press releases of Savage Season, Cold in July, Mucho Mojo and Two-Bear Mambo which is coming out. They all have a thematic similarity and I'm very fond of those covers. I'm really very fond of Mysterious Press. They're the first publisher I've had that have treated me with respect beyond just one book."

A lot of your stuff is very difficult to get over here. Does this annoy you?
"Yes, it annoys me. A lot of people enjoy being a cult figure and that's all well and good. I think that maintained my career in the States for a long time, but you want to grow beyond that. You want to be available to the people who want to read you and to let people who might not know they would like your work have the opportunity to explore it. We're working on that right now. One of the reasons for my visit here - apart from vacation - is to pursue that side of it. Two-Bear Mambo is coming out here next year. We're talking to them about Savage Season, we hope something will happen there. If possible, Cold in July. I can't make any promises, but I'm hoping to establish a solid publisher here that will publish my stuff, including the back catalogue."

Do you think part of the problem is the difficulty in categorising your work?
"There's no doubt that that's a problem. I know for years people said, 'Your career's going to be a mess because you'll never have an identifiable label.' What is happening in the States, one of the things that I most want, is that I'm being identified as 'Joe R Lansdale' rather than as 'horror writer' or 'crime writer'. I hope to transfer that same sort of thinking to here. I think it'll take some time. I don't know if I'm the sort of writer that the British audience is going to latch onto. I may be a bit too American for them, I don't know."

Is there anybody being touted as 'the new Joe R Lansdale'?
"A lot of people think that Norman Partridge is very much in my vein, and I think Norman will tell you that my work has influenced him. Norman Partridge to me is about the most exciting writer right now, coming up.'

Your children are now 13 and 9. Have they read much of your stuff?
"Well of course, my younger one hasn't. My son's read some of the short stories, but most of them are probably for when they get older. It's not a big censor thing, I just think that a certain age makes those things more powerful and you can more understand what they're about."

There's very strict censorship in this country. Do you think you'll have much problem with that?
"Censorship I've never had much problem with. The current novels I'm writing are not as violent. They're a bit more suspense-orientated, and that's purposeful, not audience-wise but boredom-wise. I feel like the really gory stuff has had its day. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I was one of the people who helped promote it and bring it about, because I wanted to shake things up. But now that's been shook and I think it's old hat. Millions of new writers coming out, and in truth I don't like the stuff because it looks like bad copies of the things that a number of us were doing in that time, and I've just seen it all."

Given that a lot of our readers won't be familiar with your work, where would you suggest that they start?
"That's a hard one. I think By Bizarre Hands if you can find it, is a good place to start. I think it shows me doing a lot of different things. And if you can get hold of Writer of the Purple Rage. There's also another collection in the States which is a good one to get because it's kind of a 'best of'. It's called Electric Gumbo: The Lansdale Reader."

website: www.joerlansdale.com

interview originally posted 4th August 2009

↧

interview: Steve Lawson

February 22, 2014, 7:50 am

≫ Next: interview: Christopher Lee

≪ Previous: interview: Joe R Lansdale

Between January 1999 and February 2002 I worked for the East Midlands Arts Boards and at some point during those three years a young man named Steve Lawson joined the organisation. Steve, it turned out, made action films. In fact, Steve had sent me one of his very early zero-budget movies, Thunderstrike, a few years earlier when I was writing the 'Independents Day' column for Total Film. It's a small world. Steve's first proper feature was Insidersin 2002 and he followed that four years later withThe Silencer. After I had seen and reviewed the film, Steve and I sat down for an interview. (NB. This is not the same Steve Lawson who directed Dead Cert and Just for the Record.)

What are the main influences on The Silencer?
"I wanted to make a movie that harked back to the kind of action movies that were coming out when I was a kid growing up. In those day, on the video shop shelves you had stuff like The Exterminator, Terminator, Cobra, RoboCop. Those kind of adult-orientated action movies, all 18 certificate and I was never allowed to see them but I would look at the cover images. So this movie was very much inspired by 1980s video cover images, specifically The Wraith and The Exterminator."

Did you start this after you finished Insiders or was it long in gestation?
"Basically we had done Insiders and myself and Simon Wyndham wanted to make another feature. We had two ideas that I was cooking up. One was a script called Retrograde, which would have required a very clean-cut, young hero, the other was The Silencer which required a very rugged, moody-looking hero. We happened to meet Glenn Salvage during a shoot for Left for Dead down in Brighton and clicked with Glenn straightaway. We got on very well with him and decided that was the project to go for and Glenn was going to be the lead. That was the process and how it was started."

How do you and Simon Wyndham share out the work?
"I do all the work and Simon complains! Just coming up with the concept, that’s generally me because I have a very active imagination. I come up with this stuff all the time, then we argue it out about what shape it’s going to take. During the actual production, shooting, Simon is the director of photography. He controls all the visual aspects and sound; he’s very skilful at that sort of thing. He’s studied an awful lot - more than I have a notion to do - in terms of lighting and camerawork and stuff. He really knows what he’s doing. He’s BBC trained. So on the set he’ll be determining the visual aspects and I’ll generally be casting the actors, working with the actors and keeping an eye on the storytelling."

So why is Simon co-credited as director?
"Because obviously he has an input in directing as well, and also in post-production. Because on a low-budget movie like this, it’s not like a normal film where you shoot it then you send it off to your hundred post-production staff who edit it and put it together. Both of us edit it and mix the sound and do all the rest of the process. This is completely a joint process all the way through between the two of us. He absolutely is a co-director because of creating the movie that you finally see."

Is The Silencer completely self-funded?
"Yes. I don’t actually know what the budget is. I’ve got a big box full of receipts and I haven’t dared look at it and count them up because I’m going to be horrified when I see how much I’ve spent on the movie."

Have you looked into getting outside funding for your films?
"Yes, I went to a funding body, a film development agency..."

I think I know who you mean!
"I described the movie and they said it couldn’t be done."

It couldn’t be done for the budget you were talking about?
"Yes. They showed no interest whatsoever and ended up laughing me out of the door. And they told me to go and make a short film."

Which you’d done. You’ve made plenty of short films.
"Yes, I had already made short films. In fact I took them a VHS of my short films and they hadn’t watched it."

What were the limitations of time, material and so on that you had to work within? In other words, did you set a level of budget or just try to do everything as cheaply as possible?
"Basically we knew that we weren’t going to be able to afford to pay people more than their expenses. We paid everybody’s travel expenses and as best as we could we fed and clothed them within the budget. Beyond that, we basically just paid for things as and when we needed them. It took about a year to shoot the thing. I had a job and I had income and we just funded it bit by bit as we went along. Most of the costumes were from secondhand places, car boot sales, that sort of thing, to try and get everything as cheap as possible. I generally paid for coach travel for the cast rather than train travel because it was always about ten per cent of the cost of a train ticket."

When you’re shooting over a year, how does that affect trying to get your cast together for relevant scenes?
"We were lucky. We shot everything involving actors in the first ten days. We had a ten-day shoot booked when we did all the interiors and most of the dialogue was done then, because it is difficult getting people back months later. Then it was just sheer prevarication and circumstances that made it drag out for another year, getting people back and shooting all the bits and pieces that we hadn’t managed to get down during the initial main shoot. Luckily most of the cast had finished their parts and it was just a case of getting Glenn back for action scenes and stuff."

How did you assemble your cast and crew?
"Obviously we’d met Glenn and he was definitely the one for that. I found Maye Choo on a casting website while the script was in development and I knew I wanted her in the movie so I wrote the female lead with her in mind and very luckily she was interested in it and did it. All the other actors, apart from one or two who are new, we found through Shooting People."

What about the sets and locations? Is that your house again? Funny how all your characters live in the same nice middle class suburban house!
"It’s quite bizarre, yes. My character lived in my house, but the mouldy green bedsit was also my house. We ripped out all the living room, put in a false wall and built the flat over two walls and a doorway. Then if you turned around 180 degrees you would see the doctor’s office which was the other half of the room. We put blinds in the window and a desk and painted the wall blue. So that was also my living room. Basically we turned my living room into a set for two weeks. I told my wife that the only way it was getting decorated was if I ripped it all out and turned it into a set. I was forced to redecorate it properly to get rid of the green slime and other stuff."

How do you go about directing the action sequences? Is it all in the editing?
"The editing was a bit of a hodgepodge. The bulk of the action choreography was down to Simon; it’s one of his specialities. He’s a very experienced martial artist. Glenn was able to do his own fight scenes - that’s one of the reasons we cast him, obviously. And we had a stunt team from Brighton called Independent Stunts who were very good and a stunt co-ordinator from there. The end fight, the scrap yard fight where Glenn’s fighting the terrorist gang, we had in mind a very specific theme. There’s a fight scene in a movie called Armour of God, a Jackie Chan film, where he fights a bunch of monks in a cave. Basically, this was what Jackie Chan was always great at: him versus a crowd of not very skilled fighters. He would be spinning round, despatching them left and right, and the bad guys would go flying through the air. That’s what we wanted to do. So that’s how we created this set-up where there was just a bunch of bruisers with bats, not really martial artists, coming at him. Glenn was able to knock them back with kicks and punches left and right and they’d go flying through windows and all this stuff that you see.

"So we based it on that idea. Simon did the choreography but it’s kind of a collaborative effort. If someone comes forward and says, ‘I can do a back-flip’, we think right - we’ll put that in. Someone else says, ‘I know how to go through a window’ - okay, we’ll put that in. And I had a few ideas where I wanted a guy to come rolling down a car and those sorts of things, so it was very collaborative. Then you put it together in the edit. But we didn’t shoot any masters, in terms of getting people to run through the whole fight with the camera locked off, way back. It’s all done in individual segments. You just kind of make it up as you go along and put it all together afterwards!

"One thing is: when you’re shooting fight scenes, you always run out of time. It happens so often on our films: you’re trying to build up to a great fight scene and then someone says, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go home now’ so it becomes: ‘Let’s just kill them, let’s just bang them with a hammer and they’re dead’. So what we did with the end fight, we shot the finale of the fight first so we knew we’d have something really good at the end, even if we were running out of time. That’s one tip I can give you."

How do you cope with directing the scenes where you’re acting as well? Is it more difficult?
"It would be if Simon wasn’t there. But obviously because he’s co-directing, he’s there behind the camera, checking everything, so he can comment on things. If I’m in a scene, obviously it’s difficult for me to judge if I’m acting very well but he can comment and everyone else comments as well. Again, that’s the beauty of co-directing."

Were you always going to play the role of Richard?
"Yes. I knew I didn’t want to play the lead in the film because we needed somebody a bit more charismatic, a bit more exciting to look at than me. But it’s handy to put myself in the movie, not for egotistical reasons, but it saves hassle on getting another actor and it means for things like reshoots and inserts and pick-ups, me and Simon can go out on our own virtually and shoot little bits and pieces, which we did a few times. So it’s very handy."

From your point of view, as writer/producer/director/actor, how is this an advance on Insiders?
"It’s a huge advance. I’ve joked about this but this is true: we spent more money on costumes for this film than we spent on the entire of Insiders. Also, when we made Insiders we didn’t know anybody. We didn’t know any actors or anybody. That’s why I played the lead and it basically had three people in it, all of whom were friends of mine. Whereas on this, we’d got a few people who had seen Insiders - Glenn had seen it - and we knew from that, that we were capable of making a halfway decent feature. Since Insiders, Simon had been working full-time as a cameraman, I’d been working full time as a video producer, so we were both a lot more experienced and a lot more confident. We also had the backing of a guy called Mike Leeder in Hong Kong who was very supportive of us and we knew that he would help us with publicity and this kind of things."

What did you learn from making Insiders that you have been able to apply to The Silencer?
"I learned not to star in the movie! I learned not to do any fight scenes myself. It wasn’t just Insiders, it was a gradual process of having made short films, then Insiders, then working more professionally in the industry, meeting more and different people. So it was gradual. We didn’t just make a film and learn from that, we’ve matured over the years."

What are the current release plans for The Silencer?
"The Silencer is due out on DVD in the UK from Blackhorse Entertainment on December 10th 2007. The international rights are being handled by Rising Sun Productions in Los Angeles."

website: www.steve-lawson.net

interview originally posted 22nd October 2007

↧

interview: Christopher Lee

February 22, 2014, 8:59 am

≫ Next: interview: Dan Duling

≪ Previous: interview: Steve Lawson

I interviewed the legendary Christopher Lee on 29th January 1996 in a hotel in London. He was promoting the documentary video The Many Faces of Christopher Lee, which gave me the opportunity to ask about many different parts of his career. This was of course well before Lord of the Rings or Attack of the Clones - his most recent credit at the time was John Landis' children's film The Stupids. Christopher Lee is very tall and quite scary and unfailingly polite but firm. He's the last of the horror greats. (He also has the most extraordinary CV which constantly throws up surprises, as witness the 1992 British animated version ofBeauty and the Beast, which was still largely undocumented when I found a copy in 2005.)

Whose idea was the new video? How did they approach you?
"I got a call to my agent from Lumiere, who anyway have brought out quite a lot of my films on video. They wanted to do a video on me: clips of some of my films, and me talking on screen about the films. So in a sense it's an autobiography on celluloid. As far as I know, it's never been done. And there is easily enough for a second one. Because they had to cut a lot of course to get it down to 55 minutes. It took two days to shoot. Somebody had the idea - I didn't suggest it - and the approach was made to me and my agent. When I was told about this I said, 'Of course.' It's a great privilege for an actor to be asked to discuss his or her career on film.

"I did it in a book called The Films of Christopher Lee, which came out in America from Scarecrow Press, but of course that only goes up to about 1983. There were stills from every film, many of which were not chosen by me, and the reproduction in some cases was terrible. The brought this book out, and the interesting thing about it, it wasn't just the film, the cast, the crew. They'd got the reviews in. And I discussed each picture. So we're doing this again, but this time we're doing it on film."

To many people, the one face of Christopher Lee is still Dracula. Do you think your identification with the role has been a help or a hindrance?
"Let me tell you something, and it was proved only the other day. Wherever I go in the world - and that's nearly everywhere over a period of time - people come up to me and they do one of three things. First of all: 'Are you Christopher Lee?''Yes.' The next comment is, 'I'm a big fan.' The next question is, 'Can I shake your hand?''Of course.' The next question is, 'Can I have your autograph?''Of course.' I've never refused one. The final comment - this is worldwide, 99.9 times out of a hundred - and this is the public, not the press: they say, 'I enjoy your films. You have given me so much pleasure over the years.' They do not say, 'I like your Hammer movies,' or, 'I loved you playing that particular part.' They don't say that.

"The letters I get; it's amazing that at my age, after all these years, I'm still getting at least 20 a day. Which is a lot - it works out at 150 a week - when you're my age and you've done all the things I've done. From all over the world - Uzbeckistan I had one from the other day. I'm trying to work out what on Earth they saw. Probably in the old days of the Soviet regime, when the sailors went ashore they saw things they normally weren't allowed to sea in Russia. So that explains it to a certain extent. But that's what they say.

"Now, I said this to this journalist, who looked a bit dubious. As we walked out of the place where I was being interviewed, two people came up and said, 'Can I have your autograph?' The journalist was standing right beside me, and the next thing was, 'We do enjoy your movies so much.'

"Let me explain something to you: the reason why people associate me with that particular character is three reasons. One: it was a tremendous launching pad for me as an actor. There's no question about that, I've never denied it, I shall always be grateful. It made my name known and my face known, the two went together. They don't always, but they did then, all over the world. Secondly, by force of circumstances, it became very effective, all over the world. Thirdly, people who saw the original films, of my generation or older - we're talking 38 years ago, the first one, and we're talking about 25 years ago for the last one - they remember them, but not to the exclusion of everything else. The other people latch on because of television and video. These are of course repeats all over the world.

"As we are talking now, somebody is watching one of those films. Some people may not look at the date. They think, 'Oh, that was made a couple of years ago,' or something like that. They do associate me with that character in a contemporary sense which is wildly out of date. Next, some of them - not all of them - became classic films and are shown as an ideal example of how to make a movie of that kind. Lastly, it's the old familiar story of sloppy journalism, because it's so easy to put a label on somebody, which is what they always do with everyone. They still refer to Sean Connery as 007, and they will do the same with Pierce Brosnan, no matter what else he's done. He was far more famous as Remington Steele in his television series, in terms of viewers. Far more people watched that than will ever watch Goldeneye; that's bound to be the case, isn't it? Look how many millions watch television.

"When I hosted Saturday Night Live in New York, the share was 39, which didn't mean anything to me. There were 30-35 million people watching that show. They still show it, and it's still, so far as I know, the third highest rated show they've ever had. So a lot of people in America associate me with Saturday Night Live and remember it very vividly. I think it's a question of what people remember you for in terms of the impact that each performance has made. It's not a question of trying to deny it, but I try to tell people that the public does not come up to me and talk about Dracula all the time because they don't.

"But the press will not accept it. As far as they are concerned, that's the label and you'd better conform. I won't conform and I never have. When people ask me what I do, I say I'm an actor. I leave it at that. It's extraordinary how people won't let go. Another thing is that there was a period between about 1957 and 1970 when I did The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes which completely cracked the type-casting situation. There was a period between those years when I was typecast, not in playing that character, but being in that kind of movie. I was, but so is everyone when they make their name. Connery played Bond seven times, I think Roger did too, and how many times did Peter Sellers play Inspector Clouseau? But look at what else they did! Everybody remembers Clouseau and talks about, 'Is this your dog?', and everybody talks about Sean and Roger in terms of Bond. It could not be more inaccurate, but it's the press that does it. I'm not trying to justify, I'm not making excuses, I'm simply saying that it isn't accurate. There was a time when I did suffer from typecasting, there's no question about it. But I broke that totally by doing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and subsequent features: westerns, The Wicker Man, and virtually all the work I did in America between '75 and '85. Half of it was comedy which is not even seen over here. So where's the typecasting? If I was to go through a list of the pictures that I've done in the last 20 years, you would have to agree with me."

Another prevalent name in your CV is the Sherlock Holmes canon: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace...
"Oh, that was a disaster. That was shot in black and white, and actually in many respects it was excellent. Really good. A marvellous cast; all the top actors in Germany who spoke very good English, and Thorley Walters was my Watson. To this day, nobody can begin to believe that when the film came out it wasn't my voice, in English. But it was shot in English! I've played Holmes twice since then."

You also played Fu Manchu five times. These are both classic Victorian characters, and Sherlock Holmes continues to be popular, people are still making Holmes movies. But apart from that Peter Sellers spoof in 1980 and a couple of other obscurities, nobody has made a Fu Manchu movie since your last one. They're both classic adventure.
"They're melodrama. I can't really answer that. I can only assume that films have now moved away in another direction where, instead of it being an imaginary story about imaginary people, now the public appears to demand far more realism. I didn't say 'reality', I said 'realism'. There was no sex in the Fu Manchu films, the violence was very limited. It was a fairy story, it was a fantasy like many of the Hammer films.

