The Mechanical Man

February 25, 2014, 1:43 pm

Director: Andre Deed
Writer: Andre Deed
Cast: Andre Deed, Valentina Frascaroli, Mathilde Lambert
Country: Italy
Year of release: 1921
Reviewed from: R0 DVD (Alpha)

This has to be one of the most amazing films that I have ever seen and I am mystified as to why it is not better known. And by ‘better known’ I mean: I had never, ever heard of this. How could this be?

There are some silent sci-fi/horror films that everyone has seen, such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. There are others that people might or might nor have seen, such as Der Golem, The Student of Prague or the John Barrymore Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And there are plenty which are ultra-obscure, of which I have on occasions been privileged to see a copy, such as You’ll Find Out, the 1914 A Christmas Carol and Ultus, Man from the Dead. And of course there are scores which no-one has seen because they are lost forever.

But how could a silent film this extraordinary, this groundbreaking, this cool have escaped my attention so completely that, when I spotted it in Alpha Video’s catalogue, my initial thought was that it must be a modern pastiche of a silent film. There was no way that there could be a 1921 Italian film about a giant robot because if there was - well, I would have read about it somewhere.

But no, bambinos, it does exist. Well, about a third of it does.

This fragmentary version runs 26 minutes at a sensible projection speed, being 740 meters of a film which originally measured 1,821 metres. As such, it would make precious little sense, even with translated intertitles, if Alpha had not thoughtfully added an opening precis derived from contemporary reviews.

The villain of the piece is Mado (Valentina Frascaroli), a female criminal mastermind who escapes from prison by injecting herself with a drug that causes her to appear critically ill. She is transferred to a hospital where she causes a fire and escapes during the confusion, dressed as a nurse.

In the missing footage that preceded this, Mado and her gang had apparently killed an inventor who had designed (but not built, presumably) a huge, remote-controlled robot. The detective who arrested Mado, Ramberto (Fernando Vivas-May) sets out to track her down again but also has to search for the inventor’s kidnapped niece, Elena D’Ara (Mathilde Lambert). Also searching for Elena is our romantic lead, ‘Modestino, called Salterello’ (writer/director Andre Deed) who refers to her father, Professor D’Ara (Gabriel Morceau) as his uncle and is therefore presumably the son of the murdered inventor, as well as Elena’s sweetheart. (‘Salterello’ is a type of dance, derived from the Italian ‘saltare’ meaning to jump or leap.)

Deed was a little chap, not much over five feet and looking and acting a little like Marty Feldman but without the protruding eyes. He does a lot of Keaton-esque, athletic/comic falls and jump (hence the character’s nickname) and it’s clear that his role is played for comedy, which sits oddly in the film where little else seems to be intended to be funny. That might mean however that this was originally intended as a comedy; after all, many of the best film comedians, from Bob Hope to George Formby, were hilarious precisely because everyone and everything around them was played relatively straight.

Anyway, Elena is recovered with the help of a gypsy woman (I think) but is in a trance-like state, from which she recovers at the sight of Salterello’s ‘hilarious’ clowning. However, it seems that while kidnapped and hypnotised, Elena gave Mado the instructions of how to build a giant robot, ‘The Monster’ goes on the rampage, smashing its way into houses and stealing valuables. In one scene we see Salterello hide in a wardrobe which the robot picks up above its head and carry to the edge of a high balcony; he slips out and escapes just before the wardrobe is smashed to pieces.

When Salterello and friends escape in a car, the robot gives chase, which is quite impressive given that until now it has lumbered along at a very slow walking pace. The chase is brilliantly executed using clever editing and double exposure to show the mechanical monster running along at 30 mph or so, plus some shots which were evidently achieved by attaching the top half of the robot costume to a frame on the back of the car. Then the robot suddenly stops dead as Mado’s control panel, back in her secret hideout, suffers a short circuit. Mado and her gang later collect the robot and ship it back for repairs.

The film’s climax comes at a masked ball in the opera house where Elena is the guest of honour. Someone turns up dressed as the robot which has terrorised the city and everyone thinks it jolly amusing as the costumed giant waves and breaks the tops off champagne bottles. But Elena’s companions are worried - what if that really is the mechanical man, being controlled to act in a friendly, amusing manner in order to lull them into a false sense of security? And so it proves to be.

Fortunately, Professor D’Ara has built his own version of the robot and sends this to the opera house where the two mechanical monstrosities tangle in a fiercesome battle, though truth be told they manage to do little except hold onto each other and shuffle round in a circle, making the exciting confrontation look more like the last dance at the giant robots disco.

At the very same time, Salterello (dressed as Napoleon, by the looks of it) rushes out, steals a police motorbike and heads off for Mado’s hideout, the location of which he has somehow divined. He is followed at high speed by Roberto (in drag!) in a car, who has proof that Salterello is innocent of something that he was arrested for (possibly the original kidnapping of Elena) - although our hero of course thinks that he is about to be re-arrested. In Mado’s hideout, Salterello causes another short circuit and this one backfires through the control panel and kills the evil genius. Mado is one of those supervillains, found in various 1920s and 1930s sci-fi adventures, who never removes her mask. Even in the first scenes we saw, when she was in prison, she still had her mask on. Now Roberto and the cops unmask her and find that the notorious Mado is actually... ah, that would be telling.

Meanwhile, in the opera house, the short circuit in Mado’s robot causes it to explode, bringing chunks of masonry crashing down to destroy both machines. In an epilogue, we see Salterello bidding goodbye to his cousin and uncle before flying off in a large biplane.

What an amazing film! Though chopped about, the quality of the Alpha footage, located in an archive in Sao Paolo, Brazil apparently and released on DVD in 2005, is pretty damn good. There is some terrific tinting, including a neat scene of Mado in prison which is blue but turns yellow when she strikes a match. The new intertitles (English translation by Liz Corra) are tastefully and artistically presented and two shots of a newspaper and a handwritten letter have been replaced with unpretentious, new, computer-generated shots with the headlines and script in English. So full marks for presentation, Alpha, and credit to Rachel Gutches for an effective score which incorporates some crude electronic sounds when the robot appears.

And what a robot! While it is not quite the 20-foot colossus depicted on the DVD sleeve, it is a good eight or nine feet tall and appears even taller next to the diminutive Deed. Designed to look as if it is made of plate steel, held together with industrial rivets, the costume nevertheless allows the uncredited actor a degree of movement in both arms and legs. The robots has glowing headlights for its eyes and acetylene torches in its hands which allow it to steal a safe in one scene and burn a hole through a locked metal door in another.

There surely can be no precedent for such a huge, mechanical monster - and when it starts carrying Elena in its arms, just before the climactic confrontation, it looks like every iconic 1950s robot, alien or monster. There are a couple of very brief shots of the robot right at the start of this fragment, which are taken from later in the story, and for a while, as I watched a tale about detectives and dinner parties, I wondered if that was all we were going to see - but no, we do get lots of robot footage and even some great (but ultimately disappointing) robot-vs-robot footage.

Almost nothing has been written about this film it seems. I have nothing in my magazine archives and all that I can find on the web, apart from sites listing the Alpha DVD, is a PDF document (now removed), in both English and Italian, about an Italian version, L’Uomo Meccanico (which is listed as 30 minutes so is presumably the same fragment, though with a different score). This lists one additional actor, Giulia Costa, who plays Countess Donadieff. The article points out that Karel Capek’s play RUR, which introduced the word ‘robot’ was written in 1920 and first performed in Prague in 1921, and that this film was passed by the Italian censor on 1st November 1921 but not released until 25th October 1922. Intriguingly, it seems that a ‘ballo meccanico futurista’ was held in Rome in June 1922 featuring a very similar robot costume to the ones in this film. The silent screen’s most famous robot, Maria, did not appear until 1927.

This surviving print was shown on the big screen at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival as part of a robot retrospective which also included screenings of Westworld, Demon Seed, Deadly Friend and the three Avengers cybernauts episodes! Apart from the cast and Deed, the only other credit is cinematographer Alberto Chentrens whose other work includes a 1922 Italian version of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea.

Andre Deed is described on the back of the DVD as a protege of Georges Méliès, with whom he worked on films such as Dislocation Mysterieuse, a 1901 two-minuter in which Deed’s limbs detach themselves from his body. In 1904 Pathé poached Deed from Méliès in order to learn the secrets behind the director’s special effects.

Deed was born Andre Chapuis in 1884 and worked as a music hall entertainer before making his screen debut. From 1908 until the mid-1920s he starred in a series of knockabout comedies as the tastefully named Cretinetti, who was renamed Boireau in his native France, Turibio in Portugal, Toribio Sanchez in Argentina and Foolshead in the USA. Some of these also featured Valentina Frascaroli who was married to Deed. The Inaccurate Movie Database lists 111 films for him although some of these may be duplicates as it gives Boireau and Cretinetti titles as separate pictures. Some of these had fantasy elements including one film in which Cretinetti dies but causes so much comic havoc in Heaven that God throws him out! Deed also starred in La Panna degli Aeromobili, a 1915 science fiction film about flying cars.

Nevertheless it’s clear, even from the limited availability of English language resources, that Deed was for a few years a huge star in France and Italy (he was lured from Pathé to a studio in Turin in 1909, returned to France in 1911, then moved back to Italy again); I have also seen it stated that he was the first actual ‘movie star’ ie. a personality identified by, and popular with, the movie-going public. His anarchic, surreal, effects-heavy early work was certainly popular with James Joyce who screened his films at Ireland’s first cinema, which opened in 1909.

Andre Deed died in obscurity in 1938 but his work has recently been rediscovered by film historians and there has even been a book about him (in Italian, sadly).

Though missing a lot of footage and displaying little lasting comedy, The Mechanical Man is a must-see for anyone who loves early science fiction movies. Alpha’s disc pairs the film with The Headless Horseman, a 1922 version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Will Rogers.

MJS rating: A

review originally published 31st October 2005

↧

Mega Python vs Gatoroid

February 25, 2014, 2:01 pm

≫ Next: Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus

≪ Previous: The Mechanical Man

Director: Mary Lambert
Writer: Naomi L Selfman
Producer: David Michael Latt
Cast: Debbie Gibson - hubba!, Tiffany - wowser!, Mrs Landingham off The West Wing - ooh yeah!
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Metrodome)
Website: www.theasylum.cc

I miss Bill Hicks. Who doesn’t? Inarguably one of the greatest comedians of all time, one of the most astute political commentators, one of the sharpest satirists, one of the most uncompromisingly honest performers ever. Taken from us far too soon by, if I recall correctly, pancreatic cancer.

I saw Hicks twice. Once in Nottingham and a year or so later in Stoke-on-Trent. On that second occasion, I actually got to interview him. I was at uni, there were plans for a student magazine, it never came to anything but while it was a possibility I used it as an excuse to contact the promoter and arrange a pre-show interview with hot US comedian Bill Hicks. The student mag didn’t appear but I later sold the interview to a short-lived comedy mag called Squib (co-edited by Douglas Adams’ Footlights comedy-writing partner).

Let me just clarify this because it’s something deeply cool of which I’m actually quite proud. I met Bill Hicks. I didn’t just meet him, I spent about 30-40 minutes alone in his company asking him questions about himself, his life and his work, I recorded all the answers and he autographed a cassette for me. (Shows how long ago this was: Hicks’ first comedy album was only released on cassette. Wow.)

Hicks was a fascinating man. He was warm and open and honest and really not tremendously different from his stage persona. Bill Hicks on stage was Bill Hicks. By this stage, just a year or so before his sudden passing, he was talking in his act about how he had given up smoking - but he had puffed on one while we were talking.

Oh, I do miss Bill Hicks. So much unfulfilled promise. Don’t you ever wonder what he would have made of the Iraq War. He would have absolutely skewered that sucker.

So what has all this got to do with Mega Python vs Gatoroid? Well, this film seems like an homage to Bill Hicks. Remember that bit about the “two little peach fishes”?: “Oh Debbie,” “Oh Tiffany. “Oh honey, why have we never tried this before?” Well, here they are Bill, here they are. Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, rolling around together at last. They fight, they throw food at each other, they end up in the water. I am certain (and not because I paused the disc) that at one point Debbie Gibson forcefully and deliberately pushes a handful of whipped cream into Tiffany’s cleavage. It may quite possibly be the single most erotic thing I have ever seen.

‘Deborah’ Gibson of course resurfaced from years of relative obscurity in 2009 in The Asylum’s genre-defining monster face-off Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus. The following year, always ones to trade on a successful formula, The Asylum made Mega-Piranha - starring that other teen songstress of the late 1980s Tiffany. It was obvious what would happen next. I wanted it, you wanted it, the ghost of Bill Hicks wanted it. As sure as Freddy would eventually meet Jason, as sure as the Alien would one day square up against the Predator, it was obvious that these two cult icons would meet on screen.

Sure, the film may be called Mega Python vs Gatoroid but its raison d’etre, its high concept, is not the meeting of a giant alligator and a giant snake, it’s Tiffany and Debbie having a cat-fight at a party and ending up in a lake. That’s what we’ve paid to see and what the film quite happily delivers in a way that only The Asylum would have the balls, the chutzpah, to do. Roger Corman wouldn’t have bothered, that’s for sure. Still, just like the man famously said about Freddy vs Jason when the umpteenth script of that failed to get made: “What do they do for the other 85 minutes?”

In a stock footage Everglades, Tiffany (39) is Terry O’Hara, some sort of wildlife ranger, and Gibson (40) is Dr Nikki Riley, some sort of animal activist. With her two acolytes (Arden Cho and Carl Ciarfalio), Riley is in the habit of stealing people’s pet snakes and releasing them into the wild, despite the effect this has on the local ecosystem. Just a week or so before I watched this, someone in Florida caught a 15-foot Burmese python. They are decimating the local wildlife. Not that the film is bothered about that.

Ranger Terry is bothered about the local wildlife, or at least trying to preserve a dwindling gator population, and she withholds hunting permits from a load of redneck yahoos who are this close to having the words ‘gator bait’ tattooed on their foreheads. The problem starts when the local snakes start growing to extraordinary size. Not Mega Snake size (not yet) but certainly King Cobra size. Various people get killed by the snakes including Terry’s fiancé Justin (Carey Van Dyke, also in The Asylum’s Titanic II and A Haunting in Salem) so she decides that the only way to deal with these big snakes is to create even bigger gators. To this end, she illegally acquires some steroids, puts them inside shop-bought, oven-ready chickens and feeds them to the alligators.

Over the next six months, not only do the gators grow into leviathan, oddly-muscled monsters but the steroids get into the snakes when they devour gator eggs. And before you know it, there’s evidence everywhere of giant monsters, although apparently no-one has yet spotted the actual giant monsters themselves. A Martinez is Dr Diego Ortiz, a supposedly Native American(!) herpetologist called in to assess the situation, which predictably kicks off on the night that O’Hara is organising a fund-raising soirée for her wildlife charity, or something. This is where we get the Tiff-vs-Debs food fight. (Soap actor Martinez was in The Asylum’s The Terminators, the 1991 version of Not of This World and millions of TV episodes including Mission: Impossible and The Incredible Hulk.)

By the next morning, the two ladies, Dr Ortiz and elderly ranger Angie (Kathryn Joosten: The West Wing’s Mrs Landingham, also in episodes of Buffy and Charmed plus a Hellraiser sequel) are driving through assorted city blocks that are supposed to be Miami but obviously aren’t. They eventually solve the problem by, I think, luring the animals with pheromones and blowing up some eggs. Actually, I have no idea how they solve the problem and neither did the film-makers. Some stuff happens and then it’s the end.

This is one of those films where the journey is more important than the destination and the journey is surprisingly fun. Scriptwriter Naomi Selfman, whose other Asylum gigs include 2012 Doomsday, Grimm’s Snow White and non-Debbie sequel Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus, has great fun showing how silly this is. “We’re feeding steroids to alligators. Nothing stupid about that,” says Tiffany as she thrusts a bottle of pills inside a chicken. There’s even a bit where Tiffany says “I think we’re alone now - there doesn’t seem to be anyone around”! (There may well be a Debbie Gibson lyric reference in here too but at no point does Dr Riley offer to shake someone’s love and I don’t know any of her other songs.)

The story is bollocks, of course. The CGI critter effects are embarrassingly poor, of course. The whole thing was made for about a dollar fifty and looks it. And the title doesn’t even make sense because it implies a single monstro-a-monstro face off à la Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus but actually there are dozens of both things. But none of this matters when there are two former teen idols MILFs having a food fight.

Also in the surprisingly good cast are Kevin M Horton as the other ranger, Sarah Belger (Titanic II, Claws and Fred Olen Ray’s Super Shark), Jay Beyers (an Asylum regular who was in Dragonquest, The Terminators, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Transmorphers 2, Princess of Mars, Mega Piranha and 2010: Moby Dick plus, bizarrely a feature-length Harry Potter spoof), Harmony Blossom (Titanic II, Mega Shark 2 and, hmm, Super Shark - is Corman stealing The Asylum’s casts?), the wonderfully named Clint Brink as a waiter, Timothy E Goodwin (Bubba Hotep), Kaiwi Lyman (Mega Shark 2, Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove), Chris Neville (Komodo vs Cobra), Robert R Shafer (Mega Shark 2, Psycho Cop 2 and, yet again, poached by Corman for Super Shark), Vanessa Claire Stewart (who was in a Ron Ford movie!) and Kristen Wilson (all three latter-day Dr Dolittle movies and the pilot of TV series Shark - which disappointingly turns out to be about a lawyer). Plus Mickey Dolenz as himself in one of the great comedy cameos of our time.

Cinematographer Troy Smith worked as a Steadicam operator in the 1990s before making the move to DP with canine sequel Shiloh 2. But the biggest surprise is the director. Yes, it’s that Mary Lambert, the one who made Pet Sematary (and Urban Legends 3 and Halloweentown 2).

I enjoyed Mega Python vs Gatoroid, for all the wrong reasons, but The Asylum have my money so I doubt they care. Actually, no they don’t: I bought this in a charity shop. Well, they have someone’s money. Although rated 15, I was able to watch this with an enthusiastic eight-year-old: there’s no swearing, no drugs and, sadly, no nudity. I imagine the rating is for the handful of very fake-looking prosthetic heads that the gators and snakes cough up.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 25th August 2012

↧

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus

February 25, 2014, 2:26 pm

≫ Next: The Porcelain Man

≪ Previous: Mega Python vs Gatoroid

Director: ‘Ace Hannah’
Writer: ‘Ace Hannah’
Producer: David Michael Latt
Cast: Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Vic Chao
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: UK DVD

website: www.theasylum.cc

Shark your love! Just can’t shark your love!

I would like to commence this review by giving props to former teen chanteuse Debbie Gibson who is surprisingly good in this film. The list of pop stars who have acted in SF/fantasy films is a long and largely inglorious one and Gibson’s acting career has not exactly been a string of hits. Wedding Band?Body/Antibody? Celeste in the City? Anyone heard of any of these?

Ironically, Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus, despite being the cheesiest, dumbest movie the woman has acted in to date (something I feel confident in saying, despite never having seen any of her other films) it is undoubtedly her highest profile screen work. And the fact that she acquits herself well, bringing far more to her role than the script or the production values could ever justify, should lead on to bigger and better things.

Although, in the short term, all it seems to have lead to is The Asylum deciding that their next aquatic giant monster movie, Mega-Piranha, should star Tiffany. Good grief.

Gibson (who acts under the name Deborah but is prominently credited as Debbie on the UK sleeve) plays marine biologist Emma MacNeil. Even in her late thirties, she’s peppy and preppy but that’s all right because marine biologists are hot. Everyone knows this. Brinke Stevens has a degree in marine biology. I rest my case.

It is a well-known fact that all hot women with a professional interest in science are either astronomers or marine biologists. A mascara overdose aside, Gibson is credible in the role. Except when she’s piloting a mini-submarine.

MacNeil and her colleague Vince (Asylum regular Jonathan Nation: War of the Worlds 2, Death Racers, 2012: Doomsday, Dragonquest) are scooting around off the coast of Alaska in this mini-sub watching humpback whales, in fact steering right through the middle of a pod, which seems awfully dangerous. The whales are CGI but verisimilitude is added (or subtracted) by stock shots of seals and hammerhead sharks (despite the fact that all nine species of hammerhead live in tropical waters).

High above flies a small helicopter whose solo pilot (David Meador) releases some sort of experimental sonar device into the water. The problem with this sequence is that it looks like the sub and chopper are in radio contact as there seems to be no-one else around. But actually the chopper is speaking to some ship or base elsewhere and neither vehicle is aware of the other’s presence.

The sonar device spooks the humpbacks and causes chunks of glacier to break off into the sea, freeing two enormous, indistinct shapes, one of which is roughly shark-like and the other approximately octopoid. MacNeil catches a glimpse as she tries to steer the sub away from danger but dismisses the sight as her imagination.

MacNeil is sacked - for ‘borrowing’ the sub - by whatever institution employs her, but not before she is called to examine a forced perspective lump of stuff which is presumably a whale carcass although it is not actually named as such. She is convinced that the injuries on this beast are natural - bite-marks - but is over-ruled. When nobody is looking she removes a two-foot-long, jagged, off-white, razor-edged slab of something from the carcass.

Unemployed, she moves in with one of her old professors, an Irish ex-Navy-guy named Lamar Sanders (Dublin-born Sean Lawlor, who was Captain Nemo in the Asylum’s Verne homage 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea and was also in Space Truckers and Titanic). Together, they conduct all sorts of scientific tests on the mysterious shard. Of course, any real marine biologist would spend their time measuring every piece of the thing and searching scientific journals for something comparable. But in this movie’s version of ‘science’, everything involves combining aqueous liquids in conical flasks.

Seriously, that’s all they do. In this and other science scenes. Conical flask with liquid A. Pour or drip in liquid B and watch liquid A either change colour or stay the same. Because that’s what scientists do, right?

After a considerable amount of this, MacNeil and Sanders eventually conclude that the two-foot-long, jagged, off-white, razor-edged slab removed from a giant bite-wound is... a tooth! Seriously. There’s the whole conical flask montage thing and it all builds up to the two of them saying, in amazement: “It’s a tooth!”

No shit, Sherlock.

What sort of marine biologist can’t identify a shark’s tooth, even at umpteen times normal size? Although, to be fair, this particular prop has been created by someone who has obviously never seen a shark’s tooth. Which is understandable really, because they’re so rare. It’s not like you can pick them up for a few cents from any beachfront gift shop...

Meanwhile, we get to enjoy a couple of scenes of the newly unfrozen mega-shark and giant octopus wreaking havoc on the high seas. The cephalopod attacks a Japanese-owned oil platform, which the caption identifies as belonging to the ‘Kobayshi’ corporation - although they probably meant to type the much more common Japanese name ‘Kobayashi’. A single, Australian survivor of this disaster (Michael Teh, who played Keanu Reeves in a film called Little Klaus Big World) is questioned in Japan while the official story released to the press is that there were no survivors and the cause of the disaster is unknown.

A giant octopus attacking an oil rig is all well and good, but the film’s most notorious moment is the giant shark’s astounding first appearance, leaping out of the water to grab an airliner in flight. This is a scene of utterly astounding magnificence, glimpsed briefly at the very end of the trailer but much more effective here where we have 30 seconds or so of build-up. Outside shots of the plane; interior shots of the stewardess asking people to put their seats up; some bad turbulence (because of course, any attack by a sea monster can only take place during a storm, even at 15,000 feet).

Then that great POV shot from inside the plane as a single passenger in exactly the right (or wrong) seat looks out and just has time to say “Holy shit!”

It would have been easy to milk this scene but its brevity is its success. Plane is flying, man looks out of window, shark bites plane. Remember that ludicrous bit in Orca - Killer Whale where the titular beast actually destroys a house? It’s like the guys at The Asylum have watched Orca recently and gone, “Pfft - that’s nothing. We can come up with something that will really knock their socks off.”

So superb is the shark-vs-airliner scene that it has swiftly passed into the general zeitgeist, to the extent that I found a diagram on a genuine marine biology website calculating exactly how deep and fast the shark would need to go in order to be able to launch itself high enough to grab the plane.

In setting out to investigate mysterious maritime goings-on, MacNeil and Sanders are joined by Japanese scientist Seiji Shimada, with whom Lamar has been in contact by e-mail although they have never met. Shimada flies over to the States: it’s never clear where these folk are but it looks like California and, the prologue notwithstanding, it sure as heck isn’t Alaska. Actually, that’s rather ironic because this film has more captions identifying locations than any other movie I’ve ever seen. Every three to four minutes, it seems, a bunch of words appears on screen to tell us where we are, even though we can usually tell from the ensuing scene what sort of place it is and no-one ever mentions any location by name.

Anyway, back to Shimada-san. He is played by Chicago-born Vic Chao who definitely looks more Asian-American than Japanese - and isn’t ‘Chao’ a Chinese name? Nevertheless, against all expectations, Shimada turns out to be the romantic lead, falling in love with and even getting down and dirty (not shown!) with MacNeil. Credit must be given to this little film for breaking down stereotypes like this and highlighting the prejudices and assumptions that still exist within society. Come on, when was the last time you saw a film where the principal romance was between a white girl and an Asian guy? And we’re not talking arthouse here, we’re talking Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus. Nor are we talking about a rebellious white girl because, for all the character’s sub-stealing recklessness and a couple of intervening decades, this is Debbie freaking Gibson, a women who spent her teenage years as the squeaky-cleanest, all-American teen imaginable and who never, as far as I know, turned bad-girl. This isn’t Britney, this is the blonde one who wasn’t Tiffany.

And Chao? He was an engineering graduate before he took up acting. One of his early roles was inside the mascot of the Chicago Bulls basketball team and he was also a contestant on American Gladiators. He has played a mix of Chinese, Japanese and American characters on big and small screen including two recurring roles in 24. He was in Mask of the Ninja, Organizm and Miss Congeniality 2.

When the trio are kidnapped by Government agents, we finally meet the fourth of our leads: second-billed king of the pony-tails Lorenzo Lamas. He plays Allan Baxter, a no-nonsense, straight-talking ‘equal opportunity racist’ (which really means he makes one passing comment about “limeys and spics”) who is in charge of some non-specific US government force, which has full access to all military and naval resources. It’s Baxter’s job to deal with the unleashed sea monsters and he has forcibly recruited MacNeil, Sanders and Shimada to help him.

Lamas, of course, is a legend with a career that combines sappy daytime soaps (Falcon Crest, The Bold and the Beautiful) with cheesily awesome action series (Renegade, The Immortal). Film roles include Gladiator Cop, CIA Code Name: Alexa, Terminal Justice, Dark Waters, Raptor Island, Sci-Fighters, Succubus: Hell Bent and the previously mentioned 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Clearly, Lamas is the man.

The first thing they do is realise that the wave of attacks are the work of two giant beasts, not one. They work this out by looking at a map of attacks: the North Pacific is dotted with scores of points but there are also three or four off Newfoundland. So there must be two monsters because it can’t be in the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. Although of course anything that could swim through the Northwest Passage could easily swim back again. And indeed so it presumably does because their plan to deal with the titanic twosome involves cornering one in San Francisco Bay and the other in Tokyo Bay.

They also don’t give any consideration to the possibility that there might be more than two of these things.

Then a package arrives from MacNeil’s old pal Vince which is plainly a DVD although Sanders refers to it as a 'videotape'. This is footage from a camera onboard the mini-sub from the prologue and clearly shows what MacNeil thought she saw: a giant octopus and a, well, mega-shark. Incidentally, the shark is identified early on as a prehistoric Megalodon, despite the fact that it is clearly more than twice the size of such a beast. There is also an unfunny and inconsistent recurring joke about MacNeil referring to a ‘giant squid’ with Sanders and Shimada correcting her: “Octopus!”

Anyway, the plan that our team devise is to lure the giant octopus into Tokyo Bay - because giant monsters must always attack Tokyo. It’s a tradition or an old charter or something. And the mega shark will be lured into San Francisco Bay. Once bay-bound, each beast will be destroyed by ... something. I’m really not sure how this is going to work. If you want to have a pitched battle with a super-massive predator, wouldn’t it be better to do that away from busy shipping lanes and major population centres?

And how will they lure the things there? After more malarkey with coloured liquids in conical flasks, our team of scientists come up with the idea of pheromones. Well, sharks are renowned for their incredible sense of smell - and octopuses have pretty good smell-sense too. No, the problem here is: how could anyone possibly know what the pheromones of these creatures smell like? Remember: these are species unknown to science, there’s only one of each and no-one has got close enough to study it without being eaten. Even if we were to just take a best guess (Megalodon’s closest living relative is the Great White - although some experts argue that it is actually the Mako) we don’t even know if these monsters are male or female.

Well, as plans go, this is only partially successful. Yes, they are able to lure the monsters into the respective bays, but whatever the second part of the plan was, it fails. The shark takes a massive bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge, while the octopus trashes Tokyo, although the latter carnage is only reported to us via a video-link with Shimada who has gone back to his home country to co-ordinate things there.

Plan A failed. Then MacNeil comes up with Plan B: “The thriller in Manila! We’ll get them to fight each other!” After all, they were locked in mortal combat when they were frozen in the ice millions of years ago. So they obviously don’t like each other. And this is a film with ‘versus’ in the title, after all.