"Also there might possibly be a racist element involved, with people who are Chinese objecting to a power-mad character being Chinese. Although when I played him, as I've said many times, I always tried to play him with an honest dignity, like an old-style war-lord. Like an emperor, with great dignity and with a brilliant brain. In other words, I read the Sax Rohmer books, I met his widow, and I tried to play him the way the author described him, just as I did in the Dracula pictures. Because of the scripts and the stories, I was prevented from doing so. It's as simple as that.

"The subsequent Dracula stories, after the first one, got so far away from the original conception, not only in the character but in the stories themselves, which had absolutely nothing to do with Stoker. The same thing happened with the Fu Manchu films. The producer bought the rights to all Sax Rohmer's stories about Fu Manchu, ignored them and then wrote his own. Something quite beyond me, I can't understand it. But I had read the books as a boy. I knew what the character was, because I knew how the author described him, so I played him the way that the author described him. It wasn't necessarily what was in the script. And the same thing applied to the character that I played in the Dracula movies. I tried to play the character the way that the author described him, but it wasn't in the script.

"I can't really account for that. I really don't know, unless it's a question of being politically correct. These sort of films still have tremendous appeal. What's the difference between a film like that and a melodrama like The Last of the Mohicans, which is also a melodrama based on imaginary people and imaginary stories."

You made Count Dracula in 1970.
"Ah, now that was the nearest to the correct appearance. The film was a disaster. I did all my scenes with Herbert Lom without him being there. He played Van Helsing, we had Klaus Kinski as Renfield: it's not bad casting. And I played all my scenes without anyone. I was playing to absolutely nothing behind the camera, an experience I have had quite frequently, one way or another. There was nobody there, so I was playing to talking to thin air. And so were they, because by the time they arrived, I'd gone.

"I did at least manage to get a bit of one of the great speeches in, because I insisted. And I did at least - and I think it's the only time it's ever happened - portray the character exactly as Stoker described him. As an old man with a white moustache, dressed entirely in black, getting younger and younger throughout the film. Because the film was made on a shoe-string, it was a mess, but it's the only occasion - as far as I know - in the history of the cinema, where he's been properly portrayed physically. Because Gary Oldman didn't do it. He didn't have a moustache, for God's sake! And the first time you saw him he was wearing what looked like a red dress! If you read the book: 'dressed from head to toe in black without a single speck of colour.' That's the quote from the book. Why did they do that? It's something I don't understand."

What did you think of Jess Franco as a director? There's been a heck of a lot written about him in the past few years.
"Yes, and I found out things about Jess that I didn't know, after a period of some years: that he'd made some rather strange films."

To say the least!
"Yes, so I gather. But I didn't know that, and I don't know that it would have made much difference to me. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that quite a few of the major directors in the world have done some questionable films. and a great many of the top directors in the world have done commercials. I don't know whether that would be considered as a step down, but even David Lean did commercials. To do a commercial, of course, is slightly different, to put it mildly.

"But Jess Franco, or Jesus Franco as he is in Spain, is under-rated in my opinion as a director, mainly because, I think, of these other films that people say he's done. As I said, I didn't know. And just because somebody has been involved in the making of what I gather were pornographic films, doesn't mean to say they can't direct, and it doesn't make much difference to me, because that's not the movie we're making. He has a great deal of experience under his belt as a director. After all, I think I'm right in saying he did the battle scenes in Chimes of Midnight for Orson Welles. Welles doesn't choose somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. That's a feather in his cap.

"He's done some very worthwhile things. He's a most amusing man with a great knowledge of the cinema. He's good with actors, he knows what he wants. But he has been so constricted over the years by the budgets: we haven't got time to turn the camera round and put the wall in again, so zoom - instead of close-up, instead of cutting. Everything is zoom to close-up. I remember the first time I met him, it was in the days of Franco, I said with two names like that - Jesus and Franco - you shouldn't have too much trouble in Spain! But he has a great sense of humour. I haven't seen him for years. I think he's under-rated, I've always said so, because he's not just a hack director. It's always a question of material; the same thing applies to actors."

The director you're most associated with from the earliest part of your career is Terence Fisher.
"Well, my career actually started with A Tale of Two Cities, which I think was just before those. That was the first really good part I had. Ralph Thomas directed that."

You worked with Terence Fisher in 1948 on Song for Tomorrow. Was that part of the reason you got the Frankenstein role?
"People ask me, you know, they ask me how did it come about that I was offered the Frankenstein part? Well, I think for once they actually did need a tall man. because I was always told, as you know - I've been quoted enough, and it's true - when I first started as an actor I was told by everybody I was far too tall to be an actor and far too foreign-looking to be in British domestic pictures. Had I been born in the United States, I think my career would have been different, because many of the actors out there were - and are - very tall people. But here, the average British star was considerably shorter than me, and even the taller ones were still an inch or two shorter than me.

"They were the ones who were even more concerned. I'm talking about the men, I'm not talking about the women obviously, because generally speaking women are smaller than men. But that's what I was told, and along comes this character where they wanted a tall man who knew about movement and could express things without dialogue. I honestly don't know. I've been asked that question many times, and I've also been asked how come they asked me to play Dracula, because I think I'm right in saying that the next film I did after the Frankenstein film, I think, was The Mummy or The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Hound of the Baskervilles was, I think, the film after Frankenstein and I played the romantic lead in that. Then The Mummy and then Dracula, or then Dracula and then The Mummy. I can't remember, it's so long ago.

"But people ask me this: 'Why did they ask you to play that part, and then why did they ask you to play that part?' I've no idea, nobody ever told me. There's a marvellous story that I can tell you, because it's true. I don't say things to the press that aren't true. It has been known to happen but not with me. Some years ago, my agent was Dennis Sellinger - still a dear friend, still a busy agent. He said to me, 'You know who Raquel Welch is?' I said, 'Oh yes, I've been reading the papers.' He said, 'Well, she's over here to do a film called One Million Years BC for Hammer with her husband, Patrick Curtis, and they'd like to meet you.''Fine, great.'

"So I went along to Dennis' house and Raquel - with whom I subsequently made four films - came in with Patrick Curtis and they were extremely courteous and said some extremely nice things. She turned to her husband and said, 'Tell Christopher what Hammer said about me.' He said, 'Oh yes, you're not going to believe this, but we were talking to one of the Hammer executives' - whom I'm not going to name - 'and one of us said to this man, "You know this actor Christopher Lee who does these films for you, he's enormously popular in the United States, a very big name in the United States." And the answer that came back was, "Yes, we know, but for God's sake don't tell him".''"

Was that because they thought you'd want more money?
"Oh yes, of course. And that leads me into another comment. I turned down - after the first two - every other Dracula film for Hammer because they said, as always, 'Of course we can't pay you, you know?' So I said, 'Well, if you can't pay me, then let's find another way.' I said, 'Anyway the script is terrible. It's further and further away from the character, further and further away from Stoker. You're bringing him into the modern disco age, which I think is quite wrong.'

"So I said to my agent, another person who is dead now, John Breakwell, so I can say this: I said to him, 'John, Hammer wants me to do this.' This went on every year. 'They want me to play the part again. I don't want to do it, because there's nothing in the script. They write the story first and try to fit the character in, which is of course absurd. Totally the wrong way of making the film. I don't want to do it, and now they're saying there's no money. I'll tell you what we'll do, John. You tell them I'll do it for a percentage.''Ooh,' he said, 'I can't do that. They'd never agree. Waste of time even asking.' I said, 'John, I'm telling you. You're my agent. I want you to ask for a percentage.''Oh, no no no. Wouldn't dream of that. There's no point me even asking about that. You'll never get it, never get a percentage. The idea of getting a percentage out of Hammer...'

"I said, 'Wait a minute. I'm not talking about Hammer. I'm talking about Warners or Universal or whoever - they all put out Hammer pictures.' He practically keeled over. And I kept on saying to him, 'John, ask! They can only say no. Ask! Blame me. Say I'm an impossible client and a difficult man who's greedy and avaricious, or whatever way you like to put it, and you tried to tell me that it wasn't possible, you tried to dissuade me. Say whatever you like so that you don't get any flak. I'll take it all, my shoulders are broad enough. I'll take all the flak, but I don't want to do it unless I am properly rewarded, and as they think only in terms of money, and so do the American distributors, this is one occasion - or two or three or four or five - when I'm going to think along the same lines because it's the only thing they understand.'

"He wouldn't do it, because he felt that if he did, Hammer would have hysterics and say, 'Well, we're not going to use any of that chap's clients.' We live in an industry which is riddled with fear and ignorance, more so now than ever before. Somebody in Hollywood said out there the very air reeks of falsehood. You can actually smell it. When you go to some of these studios, it's true. A very, very important major American director said to me only last year, 'It's getting worse.'

"I'll give you an instance of that: a television executive - I'm not going to name him, and I'm not going to name the network - asked for me to do a series. Because I've turned every single one down, during the time I lived there, ten years. I was always asked to be Guest Star or Special Guest Star. I said, 'I'll be one of 15 special guest stars, and knowing the industry they'll say, "Oh, he's given up movies. He's now TV."' Because you're either films or TV, generally speaking. They won't accept the fact that you've proved them wrong by doing both, any more than some of the producers and casting directors, to this day, won't accept the fact that I've proved them totally wrong for a very long time. I'm not on their lists. Anyway, they asked me to do this, and for various reasons I declined, and that same person who has ultimate authority, he is the person who says yes or no. Even if the rest of them all say yes, he is the one person who says yes or no. My agent in Los Angeles, in the course of discussions about me to do this, he said, 'This executive asked me if another one of my clients, by name James Coburn, had ever done a feature film?'"

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
"It doesn't make me wonder because that's the way it is. The sheer ignorance, the fact that they don't do their homework, the fact that they don't see the rushes, they don't see the finished product. The fact that casting's now done in terms of salary. If you get 15 million and the next person gets twelve, you'll get it. If you get five million and I get four, you'll get it. You must be better, you get paid more! You must have a bigger deal! The lunatics really have taken over the asylum, they really have, and it's been the case like that for many years."

What about the British film industry?
"Well, there isn't one!"

You've done a couple of low budget movies in the past few years.
"And one of them was one of the best pictures I've ever been in."

A Feast at Midnight.
"It's a completely enchanting and delightful film of which I am very proud, and everybody should be who was concerned with it, because everybody worked for nothing. This is one attempt by a group of people - technicians and cast - to make an impact with a picture which can be referred to as a film made totally in Britain with British money, British technicians, British cast, and it's good! And we can make more and more and more. Let's roll over and make another one.

"But the London press; there were four reviews that I shall never forget. And these are reviews! One said the budget was so low, how could a British film with such a low budget possibly compete with the equivalent made in the United States for young people, with enormous budgets like Jurassic Park. In other words, how could we hope to compete with Jurassic Park? That is a review!"

But it's not trying to compete with Jurassic Park.
"I'm still saying: that is a review! Another review was: the production qualities weren't all that good. We shot it in a real boys' school. Oh no, the production values weren't good enough. We shot it in the school. That's a review. I'm not suggesting that because it's a British film, the British press - 'critics' if you want to call them that - should all say it's the best film ever made. What I am saying is that they should point out the positive aspects of the film, rather than what they think are the negative aspects. To say in the review that the film wasn't expensive enough - which is effectively what somebody was saying; that the budget wasn't big enough - when the idea is to make it as cheaply as you can, so you make a profit and can then make another movie, is not a review.

"The other one - to say that production values weren't very good - is not a review, when it's shot in a real school. You begin to think that we don't deserve to have an industry if the critics - these were London critics, who gave me an award, the year before last. I received an award from the London critics. And yet the next year, three or four of them come up with reviews of a film which aren't reviews at all. Nothing about the technical work, nothing about the performance, nothing about the script, nothing about the director, nothing. Those were reviews!

"How are we ever going to have an industry? How are we ever going to make a picture that's successful, which then rolls over into another one and another one, and gradually builds up the industry from scratch, if this is going to be the reaction of some of the critics. I think it's inexcusable, I think it's unforgivable. They're perfectly at liberty to say that they didn't like me or my acting or something like that, but that isn't a review of a film either. Somebody else said the boys weren't very good. Well, I've got a quote from Joe Dante: 'The kids were terrific!'

"What do they expect? As long as they continue to knock British pictures, we will never have an industry. Again, I am not saying that they must say that everything we make is wonderful. The real reason we haven't got an industry is for far too long, for far too many years, we have made far too many films which cost far too much, and which have not been successful. As long as we concentrate on the domestic market and domestic stories, we will never have an industry. We have got to make films with international appeal, in terms of the story, and we've got to put people in who are more known outside this country. We've got to! Or we won't ever ever ever have an industry.

"Four Weddings and a Funeral was one movie, and I honestly wonder what would have happened if that had come out here first instead of America. One of the other reviews, which I've just remembered: 'Let's face it, this film is all about privileged people, and who cares?' That was a review! So when I read this, I asked the PR people - and you can quote me - 'I would be very interested to know what that particular reviewer' - I won't call him a critic - 'said about Four Weddings and a Funeral.' Because logically he had to have said the same thing, exactly: 'Let's face it, this film is all about privileged people, and who cares?' Oh no, he didn't because by that time the film was a huge success."

There has been talk for years of Hammer reviving itself.
"I've heard that many times. I've no idea. Hammer basically consists of one man."

Roy Skeggs.
"Yes. He is Hammer, as far as I know. I had lunch with him. We talked about The Devil Rides Out, and he said that they were going to remake some of their films. I said, 'Well, I hope that you do not consider remaking the ones that really made you famous. In other words: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy.''Oh no. We wouldn't do that. I think we might consider remaking Quatermass, because of the advances in special effects.' And of course The Devil Rides Out would be a huge hit! Because it was pretty good at the time. Think of what you can do with special effects now in a story like that which is all about apparitions and hallucinations, possession and evilness and Satanism. But all I've ever heard is talk, and all I've ever seen is, 'Yes, we're going to do this,' and, 'Yes, we're going to do that.' But to the best of my knowledge it's never gone any further. Certainly, nobody's approached me."

What about this Edgar Allan Poe TV series that you've made?
"I was asked if I would host a 13-episode series. There's always thirteen. I've never really found out why, but obviously there is a reason. I was asked by the South Africans if I would go to Croatia, where I'd already made a film with Pierce Brosnan which was on last night on Satellite. It was called Death Train by Alastair Maclean. I spoke only Russian in 99 per cent of the picture. I was watching it last night because I couldn't remember having seen it. When it went out in America, the producer told me that it went out on the USA Network and that they had subtitles for all the Russian I was speaking, which was very important in terms of the plot. I watched this film last night; I can't believe what I'm looking at.

"Because there's the film, there I am, speaking Russian, non-stop; no subtitles whatsoever. How is anyone supposed to follow it? The only people who will follow it are people who speak Russian. Extremely important, vitally important, because it explains everything that I was doing. No subtitles. Amateurs, amateurs.

"Anyway, I was asked to host or introduce thirteen - well actually twelve - classic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Because ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in which I actually appeared was two episodes because it was very long. So I went to Croatia, I did all the introductions, and then I left. Then they made six or seven films in Croatia with British actors and actresses: Freddie Jones, Susan George, Simon MacCorkindale (I think). The remainder were made in South Africa. I actually did do ‘Masque of the Red Death’ last April. I've no idea what's happened to it."

I'll chase up what's happening on that, try and get some stills
"I wouldn't mind some too. I was promised some stills of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, which I was not very happy about actually. It was all very well performed, but the real star was the cameraman, Rod Stuart, because he made it all look so good. But when you find yourself shooting in a house in Johannesburg, and you suddenly realise that there are doors behind you with glass windows and doorknobs, and this is supposed to be around 1200. And heavy, Dutch, dark wood furniture. I thought, 'God, I hope they don't show too much of this.'"

Another project you've done recently is doing the voice of Death for the Discworld cartoon.
"Oh yes, but I haven't finished that. I've got two more recording sessions. There are three books, I understand, and I've been told that when I've completed the voice - it's very amusing, by the way, extremely amusing. When I've completed the voice of the first book, which I'm doing in three sessions, that I'll be asked to do the second book and the third book, provided that various questions can be resolved as to who owns what, in terms of rights and things like that. Very amusing indeed."

Had you read any of the books?
"No, well I have to say I hadn't but I have now. And Death is very amusing, and of course he's in all three books."

He's in every book in the series; they're up to 18 now, and he's in all of them.
"Oh, well it looks as if I might have a good future then!"

What do you remember of your role in Space: 1999?
"Interesting. I'm not sure about this, but I have a feeling that it was one of the first television series ever made - certainly in this country - about outer space. Television shows, not films. It may have been one of the very first ever. Because I don't know if Star Trek had started then. This was 1973."

Star Trek was actually late '60s.
"Well, then it wasn't the first in the world, by any stretch of the imagination. But I have a feeling it was the first here. Martin Landau, and his wife, Barbara Bain. The sequence I did was with Roy Dotrice. I think I was one of the first persons to play an alien on British television. But you'd need to check that. But then of course, in my career I've been the first actor to do this or that a great many times. It's very strange; a lot of the pictures I've been in or been connected with have become cult films. They were before their time."

One such cult film that I was pleased to see covered on the video was The Return of Captain Invincible.
"Yes. The story itself is a very amusing and witty story. You can't ask for anyone better than Alan Arkin who, apart from Peter Ustinov, is I think quite honestly the most all-round talented man I've ever met in my life. He's a writer - I've got some of his books - he's a composer, he plays several musical instruments. He produces, he directs, he acts. The man is amazing. He's also a wonderful person, and I'm devoted to him. Marvellous sense of humour. Quite apart from anything else, the songs were so good.

"And one of my great friends, who's probably the number one opera singer in the world today, he's a bass so you'd have to say the number one opera bass in the world today, is an American called Samuel Ramey. He wrote to me and said, 'I've just seen this.' I said, 'Well, I don't want any critical comments about my singing, thank you, from an opera singer.' He said, 'It's terrific.' And I said, 'What you're really saying is that the song, the number in it about the drinks, it's brilliant!' It was written by O'Brien and Hartley and there are about 36 drinks in the song. It's a mixture of rock, operatic, anything you like.

"You see, if you don't promote a picture, if you don't do any publicity on it, if you don't advertise it, if you don't have the right kind of posters, or if you don't talk about it or the people don't appear on television or talk like I'm talking to you, who's going to know it's on? I remember Francis Coppola talking to me: 'What would anybody know about The Godfather if they didn't read about it or see people talking about it on television.?' If you don't promote something, who's going to know about it?"

They never even put out a soundtrack album.
"Wonderful music, wonderful music. But that's very much the story of my life as an actor; films that are before their time. Cult movies, if you like."

One role I was surprised to find that you'd played was Faust. What was Catharsis in 1963?
"A very strange film. It was done in black and white. I don't think anybody, including myself and possibly the director, quite knew what it was all about. I was playing an old man, without the right kind of make-up, who turns, in a sense, into the Devil. It's so complicated that I can't remember the story. I remember the director apparently committed suicide not very long after making the film. Whether that was as a result of seeing the rushes or the rough cut or whether it was what somebody said, I really don't know.