Let’s just consider that title, because it is one of the greatest ever. It tells you exactly what you’re going to get. It is just clunky enough to not be slick but not so clunky that it doesn’t roll off the tongue. It is instantly memorable. It positions this film in the subgenre of great clashes: Freddy vs Jason, Alien vs Predator, King Kong vs Godzilla (all the way back to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man). And what is really cool is that this is not a sequel or a spin-off. It’s just: there’s this giant octopus, right, and this mega-shark, right, and they’re going to have a fight, right.

Genius. Genius, I tell ya.

So anyway, vast squadrons of CGI submarines are called into play, both American and Japanese. Lots of them, all sailing along below the surface within a few metres of each other. Unbelievably dangerous.

Except, in an elementary mistake, these very obviously aren’t American or Japanese subs. They’re British. What’s the difference? It’s the fins, the horizontal planes used to assist diving and surfacing. American subs - and Japanese ones - have them on the conning tower. British subs - and CGI ones, evidently - have them on the bow.

I’m really disappointed. Bang goes my suspension of disbelief. I can accept a 40-metre Megalodon. I can accept an octopus that’s larger than an oil rig. I can accept both aquatic behemoths surviving, frozen in ice, for millions of years. I can accept the preparation of megalodon pheromones in a conical flask. I can accept Debbie Gibson as a marine biologist.

But if you ask me to accept a US Navy submarine with diving planes on the bow, I will just say no. There is a line to be drawn and I’m drawing it here.

Anyway, the subs use the pheromones to draw the monsters together. MacNeil and Sanders are in one of the US Navy subs (during Plan A they were in the mini-sub which apparently she has been allowed to use again) and Shimada is in one of the Japanese subs. The submarine sets incidentally, are okay: bunch of dials and things on the walls, periscope in the middle, red light over everything. But they are less successful in the scenes where basically the same sets are passed off as the bridge of a surface vessel. Bridges tend to be pretty well lit - windows on three sides usually - rather than encased in metal and illuminated with a red bulb.

The climax, though exciting I suppose, isn’t really very interesting. Let’s face it - once we’ve seen the shark attack an aeroplane and a major US landmark, everything else will be a disappointment. Shimada’s sub looks like it has been sunk - but no, he’s okay! And the two monsters tumble down into the deep, locked in mortal combat, although I’m fairly certain we don’t see either of them actually die. Which of course opens up the possibility of a sequel.

The Asylum aren’t averse to sequels/prequels. They have made two War of the Worlds movies, two Transmorphers movies and two Omen-esque movies. And Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus has easily been their highest profile picture to date. As soon as the trailer was released, it became an internet meme. I don’t know how many people have seen the film, but a lot more people are aware of it than, say, Alien vs Hunter or King of the Lost World.

But if they do a second film, how will they up the ante? Are they going to add a third monster? Because that’s what people will want. Just like, after Freddy vs Jason, the fans were clamouring for Freddy vs Jason vs Ash or Freddy vs Jason vs Chucky. So what can The Asylum do? Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus vs... what? The supercroc from Supercroc maybe? Or the monster from their Cloverfield rip-off Monster? Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus meets the Wolf Man?

Wait! I’ve got it!

What’s big, aquatic, dangerous, world-famous but conveniently devoid of copyright?

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus ... vs Nessie!

Oh yes. Get me The Asylum on the phone now. Because that’s a film they need to make and I’m the guy to write the script for them.

Meanwhile, what else can be said about Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus? Well, writer-director Jack Perez, who uses the pseudonym ‘Ace Hannah’ here, previously directed the Asylum’s Omen knock-off 666: The Child, when he preferred to call himself ‘Jake Johnson’. But he’s fooling no-one. He also helmed Canadian TV movie Monster Island and Andy Hurst-scripted sequel Wild Things 2. I found an online interview with him and he seems a pretty cool guy.

Among the large cast, most of whose characters have no names, are Mark Hengst (Live Evil), Stephen Blackehart (Retro Puppet Master, Cannibal Dead, Tromeo and Juliet), John Bolen (the 2005 silent Call of Cthulhu), Russ Kingston (Day of the Dead 2: Contagium), Cooper Harris (A Rogue in Londinium, Meteor Apocalypse) and Matt Lagan (various anime voices). Many of these actors have previous form with The Asylum, having appeared in the likes of 100 Million BC, The Terminators, Death Racers, 2012: Doomsday, 666: The Beast, Princess of Mars and, erm, Sunday School Musical.

Cinematographer Alexander Yellen is also an Asylum veteran with Universal Soldiers, I am Omega, 100 Million BC and Street Racer under his belt. Composer Chris Ridenhour likewise has worked for the company, scoring Transmorphers, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Merlin and the War of Dragons, The Terminators and Dragonquest. Funkily named editor Marq Morrison on the other hand is an Asylum virgin, most of his previous credits being DVD extras for things like Earth vs the Flying Saucers and Charlie Chan box sets. Make-up designer Megan Nicoll has the usual Asylum credits but has also worked on two zombie films I had not previously heard of: My Wife is a Zombie and ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction.

The DVD includes a trailer, a couple of minutes of bloopers and an eight-minute Making Of which includes interviews with the four leads and DP Yellen although director ‘Ace Hannah’ is conspicuous by his absence. Behind-the-scenes footage shows that the film was just called Mega Shark on the slate but I suspect that’s not so much an alternative working title as simply a clapper loader who couldn’t be bothered to write the whole thing out.

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus works brilliantly. Everything that’s right about it is perfect but, even more importantly, everything that’s wrong about it is just wrong enough to be, well, perfect. It knows just how daft the premise is but it never milks that. The actors play it commendably straight and that makes the film all the more entertaining. The effects are not over-used and fit the overall tone.

You would have to be a right miserable sod to not enjoy this. It’s fab.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 31st January 2010

↧

The Porcelain Man

February 27, 2014, 1:12 pm

≫ Next: Mega Snake

≪ Previous: Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus

Director: Sameer Kumar Madhar
Writer: Colin Bickley
Producer: Colin Bickley
Cast: Greg Hobbs, David Arnold, Scott Morton
Country: UK
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener

This film was sent to me several years ago and at the time I was unfortunately unable to review it because for some reason the disc wouldn’t play in my machine. This week, I came across the disc and thought what the heck, let’s see if my current DVD player will accept it. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly.

Sadly, it wasn’t worth the wait.

Let me just, before launching into the review proper, tell you about Stone Man. Stone Man was an Italian superhero thing touted around in the early 1980s which never, so far as I know, actually got made. But it had a super poster. And I remember someone in Starburst - possibly John Brosnan - bemoaning that it was a real shame the Italians didn’t put as much effort into their movies as they did into their advance publicity materials.

Well, a similar thing applies here. On receiving the disc, and indeed for several years after, right up until this week, I had assumed that The Porcelain Man was a low-budget but professional movie. It had a slickly designed DVD sleeve and quite the most professional-looking full-colour promo pack I had ever seen for a low-budget UK indie film.

But when I finally got to see the thing, it turned out to be a 94-minute home movie. Utterly amateur on every artistic and technical level and, as is so often the case with these things, woefully unaware of its own massive shortcomings, The Porcelain Man is self-indulgent, unwatchable rubbish. Which is a shame.

The creative force behind the film was writer/producer Colin Bickley who, according to the website and glossy press pack, first came up with the idea in 1993. Although it’s unlikely he came up with the whole idea because the opening scenes are a rather obvious rip-off of 28 Days Later. On the other hand, 28 Days Later was released in November 2002 and The Porcelain Man allegedly started shooting on 4th December 2002, so maybe it was just synchronicity. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Christ, they need everything they can get.

You will recall how 28 Days Later started with some animal rights activists trying to ‘liberate’ a bunch of infected chimpanzees from a lab staffed by the funny-faced bloke off The Friday Night Armistice. Well, The Porcelain Man also starts with a deadly virus escaping from a lab due to the activities of anti-vivisectionist idiots. Except that Colin Bickley and his chums don’t seem to have really grasped the idea of animal rights activists because the two young men who murder a security guard, break into a lab and murder the scientist they find there later discuss how they did it for the money. Look, either these are hired goons or they are tree-hugging psycho animal rights loons. They can’t be both and the latter do not employ the former.

Also - and frankly I’m surprised this would ever need pointing out to anyone - the labs that animal rights activists break into tend to have, you know, animals in them. And the activists tend to make off, where they can, with the animals.

This lab (filmed at Aston University) has no animals, there is no suggestion that it contains any animals and the balaclava-wearing hoodlums who break in don’t look for animals. Instead they demand “Where is it?” and are told “Here it is,” as a terrified lab assistant hands them a rack with a couple of unlabelled test tubes of blue liquid. So in what sense are these animal rights activists, except in the sense that you had just watched 28 Days Later and thought: ooh, that’s a good idea?

It sort of reminds me of all those dodgy Terminator rip-offs which used the term ‘cyborg’ without bothering to check what it meant. Arnie was a cyborg because he was a cybernetic organism, part machine and part living being. That was essential in order for him to travel back through time, wasn’t it? Part organism, part robot. A bit like the Six Million Dollar Man who originated, as we all know, in Martin Caidin’s novel... Cyborg.

But all those 1980s and 1990s dodgy B-movie makers just called any old killer robot a ‘cyborg’ without knowing why because that’s what The Terminator did. Similarly, these are animal rights activists because that’s what 28 Days Later did.

I mean, it wouldn’t have been hard. Borrow a pet rabbit or a couple of white mice from someone, film them in close-up from a few angles, maybe changing a sign on the cage to look like there’s a bunch of them, then film your lab scenes creatively and add animal atmos to the soundtrack in post. How hard can any of that be?

Sadly, after this prologue the rest of the film is not ripped off from 28 Days Later or any other film that I know, which is a shame as that may have given me a clue as to what is going on. It’s some sort of police procedural, and the virus spreads gradually through human contact, and an old guy who may be a scientist sleeps in the nude and keeps getting phone calls in the middle of the night, and all sorts of people get killed, and there’s a police inspector with the biggest (non-prosthetic) nose you’ve ever seen, and there’s the world’s least exciting car chase around a multi-storey car park, with both drivers rigidly observing the 5mph speed limit.

And the whole thing, while it claims to have cost £5,000, looks like the film-makers may have got £4,990 change back. Because this really is the cheapest, tattiest, most ludicrously over-ambitious piece of amateur rubbish I’ve seen for a while. It makes no concessions to its minuscule budget and inexperienced cast and crew but just blithely charges ahead, somehow convinced that it’s going to end up as a watchable film. Which was never, ever going to happen. Because a watchable film can only start out with a decent script.

Like far too many ultra-low budget British action films, there is absolutely zero characterisation. I couldn’t tell you what any of these characters are called, what they do, who they are, how they relate to any of the other characters, what their motivations are, where they come from, nothing at all could I tell you about them. And it’s clear that the film-makers couldn’t either. All we know is that they all like to spout clichés and run around pretending to shoot at things.

Oh, and there are zombies in this film.

You might think I’ve left it a bit late in the review to blithely mention the existence of the living dead. But that’s because the zombies themselves barely feature. They’re in maybe two scenes and they’re discussed in a couple of other scenes (using the Z-word) but otherwise you could easily miss them. It’s absolutely extraordinary. Why would you film a zombie movie and almost entirely neglect to feature or mention zombies? This is just the most half-arsed, half-hearted, pointless zombie film I have seen in a very long time because There Are Almost No Zombies In It.

It’s possible that one reason the zombies are so limited in their screen time is because they are really, really crap zombies. You know, the world isn’t short of aspiring make-up effects artists who know how to do a zombie and are willing to pitch in on a project so they can get a feature credit on IMDB. And while there were fewer such people in 2002, they were certainly out there.

But these zombies just look like they’ve had a bottle of ketchup poured over them, which makes the often ludicrously purple dialogue even more risible as characters are repulsed by these ‘rotting corpses’ and then amazed when they somehow ‘come back to life.’ “He was dead. I saw him. He was dead,” emphasises one character whose name (like all the rest) I don’t know. But what he saw was what we saw: someone who appears to have had a drunken accident with a ketchup bottle shortly before collapsing into a coma.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” asks another (or possibly the same) character in another scene, staring in horror at his hand which has a small violet blotch on it. Actually yes, I have seen something like that. I remember it distinctly because it was the last time that my pen leaked. This disconnect between dialogue and image reaches its apotheosis with a character explaining how his hands are now covered in whatever this is, except that he’s explaining over the phone so we can actually see one of his hands and it’s as clean as a whistle.

Although that’s not the only disconnect between soundtrack and image. Director Sameer Kumar Madhar was brought on board the project shortly before principal photography via Shooting People, after a number of other directors had apparently stepped up and then backed off from the project. He has a - shall we say? - distinctive style.

Basically, what Madhar does is constantly cut between two different scenes one of which is silent leaving a continuous soundtrack of dialogue from the other. Which might have worked sparingly but is employed almost continually here. And it might have worked in instances when the two scenes take place simultaneously within the narrative, but Madhar likes to do this with scenes that take place consecutively within the narrative. Often featuring the same character. This adds enormously to the incoherence of the plot, although I’m sure it would be equally incomprehensible if it had been directed by somebody who wasn’t convinced that film direction needs a new paradigm and a crappy micro-budget horror/action picture shot in Nuneaton is the place to start.

There are no credits for production designer or costume designer which is fair enough because clearly nobody bothered to design the production or costumes. Despite several of the characters being police officers, none of that alleged £5,000 was spent on hiring a couple of police uniforms for a day from the local fancy dress shop to tog up a couple of extras and actually give the impression of police work. It’s very obvious that all the actors are simply wearing their own clothes (or not, in the case of the old sleeps-in-a-smile geezer).

The mostly amateur cast includes nobody you’ve ever heard of and neither Bickley nor Kumar Madhar seem to have ever done anything else. Originally running 117 minutes, the running time was cut to 94 minutes by hacking out a lot of exposition at the start. “What was originally a 20 minute investigative segment (lots of mobile phones, edgy24-style camerawork and creepy 'trust no-one'X-Files-type glances between leads), containing five chronological scenes now exists as one five minute sequence of cross-cut scenes that effectively explain the whole plot in one short swoop” reckons the press pack. Well, apart from the fact that the phrase is ‘fell swoop’, you dingdong, I can also certify that whatever this five-minute sequence might be, it only explains the plot to people who already know it.

The Porcelain Man (I’m still not sure what the title means) had a single cast and crew screening in July 2004 at Warwick Arts Centre and then was sold on DVD via the website (without certificate), presumably also to the cast and crew. There were a couple of reviews (from people who could evidently get their screener disc to play) before the movie and all associated with it lapsed back into justifiable obscurity. I can’t see a special edition of this one being released any time soon, sorry.

MJS rating: D

review originally posted 26th August 2011

↧

Mega Snake

March 1, 2014, 10:27 am

≫ Next: Merantau Warrior

≪ Previous: The Porcelain Man

Director: Tibor Takacs
Writers: Alex J Volz, Robby Robinson
Producers: Boaz Davidson, David Varod, Bernd Ringswandl
Cast: Michael Shanks, Siri Baruc, Ben Cardinal
Country: USA/Germany
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

Isn’t it fabulous to see a good, old-fashioned movie poster which completely lies to the audience? Take a look at this promo artwork for Mega Snake (two words as on screen, although some promo material spells it as one) with a Godzilla-sized serpent smashing down buildings as jet fighters and attack helicopters pound it with missiles.

The actual title monster in Mega Snake does not knock down any buildings - in fact the whole film takes place not in a city but in a small town in rural Tennessee. There are no jet fighters or helicopters or indeed any kind of military or government intervention. And the snake definitely ain’t that big (nor does it have a cobra’s cowl, for that matter).

Nevertheless, this is a fun monster movie and the snake does grow much larger than even the biggest python or black mamba. I would put this into the subgenre of MSM - medium-sized monster - movies. Other MSMs would be things like the creatures in Garuda and The Host. Anything that’s abnormally or dangerously large but no bigger than a real animal such as a whale or a sauropod dinosaur: that’s an MSM. There you go, that’s another subgenre I’ve invented.

Filmed in Bulgaria, this US-German co-production directed by the ever-reliable Tibor Takacs for the good ol’ Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be rebranded as the CGI Monsters Channel, I believe - not that I’m complaining) opens with a prologue in the late 1980s as young Les Daniels (Itai Diakov, a child actor who played a zombie in JS Cardone’s Wicked Little Things) tries to get out of going to church.

This is because his parents are members of a fundamentalist sect that practices snake-handling. According to online man-in-a-pub Wikipedia, there are about forty churches in the Southern USA who still do this, passing around copperheads, rattlesnakes and other poisonous reptiles without (usually) being bitten. The preacher in the Daniels’ church reads out Luke 10:19, which is one of the essential texts: “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”

Les’ mother Dixie (Laura Giosh Markov: Day of the Dead remake), unnamed father and elder brother Duff (Ioan Karamfilov, who was also in Wicked Little Things as well as Anthony Hickox’s Submerged) are all believers but young Les is doubtful and when he is given a snake to hold, it lashes out and bites his father. Instead of seeking urgent medical attention, the assembled brethren declare that this is God’s will and Mr Daniels dies.

Twenty years later, Les and Duff are still living with their mother in the same house. Les is now played by Stargate SG-1 star Michael Shanks, Duff by John T Woods (Recently Deceased, Zombie Strippers) and their mom is still played by Laura Giosh Markov (in pretty convincing old-age make-up). Les is now a paramedic, partnered with sassy blonde Fay (Israeli actress Michal Yannai who was in Takacs’ squid-flick Kraken) and Duff appears to be generally unemployed. The upshot of the events in the prologue is supposedly that Les now has a fear of snakes but although this is mentioned a couple of times (“He’s afraid of commitment, afraid of snakes, afraid of everything!”) there’s absolutely no evidence of it, not even when his brother brings a snake home or when he starts investigating a damn great snake. Nor is there any evidence of regret at having inadvertently caused his father’s death. Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence of bitterness towards his family who evidently still like a spot of the old snake-handling of a Sunday morning. (Despite this, the Sci-Fi Channel publicity quoted Shanks as saying, “My character has been scarred for life ever since from witnessing this and has a deathly fear of snakes.”)

Duff’s church duties apparently involve finding new snakes so he seeks out Native American tattoo artist Screaming Hawk (Cree actor Ben Cardinal: Magic in the Water) who has a back-of-the-shop sideline as a reptile-dealer. Among the limbless beasties on offer is a small snake, swimming in a sealed jar of water, which Screaming Hawk says is an Unteka. Or possibly the Unteka. There’s a silly script snafu here where the white guy asks why he has never heard of this snake and the snake dealer says that it’s because his people killed them all except this one. But this story is later repeated as ‘the Unteka killed a whole bunch of Indians’ which I suppose could also be true but isn’t what Screaming Hawk said. Anyway, despite being warned to leave the Unteka alone, Duff can’t resist half-inching it when Screaming Hawk is distracted by a customer in the tattoo parlour.

Back home, the jar gets knocked to the floor and smashes – and Les is sure he sees the snake magically grow from a few inches to a couple of feet before Duff captures it in a Tupperware container. That night, a curious kitten investigates the container too closely and pays the price. It won’t be the last cute animal to die in this movie which is actually quite gleefully nasty in places.

Against all this is the human story. Les is dating Erin (Siri Baruc: Spliced, Unholy, The Glass Trap) who is a ‘Ranger’ - some sort of law enforcement, I don’t know - and wants to settle down. A lovers’ tiff leads to the couple drinking separately in a bar: Les with Fay (they spend the night together but nothing happens) and Erin with another ranger, vain arsehole ‘Big Bo’ (Todd Jensen: Copperhead, Sabretooth, Project Shadowchaser II and IV, Cyborg Cop - whom I met on the set of Rampage/Breeders). From the moment he appears, the audience is rooting for Big Bo to get his come-uppance and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that he eventually does.

The next morning Duff finds the escaped snake - now more distinctly snake-sized - and deposits it in a rabbit hutch (snake hutch?), unaware that it has slaughtered not only all the family’s chickens but also his mother whose bloody remains are in the henhouse. To be honest, around this point it becomes quite difficult to follow the precise order of events because the movie has a somewhat lax attitude towards the concepts of night and day. There’s nothing as egregiously bad as the night-time broad daylight scene in Haunted Prison but there are sequences which seem to take place at the same time in different time zones. It certainly looks like Dixie goes out to feed the chickens (in daylight) while Duff and Les are drinking and arguing in a bar in town (at night). Or something.

Some of the night/day and day/night scene changes seem to be there to indicate the passage of time but if they are all taken that way then the events of a couple of days actually take place over about a week. It’s not enough to make the film unenjoyable but it is distracting.

Long story short, the snake keeps growing and people start disappearing, mostly folk that we don’t know. A family out camping by the lake are gobbled up and their car later discovered, complete with smashed windows, loads of blood and huge, parallel fang-scratches on the paintwork but Bo dismisses Erin’s theory that a giant snake must be to blame. (The father is Terry Winkless who was apparently director of various Power Rangers episodes, writer of The Howling and the actor inside one of the Banana Splits costumes! The mother is Andrea Enright who appeared with Winkless as a pair of deputies in Lake Placid 2.)

As Bo and Erin are studying the damaged car, a fat chap in a fancy vehicle turns up who is obviously the mayor. We know this because (a) fat guys in fancy cars in these films are always the mayor, (b) Bo calls him ‘Mayor’ right at the end of the scene and (c) in the grand tradition of not closing the beaches, he wants the next day’s country fair to go ahead. That’s the first we’ve heard of a country fair but then it’s the first (and last) we see of the mayor who is credited as ‘Artimus’ on screen although that name is never mentioned (he is played by Michael McCoy, a veteran of both Lake Placid 2 and Wicked Little Things).

At one stage Bo arrests Les for the murder of his family but Erin springs him from gaol, having discovered a giant snakeskin that the creature has shed in the woods. This is left on the police station doorstep so Bo sets out with two previously unseen rangers who really should have been looped as their dialogue is so wooden that they might well have learned it phonetically.

It all culminates with the now-giant snake attacking the fairground. There is some attempt to exploit this novel scenario, most successfully with a roller-coaster full of decapitated bodies (although it’s not clear how the snake managed to bite so many heads off as the car whizzed around). The snake also attacks the dodgems and a kiddie roller-coaster. I had hopes, as it slithered onto the track, that the smily caterpillar cars would come round and then, one circuit later, be replaced by the similar-diameter serpent, but if this was ever planned it’s not in the finished movie.

Les and Erin have by now teamed up with Screaming Hawk to stop the monster and Les has to understand the meaning of the three warnings which apply to the Unteka in a derivative but unnecessary spin on Gremlins. These are: Never let it out of the jar (well, duh!); never let it eat anything living; and ‘never fear the heart of the serpent’. This last one becomes rather literal in the admittedly quite exciting - if frankly rather silly - climax.

Sci-Fi Channel creature features are often fairly formulaic - and Mega Snake is no exception. But what it does, it does pretty well. There’s nothing really bad about it and a few bits are actually good, plus the problematic stuff - like the main character’s claimed but non-existent phobia of snakes - are no great hindrance to enjoyment. Tibor Takacs can probably direct these things in his sleep now, having helmed Mansquito, Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, The Black Hole, Ice Spiders and this film all within a two-year period. But that’s the thing about Sci-Fi. They like reliable film-makers who can deliver the goods on budget, on schedule and to an acceptable level of excitement.

Takacs’ other films include Killer Rats, the Andy Hurst-scripted Earthquake and The Gate I and II. He also, somewhat oddly, directed the feature-length pilot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, some episodes of the TV series and the spin-off TV movie Sabrina Goes to Rome. But then, I always maintained that Sabrina was actually a much better show than it was generally given credit for. Other TV work includes The Outer Limits, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven and Earth: Final Conflict.

The cast also includes Nick Harvey and Harry Anichkin as two old guys who live in adjacent houses in the middle of the woods and set out to hunt the snake using a home-made flame-thrower. There’s probably a gay subtext in these two characters if you look hard enough. Both actors have another giant snake film on their CV: Anichkin was in Boa vs Python (also Octopus 2, Shark Attack 3 and Alien Hunter) while Harvey was in Copperhead - and, interestingly, now runs a talent agency together with Todd Jensen.

Charles Campbell, who plays the young priest in the prologue, is credited as Charles ‘Chuck’ Campbell and is presumably there as a sort of two-for-one deal for the Stargate fans as he plays the technician Chuck in Stargate Atlantis. Neither Alex J Volz nor Robby Robinson has any other produced script credit that I can locate: Volz may be the German advertising guru Alexander Volz. Or possibly not.

Mega Snake is a Nu Image production, from the people who brought us Octopus, Spiders, Shark Attack, Crocodile and assorted unconnected sequels to same. In practice this means that Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort were executive producers while producer Boaz Davidson came up with the story. All three gentlemen are on my interview wants list and have been for some time. However, despite opening with the Nu Image logo, the actual copyright lies with Taxer GmbH, a German company presumably run by gloriously named producer Bernd Ringswandl and his even more marvellously named wife, Margarete Taxer-Ringswandl, credited here as ‘co-executive producer’. David Varod, another Nu Image dude, is the other producer while Ewerhard Ed Engels is the other exec.prod. Boy, those Germans sure have great names!

The cinematographer is Emil Topuzov (Wicked Little Things, Mansquito, Shark Zone) and Takacs’ regular editor Ellen Fine handled the Avid. The music is by Guy Zerafa (Replicant, Killer Rats, Gladiator Cop) and Dave Klotz (Rats, Eyeborgs) who weirdly doesn't seem to be credited on this disc. Ashley Miller, credited as Music Supervisor, has a string of credits including Shark Zone, Raging Sharks, Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy, Shark Attack 3 and even some films that aren’t about sharks. Production designer Carlos Da Silva, like many of the crew, worked on Wicked Little Things, the Day of the Dead remake and assorted other Tibor Takacs pictures.

But the thing that sells a Sci-Fi Channel creature feature is of course the creature and it must be said that this one’s pretty good (the absence of fur and limbs must have made things somewhat easier). Scott Coulter of Worldwide FX was the Visual Effects Producer and he has a string of credits going back twenty years to the likes of Robot Holocaust and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. He spent ten years or so doing physical effects on pictures such as Arena, 976-EVIL II, The Mangler, Cellar Dweller, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, then segued into digital effects on the likes of The Prophecy, Spiders I and II, Crocodile 2, Alien Lockdown, The Snake King, AI Assault and John Carl Buechler’s version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

When it’s small, Coulter’s CGI snake is thoroughly believable. When it grows huge, slightly less so merely because of the speed with which it moves. However there are some great shots of it interacting with people and I think it’s probably only the very final shot which uses a physical section of snake.

There is one final oddity to note about Mega Snake. There is a scene at the fairground where a whole bunch of kids get excited because a guy in a superhero costume comes on stage to warn them about the dangers of electricity. When the giant snake appears, the kids run screaming and the superhero guy tries to fend it off with a microphone stand.

Now, I had to do a bit of Googling to find out what was going on here. It seems that the Sci-Fi Channel, in between CGI monster movies, had its own reality TV series called Who Wants to be a Superhero?, presented by none other than Smilin’ Stan Lee himself. Members of the American public entered this X-Factor-meets-X-Men show by designing and making their own costumes, inventing a cool name and dreaming up what their superpowers could be, then competing in some sort of contests which saw one person eliminated each week by popular vote.

The winner was a young chap named Matthew Atherton aka ‘Feedback’ and although I used the phrase ‘members of the American public’ in the preceding paragraph, he was in fact a professional actor who had already had guest roles in episodes of NCIS and Malcolm in the Middle. I’m sure all the other contestants were actors too. The people who compete in American Idol or The X-Factor or any of these shows are never just talented amateurs who sing in the shower, they’re always minor league pros.

So anyway, part of the prize was that the winning superhero would get to appear in an original movie on the Sci-Fi Channel - and here it is. However, it would seem that Feedback and his fans are rather disappointed by Matthew Atherton’s brief cameo as a man dressed as a superhero and were, presumably, expecting a full-blown Feedback: The Movie. I don’t know the whys and wherefores or the ins and outs here but I would certainly be happy to be menaced by a giant snake in a Tibor Takacs film. I mean, come on: how cool is that?

In the subgenre of medium-sized monster giant snake films, Mega Snake is pretty respectable and I feel the urge to give it plaudits for its outrageously deceitful publicity campaign.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 14th March 2008

↧

Merantau Warrior

March 1, 2014, 10:49 am

≫ Next: Midnight at Madame Tussaud's

≪ Previous: Mega Snake

Director: GH Evans
Writer: GH Evans
Producer: Ario Sagantoro
Cast: Iko Uwais, Mads Koudal, Christine Hakim
Country: Indonesia
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: UK disc
Website: www.merantau-movie.com

The British martial arts film is not, in all honesty, a healthy cinematic genre. A few films get made each year, at the lower end of the indie scale, often combined with a gangster storyline. A few just about overcome their limitations and can be viewed, by sympathetic audiences, as fun little movies. But no-one would ever claim that this is a genre where we excel. Even the very best British martial arts picture doesn’t approach the level of a distinctly average Hong Kong flick.