"It's a very strange film. I've never actually seen it but I've got some stills from it, where I'm the old man with white hair and a young face. They didn't have the time to do 'old' make-up, so to speak. And there's some marvellous stills of me as the Devil. But I've no idea what happened to the film, except that I did make it."

Are all your films still in existence, or have any of them been lost?
"I know one picture where the negative was lost."

The Wicker Man.
"Well, if you believe that. I can't say that I do. I'm firmly convinced, for various reasons that we won't go into, that the negative of that film and the out-takes do exist somewhere but are being deliberately hidden, and have been ever since we wanted them. Because we shot every word of that brilliant script. Oh, wonderful. What you saw on the screen, marvellous as it is, it's almost a shadow of what was in the script, what we shot, because we shot every word. Of course it's not possible to have every word we said used in the film. It would have been too long. But if we'd done a little bit of retouching, a bit of this and a bit of that, the film would have been a masterpiece.

"It's close to that already. And that is a cult film. And it became one from the first time it came. That is an incredible story. In fact, if you ever read the magazine Cinefantastique, they devoted an entire issue to the film and the story behind it. It went through seven distributors or something, and there's a long version, there's a short version. The negative has never been seen again since the time we first looked for it."

The version that's out on video is even shorter. Does it annoy you when your films get cut like that?
"Well, it does the case of that film. I think it's disgraceful. Because it's a remarkable and outstanding picture; one of the best pictures ever made in my opinion, and most people would agree with that. When you say, 'The Wicker Man', everybody all over the world says, 'Ah.' And I've presented it in countries like Spain and Italy and Egypt at various film festivals as the best picture I've ever been in and the best part I've ever had, because it was written for me. If something goes wrong with some of the films I've been in, or they don't turn out the way you hope they'll turn out, which frequently happens: 'This is not the film I made. This is not the performance I gave.' If it's been cut to ribbons, or badly put together or badly shot or whatever, you have to accept that because that's the way the industry functions or doesn't function. There's an awful lot of amateurs still around. So you say to yourself, 'What a pity' because on the printed page it was good. So that's happened. You just have to be resigned to that sort of thing. There's no point getting upset about it.

"But as far as The Wicker Man is concerned, to this day - and that's 24 years later - to this day I'm outraged about what happened to that film: the disappearance of the negative and the out-takes. That is an outstanding and remarkable and brilliant film, and it should have been recut, in my opinion, then we really would have had something, which we're proud of anyway, but even more so. I'd even be prepared to pay for the film to be recut if we could find it."

That was the interview proper, but one regular feature of an SFX interview in those days was always a section where the subject summed up their memories of particular films or books or, in this case, roles:

Dracula

"A character that is romantic, heroic and erotic, doomed to immortality, a terrible fate. Sadness is the main element in a character like that, and that's the right way to play a character like that. And I read the book. It's all there in Stoker's book, and I put that onto the screen, because nobody could tell me how to play that part and nobody ever did."

Frankenstein's creature

"We weren't allowed to copy the famous make-up that Boris wore because that was Universal copyright, so we were shooting in the dark totally. One of the critics said that I looked like a road accident, which actually is what one would look like if you were literally patched together from bits and pieces of other people. Provided you accept the fact that those sort of transplants could take place. And God knows, since we made that film, they have taken place. The only transplant, as far as I know, that hasn't happened - and it certainly will one day - is a brain transplant. But everything else - put together from bits and pieces of other people - has virtually happened.

"That was important to me because up till then I had been told I was too tall and too foreign-looking. So I decided, quite specifically and quite carefully that I would play that part where I would become completely unrecognisable. Then if it was successful, people would say - as they did - 'I wonder what he really looks like.'"

Sherlock Holmes

"I'm one of - good heavens - how many actors have played Sherlock Holmes? The first time I played him was in Germany in 1963. You know the story of that. They put somebody else's voice in, but it was pretty good actually, along those lines. The second time I was in a Holmes film, I had the great privilege of working with one of the greatest directors of all time, Billy Wilder. I played his brother Mycroft. Dear Bob Stephens was Holmes. Then I played him twice on television with Patrick Macnee.

"Holmes is Holmes. What can I add to it? I had to try and suggest the amazing brain, the analytical ability - based on Dr Joseph Bell, we are told - and still portray what the author wrote. People seem to forget that so often. They give their interpretation. Holmes was a drug addict; he was therefore slightly unbalanced in some respects. He had a brilliant brain; he was physically very courageous and a master of styles combat. He could be charming when he wanted to, but there was a very cold side to Holmes, sarcastic and unkind, even to Watson.

"I try always, where there is a book or a story, to be the character that the author wrote about. Holmes is an immortal; Dracula is an immortal; Fu Manchu, to a certain extent, is an immortal. And so I've been fortunate enough to play a lot of immortal characters, who won't ever die."

Fu Manchu

"He happens to be Oriental. A man like Holmes describes Moriarty: 'the Napoleon of crime' with a brain to match. A man of great power, of great ability, amazing brain and all that, who happens to be Chinese. I tried to play him like a superior warlord, almost like a priest. Because you must always do that, you must never condescend to those sort of characters."

The Mummy

"That was very difficult, because of course that was done without speaking. I don't speak for the entire picture. Or did I? Maybe I did say something at the very beginning when the princess was buried. I may have come up with some of the prayers. But of course after I'd had my tongue cut out there wasn't very much I could say.

"That was a very difficult film, very demanding, probably physically the toughest picture I've ever had to make, because I do everything with body movement, in terms of suggesting feelings, reactions. All you could see were the eyes. Physically very, very tough because I had to smash through glass, had explosions all over my body, smashed through a locked door which was bolted with a chain on the inside, which somebody had done without thinking. Then I had to carry these girls out here, to the full extent of my arms. Because they were unconscious they couldn't put their arms around my neck to help me, and I had to carry them both eight yards several times.

"Then at the end I had to carry Yvonne Furneaux, hold her above the water and the mud at the full extent of my arms, crashing into all these pipes and things underneath the mud in the tank. That was a really tough picture. Physically tough and difficult in terms of performance because it could only be done with the eyes and the body."

Scaramanga
"Ian Fleming was my cousin. Ian Fleming wanted me to play Doctor No. By the time he got around to suggesting it, the producer said, 'Well, we've already cast another actor.' By the time I came to play Scaramanga, Ian was gone. I just hope that he enjoyed it. The important thing about playing Scaramanga - who incidentally was a boy who was at Eton with Ian, who disliked him so much he decided to make him into one of his villains.

"Ian wrote the book and the character was just a thug. What the director and the writer did was to make him into a man who was totally lethal but who had great charm and was most amusing and could be very witty. In other words, a human being. So many of the Bond villains have been cardboard cut-outs and they've just been irredeemably bad from start to finish, but Scaramanga was completely different because he got the chance to be entertaining, attractive, polite, amusing and lethal. With every part I've played, I've always tried to produce something unexpected on the screen, something unconventional that people won't expect. And I think to a great extent I've succeeded."

Rasputin
"I can only go on what I've read, and what I've been told by people who knew him. When I was a small boy, I met two of the people involved in the assassination: Prince Yusupoff himself and the Grand Duke Dimitri, cousin of the Tsar. Many years later, I played the character in '65.

"In '76 I met Maria Rasputin, the daughter; he had three illegitimate children. She'd seen the film, she said I looked like him. I said, 'Surely Madam, your father wasn't quite as tall as me and he had blue-grey eyes.' She said, 'That's not what I mean: the expression.' Don't ask me what she meant by that. Then in 1981 my wife and I went to the house in what is now Saint Petersburg where the whole thing took place.

"The story of the dreadful Rasputin is very well known and I believe it's been done recently again in Saint Petersburg, with Alan Rickman, on a much bigger scale of course. This was a Hammer film. I tried to play the man as he was: an enigma, a mystery, a misty creature - you couldn't really find him. He was part saint, part sinner, like we all are - more sinner than saint - who had extraordinary authentic powers of healing, who was a terrible lecher and a fearful drunk. But that's the way he was. And that's the historical Rasputin. How else could I play him?

"You're always confined by what's in the script, but I played the character that most of the world recognises as Grigori Rasputin, the monk who had the influence over the Tsarina and through her over the Tsar, who could cure the haemophilia of the heir to the throne. He even did it by telegram once, and then wrote a letter which I've seen: 'Russian Tsar, if anything happens to me ... the Romanoff house will come to an end.' That was probably the most interesting character I've ever played because we really don't know the answer, even now. His daughter gave me a book she'd written about him. She was so nice to me, I had my picture taken with her. She looked just like him, except for the beard of course. She said, 'You came very close.' She wasn't particularly sympathetic to the portrayal."

Mr Sender
"I'm not sure that I can discuss that because the film hasn't come out. The film is called The Stupids. Tom Arnold plays Stanley Stupid, and he has a wife and two children, all called Stupid. I think it's a very funny movie. I play their adversary, not a very big part, but that doesn't matter. This is very European, as opposed to American. Some of the big stars will happily do a day in a film - Orson Welles said that - if it's an important contribution and people will remember it. But you won't get that from an American leading actor because the agent won't allow it; not enough commission. All I can say is that it's most amusing. That's all I can say at the moment because if I say anything else then I'm giving the story away.

"But the most important part of all was Lord Summerisle because it was written for me by one of the best writers of all, who'd just had tremendous success with Sleuth."

website: christopherleeweb.com

interview originally posted before November 2004

↧

interview: Dan Duling

February 22, 2014, 9:50 am

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When I transferred my review ofLast Livesfrom the old site to this one in February 2014, I was struck by how little known the film is and wondered whether I could add an interview with one of the people behind it. I was therefore delighted when screenwriter Dan Duling kindly agreed to answer a few questions by email.

What was the original inspiration behind Last Lives and what were your expectations when you wrote the script?
"I was living in a cabin in the Oregon woods in 1984-'85, pre-internet, no less, and I was still working in Los Angeles 1,000 miles away, forced by family circumstance to live and try to work up north. I'd written spec scripts in a number of different genres, but the intelligence and success of The Terminator, which came out in '84, encouraged me to try my hand at sci-fi. I can't recall if I had representation at the time, but it really didn't matter. I was determined to write something I'd actually enjoy seeing. From those very early years of video game development, I latched onto the then-intriguing idea of multiple lives to be squandered on a quest, but I was mostly inspired by the twisted notion of Malakai's dreams being so vivid that they lead an advanced parallel world to discover the existence of our parallel universe. Conversely, for our heroine, what if the man of her dreams turns out to be a nightmare?

"My original vision of Malakai was as a man born with no frontal skull, exposing his brain in such a way that it both unleashes his mental acuity and telepathic sensitivity, but also dooms him to seizures and the need for protective headgear (initially described as a razor-wire crown of thorns). His 'Christ-like' curse even included his two clumsy henchmen (the two thieves) who happily do his bidding, anything being preferable to their incarceration. Then there was the intriguing pitch: 'How do you behave if you no longer fear death?' My answer: by setting up circumstances where you and your adversary will both be killed, with only you holding the 'life band' to bring yourself back. And, of course, the resonance that we're all on our 'last lives' added to Malakai's dilemma.

"The other key for me was the 'bodybag reunion', something I hadn't seen as yet in a film (though I have numerous times since). In my original script, when Adrienne and Aaron are reunited after escaping their body bags at the end, there's a protracted and intentionally absurd scene in which they have both been rendered at least temporarily insane by all that they've been through (more on that in a minute). Finally, like Terminator, once Last Lives was set in motion, I wanted it to be relentlessly moving forward. To facilitate that, I outlined it in great detail and wrote it in 17 days. Only a handful of folks read it during the next ten years, because I was busy with other scripts and I just wasn't cultivating representation that had any feel for low-budget horror-sci-fi.

"The final twist in 1996: an actress friend of mine who was a fan of my plays, asked if I had any low-budget screenplays. I gave her Last Lives, and a week or so later, she gave it to one of her clients for whom she did astrology readings! He, in turn, put it on a pile of scripts he was pitching to Promark, and Last Lives was the first one they said 'yes' to. That director, whose name I have forgotten, stayed along for the six-month development ride, then took another job just as they were going into pre-production (hence, I've forgotten his name). At that point, two things happened that I could have never anticipated. Instead of the mountains and forests and waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest, Promark had cut a deal with a new studio near Yancyville, North Carolina, which is to say, not near anywhere! And instead of the aforementioned mountains, waterfalls etc., we had rolling hills of tobacco fields, and an old plantation mansion filling in for a mountain lodge."

How did Promark come to pick up the project and attach Worth Keeter?
"As noted, Promark was in the business of making low-budget features that generally sold directly to cable and were in profit from foreign sales even before cameras rolled, mostly budgeted around $2-3 million. They responded to the action quotient and do-ability of Last Lives and offered me a step-buyout of the script in which I'd get a percentage to start development, an in-progress payment and the bulk of the payment at the start of production. Which was the best way to keep me from pulling the plug along the way. Worth Keeter was a last-minute replacement. I met him exactly once before he hopped a plane for North Carolina. To my dismay, his first order of business was to rewrite the script in ways that I still find it hard to laugh about.

"The script I had handed Promark was edgy, reasonably smart and often funny. During six painful months of meetings and 11 rewrites (including being given notes from the wife of the German distribution director?!), it was rendered more and more toothless, and things that I thought were nicely ambiguous were spelled out in no uncertain but far less interesting terms. Worth, suddenly finding himself in North Carolina, spitballed the electified fence to replace a death at the bottom of a lake, and the explosives in the shed to replace a ghastly dual tumble over a waterfall onto rocks. I only wish I could have been there to participate in those preposterous alternatives, but since he was already on location and just trying to figure out how to shoot around an impending hurricane and some cast members on the verge of mutiny, it's easier to forgive his choices.

"But, his opening scene - not mine - is so cringe-worthy in its dialogue, not helped by a very unhappy Judge Reinhold wishing he was somewhere else, that I just have to look away even now. And his flashbacks of Adrienne as a fellow revolutionary in Malakai's world years before was never in my script because the whole point was she's not of his world. That was the conceit: you dream about a woman you've never met and she seems so real... so real you ultimately help find a way to get to her in a parallel universe! Now, if that's not romantic, what the hell is?!"

What are the main differences between your script and what actually got made?
"I've just given you the main examples: the wedding chapel massacre. Ironically, around draft 6, they said I couldn't just kill everyone, it was too randomly violent. So we gassed everyone and only killed the Best Man and Aaron. But, when Worth got to North Carolina, he just crossed that out and shot a bunch of people. The wonderful Billy Wirth wasn't my image of Malakai (mostly because I pictured him as a physical grotesque from the neck up) but he more than made up for being too handsome by being moody and intense and, most importantly, ushering a very despondent Jennifer Rubin through a shoot she was simply trying to survive (due to circumstances that had nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with her tenuous relationship to reality and reliance on self-medicating).

"But the biggest change is the complete absence of, for me, the ultimate payoff of the script, a scene of crazy madcap wackiness when our two recently reunited newlyweds, fresh from their bodybags, absorb the full impact of what they've just been through. Worth looked at Jennifer, realising by that point in the shoot that asking her to say lines and show emotions at the same time would just be too much, simply faded to black. I had written a movie designed to drive two 'normal' people out of their minds, with intentional comic subtext in virtually every scene. What was ultimately shot only salvaged hints of that. But then, they did destroy a couple of limos and set off a few nice explosions. So, I couldn't stay mad.

"But, the real reason I couldn't stay mad was because I had two goals from the beginning: to get it made! and to preserve my cameo as the Bodybag Officer through 11 rewrites! So, there I was, earning SAG residuals, standing in artificial rain and mud at 4.30 in the morning, having to say my lines again because up in the window above us, dear Jennifer had blown her line when the post-it she'd stuck to the window sill with her line scribbled on it, fell down into the shot! And, I guess the other thing that will always be a sublime 'what if' was that Promark's first choice for the role played by Judge Reinhold was Malcolm McDowell, and the thought of having the boyhood hero (Clockwork Orange, If..., Oh, Lucky Man!... Last Lives!) would have been sublime indeed. Oh, well, it got made!"

Can you tell me about some of your stage plays; I'm a big fan of anything Frankenstein so particularly intrigued by your take on that idea.
"Forty years of writing edgy, dark comedies (with a few exceptions), taking what I'd learned as an actor and my ideas as a director and not being satisfied to consider a play completed until it contained a risk I'd either never asked of myself or, more likely, never seen in the same context onstage before. Consequently, these are still very fresh, and what I call 'third week of rehearsal plays'. After getting them on their feet and digging around in the murky dark business in the foreground, there's a subtle shift where the inappropriate laughter hinted at (with varying degrees of subtlety) throughout the play begins to emerge and the absurd comedy of human foolishness comes forward to dare the audience to laugh where they wouldn't ordinarily expect to. And that's what I live for.

"The classicism of A Dream of Frankenstein turning Mary Shelley's maternal nightmare into a feminist fantasia written by a 19-year-old woman who grew up knowing she was responsible for her mother's death in childbirth, and who would herself become pregnant five times before age 25 and see only one of those children live beyond the age of three. A novel about a creature made of dead body parts isn't half as disturbing as that nightmare. And not a tenth as funny as my play's depiction of weak, pathetic men underestimating the power of a young, intelligent woman.

"I'll let Monstrosity's hybrid origins speak for themselves, but it has terrific parts for three actors and in readings here in LA, Chicago and Oregon, it works so effortlessly in its mixing of expectations and genres. I truly believe it'll find a home one of these days since I'm too poor to produce it myself.

"And I'll mention just one more script for now: Tesla: A Radio Play for the Stage is just that: a 'fake' radio play with a small ensemble, a 'star' playing Nikola Tesla, and live sound effects and even audience participation to tell a tragic tale of a true savant with no patience or acument for American business. This played to stunning success and ovations at the Pasadena Playhouse this past spring and my director is seeking a next home for it as well. It's based on two years of research I did for a screenplay about Tesla that couldn't get any traction in Hollywood. My hope is it may still have another opportunity if this play adaptation (another hybrid) gets its chance.

"And one last note: For more than half my life I have also been the scriptwriter for the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, CA (google Pageant of the Masters to get a hint of what it's like.) It's a theatrical celebration of art presented as tableaux vivants onstage in an outdoor amphitheater every summer (a different theme and selection of artworks every summer), performed live with live orchestral accompaniment and live narration. It takes a footnote in theatre history and does it with such polish that over 140,000 people come to see it every summer, and it supports a non-profit that actually makes a million dollars profit every summer on Pageant ticket sales alone. It truly has to be seen to be appreciated, but even my most cynical Hollywood friends, once they've seen the Pageant, rave about its sophistication and entertainment value.

"The highlight for me will always be Steve Martin, a connoisseur of art and theatre, asking to meet me after to praise me for what we accomplish. That meant the world. And on any given night, more people see the Pageant than many audiences for a full run of many of my plays. But, I am stubborn and, for better or worse, a man who studied and loves film (and hates the business of it) but who hung his hat in the theatre many years ago, and loved nothing better when in London than the feeling that if someone asked him what he does, he could say, 'I'm a playwright,' and not have to apologise for not having a real job. That's something it's not so easy to do in Hollywood."

website: www.danduling.com

↧

Nazi Zombie Death Tales

February 22, 2014, 2:15 pm

≫ Next: interview: Frazer Lee

≪ Previous: interview: Dan Duling

Directors: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins
Writers: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins
Producers: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins, Laura Tennant, Debbie Attwell
Cast: Tina Barnes, Lara Lemon, Jess-Luisa Flynn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: unfinished screener (Safecracker Pictures)

[I have been asked by one of the film-makers to point out that this is (as usual) a detailed review which may contain spoilers. - MJS]

As I write this review, the web is full of negative comments about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, released just a few days ago. Not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t (and could never) live up to the ridiculously high expectations that people have built up for it.

My cinematic tastes and interests are, as you may have gathered if you’re a regular reader, somewhat different to most people’s. So although I’ll probably go and see Prometheus, I’m not really too arsed about it. On the other hand, I can sympathise with these people because I feel very much the same way about the motion picture formerly known as Battlefield Death Tales. If you were to stop me at random any time in the past few years and ask which films I was most looking forward to, high on my list would be (a) the next Jim Eaves movie, (b) the next Pat Higgins film, and (c) whatever the next thing is that escapes from inside Al Ronald’s mind.

These three gentlemen previously collaborated on Bordello Death Tales, one of the first in the current vogue for horror anthologies and a corking trilogy of tales which was even better than the sum of its parts. Separately, Jim made The Witches Hammer and Bane; Pat made TrashHouse, KillerKiller, HellBride and The Devil’s Music; and Al made Jesus vs the Messiah. Having enjoyed their initial collaboration, they decided to switch from the horrors of sex to the horrors of war and set to making three new half-hour shorts that could be bolted together. Unlike Bordello DT, there is no framing story, although there is a very brief narrative cross-over between Al’s tale and Pat’s. I like a framing story in an anthology personally, and one of the previous film’s strengths was that Madam Raven was actually relevant to all three tales rather than being just a detached narrator. But for Battlefield DT, each story is separate and complete and the only connection is a Second World War setting.

We kick off with Jim’s Medal of Horror, which starts with British Captain George (David Wayman: Death, The Dead Inside) in a bar watching burlesque fan-dancer Daisy (Jeanie Wishes). Clever editing moves the story forward through his seduction of the young woman and her receipt of a letter confirming Captain George’s death. Starting the film with a full five minutes of dialogue-free narrative is a brave move, rendered even braver by the subsequent scene of Captain George, very much alive, reporting to a US Army Major (Paul Kelleher: Spirits of the Fall, The Demon Within, Simon and Emily). What follows is ten minutes of two men in a room, one sitting, one standing, just talking. Some casual viewers might turn off after a while, wondering when we’ll get to any Nazi zombies, and I’m not sure that Medal of Horror wouldn’t be better as the middle segment.

The major does introduce the Z-word in an apparently unrelated anecdote about a dead US soldier who returned to base and took a great deal of effort to subdue. But mainly he is castigating George for being a shit by sending a fake condolence letter to Daisy, who turns out to be the Major’s daughter. And who has been captured, for no obvious reason, by the Germans. Specifically by “Hitler’s high priestess of the occult” Jezebel (Tina Barnes: A Day of Violence, Bane, F).

George sets off on what is effectively a suicide mission to rescue Daisy and on the way has some rather random encounters including a German soldier in a dark blue greatcoat who exemplifies one of the films’ main problems: costumes. With a big budget, a film can afford to hire lots of historically accurate WW2 uniforms and create/adapt any additional ones required. But when shooting on a shoestring, you take what you can get. I’m no military historian but none of the uniforms on show in any of the segments really convinced me. George’s greatcoat for example has no Captain’s pips. Jezebel, when we meet her, is wearing black leggings below her smart, black SS jacket. Some of the background British soldiers seem to be wearing outfits that are distinctly post-WW2. And this particular German soldier has a coat that might pass for a French uniform in World War 1 but doesn’t look like anything warn by any German troops ever.

This sort of historical inaccuracy takes one out of the film, as do a number of very obviously modern locations. But it really is all down to budget. At this level of film-making, beggars can’t be choosers and if you know someone with a military-looking outfit that might pass muster if the viewers don’t look to closely and have never seen Where Eagles Dare, or a hall big enough to film in that’s empty for a few days, you say thanks very much. Those of us who love B-movies have to rely on the energy, originality, enthusiasm, excitement and generally daft scary fun of the movie to gloss over such things, as they assuredly do. But it would be remiss of me not to note their existence.

Anyway, George’s most random encounter is with the zombified Red Baron. He comes across a crashed scarlet triplane in the woods; a frankly dodgy model shot to which, honestly, my initial reaction was: “What is a radio-controlled model aircraft doing in a 1940s-set story?” Once again we must asume/hope that the viewers have not even rudimentary knowledge of military history, because of course Manfred von Richtofen was not shot down in a wood, and both his plane and his body were recovered. However, in this alternate history, the bright red Fokker Dr.1 has somehow remained undiscovered, and in extremely good condition, for more than 20 years.

As George stares at this, the Red Baron himself (Eaves regular Sam Smith) leaps up from the ground, although it’s not clear whether he has just been hiding there or whether he too has lain undisturbed since the last war. Clad in a red flying outfit that matches his plane, even down to a red eye-patch, and bearing absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the real von Richtofen (or indeed any German pilot!), this is very much a cartoon character. We must regard him as a character called ‘the Red Baron’, inspired extremely loosely by the legend, rather than the actual Red Baron himself.

But because a cartoon zombie WW1 flying ace isn’t weird enough, a karate-kicking Japanese zombie then appears and fights the German zombie, with both seeking to attack George if the other will let them. Quite what a Japanese soldier, living or dead, is doing in Northern Europe defeats me. Although it is worth noting that if this zombie is also meant to be a WW1 veteran then his fight against the Kraut is valid because the Japanese were on the Allied side during the 1914-18 war. On the other hand, his headband suggests he perhaps is supposed to be a kamikaze pilot, which would make him a WW2 airman and hence part of the Axis forces. While the two colourful undead tussle among the ferns, George makes his getaway through the woods and this utterly random weirdness is left behind.

In a bunker, he finally locates Jezebel and a single extraordinary German robot soldier, plus Daisy herself. Tina Barnes hams it up in her SS uniform and clearly had an absolute blast filming her extended death scene, although I can’t honestly say that I was convinced by her accent, whch at times seemed closer to Melbourne than Munich.

Medal of Horror runs about 35 minutes and, like the two stories which follow it, seems somewhat constrained by the format. I don’t know if there’s a feature here but it just doesn’t seem to fit the half-hour(-ish) restriction, especially given how slow most of the first half is. It seems a curiously disjointed tale. Fun, undeniably, but not totally satisfying.

Alan Ronald has the ‘golfing story’ slot with his tongue-in-cheek Harriet’s War which is completely different to the announced story. When the three plot synopses were revealed in January 2012, Al’s tale was called Monsters of the 4th Reich and went like this:

“Harriet Price tracks down monsters for the British Government. Armed with an array of inventions and contraptions she deals with everything from ghosts, demons, werewolves, vampires and once, she claims, even Churchill's Black Dog. But, along with her newly assigned partner; the cross dressing gunslinger 'Trixie Antoinette', this latest investigation will bring her face to face with the greatest monster of all... Hitler himself.”

The title may have been changed to avoid confusion with forthcoming British Nazi-zombie film The 4th Reich, but that’s just cosmetic. In fact, all that remains of this synopsis is Harriet Price herself, beautifully played by Lara Lemon in a costume to die for. She was in Al’s as-yet unreleased second feature Chinese Burns, which was written by and stars Julian Lamoral-Roberts - who was in Al’s Bordello DT story Stitchgirl and here plays the local vicar. Cy Henty turns up as the befuddled local copper, wearing an extraordinary policeman’s helmet and an even more extraordinary moustache.

Harriet Price is some sort of Government operative who visits the cosy little village of Chapelton to investigate a mysterious death, reporting to her superiors via a glorious sort of steampunk dictaphone. A young man has been found, dead and with multiple swastikas carved into his skin, while his girlfriend has disappeared (but later turns up in a similar condition). We saw in a prologue that they were killed by an apparently supernatural, German soldier with similar scars and a swastika blindfold

This is probably the simplest and most coherent of the three tales, let down only by the revelation of what is really going on, when Harriet suddenly proclaims to the plod and the priest, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the name of the only other significant character. Nevertheless, I think this is my favourite and it has that mannered surrealism that we have come to expect from Al’s work. Still, one can’t help wondering whatever happened to cross dressing gunslinger Trixie Antoinette...

Finally we have Pat’s tale Devils of the Blitz. This is the least comprehensible of the three stories and, truth be told, without having read the synopsis I don’t think I would have had a clue what was going on. Jess-Luisa Flynn (Adele in The Devil’s Music) plays the sister of a serving soldier with Liza Keast (The Witches Hammer) as her concerned mother and Geoffrey Sleight (also in The Devil’s Music) as her intolerant, rationalist grandfather. There are some sort of monsters in their house, grandly portrayed by rubbery puppet things instead of that modern CGI nonsense, and there is a subplot about the brother/son (Paul Cousins) being seriously injured which must have some connection to the main story but I couldn’t work out what.

As with Medal of Horror, this feels like it has been compressed to fit the format at the expense of explanation. It also suffers from being set during the Second World War’s quitest, gentlest air raid. Although we are told that the bombs are dropping outside, little can be heard and the house never shakes; a curious repetition of the silent off-screen gun-battle in HellBride.

Battlefield Death Tales is a fun little film but it’s not, in my opinion, as good as its predecessor. However, I’m in two minds about whether I’m being objective in this assessment (in a subjective way) or whether my disappointment is coloured by my high expectations. In one sense, I got exactly what I expected, because once again the segments are individualistic and identifiable. With a Jim Eaves film I expect action and startling imagery. In a Pat Higgins picture I expect strong characters and relationships. And when Al Ronald sits in the director’s chair I expect off-beat ideas and that thing I have mentioned before: mannered surrealism. And hey, I got all this from Battlefield DT. Never, in the field of indie horror movies, has so much scary fun been created by so few.

What I didn’t get was neat little vignettes of horror - and that’s what people expect in an anthology like this. Each of the tales in Bordello DT was ‘high concept’ but the stories here are more complex and none of them really succeed completely in what they set out to do.

There is also the question of the title. When the film was picked up for UK distribution by Safecracker, who had recently released Bordello DT, it was renamed Zombie Death Tales, with Amazon and other etailers mistaking promotional artwork for a finished DVD sleeve and listing it as The Red Baron in Zombie Death Tales. I can see that ‘zombie’ in a title has more marketing cachet than ‘battlefield’, and this matches the similar retitlng of US B-movie Horrors of War as Zombies of War by UK distributor Point Blank a couple of years ago. But of course, all zombie films are ‘death tales’ so that title didn’t really work and it was swiftly amended to Nazi Zombie Death Tales, which is what was on my screener. [The film was subsequently released in the USA as Angry Nazi Zombies and in Germany(!) as Nazi Zombie Battleground, meaning it now has more titles than the average Jess Franco flick. - MJS]

But here’s the problem. So far as I can tell, there are no Nazi zombies in this film. There are Nazis, and there are zombies, but no actual Nazi zombies. And truth be told, both Nazis and zombies are in short supply. Nazi-wise, there’s Tina Barnes as a sort of latter day Ilsa, there’s that briefly seen soldier in the blue coat, and there’s one more character who provides the explanation for the blindfold thing in Harriet’s War. There are no zombies at all in Al’s and Pat’s stories and although there is one zombie bite that sets up the climax of Medal of Horror, the only other possibly undead characters are those two bizarre figures who fight in the forest.

These two feature on Safecracker’s sleeve alongside the Nazi robot thing, and they have cheekily photoshopped a swastika badge onto the ribbon around the Red Baron’s neck. But in the film that ribbon supports an Iron Cross and the character is devoid of swastikas because of course he is a remnant from the First World War.

Nazi Zombie Death Tales isn’t really a zombie film, unless you’re ultra-completist. And while putting ‘zombie’ in the title may shift more units, I can’t help feeling it will shift them to people who will be pissed off when they find that they have bought a film with few if any zombies in it. Mind you, none of the stories are set on a battlefield either...

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 7th August 2012

Postscript. I did go and see Prometheus. It was shit.

↧

interview: Frazer Lee

February 23, 2014, 2:54 am

≫ Next: interview: Loren Lester

≪ Previous: Nazi Zombie Death Tales

Frazer Lee is one of the best new hopes for British horror. The first short from his Robber Baron Productions set-up, On Edge(based on a short story by Christopher Fowler) starred horror icon Doug Bradley and was extremely well received. Lee and Bradley reteamed for a second short in 2003,Red Lines, with a view to further collaboration, and the writer/director took the time to answer one of my infamous six-question mini-interviews.

How did you first hook up with Doug Bradley?
“Doug Bradley was my first choice for the role of Doctor Matthews in On Edge. I sent him a screenplay through his agent, who advised him not to do it because we had very little money. Doug was familiar with Christopher Fowler’s work and said he loved my adaptation, so he agreed to do it. We met up and I pitched a few other film ideas to him - and we still hope to make those in the future.”

Without giving too much away, what is the basic premise behind Red Lines?
“Red Lines is the tale of a school detention gone horribly wrong. Kirsty Levett plays Emily, a schoolgirl who has to write lines because she’s been caught running in the hallway again. Doug Bradley is her teacher and Leone Hanman plays what can only be described as a ‘supernatural force’. I was very much inspired by classic, atmospheric horror The Haunting by Robert Wise, and the Ringu trilogy. I wanted to explore atmospheric psychological horror storytelling. All the recent media coverage of murdered schoolgirls was almost as gross as the murders themselves to me, so I think I was reacting against that too.”

What did you learn from On Edge that has helped you in making Red Lines?
“On Edge was big budget compared to Red Lines, which came about when the guys at Urbanchillers.com challenged me to create a five-minute horror movie. It is incredibly difficult to tell a story in such a short amount of screen time, but I think we pulled it off. The biggest lesson I learned from On Edge is to surround yourself with the best talent you can find, and to professionally drive the project with humour and enthusiasm. Spotting and seizing opportunities is a key factor in filmmaking - we turned On Edge around in seven months and Red Lines was scripted, filmed and edited in just one month.

“On Edge was strongly visual, with lots of POV shots and expensive opticals and prosthetics, but it still relied heavily on dialogue to tell the story. Red Lines has a tiny bit of dialogue but tells the story mainly through the visual information. We shot On Edge 35mm Cinemascope, which was a beautiful luxury, but Red Lines was shot digitally due to time and budget constraints. Post-production experience from the first movie taught me to visualise the entire project from script to finished film - and luckily I had amazing technical support for Red Lines with a full digital grading process. I learned a lot from both films and hope to take it to another level with the next project.”

Why are you turning your feature screenplay Urbane into a graphic novel?
“Bottom line, I love graphic novels and am a big fan of Shane Oakley’s incredible artwork. I’m really excited to be publishing my first comic book! From a practical angle, it is incredibly difficult to make the leap from directing short films to directing features. Studios and financiers see you as a high-risk investment, it seems. Hopefully the graphic novel will land on the right desk one day and help convince someone, in a position to greenlight such a project, of my vision. Also, Urbane has reached Draft 8 and I realise that further rewrites may be necessary before shooting the film. The graphic novel gives me the chance to make a kind of ‘director’s cut’ version of Urbane, at least on paper.”

What can you say at this stage about URbrain?
“URbrain completes a trilogy of shorts featuring Doug Bradley. It is a dark and twisted tale set on the London Underground, inspired by a sequence from the Urbane screenplay. To put it bluntly, a young lady makes a journey she wishes she’d never made at all! We found an amazing location in the form of Aldwych, a disused Tube station - very creepy. Director of Photography Alan Stewart is hyped at the prospect of shooting down there, and we both believe URbrain can be fricken fantastic if we secure the funding to make it.”

What is your long-term plan beyond these shorts?
“If and when URbrain is in the can, I intend to release all three shorts on DVD with interviews, out-takes and bloopers. I’m confident Doug Bradley fans would embrace such a package, as we get e-mails from horror aficionados all the time asking for the shorts on DVD. Hopefully, the DVD and graphic novel will help in pitching feature projects. I have a few features in development besides Urbane, including an incredibly exciting project called Crowleymass. I’d like to collaborate further with the amazing people I worked with on the first two films, and to continue stretching myself as a writer and director. British horror still needs a good kick up the arse and I am dedicated to doing just that.”

website: frazerlee.wordpress.com
interview originally posted before November 2004

↧

interview: Loren Lester

February 23, 2014, 3:02 am

≫ Next: interview: Melanie Light

≪ Previous: interview: Frazer Lee

Loren Lester contacted me about my review of the animated version of Five Weeks in a Balloon, for which he supplied the voice of Oliver, the main character’s teenage, American nephew. He very kindly agreed to answer some questions by e-mail - and in return I sent him my copy of the film, which he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

What do you recall of recording the animated version of Five Weeks in a Balloon?

“I was 17 and it was one of my first jobs (my first in animation). I had done a few commercials (both on-camera and voice-over) and had never even considered that I would have a career in animation. My agent at the time handled every aspect of the business: commercials, TV, movies, voice-over etc and so I was very lucky because I was given the chance to make inroads in all these areas at a young age. We recorded in the hallowed halls of Hanna-Barbera (the historic building is still there but now it’s owned by a different company). When I was a kid, my favourite cartoons were made by Warner Brothers, Jay Ward or Hanna-Barbera so every time I worked at HB I really had to suppress the ‘wow’ factor. (I would record other shows there later in life, too.)

“The voice-director of Five Weeks was a tough old guy named Alan Dinehart who was a legend. He did not mince words. If he wanted more energy in a read he wouldn’t say, ‘More energy,’ he’d say, ‘You sound like a lox!’ He did not hesitate to give line readings either, even to veterans on the show, and I would find out later that this was actually common (although other directors would ask. ‘Can I give you a line reading?’)

“I remember Laurie Main, who played the main character, and it was my first time working with a distinguished British actor (face it - the Brits set the ‘gold standard’ for all of us in the acting profession). It was also my first time working with John Stephenson (who is now a friend) who will always be a voice-over legend. When the show aired - it was an ‘afterschool’ special - my friend threw me a little party at his house and we watched it. I remember feeling total confusion at hearing my voice for the first time (on a broadcast) and thinking that it didn’t sound like me at all. I waited in horror for the final credits to see if I had been replaced because I was convinced that it wasn’t me.”