The night before I watched Merantau Warrior, I tried to sit through a typically ultra-low budget British action film and only made it halfway (I won’t mention the title or film-maker, and no, I won’t be reviewing it). It had everything that is wrong with the genre in this country, principally an almost total absence of story and character. It was just a succession of lacklustre fights with atrocious camera-work and sound, plus a level of acting for which there are simply no words.

So it was a huge joy to be able to watch Merantau Warrior, the second feature by GH (Gareth) Evans, a good Cardiff boy who previously helmed the magnificent Footsteps. I would love to be able to proclaim this as far and away the finest example of a martial arts action picture ever made in Britain. Except I can’t. Because it was made in Indonesia.

It’s not even a British film shot in Indonesia. This is a Indonesian as Pangkal Pinang Bus Station. But it was directed by a Welshman and features, as its chief villains, a Frenchman from China and a Dane. Truly, it’s a modern world.

Despite its unlikely lineage, Merantau (the original title, used onscreen) is an absolutely terrific film. This is real, top-notch martial arts cinema, combining dazzling displays of controlled combat with a powerful story, superb camera-work and remarkable achievements in all technical and artistic aspects. If you enjoy martial arts cinema, by which I mean real martial arts cinema that combines the artistry of combat with the artistry of film to create something greater than the sum of its parts, then you do not want to miss this film.

The story is simple and tells of Yuda (Iko Uwais), a young man who lives with his mother and elder brother on a tomato farm in Sumatra. Theirs is a peaceful, rural existence. But there is a tradition in that region that for a youth to truly become a man, he must leave his family and, well, it’s not entirely clear but I think the European equivalent would be ‘setting off to seek his fortune’. So, just like Dick Whittington journeying to London (but without the cat) Yuda takes the bus to Jakarta where he hopes to earn a living teaching silat.

Silat (or pencak silat) is an Indonesian martial art. And I don’t know enough about the technicalities of these things to be able to say precisely how this differs from karate or kung fu or muay thai or other forms of martial art. But it’s a stylish, fast-moving form of combat which seems to mainly consist of blocking, grabbing and twisting, pulling or otherwise disabling an opponent. Rather than, say, repeatedly kicking him.

Inbetween Footsteps and Merantau, Gareth shot a documentary on silat for a production company owned by highly respected actress Christine Hakim, who plays the mother in this film. Although various versions or approximations of silat have appeared in films over the years, mostly during the exploitation boom of the 1970s and 1980, this is the first movie to actually concentrate on the subject and, allegedly, the first martial arts actioner shot in Indonesia for about 15 years. I guess there just weren’t enough Welshmen in the country.

In the city, Yuda finds that the address he has been given doesn’t exist and so takes up temporary residence in some concrete pipes on a construction site while he tries to figure out what to do. When his wallet is stolen by a young urchin named Adit, Yuda gives chase and catches the boy in an alley just in time to see his sister, Astri, being abused by her boss, Johni.

Johni runs a gentleman’s establishment called the Gogo Club where Astri works as a pole dancer, but she doesn’t want to give him the tips she has earned. Yuda, being a well-brought-up lad, steps in to defend the young lady but receives no gratitude; Astri is furious that his roughing up of Johni has cost her her job.

Johni, it turns out, has a sideline providing girls to a European people-trafficker named Ratzger, faultlessly played by Mads Koudal. I’ve never seen Mads be anything less than great (he was an equally nasty slimeball in Footsteps) but here he’s absolutely terrific, a superb study in efficient psychosis. “I’m a man who does business but not a businessman,” he points out in one of his early scenes, intimidating Johni. “If I was a businessman, I would just sue you...”

Ratzger is assisted by Luc (who may be his brother?) played by Laurent Buson who was born in Paris but raised in China and is one of the few Europeans to have been allowed to train in the Shaolin Temple. They have a shipment of girls waiting to leave the country but need one more: Johni promised them five but, with Astri gone, he can only offer them four. So Johni tracks down Astri and takes her to Ratzger but Yuda, quite by chance, sees them and knows he has to rescue her again.

Initially beaten up by Johni’s goons, Yuda picks himself up and enters the club, dishing out silat action left, right and centre in an amazing long, single shot which was, according to the Making Of, the very first shot of production and took more than 50 takes! As Yuda rescues Astri from Ratzger, the white guy gets a face full of broken glass, one piece of which he actually removes and uses to threaten an underling. From then on, Ratzger carries a series of parallel scars on his face that just make him look like the meanest motherfucker you ever saw, excuse my language. I mean, honestly. You would not want to mess with this guy. At all.

Now all of Johni’s goons are on the lookout for Yuda, Astri and Adit, knowing that Ratzger will severely punish them if they don’t come up with the goods. The pace of the film becomes non-stop as fight follows chase follows fight. Astri hides her brother but is recaptured and the final showdown comes at a depot amid a city of shipping containers, one of which houses a dozen petrified young women. It’s time for full-on, no-holds-barred silat kick-assery culminating in a truly shocking encounter between Yuda, who is still essentially a good farm boy, and the sociopathic, batshit insane Ratzger.

This is the real stuff, no doubt about it. Merantau is everything that a really good martial arts film should be. It has characters we care about, fighting for moral reasons against bad guys that we hate - rather than the standard British model of one bunch of shaven-headed thuggish crooks fighting another bunch of shaven-headed, thuggish crooks for no reason that we know or care about.

There’s a story to Merantau and, if the above makes it sounds simplistic - well, I suppose it is, but not overly simplistic. It’s not a dodgy 1930s serial cliffhanger plot of guy rescues girl, girl gets captured again, guy rescues girl again etc. It’s coherent and well-structured. Granted there are a couple of slightly weak moments, not least that the whole thing hinges on the coincidence of Yuda phoning his mum across the street from, and at the same time as, Johni unloading a semi-conscious Astri from the boot of his car. There is also a later scene where Astri and Adit are pursued by thugs who are mere yards behind them, then they turn a corner and there’s time for brother and sister to have quite a long, emotionally wrought conversation before the villains eventually reappear. But these are moments - few and far between and entirely failing to spoil in any way the films’ achievement or the viewer’s enjoyment.

There is also a nice subplot about a guy named Eric who initially gets chatting to Yuda on the bus and later turns out to be one of Johni’s men, leading to a terrific fight inside a lift which culminates in one of the most emotionally powerful scenes you’ll ever see in a martial arts flick.

Technically the film is flawless. Gareth brought over his Footsteps cinematographer Matt Flannery who does a magnificent job, both on location and in the studio. The make-up effects are impressive without ever being over-the-top and sometimes shocking in their realism: check out the glass-of-scotch-to-the-head scene. Gareth did his own editing. The very effective score was composed by Fajar Yuskemal (who scored the award-winning horror short Dara) and Aria Prayogi.

Producer Ario Sagantoro’s experience has mostly been in TV commercials while line producer Daiwanne Ralie (who also translated Gareth’s script) has worked extensively in Indonesian television after studying in the US at Northeastern University. Executive producer Rangga Maya Barack-Evans has worked with Gareth since his short film Samurai Monogatari.

While the executive producer may have a brilliantly long and complex name, it pales beside that of fight choreographer Edwel Datuk Rajo Gampo Alam who was assisted by three of his students under the name of Team Silat Harimau.

But for all the many contributions in front of and behind the camera, this film stands or falls on the central performance by Iko Uwais, a young man with no previous acting experience but a phenomenal skill at silat. It was very important to the director that he cast people who were good martial artists. It is evidently easier to teach an expert fighter to act than to teach an actor to fight like an expert. Fortunately, Uwais exhibits just the right amount of screen presence: a simple, humble, honest morality that makes us sympathise with him and gives him a (literally) fighting chance of facing down the unpleasantness upon which he accidentally stumbles.

Sisca Jessica who plays Astrid and (not unexpectedly) young Yusuk Aulia as Adit are also first-timers - although the former has some TV experience - and really it was a tremendous risk to have three feature film debutantes but they all acquit themselves well. What is more they are balanced by some real experience.

Mads Koudal has more than fifty credits including features, shorts and TV work in a bewildering variety of countries. As well as Footsteps, he was in Andrew Jones’ The Feral Generation, Jeff Brookshire’s Awaken the Dead, David Noel Bourke’s No Right Turn, Emil Ishii’s Rovdrift, Swedish horror flick Die Zombiejaeger, the Campagna Brothers’ post-apocalyptic western Six Reasons Why, unreleased vampire feature Pool of Darkness and, most recently, Paul Sampson’s Night of the Templar. Mads is always tremendous value in whatever he does, especially when he’s playing the villain (which seems to be most of the time).

Laurent ‘Lohan’ Buson I wasn’t familiar with before this although I had seen Michelle Yeoh/Luke Goss starrer Silver Hawk in which he plays a hitman. Born in Paris, he travelled to China as a young man and was granted the rare honour of actually training in the Shaolin Temple under Shi Yong Xu. In recent years he has founded the Z-team, the only action/stunt team of westerners working in China, with his younger brother an a couple of friends.

Then there’s Christine Hakim. You might not know the name or the face and you certainly won’t have heard of any of her previous features, but Hakim is a huge star in Indonesia and has won the local equivalent of the Oscar no fewer than six times. She was on the Cannes Festival Jury in 2002 and recently made her first US film, acting opposite Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love.

The uniformly excellent cast is rounded out by Alex Abbad as Johni, Yayan Ruhian as Eric, Doni Alamsyah as Yuda’s brother Yayan and Ratna Galih as Ayi, a character I don’t even remember. According to the website she’s a dancer who is a friend of Astri’s but it looks like much of her part might have been cut because there’s no significant character like that.

Speaking of cut things, the DVD includes two ‘deleted scenes’, one of which is actually an existing scene of Ratzger and Luc with a few more lines of dialogue. It’s wrily amusing and may have been trimmed because the humour upset the scene. The other, wholly excised scene, is an early sequence centred on Adit which is beautifully shot and quite charming and which actually pays off at the end of the film. But I can also see why this has gone: it would put too much emphasis on Adit early on at the expense of his sister (and Yuda). It is much better to have our introduction to the boy in a scene of petty theft.

However, there is another entire scene missing, footage of which can be seen in the hour of excellent Making Of featurettes included on the disc. It’s a ‘thug recruitment’ sequence of Jakarta lowlifes lining up to try out for Johni’s gang and features what looks like a cracking demonstration of silat combat by the character of Eric. Again, there is undoubtedly a good reason to leave this out of the finished film (which is quite long enough already) but I’m puzzled why that’s not included with the other deleted scenes. Maybe it’s an Easter egg or something.

The Making Ofs are top-notch with just the right amount of behind-the-scenes footage and talking heads. Like the movie itself, the Indonesians are subtitled while the Europeans aren’t (in the film Ratzger and Luc speak English while Johni speaks both languages, depending on who he’s talking to). There is also a self-contained 20-minute Making Of done for TV which, to my surprise, has no significant overlap with the rest of the featurettes. Plus a trailer.

Merantau is a very, very fine piece of work indeed. While I don’t think it’s going to have the international impact that Ong Bak did - and which the marketing explicitly suggests it might - I do think it has already raised the awareness of Indonesian cinema and Indonesian martial arts among the faithful fans of this genre. It’s also an absolutely amazing sophomore feature for Gareth Evans.

I mean, Footsteps was great but only played a few festivals, had no domestic distribution and was released in the States on just a very small DVD label. This has been a smash hit at festivals worldwide and had impressive theatrical distribution not only domestically but in other Pacific Asian territories too.

And in terms of subject matter Gareth’s first feature was very grim, very bleak, very Welsh and very small, displaying more in common with the British horror revival than the flash-bangery geezerness of modern British thrillers or dramas. To go from that to a slick, well-budgeted Indonesian martial arts action feature is surely the biggest leap that any director has ever made with their second film.

I think Merantau is a triumph for Gareth Evans, a triumph for Iko Uwais and a triumph for Indonesian cinema in general. Evans and Uwais are now working on a prison drama called Berandal (there’s a teaser trailer on the web) which could be the film that combines Footsteps’ gritty, bleak attitude with Merantau’s stylish, powerful action. [In fact, Gareth's next feature was the amazing, and amazingly successful, The Raid. His Berandal script was then adapted into The Raid 2. - MJS]

Incidentally, all the combat in Merantau is unarmed, apart from various metal pipes and crowbars which the bad guys swing around. The small knife featured in publicity images is only ever seen in a solo routine that Uwais/Yuda performs under the opening titles.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 17th September 2010

↧

Midnight at Madame Tussaud's

March 1, 2014, 1:19 pm

≫ Next: Mil Mascaras: Resurrection

≪ Previous: Merantau Warrior

Director: George Pearson
Writer: Kim Peacock
Producer: J Steven Edwards
Cast: James Carew, Lucille Lisle, Patrick Barr
Year of release: 1936
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

This is a very early British horror film - only three years after The Ghoul - though it’s really more of a thriller with its spooky wax museum setting tipping it over into the horror genre. Nowadays, if it is known at all, it is usually as an early credit for a very young-looking William Hartnell (rather quaintly credited here as ‘Billy Hartnell’) before he went on to play a succession of ill-tempered army sergeants and then got cast as the first Doctor Who.

Hartnell plays Stubbs, comic relief sidekick to Daily Tribune reporter Gerry Melville (Patrick Barr, whose career stretched from an uncredited appearance in Things to Come right through to Octopussy, via The Lavender Hill Mob, The Dambusters, latter-day Tod Slaughter short A Ghost for Sale, Gilbert Harding Speaks of Murder, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The House of Whipcord and The Flesh and Blood Show!). Tall, debonair Barr and small, wiry, cheeky Hartnell have a relationship which at first glance seems very clearly modelled on Richard Murdoch and Arthur Askey, who later made their own contribution to the ‘borderline horror’ genre with a version of Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train. Hartnell had himself performed in two productions of Ridley’s play in 1935 and 1936, ironically as Teddy Deakin, the role played by Murdoch in the 1940 film version (Askey’s character is not in the original play and was specially created for the comedian).

But in fact, the Askey-Murdoch partnership dates from 1938, when they were cast together in the seminal radio comedy Band Waggon, so either they were influenced by this film (unlikely...) or both partnerships were influenced by the same (probably American) crosstalk acts on stage and radio.

Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s begins with Sir Clive Cheyne (James Carew: Strange Experiment, The Tunnel, The Mystery of the Marie Celeste, High Treason) going to inspect his new waxwork at the world famous London tourist attraction. Sir Clive is a hero of the British Empire - he led a Polar expedition in 1925 and quelled a frontier revolt in 1927 - whose name is, perhaps not coincidentally, pronounced ‘Chaney’.

He and his chums are shown around the museum by ghoulish, bespectacled chief sculptor Kelvin (an uncredited Bernard Miles!). “Ah, there’s Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra,” says one fellow, pointing at a statue of Marie Antoinette. “Don’t be stupid,” replies another. “That’s Greta Garbo as Charlie’s Aunt!” Waxworks of Chaplin and Mae West are also seen and discussed though neither is, interestingly, named.