Your most notable 'cult' role is probably Dick Grayson/Robin/Nightwing: what were you able to bring to this character and how has he developed over the various series, films and games in which you have voiced him?
“Again, I have to go back to my dreams as a little boy. The TV series Batman (with Adam West) was an absolute obsession. I wanted to be Batman and had a small shrine erected to the show next to my bed (a nightstand covered with Batman toys etc). I still have most of these toys but, fool that I am, I actually played with them and so they have no worth except as memories. (My mother used to tell me to keep the packaging - boy did she have foresight - but who listens to his mother at seven?) Robin was an essential and invaluable member of the team but I didn’t dream of being the Boy Wonder - I wanted to be Batman. Fast forward - I think it was in 1991 - I auditioned for the pilot of the new Batman animated series. It was just one of many auditions at the time and I didn’t seriously consider that I’d get it. But when I was called back, I have to admit that I got pretty excited. The voice I’d chosen was essentially my own voice but ramped up in pitch and urgent energy - no doubt Burt Ward was lurking in my subconscious.

“One of the happiest days of my life was coming home and hearing a message on my answering machine with my agent saying, ‘Hi, I’d like to leave a message for Robin...’ This huge emotional high continued through the taping of the pilot episode, which included two other great British actors, Tim Curry and Clive Reville. I would not record another episode for an entire year and thought that I’d been fired. Later I learned that they had decided not to go forward with a Robin character at all. I was devastated.

“Then suddenly I was on the show again and I learned that this was at the insistence of the Fox Network (which was airing the show at the time). My appearances were only sporadic, though. In recent years I have read several books about the series written by the producers of the show and I have come to realise that the producers really liked me and had great respect for my talent but they truly wanted Batman to be a dark loner and thought that the Robin character took away from that. I worked with a truly extraordinary cast of ‘regulars’: Efrem Zimbalist, Bob Hastings, Bobby Costanza and, of course, Kevin Conroy as Batman. And there were some amazing guest stars - almost all of whom where celebrities like Ed Asner, Tim Matheson, Paul Williams (brilliant as the Penguin) etc etc.

“My favourite episodes were the two-part ‘Robin’s Reckoning’ and my absolute favourite ‘If You’re So Smart Why Aren’t You Rich?’ It was the only episode during the series that Robin was a step ahead of Batman and was key to solving the show’s mystery instead of just going, ‘What should we do, Batman?’ Sub-Zero, the feature film we did with the Batman characters, is also a personal favourite and Robin was finally allowed to rise to the level of heroism.

“I remember getting a call from Batman’s director who called to tell me that in the final season of the show, I would no longer be playing Robin - that it was going to be voiced by a young boy as the Tim Drake Robin - and I was getting a promotion to ‘Nightwing’. I thought long and hard about what voice I would use and there is no doubt that I was ultimately influenced by the talents of Kevin Conroy. Since Robin graduates to the level of ‘superhero’ and since Robin had been mentored by Batman, it only made sense that my voice should take on some of the gritty, smoky qualities of Kevin’s Batman.”

Your biography on your website says you recently worked 'again' with John Cleese - what work have you done with him?
“John has done a series of commercials for Titleist golfballs in which he plays a crazed Scotsman, furious at the way Titleist golf balls have changed the game of golf (making it faster etc, which he opposes). I’ve played John’s dentist in two commercials. In the first it was just the two of us, and what a thrill.

“This was my first experience being in the presence of a true genius. And I’m not just referring to comic genius, which goes without saying in the case of John Cleese. He knew exactly how to make each moment funnier and funnier. But he is a bona fide genius outside of comedy and can discuss just about any subject in a scholarly fashion. We had some nice chats about history, sociology, psychology (one of his favourite subjects). Then last year we did another commercial and they reprised the dentist character. I appear with other ‘family members’ in an attempted ‘intervention’, trying to get John’s character to stop his mad obsession trying to destroy Titleist golfballs.”

One of your earliest roles was in Evilspeak, which rapidly became notorious for its many different censored versions and was one of the 39 'video nasties' famously banned by the British government in 1984. When you were making the film, did you have any inkling of how controversial or extreme it was going to be?
“This is news to me. I had no idea there were censored versions. Where can I see some of these? For many years I could often get a laugh saying, ‘I was in a film once where I was eaten by Satanic pigs.’ During the filming the actors referred to it as ‘the pig movie’. One of the producers was a nice guy from another country with a thick accent and we used to imitate his voice. We’d pretend to be this producer and say things like, ‘If this goes over-budget I pull the plug on this pig movie.’

"Some great character actors on that film: RG Armstrong, Charlie Tyner, Joe Cortese and a great, great actor named Claude Earl Jones (who played the coach). I’m still friends with Claude and with Don Stark (who continues to work a lot). I remember one scene where the director (Eric Weston) felt we weren’t scared enough. So he shut off all the lights on the set (and it became pitch black because we were in a kind of basement) and he went around trying to scare us in the dark. This was also my second cult-film-in-a-row with Clint Howard (we had done Rock’n’Roll High School the previous year).”

Did you really provide the voice of the cartoon incarnation of one of the New Kids on the Block in their cartoon series? That must have been a bit weird...
“The boys were busy doing concerts and had no time to voice a cartoon series so a group of VO actors were recruited to double their speaking voices (obviously they used the New Kids to sing their own songs). We had to match voice samples that the boys recorded but they weren’t actors, so the samples were just ’slice of life’. We had to then translate those voices into plots that were frenetic and energised. Quite a challenge. That was my first network cartoon. An interesting bit of trivia: one of the actors in the series, Scott Menville, would later go on to voice the role of Robin in Teen Titans.”

You recently worked for Wes Craven on Red Eye: what was that like?
“With Red Eye, Wes Craven finally broke out of the box imposed on him by the film industry. Wes is a master film-maker but has not been allowed to do anything other than horror. The brilliance of this film is that it created enormous suspense without any blood or gore. I knew the ending of the film because I read the script (obviously) but I was still on the edge of my seat during the screening. Wes knows how to create tension but he also knows how to break it with comic relief. That’s why my part grew as the filming went on. My part started out pretty small but became something memorable and substantial because Wes saw a chance to use me for comic relief. Very Hitchcock. I also admired Wes for his quiet demeanour on the set - he created a wonderful working atmosphere. Yet under the quiet you could always see the mischief-maker at work and he would often break up the set with a perfectly understated wry observation.”

website: www.lorenlester.com
interview originally posted 21st April 2006

↧

interview: Melanie Light

February 23, 2014, 4:06 am

≫ Next: interview: Brian Lloyd

≪ Previous: interview: Loren Lester

Melanie Light has worked as production designer or art director on a number of cool films, some of which I have reviewed on this site. So I was delighted that she agreed to an e-mail interview when I contacted her in June 2009.

How did you first become involved with film-making?
“I guess my first real experience was from bagging a place in the art department for Adam Mason's The Devil’s Chair. That movie completely opened a door to me. I was kinda homeless and jobless and needed an escape. I had discovered mandy.com and would go to the library for free internet until I got kicked off. There was an ad for an art director assistant for a horror movie in Cambridgeshire and I was like, 'Holy shit - this sounds amazing!’ I emailed them ASAP and luckily was the first to answer and had a car.

“I kinda went into The Devil’s Chair pretty blind to the way you make movies. I'd always wondered how you'd get in there. I had no contacts within it and thought you had to work on Star Wars to work on movie sets. For a while I used to watch the behind-the-scenes and make notes; I kinda always used that sort of influence in art works I was making in my spare time.

“We had a small art department of three, the production designer being my now friend Neil Jenkins and another guy who kinda clashed with me. I remember some great times, like choosing the colour and decorating the space of the hospital mental room and dirtying down walls at 4am with just water from a weird scary building tank thing; making the best-I-ever-made fake blood for the hardcore scenes at the end of the movie; choosing the weird horse and my small cameos.

“Working on The Devil’s Chair was like the coolest job ever, which is like more of a hobby. I loved the crazy energy of being a part of a team within in a team. It was almost like being at college again. My only experience before that was being at a friend’s music video shoot as an extra but I kinda ended up making a few suggestions. Also making a zombie graveyard set for a public Halloween horror tour in Kent. (That was fun! I also kinda directed my fellow zombies and did make-up.) I had a few fiddles about with things at uni and I did shoot a kinda suicide home movie where I pretended to be drinking vodka in the woods and then shoot myself, but the camera was on in my bag as I started my way to the woods, and wore the battery down. Dunno what happened with what I did get.

“Oh, and I guess going to a horror convention in something like 2002 at the Radison Hotel. I'd seen it advertised in Dark Side magazine, hardly anyone went, I thought it was so cool to have people talking on a panel with stories of their movie making process. Meeting the likes of Ingrid Pitt who later made an appearance in Beyond the Rave, which was an incredibly cool moment for me, seeing a horror legend doing some crazy scenes right before my eyes, that made all the long night shoots completely worth it.

“I also met Paul Davis who is doing incredibly well with his American Werewolf in London docu and the creator of the Little Apple Dolls figures, Yurie Urie. All that and I guess spending my university reading week hiring three horror movies a day and making an image and title for works influenced by a movie poster. I guess my past lives were all pushing me into the right direction and hopefully they still do!”

What is the actual difference between a production designer and an art director?
“Good question. The production designer is like the boss of the art department, the art director is like the manager. The production designer works closely with all the other heads of departments and the director and producers. Usually you get involved a lot earlier on in the project. You go through the script and break it down, find out how much money you’ve got to spend and on what, where you’re going to shoot, what needs building etc. Whilst dealing with that, figuring out what sort of colours, fabrics, textures, sizes, looks of the movie, how to make the director’s ideas work out, planning the whole ordeal. The art director is kinda like the instigator to the production designer, working closely together, creating the overall look of the movie.”

Most of your film credits are horror/fantasy: is that a personal interest in the genre or does it have to do with the greater scope for imaginative design inherent in these sorts of films?
“Horror and fantasy do seem to be what I have fallen into. I am a big fan of those films, particularly horror. I have been a horror fan in some way or another for a long time. They do tend to have a much wider scope and imagination for influencing a look.

“I have recently shot an action-spy-CIA-agent thing in Morocco which was a lot of fun, having stunt guys jumping out of buildings and blowing stuff up. Choosing pretty cool weapons like rocket launchers! I get into whatever the project is really and new genres are always a nice challenge. The Scar Crow had period elements which I really dig doing too. At the end of the day I always throw myself into what I do.

“Horror is great as you get to create a set-up that can embed eerie atmospheres to the viewer’s brain without them noticing. I do like dirtying things down and fucking stuff up! But then for some sets I get a kick out of making sleazy sex parties and co-ordinating colours and styles. Another recent project for a pilot pitch for BBC3: I got to get back to my sculpture ways and, whilst organising the green-screen set-ups, I spent many hours making a cool wonky model of a house. Somehow it ended out being quite Tim Burtonesque which was fine and something I'm proud of.

“No matter what I think, I am starting to create a style for myself and I get offered a lot of horror stuff. I'm still holding out for a real horrific project which will make people sick for watching it, ha! I was hooked on the horror stuff but recently I have been making a huge effort to watch recent mainstream movies with huge budgets to see how they look. I spent some time on Centurion, the latest Neil Marshall flick, thanks to Simon Bowles the ever amazing production designer and that really influenced ideas to me. You got films like Benjamin Button winning Best Art Direction at the Oscars and you watch that and can really see the fine details and beauty in a movie, making it art.”

Tristan Versluis’ short film I Love You is basically one scene of two people sitting at a table in a darkened room - so, if you'll forgive the impertinence: what exactly was there to design?
“That's another good question. I Love You does seem very much a simple project and I will say that I really love working with Tristan as he has some fantastic twisted ideas. I spent a week attacking the table in I Love You and even have a nice chisel scar on my hand from being so into it. You get to really see that table over the credits. I had carved some sweethearts of various sizes on the woman's end and some deep scratches on the sides as if they were from the woman going towards the man.

“The table was the table we used in Pixel. I had to woodstain it a more walnut kinda teak colour as I did the same with the church chairs I managed to source, which I purposely chose as they had such upright backs, which meant we got a better controlled posture from the actors. They have nicks and cuts in them also, most of which are in the man's chair. I also sourced much of the table dressing which you see, the odd, everyday objects of torture. Amazingly I found a knuckle duster in an antique store in North London, a real treasure.

“I also supplied the black silk gown Axelle is wearing. I got to bloody up the brilliant heart that Tristan had made too. Also be on set to re-set things and make sure the table always looked cool. It’s all kinda subtle in I Love You, which fits with the tension and passion which we get from such a short.”

What was the biggest challenge on The Scar Crow and how did you deal with it?
“The Scar Crow amazingly was shot exactly this time last year and is already doing some festivals, which is down to Andy Thompson being so good at producing. I think I had about a month for preproduction. I had done some recce’s at the location which was a barn/shed which we re-dressed and a build which was in another empty grain barn, the rest was a bar and exterior stuff. As there was not a lot of money and period elements then that was a challenge in itself.

“I was fortunate enough to have a great and eager art department helping me on this and Lee who is a great prop maker and now is doing his own production design stuff, had a brilliant collection of magic books and odd things from his little country house in Cornwall. We managed to hire some stuff from a cider farm too for next to nothing. I spent a week before the shoot with a small team, making the rest of the props and decorating and painting the set. I was obsessed with the fact that the walls had to be textured and not flat, this made a huge difference. I also built a cool cage and the large cross that our Scar Crow resides at. I did make a star shape for the ritual scenes but it never got shot to its full purpose.

“Looking back now I was pretty pleased with my construction of a tank made of wooden pallets and lined with a kids paddling pool, then filled up with water. It’s like the opening shot to the movie. Andy had his heart set on this shot, so I kinda left my guys on stand-by and screwed that thing together in no time.

“Every movie you make has challenges every day and you have to be fast on your feet to make things happen. Scar Crow was my first feature to production design and I don't think it was that much of an ordeal. I'm a pretty organised person and I had time to prep accordingly for it and Andy was great to work with as was everybody else involved. It was a lot of fun to make. More stressful challenges come from little prep, re-writes of scripts during shooting, big ideas and no budget.

“Andy had a controlled set kinda going down with Scar Crow. I will say that somehow I managed to put in a set report visit on The Descent 2 at Ealing Studios in the middle of night shoots. But I'd say the most tiring thing was when we had to change and dirty the set down more for the scenes of the guys in the farmhouse. I think we finished shooting at 10pm, then we took everything out and re-dressed. I sent to others to bed and think I worked till 6am for a 9am call. Luckily I had stand-bys that I made have more sleep than me so I could be a zombie for the day.”

You have worked on several on-line serials for Pure Grass Films: how do those productions differ from a feature film and what considerations do you, as production designer, have to make because of the different way that people will view the images?
“My first experience with Pure Grass was Beyond the Rave. We shot this as a feature; now this was a difficult project! In regards to long hours and travelling about, not to mention the weeks of night shoots and little prep time. Anyway, like I said we shot this the same way you shoot low budget features over the course of weeks depending on actor availability and locations etc. I was the art director and since then have been their ongoing production designer for some pretty cool projects.

“Last year we shot an on-line series called Kirill, a cool sci-fi drama with David Schofield who was in American Werewolf in London. We shot it in a week in a cute little studio near Shepperton Studios. It was kinda based within the one set of the character. I was fortunate to have Oli Smyth as the creative director, who is another guy I love working with, as we are on the same page. There was some green screen and visual effects for this but not as much as Cell 2, another sci-fi action series starring Craig Conway (Doomsday, The Descent). It was for the same people, Pure Grass and Endemol. This had a huge amount of blue screen and I had to make set pieces that could be moved around and re-used for different set-ups. I built an awesome jungle for this too which I'm pretty proud of.

“How I managed to get this all done I don't know. I think I had a week and a half prep for a two week shoot! That includes some basic drafting for the construction manager. I tend to treat the work the same as a feature but then you always seem to have less time and money! We are still shooting on HD - or, in Morocco, Shadow Line was shot on 16mm which was cool. No matter what, they are all achievements and seem to be doing something right as Kirill has won an International Webby, was nominated for a BAFTA and a Digital Emmy award and I think there's another one too.

“I kinda like these little jobs inbetween the features as they (a) keep me busy, (b) are usually a lot of fun and (c) seem to be a less serious content but with some outstanding portfolio pieces. Basically they are intense and over with fast and likely to be on-line for me to forward to friends and family as opposed to waiting for the DVD to come out (not including Beyond the Rave). I treat them the same as features in a way to making them work out.”

I was surprised to find that infamous cut-price US studio The Asylum had made a film in Wales: Merlin and the War of the Dragons. What did you make of them?
“Haha - I love The Asylum now! I got onto that job as I had met Mark Atkins, a cinematographer and director of theirs, through mutual friends in LA. Hell, before I even knew who they were I had been to an Asylum party as part of the AFM film festival in 2007, partying with Jake West. I had a Facebook message from Mark thinking I did make-up. I was like no, I'm art department. So eventually after realising you need art department on your movie I drove to Wales and met up with the small crew of, I think six and then two kinda runners - smallest crew ever I think. It was nuts, making such a huge movie in like 12-14 days.

“The Asylum make a movie a month, which is just something in itself and kinda explains why some of it looks and sounds so bad. Wales was beautiful and rained a lot. Somehow we got shit done. Hell, we did a 24-hour day once too with our one day off afterwards. I made some great friends and contacts through that job and I thought it was so much fun despite the fact it was such hard work with no assistants. I think it's good for people to have gone through the motions of busting ass on set, like learning the hard way and sticking with it. I'm good friends with some of the crew members that work the Asylum gigs and I would totally do another one and another if my friends are directing and on set. It’s a kinda fun, retarded way to make movies. I watched Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus the other day with the on-set sound recordist and line producer - I got a live commentary which was awesome! A lot of Asylum films are almost how not to make a movie and as soon as I get on another one I'll do what I can to up its spec, despite the low budget; it makes it a challenge in itself. I want them to come back to the UK and make some crazy shit happen. It seems they are slowly getting the cult status nowadays which I seem to think is kinda cool and B-movietastic.”

What work have you got lined up and where do you see your career progressing?
“Right now I have a few things in the pipeline. It’s been a little bit slow this year so far. I'm still holding out for a project called Big Cats, a horror comedy by the guys who did Freak Out, a mega low budget but brilliantly made cult movie. Tristan Versluis has something up his sleeve too. There's always little bits inbetween that pop up too and I'm hoping to do a few more music videos - they have some great energy about them and visually can be totally out there. There could be another trip back to Morocco for me and I am also working on getting a visa for the USA so I can kick some ass over there.

“Adam Mason will have something up his sleeve soon and I'd like to be jumping on that wagon as he is a fantastic director who I totally support as it was he who got me here in the first place. Vivid should be coming together and I look forward to seeing that finished and out there as with a load of other little things. I'm also looking into getting some of my personal art back out there and hopefully I can do some more writing for Shocktilyoudrop.com. We'll see. Freelance film making is a strange, unpredictable business. No matter what, I always have something on the go.”

website: www.misartressmelanie.com

interview originally posted 10th June 2009

↧

interview: Brian Lloyd

February 23, 2014, 4:47 am

≫ Next: interview: David A Lloyd

≪ Previous: interview: Melanie Light

I interviewed Brian Lloyd, one of the stars of Doll Graveyard, by phone in February 2006.