Shown around Kelvin’s beloved Chamber of Horrors, Sir Clive accepts a hundred pound wager from his friend Harry Newton (Charles Oliver: The Lady Vanishes, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, Ask a Policeman) that he dare not spend the night there alone. Sadly for those hoping to see waxworks of Karloff and Lugosi, there’s no sign of them but we do see statues of Dr Crippen, ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer George Smith and Monsieur Landres ‘the French Bluebeard.’ Sir Clive says: “All I shall want for a comfortable evening is an armchair, a cigar and the evening papers.”

We then meet Sir Clive’s niece and ward Carol (Australian stage actress Lucille Lisle) as she travels in a taxi with her beau, compulsive gambler and crook Nick Frome, played by Kim Peacock. (There is no actual ‘script’ credit on this early talkie, but Peacock is credited with ‘dialogue’ from an ‘original story by James S Edwards and Roger MacDougal’, who also wrote The Man in the White Suit and The Mouse That Roared.) Frome produces a ring and proposes; Melville spots this hot society story immediately when it literally lands in his lap - the discarded Cartier jewel case is tossed out of Carol’s taxi and into the cab containing the two journos!

Frome is of course up to no good - his prospective father-in-law characterises him as a “young man with expensive tastes and no job” - and is actually in league with Newton, who owes Sir Clive £15,000. The plan is that Frome and the love-blind Carol, introduced three weeks ago by none other than Newton, will quickly marry. She will transfer £50,000 of her inheritance to her husband, and Newton will then pay off Sir Clive using his own family’s money, while also scoring a tidy profit to split with Frome and his lover Brenda (Lydia Sherwood), who is explained to Carol as his ‘sister’. But Sir Clive wants the money tomorrow and when it becomes clear that the engagement will take some time, a murder plot is hatched by the dastardly trio.

This is actually quite good news for the men from the Tribune. “What wouldn’t I give for a real, juicy murder,” says Stubbs, to which Melville replies, “You Dracula!” Melville uses his journalistic guile to get into the Cheyne home and ingratiate himself with Carol, who is using the trapeze in her personal gym.

What this all boils down to, after an hour or so of romance and skulduggery, is that Newton plans to murder Sir Clive during his night spent in the Chamber of Horrors, so that Sir Clive will not have him arrested for failure to repay his debts. He conceals himself among the exhibits when the visitors leave and then cuts the face from the Sir Clive Cheyne waxwork so that he can pass as his victim when leaving past the security guard on the door. (After the mask is in place, Newton is of course played by Carew, trying to keep his face emotionless.) All the action of Newton stalking Cheyne is shot silently - there’s no dialogue so there’s no music and no foley - which really highlights both the age of this film and the normal working practices of its experienced director.

Fortunately, Melville has worked out what’s going on, punched Frome’s lights out, and he and Stubbs have made it to Madame Tussaud’s accompanied by Carol and assorted bobbies. The denouement is rushed, off-screen and not entirely clear but everyone seems to live happily ever after apart from the bad folks.

This interesting curio was shot at Highbury Studios in London and on location at Madame Tussaud’s itself ‘with the co-operation of Mr JM O’Connor.’ For American audiences who might be unfamiliar with Tussaud’s, the title was changed to Midnight at the Wax Museum.

Jonathan Rigby in English Gothic calls Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s“close to being unwatchable” which seems terribly unfair. For fans of 1930s British cinema, it’s an enjoyable little diversion with several notable features for the era, not least some footage shot from inside a moving Rolls-Royce. A ‘Premier Sound Film Production’, it used the RCA Photophone sound-on-film recording system for its soundtrack.

Director George Pearson had a long history of borderline British horror films, having directed Ultus, the Man from the Dead and its three sequels in 1916-17, as well as a 1914 version of A Study in Scarlet and, more recently, such interesting-sounding titles as Murder by Rope, The Secret Voice and The Fatal Hour. Art director Donald Russell also designed the 1962 obscurity Dungeon of Harrow.

Some critics see Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s as a cash-in on the 1933 classic Mystery of the Wax Museum but there is no connection apart from the setting. In any case, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s had already been used for the climax of an even earlier British talkie, the 1932 Jack Hulbert comedy Jack’s the Boy. However, that was just a studio set - with figures depicting various royal executions and an extraordinary pointy-toothed caveman - as the film-makers presumably did not have the co-operation of Mr JM O’Connor.

Possibly the most disturbing things in the film are the waxwork figures of Hitler and Mussolini, both deliberately featured in close-up (Stalin can be spotted in the background). Three years before the invasion of Poland, these were just two famous world leaders and it is uncomfortable to see them depicted in a British film, devoid of any connotation of war or genocide.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 2nd january 2005

[Frustratingly, there is not a single poster or newspaper ad for this film anywhere online. Nor has it ever been released on VHS or DVD as far as I can tell. Most of the images here are screengrabs from a silent super-8 version on YouTube in which the intertitles rename Cheyne as 'Sir Philip Findley' and Newton as 'Shepard'. - MJS]

↧

Mil Mascaras: Resurrection

March 1, 2014, 1:19 pm

≫ Next: Mind Breakers

≪ Previous: Midnight at Madame Tussaud's

Directors: Chip Gubera and ‘Andrew Quint’
Writer: Jeffrey Uhlmann
Producers: Jeffrey Uhlmann, Kannappan Palaniappan
Cast: Mil Mascaras, Willard Pugh, Richard Lynch
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Stick with me on this one because it’s going to take a little while to get to the point.

When I was a young man - in fact I think I was still at school - I bought a budget-price LP called The Very Best of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I had probably heard one or two Bonzo songs and I knew of their connection with Monty Python but I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for when I first put the stylus on that record.

Those of you who are familiar with the Bonzos will, I am sure, realise the effect that 40 minutes of the band’s best songs had on me. Those of you who don’t know the Bonzos, well, you are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. This was a band, who released a few albums in the late 1960s, early 1970s and had one solitary top ten hit (produced by Paul McCartney under a pseudonym) and who have a very strong claim to being the greatest comedy music act of all time. They weren’t parodists like Alan Sherman or ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, they weren’t satirists like Stan Freberg or Flanders and Swann. Probably the closest comparison would be Spike Jones and his City Slickers, in terms of their free-form, take-no-prisoners approach to lunacy. Except that the Bonzos were art school graduates, steeped in admiration for the surrealist school (in fact their original name was the Bonzo Dog Dada Band but they got fed up having to explain to people what dadaism was) and reacting against not only 1960s pop and rock but also, during their brief existence, the oddity that was the 1960s trad jazz revival.

Look, if you don’t know anything about the Bonzos, just go and buy, borrow, download, whatever some of their songs and I hope you will realise just why they are so special.

I bought a couple of their original LPs, I bought the complete collection on CD when it was released, I got excited every time I saw a clip of them on TV, invariably one of their appearances on semi-lost proto-Python quasi-kidfare Do Not Adjust You Set, I even saw solo gigs by two of the ex-members. But there was something missing and it was this: the Bonzos were, by all accounts, an amazing live act. But there was no actual record of this beyond hearsay and contemporary reviews. No recording existed of them actually performing, apart from the DNAYS clips and their legendary cameo in Magical Mystery Tour, neither of which really captured them in a live setting.

Then in 2006, twenty years after I bought that LP, something amazing happened. The Bonzos reunited. They did some Christmas shows in London with some of today’s biggest comedians handling vocals in lieu of the sadly missed Viv Stanshall. And then - they went on tour! All the original members (bar the two dead ones), in their sixties or seventies (or eighties in one case) with Phill Jupitus and Ade Edmondson sharing vocals. It was a real live Bonzos show - and it came to Leicester. It came to my town.

I was able to go to my local concert hall and see the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band performing live, not just trotting through a few old tunes but having a whale of a time indulging in all the old lunacy: the robots and the costumes and the props and the head ballet and music for the leg and, ooh, everything. All this happened, right there, more than thirty years after everyone thought it had ceased for ever. Holy freaking cow. Even now I can’t get over this.

It was the pop culture equivalent of finding a coelacanth in your fishing net.

Well now, here’s another coelacanth. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is an honest-to-goodness brand new lucha libre movie starring the actual Mil Mascaras and pitting him against the most iconic monster ever to emerge from the Mexican film industry - the Aztec Mummy.

I can’t claim to be anywhere near as familiar with Mexican wrestling films as I am with the Bonzos but I’ve seen a few, in fact I’ve seen enough to know that this is spot-on. The plot, the dialogue, the characters, the wrestling matches: everything is archetypal. And yet this is not some cheesy spoof or even a sincere homage, it actually is a genuine lucha libre film (starring a genuine lucha libre film star). The production values are bang up-to-date and the picture was actually made by Americans in the Unites States yet the ‘feel’ is pure 1960s south-of-the-border grapplefest. And part of that is a casual acceptance on the part of every single character that the portly fellow in the gaudy mask - whose name is pronounced MAS-caras, not like the make-up - is a real-life superhero, an inarguably noble, valiant force for good. “You are the most respected man in the world,” somebody tells him at one point.

‘Mil’ is called in by the never-named black, bespectacled Police Chief (Willard Pugh: Puppet Master 5, RoboCop 2, The Guyver and Brian Yuzna’s Progeny) to help solve a puzzling series of crimes: seven blood banks have been robbed of blood on seven consecutive nights. Mil points out that all seven nights had a full Moon (yes, it’s that old B-movie staple, the full Moon that lasts a week). “Vampires?” queries the Chief. “No,” responds Mil, “just someone who can’t see very well in the dark.”

Using a female-voiced computer (which, apart from this one scene, is never seen, heard or mentioned again) Mil brilliantly deduces where the next robbery will take place - because there are only eight blood banks in Mexico City.

You can see that already we are into some seriously loopy plotting but the fabulous thing here, which gives the movie its verisimilitude, is that the whole thing is played completely straight. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is absolutely serious in every respect - which is why it is so deliriously, knowingly , hilarious, deliberately entertaining. In fact our introduction to MM has him eating dinner in a posh restaurant where his fiancee (Stephanie Matthews) gently dumps him. “I don’t really know you at all,” she laments. “Is it because you have never seen me without my mask?” he innocently queries.

As well as Mil and the Police Chief, our other major protagonist is an equally unnamed Professor (Kurt Drennen Mirtsching, who is actually director of a chain of pizza restaurants!), resplendent in lab coat, pony tail and dickie bow, whose daughter Maria (Melissa Osborn) has the hots for Mil Mascaras. Well, what young woman wouldn’t fall for an overweight, elderly man whose face she has never seen?

Ranged against these guardians of justice are an Aztec Chief (computer scientist/film critic Marco Lanzagorta, who has co-authored several technical papers with this film’s writer-producer Jeffrey Uhlmann and is now working on a book about HP Lovecraft) and the Aztec Mummy whom he reanimates with the blood of a human sacrifice (Jonathan Verdejo-Rocha) in a prologue. We also get to see Officer Guerrero (Gary Ambrosia, who was also production designer here and has directed several action flicks) - who for some reason gets a surname while more major characters don’t - attempting to arrest the Aztec Mummy only to fall under the hypnotic spell of a blue jewel in the top of the Mummy’s staff.

When Mil turns up late for the stake-out at the blood bank, having been slightly delayed due to a tag-team wrestling match over-running, the only cop still around is... Officer Guerrero! And the bad guys jump Mil but he beats them up and so on and so on. There are loads of neat, straight-faced fights in this movie including two wrestling matches, the first of which, the aforementioned tag-team bout, partners Mil with... Santo! (Played by... El Hijo del Santo!)

The second bout is Mil Mascaras vs Magister, who plays himself in the ring but is played by Aaron Laue (who was Fox Mulder in an X-Files fanfilm!) in a locker room scene where the real Magister is knocked out and replaced by one of the Aztec Mummy’s supernatural goons who then adopts his form. One of the absolute sacrosanct rules of Mexican wrestling, which this movie faithfully follows, is that every match must have the same basic plot. Which is this: the bad guy beats up the good guy over and over again, doling out cruel and painful punishment while the crowd screams at the good guy to stand up for himself, then eventually, for no apparent reason, the good guy decides that he can fight back after all and kicks the bad guy’s arse. Every match, exactly the same.

The basic plot of this film, by the way, is that the Aztec Mummy and his feather-crowned, flabby friend the Priest have been stealing blood in order to raise an army of dark-robed minions, somewhere inbetween zombies and Jawas. His ultimate aim is to capture and hypnotise Mil Mascaras because once he has the world’s greatest human being under his command, everyone will follow him. But the plot is just an excuse on which to hang a whole host of ideas, some of which are dealt with in depth, others of which are skimmed over and then forgotten.

For example, the Professor has a quite brilliant robot called Idaktor which has been programmed with information about “science, art, wrestling, technology, history, philosophy and literature” and this does come into play at the movie’s climax. On the other hand, there is one shot where we see that the Prof’s vehicle of choice is a (genuine) prototype solar-powered car - supplied by Richard Whelove of the University of Missouri Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department - but this is not mentioned in the dialogue and never seen again.

There is also a sort of prophecy: Maria has a birthmark on her back (which we never see) that matches a symbol in some stones in the Aztec Mummy’s temple and marks her out as important in some way, although when she is kidnapped (off-screen) towards the end it is merely to act as bait in a plan to trap Mil Mascaras.

Incidentally, a couple of points about Mil himself. His name (which obviously means ‘thousand masks’) stems from his habit of wearing not a single distinctive mask like other luchadores but a different mask for every bout (invariably with an M on the forehead). Or in this case, a different mask in every scene. And there is a terrific sequence where the Prof explains to Mil that his mask matches his head perfectly (well, duh, it’s made of cloth) and that it has some sort of amazing magic/technology within its fibres that rearranges the design at frequent intervals. In fact the Prof has worked out that there are one thousand different variant designs that this single mask could have, This is a great bit of retrofitted explanation for the many mask designs.

Of course, Mil didn’t make or find this mask, it was handed to him by his father, also known as Mil Mascaras, who got it from his father. An early scene has Mil, desolate at being dumped by his fiancee, talking to an image of his late father reflected in a river.

What else can we find to enjoy in this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink curiosity? There’s a scene where Mil travels to America to meet with the US President (Richard Lynch: Trancers 2, Puppet Master 3, Cyborg 3, Scanner Cop, Necronomicon, Curse of the Forty-Niner, Halloween remake) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; there’s a sequence where he poses alongside two 1960s-style dolly bird twins (Jenna and Jessica Brondel) for a photo-session, then subsequently discovers that the girls are vampires; there’s a scene in a restaurant where a fake waiter poisons Mil with hallucinogenic mushrooms; and there is a burgeoning romance between Mil and Maria. Oh, and Halloween’s PJ Soles turns up as herself, judging the tag-team wrestling bout.

Best of all, there is a sequence near the end when a whole gang of luchadores (and a couple of luchadoras) come to help Mil in his battle against the Aztec Mummy’s henchmen. This ‘Champions of Justice’ squad consists of Blue Demon Jr, Neutron, Huracan Ramirez Jr, Dos Caras, Argozan, La Torcha, Maura Incognita, El Medico Angel, El Cardo and Trench Fighter. (Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras both starred in a 1971 lucha movie called Champions of Justice and its 1972 sequel.)

Really, Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy (as it is alternatively known) gives lucha fans everything they could possibly ask for. The production values are expertly judged: good when they need to be but allowed to drop when required (the robot, for instance). The acting is all very slightly stilted but never hammy or over-the-top. The script manages to shoe-horn in pretty much everything that you might expect and a whole lot more. This is a film made by lucha fans for lucha fans but it’s certainly not a fan-film. The whole thing looks extraordinarily professional, and I use the term ‘extraordinarily’ for two reasons. First, because no Mexican wrestling movie has ever looked this slick, and second because no film made by Associate Professors of Computer Science has ever looked this good.

Jeffrey Uhlmann wrote the script, produced and executive produced as well as playing the Aztec Mummy. In real life he has a PhD (Oxon) in robotic engineering which must have come in handy as that’s also him inside the robot suit. He now teaches and researches at the University of Missouri-Columbia where “his most cited works relate to unscented Kalman filtering, covariance intersection, and metric trees.” Which, you must admit, is not something that you can say about many other film-makers. His colleague, the gloriously named Dr Kannappan Palaniappan, shares producer and executive producer credits; he obtained his PhD at the University of Illinois. And the whole shebang was directed by Christopher ‘Chip’ Gubera who sings and plays lead guitar with alt rockers The UnFashionables. But I can’t find anything saying where he got his doctorate.

Ah, but there is another credited director - one Andrew Quint - and this is where the story behind Mil Mascaras: Resurrection gets interesting and rather complex. Uhlmann originally offered the directing gig to Scott Spiegel of Evil Dead 2 screenplay fame, whose previous directorial work includes the first From Dusk Till Dawn sequel and a 2004 Modesty Blaise movie. Spiegel declined but recommended Jeff Burr, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, Pumpkinhead 2 and Puppet Master 4 and 5, who accepted.

For some reason, Burr was not going to be able to make it out to Missouri until a couple of days before principal photography commenced so he sent over two guys whom he knew and trusted to handle pre-production on his behalf. These were Dan Golden (director of Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats, who had worked with Burr on Night of the Scarecrow) and Chuck Williams (producer of, among other things, Danny Draven’s Stitches, who had worked with Burr on Straight into Darkness). Burr also brought ace cinematographer Thomas Callaway to the project. As well as photographing Night of the Scarecrow and Eddie Presley for Burr, Callaway has DPed such B-movie classics as Creepozoids, Critters 3 and 4, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Steel and Lace, Project: Metalbeast, The Dead Hate the Living and Doll Graveyard.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of falling out between Uhlmann and Burr with the result that Burr and his associates (most of whom were working without contracts) dropped off the project. Nevertheless, Callaway retains sole credit as cinematographer, Golden shares 1st AD credit with Mike Neu (Last Breath) and Williams is the third of the named producers. As for Jeff Burr, he evidently took his name off the picture, substituting the pseudonymous ‘Andrew Quint’, which he also used on Devil’s Den. (It’s the name of Oliver Reed’s character in the 1967 Michael Winner film I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name.)

This raises an interesting question, which is: how much better could the film have been if these experienced, LA-based film-makers had worked on the whole thing? Well, having watched the film without any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, I have to say: not much. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is absolutely terrific. It’s note-perfect. I honestly couldn’t see any area where it could be improved. I don’t know how much of that is down to whatever work was done on the project by Burr and co and how much is down to Uhlmann and his colleagues - and it doesn’t matter. One’s enjoyment and appreciation of an artwork - of any sort - should not be coloured by knowledge of who created it. That knowledge may colour one’s expectations, of course, but if it colours one’s experience that’s rather sad because it moves one into the realm of the fanboy. And that applies as much to those people who believe that a particular author or film-maker can do no wrong as it does to those scholars and critics whose opinion of a painting or poem changes when it’s confirmed as a long lost Rembrandt or an uncatalogued sonnet by Shakespeare.

Elsewhere in the credits, Vaughn Johnson provided the score and the editor was Thom Calderon whose assistant editor credits include Gremlins 2, The Flintstones and Dude, Where’s My Car? The ‘sound design’ is shared by Kent Gibson and Alan Porzio whose coolest credits are, respectively, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and the 2003 extended cut of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Thaddeus Wadleigh (The Mangler Reborn) and Gene Ertel (who worked on Chip Gubera’s earlier films: Snakebite, The Wilding and Song of the Dead) share the curious credit of ‘associate directors of photography’ which I can only imagine is a consequence of the brouhaha referenced above.

‘Creature masks and effects’ were provided by the dudes at Robot Monkey Lab (Undertow, Savage Harvest 2) while Scott Uhlmann (brother?) designed and constructed the robot. Sandra Keeney was in charge of wardrobe while Mil Mascaras designed his own costumes.

Although he didn’t direct it, this is very much Jeffrey Uhlmann’s movie. As well as his writer, producer, executive producer and actor credits, he is listed as one of seven ‘featured stunt/body doubles’, one of fourteen ‘Mummy henchmen and henchwomen’, one of 27 ‘resurrected creatures’, one of six stunt co-ordinators (along with Mil Mascaras and Neutron!) and ‘additional mask tailoring’. Plus he apparently had a personal assistant with the completely brilliant monicker ‘Bambi Fontaine’!

You’ve got to give credit to Uhlmann: against all odds and expectations he has fashioned a film which in its own way has revived the lucha libre genre as successfully as Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who. Under his guiding hand, something which could easily have been a labour-of-love, self-indulgent, fanboy monstrosity has emerged as a hugely entertaining movie which both continues and celebrates the dormant genre to which it belongs.

In fact, Uhlmann has made two of the things. When the production of Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy fell apart in 2005 after the departure of Jeff Burr back to LA, Uhlmann, Gubera and Mascaras reteamed to make Wrestling Women vs the Brainiac before completing the first film with crew assembled for the second. And just as Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy has been retitled Mil Mascaras: Resurrection (although Uhlmann plans to revert to the original title when it hits DVD) so Wrestling Women vs the Brainiac has been retitled Academy of Doom. I haven’t seen the Wrestling Women film but the word on the net has it that it’s as enjoyable as MM:R without being so lavish or ambitious.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 27th November 2008

↧

Mind Breakers

March 2, 2014, 1:40 am

≫ Next: MindFlesh

≪ Previous: Mil Mascaras: Resurrection

Director: Fred Gallo
Writer: Fred Gallo
Producer: Darin Spillman
Cast: Robert Englund, Adam Baldwin, Jerry Trimble
Year of release: 1996
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

The fact that Roger Corman was executive producer of this movie should have been a warning, but even that could not prepare me for how bad Mind Breakers (aka Starquest II aka Galactic Odyssey) is. I never thought I’d say this but: this film certainly isn’t up to Corman’s usual standard.

The story concerns three couples who wake up aboard an alien spaceship, uncertain how they got there. They are married scientists Lee (Adam Baldwin: also in Corman’s 800 Leagues Down the Amazon and Sawbones, plus The Cape and Independence Day) and Susan (Kate Rodger: The Protector for Corman, plus Days of Our Lives and various Chained Heat pseudo-sequels); soldiers Devon (Duane Davis: Ghosts of Mars, Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space) and Kelly (Jolie Jackunas: The Dead Next Door); plus thug Trit (kickboxing champion Jerry Trimble: Corman’s Live By the Fist, One Man Army and Stranglehold - plus Tsui Hark’s The Master!) and his girlfriend, lapdancer Jenna (Jeannie Millar: Corman’s Black Scorpion II and Ladykiller). Already aboard are Carrie (Gretchen Palmer: Black Scorpion and Alien Avengers for Corman, plus Wishmaster and Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town) and Father O’Neill (token name value Robert Englund - who previously worked with Corman on Galaxy of Terror) plus a guy whose real and character name I cannot find anywhere on the web. Oh, and someone called ‘the Indian’ who we meet just as he’s being fried by a death ray. (The thug and stripper couple are stock Corman characters, dating back as far as 1956’s Day the World Ended.)

The threadbare, nonsensical, contradictory ‘plot’ which peeks out occasionally from behind several lengthy, dull, softcore sex scenes and a few quite good fights, is that the Earth has been destroyed and these six have been rescued by aliens with a view to recreating the human race. Lee and Susan were taking part in a cryogenic experiment, but it’s entirely unclear how the other four were spirited aboard. Needless to say, Father O’Neill, Carrie, the guy I don’t know his name (and presumably the Indian) are all aliens disguised as humans.

Oh, also aboard, standing in an alcove in what passes for a flight deck, is an android (again, I can’t find any ID for the actor - should have taped this) who fights anyone who tries to interfere with the ship’s controls. Yes, this falls into that extensive genre, KCMs - it’s a Kickboxing Cyborg Movie!

Now, none of this makes any sense. The only way our characters know the world was destroyed is because Lee says so - but he was in deep freeze at the time! He also recognises the type of cyborg - but what is a human cyborg doing aboard an alien spaceship? (Which also has a human computer voice and a display announcing that it’s 2041 and they are aboard the Omega-Four.) There is an attempt at story complication when it transpires that the aliens might actually want to breed humans as organ donors for their dying race, rather than any altruistic motive. This allows for dissent between Carrie and Father O’Neill but is never resolved.

A few more things at random (though this is really like shooting fish in a barrel): No-one ever questions who Father O’Neill is, though he wears no dog collar or Christian insignia. Instead, he has a white smock with a purple chevron and a weird symbol. Rather amusingly, in order to avoid getting fake blood on the purple bit of his costume in the final scene (ooh, spoiler!), he has to wear it backwards and hope no-one notices! What else? There’s a stunning piece of crap editing where a character points out that two people who died used the same last words, despite the fact that neither character actually spoke any last words! (And another character immediately points out that they said different things anyway!) Oh, I can’t go on...

But mainly this is a chance for Corman and co. to recycle footage. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Corman’s recent work that the spaceship they are on is the ‘hammerhead’ ship from Battle Beyond the Stars. Just how many films has Corman used BBTS spaceship footage in? About half an hour in there is what must be the least interesting spaceship battle ever. The (mute) cyborg sits in the command chair and is intercut with shots of other BBTS ships attacking this one. There are even cutaways to the lizard-alien from BBTS and, for one unexplained shot only, to the Nestor clones!

Mind Breakers really is a greatest hits package, with dozens of clips from other Corman movies, including those which star the current cast. The first five minutes is a confused montage of almost random images, including - brilliantly - scenes of people running around inside spacecraft corridors with shots of a space shuttle! There is also a psychedelic sequence towards the end which has overtones of 2001: A Space Odyssey and means that at least one of the three titles makes some kind of sense. (In fact, since there is no actual odyssey or quest and no mind gets broken, the most accurate title is the Japanese one, Alien Snatchers, because there are actually people being snatched by aliens, as it were.) All told, I would estimate that at least a quarter of this film consists of library footage (NASA, war, riots, etc), clips from other Corman epics, and flashbacks to other bits of this film. It’s not as if it’s all even SF movies. Trimble is seen in a prison, Millar in a lapdancing club, and the introduction of the ‘organ donor’ concept prompts the computer to witter on about vivisection while showing an animal liberation scene from (I’m reasonably sure) Watchers 2.

This is a staggering film, even by Corman’s usual standards. I would estimate (seriously) that it was probably shot in about five days and cost under $200,000. And it’s because these things cost so little that Corman can turn a profit on them, and as long as he can do that - he’ll continue to make them. Writer/director Gallo also worked with Corman on Dead Space, Termination Man, Dracula Rising and Black Rose of Harlem. The only other notable thing about this dreadful film is that it was an early credit for make-up effects artist Rob Hall, who later created many of the demons for Buffy and Angel.

MJS rating: D-

review originally posted 19th December 2004

Addendum: A press release reveals that the guys whose name I didn;t catch is called Luke and played by Mark Folger (Dark Planet, Black Scorpion II), while the cyborg actor is stuntman Darrin Prescott (Jeepers Creepers 2, Phantoms, Mars Attacks!).

↧

MindFlesh

March 2, 2014, 2:01 am

≫ Next: Minds of Terror

≪ Previous: Mind Breakers

Director: Robert Pratten
Writer: Robert Pratten
Producer: Robert Pratten
Cast: Peter Bramhill, Carole Derrien, Christopher Fairbank
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.mind-flesh.com

Robert Pratten’s second feature arrives five years after his impressive debut London Voodoo (I received a screener of this in November 2007 but it has a 2008 copyright date). MindFlesh is a more complicated and esoteric film that its predecessor; it is billed as a ‘Cronenberg-style horror thriller’ and it certainly falls into the ‘body-horror’ subgenre with which the Canadian director is most closely associated.

But this is a British film, about a London cab-driver named Chris (whose license, in an irrelevant but fun touch, is due to expire on Halloween). Driving around London late at night, Chris (Peter Bramhill: LovecraCked! The Movie) has frequently seen a mysterious woman - the statuesque Carole Derrien (Nature Morte) - by the side of the road and has in fact become slightly obsessed with finding out who she is, to the extent of keeping a log book of ‘sightings’ and plotting them on a map on his wall.

Among his associates are another cab driver who suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him, an aggressive bloke who likes to hang out at lapdancing clubs, and Chris’ ex, a conceptual artist with whom he remains on friendly terms. Over the course of the film, Chris’ relationship with the woman develops in intriguing and frankly disturbing ways. He starts seeing her in his flat and they actually begin a relationship, although she still has a tendency to not be there when he turns round. Gradually, she becomes not only more permanently corporeal but also the dominant sexual partner.

However Chris has also been seeing something distinctly less attractive than the shapely form of Ms Derrien - a grotesque monster which we never see clearly (although you can see a maquette and the suit under construction in photos on this page). This is a being from another dimension (I think) and its message to Chris is that he must face his hidden fears otherwise all his friends will die.

Now this is where the film lost me. The creature is clearly presenting Chris with a warning of danger, not a threat of violence, but I couldn’t understand why these people would die if Chris didn’t uncover his repressed childhood trauma. Nor, for that matter, could I determine the connection - if any - between the monster and the lady. I can only assume that she is also from another dimension but whether she is working with or against the monster, that passed me by.