How did you get involved with Doll Graveyard?
"It’s the first project I’ve done since I came out to start acting. That was about two years ago, so about a year after I came out here. I’d been working at stuff, just dropping off head-shots and looking for things online, seeing what the listings and the castings were for each day, studying three times a week and just busting my butt. I ended up with an audition and I read well for it, then they brought me back in. After the reading they said, ‘That’s the guy we want,’ so it was a pretty neat opportunity."

Were you familiar with Charlie Band’s work beforehand?
"I wasn’t before, in terms of connecting Charlie to the films. I knew Troll and Ghoulies and Puppet Master but I wasn’t familiar with that being Charlie. So needless to say, I didn’t know what to expect. It was a real small budget, a non-union film, but the first day of shooting I saw that things were going to be fun and it was a real professional setting. Considering how small it was, they were really efficient and Charlie knew exactly what he wanted. It ended up just being a fantastic first experience. I enjoyed working with Charlie more than I ever knew I would."

A lot of the cast were fairly inexperienced: were you all learning together?
"Yes, I definitely think so. The five of us who played the high school kids, we had good chemistry together, we all got along, which was a lot of fun. That obviously helps when you’re shooting. Charlie was patient and the crew was fantastic. They made it real easy to say, ‘Here’s what I’m looking for.’ They gave you the flexibility to say, ‘Okay, I’ll make some choices here and do this and see how it happens.’ I think people had fun with it; there weren’t big egos involved or anything like that. You’re sitting there going: ‘I can’t believe it: I’m making a movie. It’s actually a legitimate deal.’ It was fun that way."

It must also have been very hard work, especially with such a tight schedule.
"Yes, especially as we knew that Charlie wasn’t making this movie for a whole lot. If I remember correctly it was 35mm which is fairly expensive. You’ve got to be efficient, you’ve got to be professional about things. So it was a good first experience to learn those things for the future. I learned a ton, just being on set. That small environment where the camera is, how wide the frame is, working within that distinction of what we’re supposed to do. It taught me a lot for things I worked on in the future, it made me more comfortable and better."

How did you find working with the special effects and the puppets?
"I got asked that yesterday. I thought it was fun. Those things were about a foot and a half tall. It’s a little different because you’re obviously not getting a whole lot back like you would do from an actor where you can really focus and listen and give natural reactions. But at the same time, a character like mine who’s an over-the-top jerk, a meat-head jock that was fun to play; the specific interaction that I had with that little Ooga-Booga doll was a ton of fun to deal with. It was just different but we had fun with it."

What did you think when you saw the finished film?
"I didn’t know what to expect about that. It just happened that I have a younger brother who goes to school out here. He was playing soccer and my folks happened to fly in that day that they did a screening for the cast and crew and gave a party. When I saw it I was really, really pleasantly, not surprised but ecstatic about it, going, ‘This isn’t too damn bad at all!’ I didn’t know what to expect from my performance or the other performances. It was neat having my parents there, I think they were kind of tickled about it. They’re proud. And I just thought: gee, the producers are really happy about it before we had a seen a thing. It’s come together really well, Charlie’s happy with it. For a B horror movie, what you’re getting, what you’re going in for, this is not too darn bad at all!"

I understand that you studied accountancy and business administration, so what are you doing acting?
"That’s a great question. I think my dad’s still wondering the same thing! We’re really good friends with the Dean from the business school at North Dakota. My dad and he were from the same small town in North Dakota and were fraternity brothers together in college. Over Christmas I went back, got a tour of all the wonderful things that the business school has got. My dad looked at his buddy, the Dean, and said, ‘I want my money back.’ But they’re very supportive. When I saw The Sting when I was eight years old, with my Dad, for the first time, I just fell in love with Robert Redford. I just thought what an awesome, amazing, cool guy. I loved that movie. Acting was always something that I admired greatly and sort of had a calm desire for underneath but I always thought: ‘No, it’s not my gig, not what I do. I’m a sports guy. These other kids, they’re the good actors.’ As much fun as it was to go see a movie or a show, there was always a little desire underneath, saying, ‘I think I could do that. What an amazing neat thing, if a guy could do that.’ Part of that challenge was just wanting to get a taste for it.

"So then I’m though college and I did the fraternity and I did school and I had a great time. I started working outside of school, selling pharmaceuticals. I had an opportunity to go to New York City to go audition for All My Children. I had been working with a girl that was getting me some little print opportunities. So I went out there and visited a good friend of mine but I told no-one else about the fact that I was going to do this. I went out and read for this woman who was the casting director for All My Children; didn’t do well, I’m sure I was pretty green, But I met some agencies out there and cold read for them. They said, ‘You know what? We think you’ve got good instincts and if you come out to LA, we’ll rep you.’ I thought about it for about five minutes and said, ‘I’m going to go. It’s what I’ve got to do.’ It’s crazy, it really is. You sort of have to be half-cocked and crazy to do something like that. When I came out, I really didn’t know what I was doing but I tried to have as much of a plan as I could. I’m going out, I’m going to work at it and see what happens."

You’ve got that grounding in another profession if you need to fall back on it.
"I always say that I’m not worried about following a different path in life. I truly believe that if you do what you love, money and stability will follow. If you do the right thing for the right reasons, opportunities will present themselves. I think God’s there to provide for a person. If you have faith in that and you do the right things for the right reasons, with a little bit of stability and some hard work - you’ll get there."

Where has your career taken you since Doll Graveyard?
"Subsequently I have shot two other, small independent films. One was a horror/sci-fi film and the other was a sort of Van Wilder-meets-American Pie college-type movie. They were fun to do and had a little bit bigger budgets. We’ll see if they come out or not. I know they were shopping around and they’re in post-production, The second one, the college-type movie is called Bald and the other one is called Candy Stripers. In Bald I had a supporting role; I played Joey Powers, the jock who was kicked off the wrestling team for rubbing his manhood up against the other wrestlers. I end up being the boyfriend of the real flamboyant gay guy in the movie. So that was fun, it’s a really different thing to try out. In Candy Stripers I play a jolly, all-American lead in it. We’re in this basketball team, there’s a fight on the court, we end up at the hospital, get attacked by aliens - and mayhem ensues. It was good to do because I got a lot of good reel from it. It was a good experience. But I’ve got to say that playing the character Rich in Doll Graveyard was the most fun I’ve had because he was just such a rocking character to play."

What’s your ultimate ambition?
"After getting a taste for television - I got a chance to get a couple of small roles on CSI: New York and a show called Huff - honestly my number one big goal is to support myself as a full-time, working actor, living comfortably. My second big goal is to have the opportunity to have enough success where I can move back to North Dakota. That would be the ultimate: if I was able to move back there and live there and still be able to say, 'Okay, here’s a project to work on.' Actors do that once they have reached a certain level and have representation that can set up opportunities for them. So that’s my biggest goal.”

interview originally posted 9th April 2006

↧

interview: David A Lloyd

February 23, 2014, 4:54 am

≫ Next: Magic Island

≪ Previous: interview: Brian Lloyd

One of the eponymous relatives in Canadian indie outfit The Cousin Company, David A Lloyd kindly answered a few questions about the cousins’ first feature, The Legend of Viper’s Hill, in October 2006.

What was the initial inspiration for The Legend of Viper’s Hill and how close does the finished film come to what you originally conceived?
“The initial inspiration for The Legend of Viper’s Hill was just to do a good, old-fashioned ghost story. With it being our first real feature we weren’t planning on reinventing the wheel. That’ll come later. I think we achieved mixed results. Some things turned out better than I hoped while some things got lost in the translation. The cast was amazing and any faults with it are mine.”

How did you find that making a feature differed from making shorts?
“Not a big difference. We pretty much approached it the same as we would a short. The only real change, I’d have to say, was that The Legend of Viper’s Hill had the largest cast of anything we’ve ever done. So there was a little more sitting and waiting for your scene.”

With your cast and crew, what balance did you have between a regular Cousin Company team and people who were cast/selected specifically for this film?
“Because we work fast and cheap and fly pretty much under the radar we work with a lot of the same people, but we try to inject some new blood with each project. David Rusk has been with us pretty much since the beginning. He’s our go-to guy. If we need someone to play a creepy neighbour we call Dave. Corrupt cop, Dave. Sleazy lawyer, Dave again. However I think he has figured out we’re typecasting him.

"Donna Henry went to college with my partner and cousin Norm Scanlon and I. Initially Donna was only going to play the ghost of Rosie. We had someone else in mind for Meredith. But that sort of fell through. Then it hit me. Here we have Donna, who was great in our short A Fine Murder, and we put her in a role with no dialogue. After we kicked ourselves for a while we called Donna and said, ‘Hey, you’re playing Meredith too.’ Donna’s a trooper and after giving 110 per cent on an exhausting first day she came back for more. She’s a good one in my book.

“The Legend of Viper’s Hill was our second go-around with Tina Michaud. Her first appearance was in the Cousin Company production The Last Heartbeat where she played a psycho who stabs a sleazy wannabe - played by David Rusk, of course - in the chest and pulls out his heart. Tina’s a very high energy performer who gives it her all. By the way, Dave lived to tell about it. I warned Donna before we started shooting: ‘If the script calls for Tina to drag you down the hall, be prepared to be dragged down the hall.’

“Our new face this time was Tom Griffin. He was a discovery of Norm’s and in all honesty I was a little unsure at first. But he proved me wrong. Tom was right there putting it all out and he was a major boost behind the scenes as well. Tom will be back.”

What problems of time, equipment, budget etc did you face and how did you overcome them?
“We own all of our equipment so that was never an issue. The biggest chore was getting everybody together. Big chunks of the movie were shot over three non-consecutive weekends with everybody. Then bits and pieces as needed. A day here, a day or two there. We started shooting Friday May 13, 2005. Friday the 13th. How’s that for an omen? Then finished shooting almost a year to the day later. Everybody was in for the long haul and I love them all for it.”

How has The Legend of Viper’s Hill been received so far and what plans do you have for distribution?
“The Legend of Viper’s Hill has been received pretty well. We’re not expecting to get rich with it. Right now it’s available at Indieflix.com. It’s a non-exclusive agreement so we’re hoping for a couple of other distributors. Right now I’m just getting the word out.”

What is next for the Cousin Company?
“Next for the Cousin Company? Take what we’ve learned and improve upon it. Norm and I are tossing around a couple of ideas about what to tackle next. You never know, sooner or later we just might do that wheel thing.”

website: www.thecousincompany.ca

interview originally posted 22nd October 2006

↧

Magic Island

February 23, 2014, 2:59 pm

≫ Next: Makdee: The Web of the Witch

≪ Previous: interview: David A Lloyd

Director: Sam Irvin
Writers: Brent Friedman, Neil Ruttenberg
Producer: Debra Dion
Cast: Zachary Ty Bryan, Andrew Divoff, French Stewart
Country: USA
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Ladies and gentlemen, the Dick Van Dyke Award for the Most Preposterous British Accent in a Motion Picture goes to… the entire cast of Magic Island, a mid-1990s children’s fantasy from Charlie Band’s Moonbeam Entertainment.

Throughout the history of the talkies, there have been many hilarious attempts by otherwise competent American actors to replicate a British accent, any sort of British accent: from DVD himself and his notorious catchphrase “Cor Blimey, Maori Poor Pens!” to Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as Victorian England’s only Californian surfer dude. And never let us forget the monstrously bad Mary Reilly in which Julia Roberts’ accent took a walking tour of the entire United Kingdom, something which she actually acknowledged in media interviews but tried to excuse by saying, “We wanted to give the impression that Mary had lived and worked all over Britain and picked up lots of different accents.” (I’m not making this up. I saw her on TV saying this with a straight face, which I suppose shows that she is a good actress after all.)

Anyway…

Thirteen-year-old Zachary Ty Bryan from Home Improvement plays Jack Carlisle, the sort of clean-cut blond American 13-year-old traditionally played by child stars from Home Improvement. As an American playing an American, his accent is okay and the same goes for his obligatory single parent (Schae Harrison: The Bold and the Beautiful) who is too busy with work to notice that her son has no friends. When Jack’s mum skips dinner for a business meeting he is left with their Haitian cook, Lucretia (Ja’net Dubois, mostly a TV actress although she can be spotted as ‘Momma Bosley’ in the second Charlie’s Angels movie), whose accent sounds okay although I can’t guarantee authenticity as I have never met anyone from Haiti. Still, West Indian with a hint of French seems reasonable.

Lucretia gives Jack a book about pirates into which he falls, plummeting out of the sky, together with his shoulder bag. Boy and bag land on Blackbeard’s head, knocking the legendary pirate to the sand and thereby saving his opponent in a scene which will have you thinking, “That’s a point – I must watch Time Bandits again.”

Blackbeard is played as a sort of Happy Shopper pantomime villain by the Wishmaster himself, Andrew Divoff. He has a useless, foppish, heavily bewigged first mate named Saperstein (Third Rock from the Sun’s French Stewart, whose other DTV claim to fame is the title role in Inspector Gadget 2) and two dense comedy pirates, Duckbone (Abraham Benrubi: George of the Jungle, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died and later a regular on ER) and Jolly Bob (Sean O’Kane - who is actually Scottish!). Facing off against them are a trio of ‘buccaneers’ – so they’re like pirates, but good – led by Morgan (Edward Kerr: seaQuest DSV) who is the King of England’s nephew. (There is a scene later on where Morgan bemoans how his father never had time for him, thus mirroring Jack’s situation. Except, well, Morgan’s father was brother to the divinely appointed ruler of a globe-spanning empire, providing close support to a blood relative who was continually embroiled in domestic and foreign politics and usually fighting at least one war, while Jack’s mum needs to get the Atkinson account faxed by Thursday. It’s not really the same thing.) Morgan is confident if not forceful but makes up for this with his choice of companions, a fierce-some wench named Gwyn (Lee Armstrong: Leprechaun 3) who is “the finest swordswoman in all of Ireland” and a black bodybuilder named Dumas (Oscar Dillon, who was one of Harvey Dent’s henchmen in Batman Forever that same year).

Between them, the pirates and the buccaneers are responsible for, I would say, seven of the ten oddest accents ever heard in a feature film. Gwyn’s is possibly the worst which is odd because: aren’t there some Irish people actually living in America? With the exception of Dumas, who is meant to be West Indian (we eventually find out that he is an ancestor of Lucretia and one of his relatives wrote Jack’s book), the actors produce accents which can only be described as ‘Britoid’. That is: they are clearly meant to be British accents, and they sound more British than, say, French or Japanese, but that doesn’t mean that they even remotely resemble any of the many accents spoken throughout the British Isles. They’re not Southern English, Scots or Irish although there are hints of those accents so presumably those are stronger influences than, say Brummie, Geordie or Welsh. (Dumas has a vague accent which seems uncertain whether it should be West Indian, American or Britoid. By comparison with the others it’s quite reasonable.)

You just wonder whether any of these actors has ever actually met anyone from the UK. Or seen a British film or TV show. Perhaps American actors train for British roles by watching Mary Poppins, Mary Reilly and re-runs of Frasier (famous for managing to extract a hilarious Britoid accent from an actress who was actually British).

Anyway, the pirates and the buccaneers are both searching for a treasure on Magic Island, a storybook isle populated by ghosts and monsters. Morgan and friends consider ‘Mad Jack’ to be a sorcerer and he impresses them over the course of the film with modern day miracles such as a Walkman and a cigarette lighter (though there is never any suggestion that he is enough of a rebel to actually smoke – it’s just a plot device). Climbing a pizza tree for food, Jack encounters a ‘sandshark’ – basically a big lizard which burrows through loose sand like a sort of low-rent Tremors graboid, except this actually has a shark fin on its back. Jack defeats it using bubblegum. He subsequently encounters Lily, a young mermaid who saves him from drowning and thereby is magically granted legs for one day. Which is convenient.

Played by 13-year-old Sally-Ann Friend, Lily is a real problem because she spends the whole film wearing a sea-shell bra and a loose, flimsy skirt. There is a romantic subplot between her and Jack which ends with a couple of chaste kisses which is just creepy. I mean, bless, young love and all that, but I think that I speak for adult heterosexual males everywhere when I say that watching skinny, scantily clad 13-year-old girls makes us uncomfortable. Unless they’re playing a coquettish Lolita in some serious drama, 13-year-old actresses should not really be strolling along beaches - wearing what is, effectively, a small bikini – while making goo-goo eyes. (Lily’s accent, while not Britoid – god I love that word now! – is nevertheless very, very odd. Fair enough, it’s not clear what accent a mermaid would actually have, but why not just stick with the actress’ natural accent? Or maybe that is her natural accent.)

Among the other strangeness encountered on the island, as the buccaneers and pirates make their separate ways towards the treasure, occasionally encountering each other, is a trio of carved talking heads – one silly, one angry, one female – voiced by no less a trio than Martine Beswick (Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Cyclone), Isaac Hayes (Shaft, South Park) and Saturday Night Live alumnus Terry Sweeney. Eventually a stone door is located by both parties, which Jack successfully opens by lifting the toenail of a large stone statue sat astride the entrance. This then comes to life – and so, in turn, does the film.

Animated by Joel Fletcher, who also worked on Dragonworld and now does CG animation on movies like King Kong and X-Men III, this 30-foot high statue is the undoubted highlight of the film. It’s very Harryhausen-esque, almost like Talos’ little cousin, and is not only well-animated but very well matted into the action as well, actually interacting with the background and the characters. Without wishing to belittle Magic Island– which is a fun kids film that TF Simpson thought was great – the sequence with the stone giant is like something from a different, better film. It has certainly notched this movie’s MJS rating up a couple of points.

After Jack defeats the stone guardian, the opposing teams meet up again inside the chamber where a vast amount of treasure is stored. This was hoarded by a warlock named Carabas who is in fact still there as a golden face on the wall – which is actually director Sam Irvin sticking his head through a hole in the set. Blackbeard suffers for his greed by being turned into living gold, unable to move as the walls start to grind towards each other, threatening to crush pirate and buccaneer alike. Everyone escapes but, alas, Lily’s legs have vanished and she’s back to being half-fish, so Jack pulls her out on a rug, just before the walls finally close.

Having returned Lily to the sea, and with Saperstein, Duckbone and Jolly Bob eager to be Morgan’s new crew, Jack takes his leave back into the book – and wakes up in his bed. His mother has skipped the meeting and come home to be with her son, which is a happy ending although it’s not exactly narratively satisfying because Mrs Carlisle’s change of heart is unexplained and unrelated to her son’s magical adventure. Normally you would expect the character who has the adventure to learn something about themselves and alter their attitudes or habits, but here it’s the other half of the faulty relationship who mends her ways, for no real reason.

Lily gave Jack a seashell to remember her by, which had all the hallmarks of being the item that would make him think ‘Was it really a dream?’ but in fact that is not mentioned in the epilogue whereas Jack’s torn and wet jeans are clear evidence that what he went through was real.

With its comedy villains, harmless swashbuckling and spooky encounters, Magic Island is good, solid fun for undemanding kids. I can’t see it going down so well with youngsters of Jack’s age but that’s okay. You should always make your child protagonist older than your child audience because kids aspire to be older. For adults, the highlights are the stop-motion stone giant and, of course, the hilarious bad accents. Irvin’s direction is fine, the sandshark and other special effects are okay and the Mexican locales are suitably photogenic and magical.

Zachary Ty Bryan, who was halfway through his eight-year Home Improvement run, had starred in Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter the previous year (some sort of contractual thing I guess as his Home Improvement co-star Taran Noah Smith went on to make Little Bigfoot 2 a couple of years after this). Bryan later had roles in The Rage: Carrie 2, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and episodes of The Outer Limits, Buffy and Smallville. Andrew Divoff’s massive genre CV includes Neon Maniacs, Graveyard Shift, Oblivion 1 and 2, Xtro 3, Nemesis 4, Brian Yuzna’s godawful Faust and a 2002 version of Dracula starring Patrick Bergin.

Director Sam Irvin was a protégé of Brian de Palma and has directed a wide range of features, ads, video etc; from our point of view the interesting ones are Oblivion I and II, Elvira’s Haunted Hills and a Making Of featurette for Gods and Monsters (a film on which he was co-executive producer). He also produced Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy. Neil Ruttenberg wrote Deathstalker II and also Prehysteria 3 on which he collaborated with Brent Friedman. Friedman’s other credits include Syngenor, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Prehysteria 2, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and episodes of three series on which he got a producer credit: Dark Skies, Enterprise and the 2002 version of The Twilight Zone.

Cinematographer James Lawrence Spencer lit a whole bunch of Band films in the 1990s, including kidflicks such as Prehysteria 2 and 3 and more adult fare: Beach Babes from Beyond, Dreammaster: The Erotic Invader, Blonde Heaven and Beach Babes 2. He DP-ed second unit on Castle Freak and Lurking Fear, and as a grip/gaffer/sparks he has worked on the likes of Creepozoids, Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Critters III and IV, Puppet Master II, Trancers II, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Amityville Dollhouse and The Dead Hate the Living.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 12th October 2006

↧

Makdee: The Web of the Witch

February 23, 2014, 3:11 pm

≫ Next: Malice@Doll

≪ Previous: Magic Island

Director: Vishal Bhardwaj
Writer: Vishal Bhardwaj
Producer: Vishal Bhardwaj, Sanjay Routray
Cast: Shweta Prasad, Makrand Deshpande, Shabana Azmi
Year of release: 2002
Country: India
Reviewed from: UK theatrical screening

Munni and Chunni are identical twins - bright as a button, about eleven years old - who are distinguishable only because Munni has a mole on her upper lip. Munni is clever, good, sensible and respectful, while Chunni is naughty, cheeky and lazy and sometimes disguises herself as her sister using a fake mole. The girls live with their widowed father, a toymaker, and their almost blind grandmother. Chunni’s best friend is Mugale Azam, a fat orphan who was adopted by the alarmingly bewhiskered local butcher Kallu, who uses him almost as a slave. Chunni sometimes sneaks out at night to meet with Mugale Azam and trade toffees for homework.

Just outside the village is a spooky old house, home to a mad witch - called Makdee, though she is not named on screen - who changes people into animals. All the villagers are terrified of the place because everyone who has ever entered the house has emerged transmogrified. We see this for ourselves in the prologue, when a young thief seeks refuge from an angry mob in the witch-house - and re-emerges as a goat (still wearing his vest!). The voice of reason is Masterji, the girls’ teacher, a rationalist who dismisses the idea of witches and ghosts.

Mugale Azam’s puppy Aladdin disappears into the witch-house and so does Munni, who subscribes to Masterji’s scepticism, when an angry Kallu chases her, thinking that she is Chunni (Chunni has let all of Kallu’s hens out of their cages, then persuaded the butcher that she is really Munni - are you following this?) The witch turns out to be a scary-looking young woman who is about eight feet tall with wrinkled grey skin, a frizz of black hair, differently coloured eyes and long, claw-like fingernails. The camerawork when we see her is very good - atmospheric, scary, speeded-up tracking shots around her to a pounding beat.

Feeling guilty, Chunni bravely enters the house to rescue her sister, only to find that she has been turned into a chicken. The witch allows Chunni to take Munni home if she will bring her instead one hundred real chickens. This sets up Chunni’s great double dilemma: she must fool her father and others into thinking that she is both Chunni and Munni, while also sneaking out every night to steal a chicken or two from Kallu. The little girl realises how important family is - we see flashbacks to her mother’s death - and learns the meaning of responsibility. Alas, the chicken that is Munni disappears and Chunni discovers that Kallu has taken it, assuming it to be one of his escapees. Now she has no way of knowing which hen is Munni, who will suffer the same fate that all the other chickens will - beheading by the butcher! And she still owes the witch 92 chickens.

The solution to the mystery comes when Masterji enters the house and is turned into a dog. Mugale Azam recognises this as Aladdin, which means that the witch isn’t really transforming people into animals, she’s actually kidnapping them and just sending animals out to maintain the charade. The two children, emboldened by this knowledge, cautiously enter the house and discover the horrific truth for themselves, while Aladdin runs back to the village, where Kallu recognises him and comes to the same conclusion.

The whole thing is an elaborate deception, involving trapdoors and spooky make-up, to provide slave labour to help uncover a buried treasure. With Kallu’s help, Chunni saves the day and the witch is punished; she is beaten up by the kids she kidnapped and imprisoned and there is one shot from her point of view of the kids moving in which is pure Lord of the Flies-style horror. As an epilogue, we see that the treasure has been sold to a museum to pay for new facilities in the village, Kallu realises how awful he has been to Mugale Azam, and Chunni is declared a hero.

What an absolute gem of a film. It’s like an old Children’s Film Foundation movie, with bad adults and good adults but kids saving the day. Of course, being an Indian movie it has to have several songs in it, but they are well-integrated and help to define character without detracting from the plot (and unlike many Indian films, it is only 90 minutes long!). The actors are all great, especially Shweta Prasad who stars as both Chunni and Munni; she is a real star and has also appeared in TV series such as Khani Ghar Ghar Ki and CID. I’m very impressed at the direction and editing that allows the twins to appear on screen together without, obviously, expensive CGI. I assumed, until I checked the cast list, that I was watching India’s answer to Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Alaap Majgavkar provides good comic relief as Mugale Azam. Among the adults, writer/director/actor Makrand Deshpande clearly has a ball as the rotten-but-redeemed Kallu, while Shabana Azmi is very effective as the witch. Azmi is a big star in India, having acted in a wide range of both arthouse and populist films for directors such as Satyajit Ray, and has even made a few western films, including Madame Sousatzka and Son of the Pink Panther. She is the only Indian actress to have won four National Awards (the Indian equivalent of the Oscar or BAFTA) and is also a politician, campaigning strongly for women’s rights and for the rights of the poor.

Director Vishal Bhardwaj started as a composer - a much more important role in Bollywood, where most films are musicals, than in the west. Makdee is his feature debut as director after helming two short films for Indian TV. The camerawork, sound and production design (by Samir Chanda, who later worked on Krrish) are all very good, especially the spooky interior of the witch’s house. If anything lets the film down for international audiences it’s the subtitles which contain a lot of grammatical errors, suggesting they have been translated rather literally, though they are nevertheless easy to follow.

Makdee: The Web of the Witch received glowing reviews when it opened in India, many pointing out how rare it is for the world’s most prolific national film industry to actually make a kids’ film. It has played various international film festivals, winning an award in Chicago. This print - on-screen English title just Makdee - was screened as an afternoon matinee at Phoenix Arts in April 2003 and attracted an audience which was an interesting mix of both ages and races. The children all seemed to love it and it certainly has broad, cross-cultural appeal, as well as being a great way to introduce children to the idea of foreign language films, so it would be nice if it could get a more general release. Funny and scary in just the right measure, it is, as I say, a little gem.

(According to an interview with Shwetap Prasad - who lists her favourite films as Terminator 2, Edward Scissorhands, Jurassic Park, Matilda and Scooby-Doo - she is now shooting Karishma ka Karishma, an Indian version of dodgy 1980s American sitcom Small Wonder, presumably as the lead character, a little girl who is really a superintelligent android. I would love to see an episode of that!)

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted before November 2004

↧

Malice@Doll

February 24, 2014, 12:54 pm

≫ Next: The Man from Beyond

≪ Previous: Makdee: The Web of the Witch

Director: Keitaro Motonaga
Writer: Chiaki J Konaka
Year of release: 2001
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: DVD screener

In the future, in a long-abandoned entertainment complex, the robotic prostitutes (or ‘Dolls’) and various functional/administrative robots continue their now meaningless existence. Then one day, one of the Dolls - Malice - becomes human.

That’s the premise of this extraordinary and beautifully realised fable. In essence it’s a unique twist on the Pinocchio story, with robots becoming human against their wishes (initially). Malice Doll is sent by the head robot, Joe Admin, to be repaired when fluid starts leaking from her eye. But something bizarre happens and when Malice regains consciousness she is, well, conscious. She looks different (though still beautiful), her body is soft and pliant, she can feel pain - both physical and emotional. She has become human.

The other Dolls initially distrust her, but one by one succumb to the desire to change, as do the non-humanoid robots which attend them. The humanity is spread, virus-like, by kissing (“It is all I can do,” says Malice numerous times) but the other dolls and robots become deformed and monstrous. An additional, constant threat is a destroyer robot, Devo Leukocyte, which prowls the corridors - and once the Dolls are human they can feel pain and even die. Eventually Malice progresses beyond humanity and becomes a spirit, soaring away up through the complex.

I’m not 100 per cent certain what it all means, but Malice@Doll is a magical piece of computer animation with a mystical, PK Dick-ian theme, exploring the difference between ‘robot’ and ‘human’ in the way that Hollywood tosh like A.I. conspicuously failed to do. The emptiness of the entertainment complex and of the Dolls’ lives is wonderfully presented. There is no clue as to when or why the complex was abandoned or whether humanity still exists at all. The Dolls and robots have no real idea why they’re there - as they apparently never did - and with the patience of machines they are simply waiting for something or someone to arrive.

Why/how does Malice transform from Doll to human? I don’t know and I’m not sure it matters. It relates in some way to a ghost(?) of a little girl which she sees, but more than that I cannot say. There may be a (M)Alice in Wonderland connection here as screenwriter Chiaki J Konaka also worked on the TV series Alice 6 and the Playstation game and anime series Alice in Cyberland (as well as writing some Ultraman episodes and Evil Dead Trap 2). But other than the image of a rabbit at one point, it’s not immediately evident.

Rendered in 3D CGI, the animation is perfectly suited to the stilted body-movements and mask-like visages of the Dolls and the robots. Interestingly, the ‘camera’ is locked off on every shot, making the film more theatrical and staged. The final sequence, when Malice becomes a spirit, mixes computer animation with traditional cel animation to interesting effect. The character design is credited to Shinobu Nishioka while Yasu Moriki was responsible for ‘creature and conceptual design.’

I speak as someone with a pathological dislike of anime (don’t ask me to explain it: I love Japanese movies, I love cartoons, but Japanese cartoons leave me cold). But Malice@Doll doesn’t seem like anime to me, more like a puppet movie (Konaka has expressed a fondness for Czech animation - Jiri Trnka and the like). Perhaps the new wave of CGI animation emerging from Japan will find a whole new audience in the west, previously put off by western marketing of anime.

Malice@Doll is something new and different and should be watched, and enjoyed, with an open mind.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 23rd December 2009

↧

The Man from Beyond

February 24, 2014, 1:07 pm

≫ Next: Man Who Sold the World

≪ Previous: Malice@Doll

Director: Burton L King
Writer: Harry Houdini
Producer: Harry Houdini
Cast: Harry Houdini, Jane Connelly, Arthur Maude
Country: USA
Year of release: 1922
Reviewed from: UK VHS (VRI, 1993)

Believe it or not, Harry Houdini also made films - several of them - and the best thing that can be said about them, based on this example, is that as an actor he was a great escapologist. He also wrote this movie. It seems to have been his only attempt at writing a ‘scenario’ and, well, he should have stuck to acting.

The film opens with an Arctic expedition reduced to two blokes, one sled and a couple of huskies. The chaps are Dr Gregory Sinclair (Erwin Connelly, who appeared with Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr and with Valentino in Son of the Sheik) and a grim-looking French-Canadian named Francois Duval (Frank Montgomery, a prolific director-turned actor) who is just about to leave the ill Sinclair to die when he spots an old ship, frozen into the ice.

Duval and the suddenly much-better-thank-you Sinclair explore and find a ship’s log that shows the vessel was abandoned just over one hundred years ago in 1820 and a thousand miles from their present position. On the deck, Duval examines a chunk of ice and - blimey, there’s a fella inside it! He chips away the ice then drags the body into the captain’s cabin where he and Sinclair manage to revive the ‘man from beyond’ somehow.

This is our hero, Howard Hillary. (Houdini had a thing for his initials and in other films played characters named Harvey Hanford, Harry Harper and Heath Haldane.) A letter to his sister which Sinclair finds in the cabin tells us that he joined the Barkentine as First Mate then fell in love with the daughter of one of the passengers, Felice Norcross (Erwin Connelly’s wife Jane, who was also in Sherlock Jr), inciting the jealousy of the ship’s captain (Luis Alberni, who had an uncredited role in the 1934 The Black Cat). In a dreadful storm, Hillary and Felice were lowered over the side in a boat but she begged him to return to the ship and save her father (Yale Benner). Back on board, in an argument with the captain, Hillary was knocked out and everyone else then abandoned ship. This is shown in flashback and makes about as much sense as what I have just typed.

Now here’s where the film gets seriously screwy because Sinclair and Duval resolve to not tell Hillary, for now, that a century has passed. They take him back to upper class US society - and they still don’t tell him. You would think that at the very least the changes in fashion would confuse or puzzle him - oh, and the motor cars that he sees - but apparently not.

They reach the home of Sinclair’s brother-in-law, Dr Crawford Strange, just as Sinclair’s niece is about to be married to her oily neighbour Dr Gilbert Trent (Arthur Maude). The marriage is interrupted and then abandoned because - wouldn’t you just know it? - Miss Strange is a spit for Hillary’s lost love Felice (and played by Jane Connelly too, naturally). Oh, and she’s called Felice too. Hillary’s ravings see him dragged off to a lunatic asylum where he is securely tied in a straitjacket and strapped to the floor of a cell (very humane treatment of a mentally ill person, I must say).

At this point, our interest perks up. Houdini has been tied up: how will he escape? Felice, curious to know more about this man who claims to know her, goes to the asylum to see him but when the warders open the door to his surprisingly spacious cell... he has gone! What a cheesy swizz! You pay good money to see an escapologist and he escapes while we’re watching other people.

In actual fact his escape is shown in its entirety a little later when he sneaks into Felice’s boudoir and he explains it with a flashback. But it is still thoroughly dull. He struggles and wriggles on the floor until eventually he is free of the straps and the straitjacket, then he ties them together into a rope and uses that to escape through the high, barred window. I’m sure Harry H really did escape, and it’s shown in one continuous take - but so what? If we had seen him do this on stage after members of the audience had fastened the straps and attested to the soundness of the straitjacket that would be jolly impressive, but this is the movies. It’s not real. It’s all pretend. We know he wasn’t really encased in ice, so why should we think - or, frankly, care - about his apparent bondage? Any actor, anyone at all, could have done the same thing. We don’t even get any close-ups of the situation to allow us to examine the buckles and belts, it’s just one slightly fuzzy bloke wriggling out of a slightly fuzzy white get-up on the floor of a room. As spectacle, it’s rubbish.

It is while Hillary is explaining this to the woman he still believes to be Felice Norcroft that she, Felice Strange, shows him the date on the newspaper. My Lord, it’s 1922, more than a century since he was on that boat. So Felice Norcroft and everyone he knew is dead. And there’s an explanation for all the horseless carriages and electric lights and everything else that apparently was invented while he was in the Arctic.

Now, adding to the complications is the disappearance of Dr Crawford Strange, Felice’s father. He set off on the expedition with Sinclair and Duval but turned back when a message reached him that Felice was ill. But Felice has not been ill and sent no such message. So what happened and where is he? I’m sure it has nothing to do with that conniving rascal Trent next door, or the cellar where, we are told, he conducts experiments on animals (something that has no bearing on anything and is never mentioned again).

Trent endeavours to have Hillary imprisoned by introducing Duval to a femme fatale, Marie Le Grande (Nita Naldi, a genuine screen star best known to genre fans for her role opposite John Barrymore in the 1920 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) who persuades the ‘half-breed’ to claim that Hillary murdered Strange. The ‘man from beyond’ is marched off to prison; could another perilous escape be on the cards? Sadly no, because on the way there he successfully persuades Duval to admit to lying, whereupon the guards let Hillary go and march Duval off towards the State Pen.

Hillary and Sinclair investigate Trent’s house (for some reason) and spot a rat at the foot of the stairs with a scrap of cloth tied to its leg. On inspection (it’s a remarkably tame and hygienic rat) this proves to bear the embroidered initials ‘CS’ which they deduce to mean Crawford Strange. Examining where the rat came from, they find that the stairs are actually a cover which can be lifted up, and underneath them is a flight of stairs down to a hidden cellar. And in this cellar they find a barrel which is actually a fake barrel concealing a doorway to a low tunnel. Boy, whatever is down here certainly needs to be kept hidden. Lo and behold, it’s Dr Crawford Strange who has been imprisoned under Trent’s house for three years but finally decided to rip his shirt pocket off and tie it round a (tame, hygienic) rat’s leg shortly before his newly returned neighbour and a friend broke into the house.

Last time Trent was down there, Crawford refused to sign over his property so Trent declared that he would get his grubby mitts on half of it anyway by forcibly marrying Felice. Hillary races to wherever it is that Trent has taken the young lady and has a fight with him atop some high rocks while Felice runs alongside the river, chased by Trent’s servant. Having disposed of Trent, Hillary also runs along the riverbank but Felice, to escape, has climbed into a canoe and paddled off into the river. Alas, this just happens to be slightly upstream of Niagara Falls. I don’t know which is worse: the arbitrary convenience of the canoe or the utter irresponsibility of leaving such a thing lying around a few hundred yards from the most dangerous waterfall in the world.

Hillary bravely leaps into the water, swims through the rapids, climbs into the canoe then climbs out again bringing Felice with him and they cling to a rock while the canoe tumbles over the falls. How they then get back to the bank is not shown. An epilogue sees Felice, whom we have discovered is the great-great-niece of the original Felice, admitting to the possibility of reincarnation as she talks with Hillary while her father and uncle look on admiringly. A close-up shows us that Hillary is reading a copy of Spiritualism and Rationalism, a 1920 non-fiction book by notorious spiritualist dupe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And so they all live happily ever after, but what a rubbish film. The reason you have probably never heard of this and almost certainly never seen it is simply because it’s crap. The story makes little sense but worse than that it is entirely devoid of thrills, tension and excitement - which are the sort of things that you associate with Harry Houdini and probably what people associated with him in 1922.

Houdini’s film career is a little-documented aspect of his weird life. According to Wikipedia (the online equivalent of a man in a pub, but you have to start somewhere), he first appeared on screen in 1901 in Merveilleux Exploits du Celebre Houdini a Paris but that’s awfully early in cinematic history. Any such film would have been about three minutes long and quite probably didn’t star Houdini but just someone pretending to be him. In 1916 he was allegedly a ‘technical consultant’ on the now-lost serial The Mysteries of Myra, in which the villains are adept in black magic but there is, as far as I can tell, absolutely no evidence for this rumour whatsoever. Nor do I give any credence to the wiki-claim that he was offered the role of Nemo in the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Houdini was not an actor and that is just hogwash.

Houdini made, it is generally accepted, five films. The Inaccurate Movie Database (and various websites deriving their information from same) lists a sixth, a 1921 picture called The Soul of Bronze which Houdini allegedly starred in and directed. Of the five proven Houdini movies, the first was a 15-chapter serial, The Master Mystery, in which Houdini’s character did not have the initials HH (he’s called Quentin Locke). He played a sort of pre-FBI man investigating a bunch of crooks who have a large robot at their beck and call. This at least sounds like fun because you can’t go wrong with a robot, however goofy it may be. Burton L King and Harry Grossman shared directorial duties.

He followed this with two features for Famous Players-Lasky. In The Grim Game (1919) he played a man wrongly imprisoned for murder who uses his amazing escape skills to, well, escape. It was directed by Irvin Willat and the cast included Augustus Phillips (who played the title role in the 1910 Frankenstein) and regular Laurel and Hardy co-star Mae Busch. The second feature was Terror Island, set in the South Seas and directed by James Cruze. There is no reason to suppose that either of these films is any more thrilling than The Man from Beyond.

Unhappy with working for The Man, Houdini set up his own film company which made made this tedium and a final feature, Haldane of the Secret Service, which Houdini actually directed himself. Since he was a fairly wooden actor and a hopeless scenario-writer, we can safely presume that he was also a rotten director. What I have read about Houdini indicates that he was frustrated as a magician because all that anyone wanted to see was his escapology - and the reason they didn’t want to see his magic was that, although technically proficient, he lacked the showmanship that a great magician needs to ‘sell’ his tricks to the punters. And I think that lack of showmanship is evident here.

The Man from Beyond exhibits competent, workmanlike direction by Burton L King, who had directed most of the episodes of The Master Mystery. But the scenario, adapted by Coolidge Street from Houdini’s own story, combines an unexciting plot with deus ex machina developments. Most astoundingly of all it completely and utterly fails to explore the man-out-of-time possibilities of the basic premise. The fact that Howard Hillary was frozen in ice for one hundred years is totally irrelevant to the main story.

This is the only one of Houdini’s films which is readily available. The British VHS was released in 1993 by an outfit called VRI on their ‘Golden Age Films’ label (which also released Murnau’s Faust and a few other titles). The music, which was composed and performed by Andrew Youdell, an experienced British accompanist to silent films, is not memorable but at least it was specially written so it doesn’t jar with the images. The film is now available on DVD from Alpha; I don’t know what their soundtrack is like.

However, there seems to be some serious debate about the movie’s running time. This tape’s sleeve claims 80 minutes but the film actually runs 60 minutes and appears to be projected at the correct speed. The website of the Houdini Museum describes this as a 90-minute film. The IMDB, for what it’s worth, says 74 minutes. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The film is just boring and a longer version is just more boredom.

Finally, it is worth noting that although Houdini is the subject of a 2005 graphic novel entitled The Man from Beyond, that has no connection with this film.

MJS rating: C-

review originally posted 10th March 2007

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Man Who Sold the World

February 24, 2014, 1:39 pm

≫ Next: Mars Men

≪ Previous: The Man from Beyond

Director: Louis Melville
Writer: Louis Melville
Producers: Louis Melville, Stuart Fenegan
Cast: Jonathan Sidgwick, Rita Kvist, Dan van Husen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: advance screener disc

Even from this unfinished version it's clear that Man Who Sold the World is an authentically spooky fantasy and an undeniably original film. The two central performances are both great, the creepy kid is suitably creepy, the sense of paranoia and nightmare is very well built, the transitions between levels of reality/dream are adroitly handled, the locations are marvellous and well-used, the editing is bang-on, the camerawork is great and the music is terrific.

But I would be lying to you if I said I understood the ending.

Jonathan Sidgwick (The Witches Hammer, Bane) stars as Max Trisch who inherits a rambling, antiques-filled stately home from his grandmother and drives out there to take a look. In an upstairs room he finds Zisna (Dan van Husen: House of Blood, Forest of the Damned, Cold and Dark), an Aleister Crowley lookalike priest, helping himself to some thing that Max’s mother had borrowed. Subsequently exploring the local area, Max finds an empty church with a worried Christian priest, Reverend Carmichael (Andrew Tiernan: 300, The Quatermass Experiment, The Bunker), who is evidently in opposition to Zisna.

But mostly what Max sees is an expressionless, silent boy (Alex McNeill), aged about 12 or so and wearing an old-fashioned school uniform. Appearing and disappearing, this ghost leads Max through the woods until he collapses and finds himself revived in the stately splendour of Zisna’s home, from where the charismatic leader controls, via internet sermons, a worldwide cult of ‘Koslantians’. This seems to be a standard end-of-the-world cult: armageddon is a-coming and the Koslantians will be saved and transported to humanity’s true home, a place called Koslantis. Evidently, acolytes can progress through levels as a ‘tapoge’. It’s all a sort of Branch Davidians meets Scientology set up with a heavy dose of Crowleyism. Max, understandably, is polite to his gracious host but remains thoroughly cynical.

Max’s Scandinavian girlfriend Lidija (the lovely Rita Kvist - The Weight of Water, Lime - about whose brief, gratuitous nude scenes you won’t find me complaining) arrives to keep him company. Together they investigate the old house and find evidence that Max’s grandmother was inadvertently responsible for allowing the Nazis to get their hands on the Holy Grail. This ties in with visions of Nazi pomp and circumstance which Max is experiencing, all Teutonic knights and busty Rhinemadchen.

This is one of those films where the weirdness builds relentlessly over the full ninety minutes. Max and Lidija attempt to drive away but however far they go, they’re still within walking distance of the house. Red-jacketed Koslantian tapoges hunt for them; Reverend Carmichael bangs on their door, shouting that the apocalypse is here; Max’s pet python Fido escapes and is never found (a shot of Fido slithering past a half-eaten apple must have some sort of Biblical symbolism, I guess). Most significantly, elements of Nazi concentration camps start to appear with first the creepy boy and then Max himself in stripy prison pyjamas with a yellow Jewish star. (This raises the question of whether Max is Jewish, which seems unlikely as what we are told about his paternal grandmother indicates her to be Christian, possibly Catholic. Maybe he’s Jewish on his mother’s side.)

Interspersed with this are interactions between Max and a beardy psychiatrist, sometimes in cutaways, sometimes in voice-overs which sound rather too much like narration. I actually found these quite confusing: at first I thought they were flashbacks to before Max left London, then they seemed to be part of the main story (which left me wondering how Max was able to drive back and see the shrink, then get home so quickly). Eventually I decided that they must be a framing story with everything else as a flashback. The disc I saw wasn’t the final edit so this confusion may be cleared up - or perhaps it’s deliberate.

And that ending? I really don’t know. It’s something to do with stigmata, and Adolf Hitler himself appears briefly in some sort of white limbo. But precisely what is going on, what it means and how it relates to anything else - search me. In some way, Man Who Sold the World reminded me of old European films: plenty of weirdness, middle class protagonists trapped in a nightmarish series of events and no real explanation for the viewer. If this had been made thirty years ago in Spain, Redemption would be all over it. There is also a touch of The Avengers in the dangerous eccentricity hidden away in the English countryside, maybe a dash of The Wicker Man too.

For a first-time director, Louis Melville does a bang-up job. Every time I made a note of something which didn’t seem to make narrative sense, I had to scribble it out two minutes later as the situation was explained in the dialogue. He is greatly assisted by the cinematography of James Friend (Wishbaby, Reverb) and Boyd Skinner (Cargo, Springheel Jack) although there is an unavoidable shot-on-DV flatness to the image. Editors Adam Biskupski and Richard Graham are also to be commended for stitching together such a potentially disjointed story. A fine orchestral and piano score by Simon Lambros (The Last Horror Movie, Puritan) is augmented by a handful of sparsely beautiful songs by Tally Koren. Mark Stevenson, who was so great as the assistant in The Last Horror Movie, appears as a monk with a mask even beakier than the one in HellBride.

Though it kept me gripped to the very end, Man Who Sold the World left me slightly niggled because I don’t know whether I was even supposed to understand the denouement. The whole film goes somewhere - but where? Undeniably skilfully constructed and resolutely intriguing, here is a movie which raises more questions than it answers. Take a look - maybe you’ll spot something I missed.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 29th June 2007

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Mars Men

February 25, 2014, 1:09 pm

≫ Next: Masterpiece

≪ Previous: Man Who Sold the World

Director: Chen Hun-Ming
Writer: Jack Lin
Producer: Tsi See-Shung
Cast: Wen Chang-Lung, Yeh Hsiao-I, Fang Mien
Year of release: 1974
Country: Thailand/Japan
Reviewed from: Italian VHS (Torino Video - and that spaceship is not in the movie!)

Here’s what I can discern from this, with the aid of Damon Foster’s indispensable and sorely missed Oriental Cinema magazine and the also-now-defunct Ultraman 2000 fansite. Gli Uomini di Marte is the Italian dub (and apparently, to some extent, re-edit) of a Thai/Japanese co-production called Yak Wat Jang wu Jumborg A in Thailand and Janborg A tai Giant in Japan.

This is the feature film spin-off from a 1973 TV series, Jumborg Ace/Janborg A, which was a Thai attempt to make a show like Ultraman, using the effects expertise of the Tsuburaya Company, who of course made Ultraman in the first place. Eiji Tsuburaya’s Thai protege was called Somport Sangdaunchay or Sompot Saengduenchai. Jumborg Ace (‘jumborg’ = ‘jumbo cyborg’!) looks very like Ultraman, but can produce a sword from a slot in his chest. He is created from a light aircraft piloted by someone who, well, isn’t actually shown in this movie, using a magic stone set in a wristwatch. Intriguingly, the Italian dubbed dialogue refers to the giant robot as ‘il gigante roboto Americano’...

So here is my attempt to make sense of an nth generation copy of an Italian dubbed video of a bad print of a Japanese/Thai film. We open on some kids playing baseball near an ancient Thai temple; one little kid (called Lin) goes looking for the ball, finds a hidden cave, and unearths a small statue, about a foot high. This is a typical Thai demon - scary face, pointy hat, long frock coat, etc. - called Yak Wat Jang (first seen in the bizarre fantasy Tah Tien).

Meanwhile, Lin’s father is watching TV when the broadcast is interrupted by a Martian spaceship announcing that it is planning to conquer the universe - starting presumably with Earth. Lin runs in and shows his dad the statue, which the old chap identifies as being 3,000 years old (according to my rudimentary knowledge of Italian, self-taught from horror movie titles!).

A young lady (Lin’s sister?) comes home and finds both the old guy and the kid on the floor. They are rushed to hospital where it is discovered that their skin has turned to metal (I think!). Neither is ever seen again, so presumably they’re actually dead! The young lady is Nipha, wife of Dr Suriya - both are members of a super-high-tech Earth defence force called the Protective Attack Team (PAT) and race to their secret base in an old temple, where they wear gold space-suits.

Although there are a bunch of Martians on the flying saucer which is menacing Earth, the only two we see do anything are the leader, who has a mane of golden hair and is (I believe) called Jump Killer in the original, and his pointy, more cowardly lieutenant named Antigone. The two ‘beam down’ to Earth, where they turn out to be giants, and destroy some buildings. It must be said, the miniatures aren’t bad and the effects shots of the flying saucer passing over cities are nicely matted.

In the cave where Lin found the statue, Antigoné finds a magical stone, the solar eclipse diamond, seen by Dr Suriya and Nipha. (The Ultraman 2000 site said that this happens at the start of the movie, which leads me to think the Italians re-edited the film; also some sources give the length as 100 minutes, when this version is a bit under 90 minutes.)

The Martians use the diamond to set up a giant heat-beam weapon on the Moon, with which they blast cities on Earth. Who can defeat them? Well, il gigante roboto Americano (Jumborg Ace to his friends) for one - who is introduced with no explanation whatsoever. At the same time, Dr Suriya and Nipha check Lin’s father’s house with a geiger counter and discover the small (radioactive) statue, which they take back to their base and blast with X-rays. When they look at it again later, it has tripled in size and shows signs of movement. As they watch, it leaps off the table, flies out the conveniently open door and heads off up to the Moon, growing to giant size as it does so.

The last half-hour is basically a series of fights between the four giant characters: Jumborg Ace, Yak Wat Jang, Antigone and Jump Killer. Initially the two good guys make the mistake of fighting each other, but later join forces to grapple the Martians. Yak Wat Jang has a sort of magic staff, while Jump Killer has an eye in his waist which blasts a heat-beam, and can also fire bullets from his torso. It’s cracking stuff, it really is! At one point, Jump Killer calls forth two rubber monsters (one of which has a gauze patch in the neck - for the actor to see and breathe - which is painfully obvious even on this fuzzy copy). When Yak Wat Jang destroys these two, the suits actually explode! Fantastic! Eventually, the Martians are defeated, Yak Wat Jang and Jumborg Ace thank each other and return to their respective parts of Earth.

This is a rollicking good piece of fun, with the Thai designs giving a whole new look to the normal Japanese giant hero genre. It’s difficult to read the credits on the small jpegs of Italian posters that I have found but they clearly don’t correspond with the ones on the print: the director is given as ‘Seika Den’ but that’s not a name you’ll find on any other film. It is also interesting how the title Mars Men is prominently displayed on the Italian posters to give the impression that this is an American picture, even though it has never even been dubbed into English, let alone released in the USA.

The French version, Les Hommes d'une Autre Planete, credits Ho Li Weper as producer and lists the cast as Yen Chiang Lung, Wang Pao Yu, Yen Tsiao, Fang Yen, Yan Fran Sua and Ro Gei. Allegedly this film was released in Thailand but not Japan. I don't know about that but it's worth noting that the Turkish(!) poster seems to be a merely a Chinese poster with the title Mars Adam printed over the top.

Fans of Ultraman, Godzilla and pals will love this and should watch out for two similar subsequent Thai/Japanese co-productions, Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman and Hanuman vs 5 Kamen Rider. However, beware of a Thai VCD which purports to be the original Yak Wat Jang Vs Jumborg Ace but is actually a hopelessly incomprehensible bodge of footage from this film and the Jumborg Ace TV series, together with some material about a new version of the PAT.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 6th January 2005

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Masterpiece

February 25, 2014, 1:15 pm

≫ Next: The Mechanical Man

≪ Previous: Mars Men

Director: Andrew C Tanner
Writers: Andrew C Tanner, Rhys Hills
Producer: Andrew C Tanner
Cast: Mark Paul Wake, Sarah-Louise Tyler, Boyd Clack
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener

There’s really not a lot to say about Masterpiece, the second feature from Andrew Tanner. It’s very, very good. But my God, it’s depressing.

That’s about your lot, really.

Mark Paul Wake delivers an absolutely extraordinary performance as Martin, an aspiring writer whose obsession to write his epic novel threatens to destroy him. Martin is a thoroughly unsympathetic character - a self-obsessed, self-centred, deluded monomaniac with a callous disregard for the concerns and feelings of those around him.

Not that he exactly has a big social life. Just his tolerant, long-suffering girlfriend Kate (Sarah-Louise Tyler: High Stakes) whose tolerance, like anyone’s, has a limit. And Rod (Boyd Clack, from Welsh sitcoms High Hopes and Satellite City) - beardy, sincere tutor on Martin’s creative writing course who wrote a couple of books himself once in the day.

There’s no real plot to describe here, just a slow, inexorable descent into madness and pain, a self-destructive downward spiral fuelled by anger, booze and misplaced belief that the world is waiting for this one random, rambling work. We’re not told anything about the content of Martin’s novel, we just see him writing it endlessly, day-after-day, in longhand on lined paper. Page upon page upon page, stacked up inches deep. Page after page after page, taped to the walls of Martin’s study from where he refuses to emerge. He is literally living inside his book, literally wrapped up in his work.

Eventually things come to a head when Martin encounters a stranger in a pub (gamely played by co-writer Rhys Hills with undisguisable glee), an almost spiritual figure, a johnny-come-lately Mephistopheles whose advice will resolve Martin’s situation one way or the other. Does this bleak, angst-ridden tragedy have a happy ending or fade to black? Either could be narratively satisfying. I’m giving nothing away.

Much of the music used throughout the film is Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies and they fit the pace and structure perfectly. The whole film feels like a gymnopedie, an endless repetition with subtle variation that travels without ever going anywhere, the gentlest of musical or dramatic gradients which continues down forever.

The central performance is magnificent; Martin is a gift for an actor and Wake has embraced the role fully. This is the sort of acting that wins awards - and indeed, the day after I drafted this review, Wake picked up Best Actor at the British Independent Film Festival! The rest of the cast are flawless too, especially Tyler who pulls off some disturbingly emotional scenes. Kudos also to cinematographer Robbie Bryant (camera assistant on The Feral Generation, Burke and Hare, Cockneys vs Zombies and Captain America: The First Avenger!) whose photography is spot-on, complemented by Tanner’s own razor-sharp editing.

If there’s a mis-step in the film (hey, nothing’s perfect) it’s the sequence where Martin is fired from his part-time job as a hotel cleaner. Despite his antisocial attitude, obsessive nature and arrogant belief that he is better than the other minimum wage monkeys, the actual trigger for his dismissal is an honest mistake. A moment of genuine concern and an uncharacteristic attempt to do the right thing backfires.

There’s no doubt that his well-meaning boss uses this as an excuse to let Martin go, but there’s no real acknowledgement of the utterly cruel irony in this situation. Apart from that though, it’s hard to fault Masterpiece (which is just as well, given the presumptive title!). The whole thing is a step up from Tanner’s promising debut Psychosomatic, both technically and artistically. Neil Jones executive produced the film for Burn Hand Films which is becoming quite the movie factory nowadays.

The cast includes Ieuan Rhys (who was a traffic cop in Darklands and spent 13 years in Welsh soap Pobol Y Cwm), Gareth King (also in Burn Hand Films’ The Reverend and Risen), and Madeleine Havell who, along with Sarah-Louise Tyler, was in a previously unknown 2008 horror anthology called Dreaming of Screaming. Art director Felix Coles also worked on Jack Falls, Panic Button, Kill Keith and for You-Know-Who on Eldorado.

Though there is a little violence, Masterpiece is by no means a horror film. I would hesitate to even call it a thriller, it’s really a pitch-black psychodrama, intense and strangely compelling despite its 104-minute running time.

And that short review really is your lot. Masterpiece: brilliant film, bloody depressing.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 10th May 2011

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