MindFlesh is based on a novel, White Light by William Scheinman, and on the printed page there would be much more room to explore what was going on. Conflating that into an hour and a half, much of which is tautly edited scenes with little dialogue, leaves the viewer admiring the style, the atmosphere, the imagery - but confused about the actual plot. There must be some reason why Chris has to face his trauma, some reason why this is important to the creature and some reason why his friends will die if he doesn’t, but it all comes across as an arbitrary McGuffin and in a film like this (bearing in mind also Rob’s excellent first movie) I just can’t believe that it’s arbitrary, yet I can’t discern the rationale.

Although a plot such as this might seem ripe for a Final Destination-style race against time with characters meeting gruesome ends, in fact there’s very little death in MindFlesh. Chris, who has been having flashbacks to his childhood and his relationship with his mother, does eventually uncover and face the traumatic memory which he has kept hidden and even in today’s cynical world it’s a shocking one. But how does that set things right in this dimension and wherever the monster and/or woman come from?

Christopher Fairbank (Moxy from Auf Wiedersehen Pet, who was also in Alien3, The Fifth Element and The Bunker) turns up as an author/professor who has some idea what’s going on and wants Chris to keep away from him, but he doesn’t impart this crucial information to the audience, leaving us aware that something bad is happening but unsure what or why.

Maybe it’s just coincidence or perhaps Carole Derrien picks films like this deliberately, but Mindflesh confused me as much as Nature Morte did, and is certainly as stylish as that film although thematically there’s no connection between the two. As with Paul Burrows’ thriller, I just let the cinematic style wash over me and didn’t worry about figuring out the substance of the actual plot. What else could I do?

For the record, here’s the mini-synopsis from the film’s website: “Chris Jackson is a gateway for obsessions to pass from the mind to the physical world. To close the gateway he must face his childhood trauma before everyone he knows is killed by extraterrestrials.” As you can see, that doesn’t help much. Here’s the one on the promo postcard that accompanied the screener: “Mindflesh tells the story of a taxi driver, Chris Jackson, whose obsession with a supernatural goddess becomes real. Add cruel extraterrestrials that punish Jackson for pulling the goddess from a parallel dimension and Mindflesh establishes what could be a very successful franchise in the tradition of David Cronenberg.”

The references to the Canadian ‘body horror’ director are valid, incidentally, as Chris is also noticing strange fleshy protuberances on his stomach which come and go, but these are not explained any more than the woman, the monster or any of the rest of the weird things which happen to the luckless cabbie.

Mindflesh is a very different film to London Voodoo without being a significant departure for Rob Pratten, if that makes sense. If you enjoyed the first film for its story and characters, Mindflesh may disappoint you. If you enjoyed the presentation, the photography, the music, the mise-en-scene, the direction, the design - well, then you may enjoy Mindflesh just as much or even more.

Also in the cast are Roy Borrett (London Voodoo), Cordelia Bugeja (The Pool), Lucy Liemann (The Bourne Ultimatum), Steve O’Halloran (London Voodoo) and Charlotte Milchard inside the monster suit. Crew returning from Rob’s first feature include cinematographer Patrick Jackson, editor Matt Jessee, composer Arban Severin and sound recordist Ryan Chandler (who also does Top Gear!). First AD Maxwell Smith also worked on little-seen British sort-of-werewolf feature Lycanthropy while production designer Daneeta Loretta Saft made the Making of London Voodoo featurette. Sangeet Prabhaker designed and built the impressive monster suit; his previous work is mostly in the theatre and includes prosthetics for the stage versions of Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh and Lazytown!

This is not an easy film to watch so if you’re looking for a fun monster flick, look elsewhere. But if you want a movie that will make you think, make you wonder and make you argue with other people over what it’s actually about, try Mindflesh.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 9th December 2007

↧

Minds of Terror

March 2, 2014, 2:28 am

≫ Next: Missile to the Moon

≪ Previous: MindFlesh

Director: Mark Adams
Writer: Mark Adams
Producer: Mark Adams
Cast: Joe Estevez, Nicole Crawford, Randy Allen
Country: USA
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.adamstarpictures.com

Ultra-low budget, shot-on-video cheapies - of which Minds of Terror is an example - fall into one of two camps, depending on their plot. They are either coherent but clichéed or original but incomprehensible. Minds of Terror is definitely the latter. It is different enough to the morass of competing camcorder horrors to stand out - but it makes not a lick of sense. Nevertheless, this is an ambitious and intriguing horror picture that punches above its weight.

What Minds of Terror does indubitably have going for it - and I’m not saying this makes it a better film, just a more interesting one - is an utterly bizarre production history which has seen not only a string of title changes but the whole structure of the film turned inside out and upside-down. It also features brief appearances by ‘names’ which redefine the limits of the term ‘cameo’.

Chris Watson (Zombiegeddon, Evil Ever After) was the man with the idea to produce Minds of Terror, an anthology picture about inmates at a mental institution. Mark Adams was approached to direct two segments for this anthology, one of which would concern three students investigating the abandoned asylum and meeting a strange man who claims to be a former warder but is actually a former patient. The other story told of a man who staggers from a car accident, having lost his memory and finds his way to a farmhouse. The man he meets there, he assumes is the owner but in fact is also a stranger, his car having broken down. When a radio newsflash announces that a family has been killed, both men suspect the other. Meanwhile the first man is being stalked by a knife-wielding stranger who seems to be everywhere at once and is possibly a ghost.

All well and good but that initial conception of Minds of Terror fell apart. Eventually Adams was able to film both his stories, although not in the way he planned, and combined them into a feature called Lost Souls. In addition, he crafted each story into a separate short, with the intention of sending them to festivals. The story of the students was titled Stoneridge (the name of the institution) and the story of the car crash amnesiac, which featured Joe Estevez (DeathBed, Hell Asylum, Dead Season and a million other B-movies) as the real owner of the farmhouse, was titled Lost Souls and Evil Thoughts.

Chris Watson took the films and edited them together in the opposite order under the original planned title of Minds of Terror. ‘Opposite order’ means that in Lost Souls, the students story is a flashback within the car crash amnesiac story, while in Minds of Terror (which is what I’ve just watched) the car crash amnesiac story is a flashback within the students story.

Are you following this?

The explanation on Adams' website goes into great detail about who was cast, who was recast, how schedules were shuffled and how footage from other films was included or omitted. The finished film (Minds of Terror, just in case you’re getting confused) includes two or three blink-and-you’ll-miss-them clips from other stories originally intended to be part of the anthology structure. This means that the three actors whose names grace the DVD sleeve alongside Estevez - Eric Spudic, Robyn Griggs and Conrad Brooks - have about twenty seconds screen time between them and I think only Brooks has a line. Spudic (Psycho Santa, Savage Harvest 2, Halloween Night) is credited as ‘Henry’, Brooks (Glen or Glenda, Plan Nine from Outer Space, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots) as ‘Doctor’ and Griggs (Dead Clowns, Zombiegeddon, Final Curtain) as ‘Robot woman’ (‘Android girl’ according to the Inaccurate Movie Database) - but none of them have any definable character because none of them are on screen for more than, literally, a moment.

So let’s take a look at what we’ve actually ended up with on this DVD. Three Kansas University students - Karla Terry (Nicole Crawford), her long-haired, goateed brother Robert/Bobby (Patrick McCaffery) and their friend Andy Carlson (Matthew Mazouch) - are on their way to the old Stoneridge psychiatric establishment when their car breaks down. Andy visited the place as a child and claims to have seen ghosts; Karla is a scribe for the student paper who plans to write a story on the spooky old place and Bobby is a snapper for the same publication who wishes his sister would call him Robert (a running gag which quickly becomes tiresome although it does have a pay-off right at the end of the film).

The trio walk from their car to Stoneridge which they are surprised to find is not only in good repair but is actually occupied by an oddball ex-warden named Jeffery Vandoren (Randy Allen) who says he is studying the psychological and medical backgrounds of former patients in an attempt to locate the root cause of insanity. Or something. Allen plays Vandoren as a slightly unnerving, weirdly placid, emotionless individual - a complex performance which is far more than a movie of this size usually enjoys or deserves.

Quite what happens during the rest of the film is anybody’s guess. The three students explore for a while then get split up and have various dreamlike experiences both inside and outside the building, some of which involve being chased. Eventually Karla finds Bobby dead and Andy trussed up and tortured, at which point Vandoren (whose files she had read in an office) admits to being an ex-patient and launches into a tale about the time he wandered towards a farmhouse after banging his head in a car crash.

Now we’re into the other story, the only connection being Vandoren who is played here less otherworldly and with no reference to him being either a mental patient or a warden. Adams himself plays Brad Noland, the fellow whom Vandoren initially assumes to be the owner of the farmhouse. A curious aspect of this film - which must have had a budget that made change from five bucks - is that Adams is essentially a one-man band. He is the entire crew so in these scenes he has simply locked off the camera on a tripod and stepped in front of the lens. It is to his credit that I did not realise this until I saw the 15 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage included on the DVD. Rather cheekily, Adams credits himself not only as director but also as director of photography and camera operator. Technically he could probably have had ‘focus puller’ too but maybe he thought that would be taking the piss?

One downside of this one-man-band approach is that there is no sound-man and everything is simply recorded on the camera mike. Remarkably, in defiance of both the normal quality of sound on zero-budget productions and my belief that you can’t make a decent film of any sort without a boom mike, the sound quality is very good. The only time it drops, ironically, is when the best actor is on screen. Joe Estevez mutters his lines when he appears as the real owner of the farmhouse and the camera mike simply can’t pick up his dialogue. (The unnamed character is simply credited as ‘The farm owner’, not ‘Kyle’ as the IMDB would have you believe. I might also point out here that executive producer Chris Watson’s role as ‘James’ - whoever that is - is credited to his own name and not, as claimed in IMDB-land, to the pseudonym ‘Chuck Fonda’.)

This whole sequence lasts about twenty minutes, including some excellent editing of scenes where ‘The apparition’ (Andy Battmer, whose farmhouse was actually used), a silent bloke with a big knife, appears and disappears from view. The central premise - both men think the other is a murderer: which one is right? - is clever and adroitly handled but once we do find out who was telling the truth, the dialogue descends into pseudo-mystical gibberish about, well, lost souls and evil thoughts. “Evil attracts evil,” intones Estevez solemnly.

Returning to the framing story, that too swirls down into a pit of portentous but meaningless dialogue, some of which is deliberately repeated from the farmhouse story. There is more dreamlike stuff and eventually Karla escapes, heading back to the University to write this all up in the campus newspaper (and presumably to call the police and arrange a couple of funerals). There is just time for one final shock which makes as much sense as any of the previous ones, ie none at all.

The editing, as mentioned, is often terrific, especially in the transitions between one reality and the next as characters step through a door to find themselves somewhere else entirely. Editing is credited to Mark Adams ‘with’ Michael Fritz and Steven A Grainger (writer/star of horror spoof Come Get Some! and its sequel Come Get Some More!). Unfortunately the camerawork is less impressive and the lighting almost haphazard, displaying a complete disregard for such concepts as ‘day’ and ‘night’. Several times the three students prowl down a corridor, flashing a torch despite the place being as bright as day. The most egregious example of this is one scene where there is apparently (in fact, evidently) enough light for Bobby to take photos without a flash, yet Karla feels the need to shine her torch ahead into the bright sunlight.

When not on screen, Crawford was responsible for bloodying up the handful of non-speaking ghosts/zombies - she can be seen doing this in the DVD extras - and gets due credit as ‘blood technician’. To stop the other actors from being left out (and possibly to pad out a credit roll that would otherwise mostly feature his own name) Adams has given courtesy credits to McCaffery (‘key grip’), Allen (‘head gaffer’) and Mazouch (‘best boy’).

The IMDB credits Josh Barnett and Max Kreutzer with make-up but on-screen only Tracey Adams (the director's wife, I assume) is ‘make-up consultant’. Mark D’Errico (Pot Zombies,Vampire Whores from Outer Space) provided the music for this version while the score for Lost Souls was created by Kerry Marsh, now a big name in jazz vocal arrangements. Michael Compton gets the somewhat involved credit ‘ghost/monster sound effects consultant and re-mix technician’.

Mark Adams has been making films since he was a pupil at Pembroke Hill School in the early 1980s and continued as an undergraduate at Kansas University. His other features include Deathgrip, Timeline, Omega Red and Sidetracked and he also worked on a few professional productions including Princess Warrior. Chris Watson and his regular production partner Andrew J Rausch are credited as executive producers on this movie and Watson also gets a ‘second unit director’ credit which presumably refers to the handful of frames of Brooks, Spudic et al. The cast also includes Len Kabasinski (writer/director of Swamp Zombies, Curse of the Wolf and Fist of the Vampire), Kara Benelli (Cleveland in My Dreams) and Brock Short (Zombiegeddon).

The farm scenes were shot in July 2002 with Estevez, originally intended to to play Brad, switching to the smaller ‘farm owner’ role when an over-run on the other film shooting that weekend left not enough time to shoot all the Brad scenes. That film was Zombiegeddon, in which Mark Adams appeared with Robert Z’Dar (Maniac Cop) as a couple of detectives. Z-Dar had originally been considered for a role in Minds of Terror, and Zombiegeddon was directed by Chris Watson. I told you it was complicated.

The Stoneridge scenes were shot the following January with Lost Souls (Adams’ version of the feature) premiering at a local college later that year. Minds of Terror (Watson’s cut) finally surfaced at a one-off screening in Los Angeles in March 2005 (though it retains a 2003 copyright date). The film then disappeared into limbo until the summer of 2007 when Chris Mackey, webmaster of the Guestar B-movie website and director of Boot Hill Blind Dead, picked it up for DVD distribution. Chris (who worked with Chris Watson on Evil Ever After) has set up a MySpace page for Minds of Terror and is selling copies through eBay. The DVD includes 15 minutes of behind the scenes footage, 15 minutes of cast interviews, seven minutes of bloopers and a trailer which jointly credits direction to both Adams and Watson.

When all is said and done, Minds of Terror is a fun little Z-movie with a few clever bits in its favour and a few less clever things to its detriment. It doesn’t have pretensions and it features a cast and crew (all one of him) with some skill and talent. Whether Lost Souls is better or worse, whether it makes more sense or less sense, I can’t say. But Minds of Terror is a credible effort which succeeds in making something out of (almost) nothing.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 13th September 2007

↧

Missile to the Moon

March 2, 2014, 2:42 am

≫ Next: Monster from Bikini Beach

≪ Previous: Minds of Terror

Director: Richard E Cunha
Writers: HE Barrie, Vincent Fotre
Producer: Marc Frederic
Country: USA
Year of release: 1959
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Classic Entertainment)

Produced a year or so after Sputnik but a couple of years before Gagarin, Missile to the Moon opened in theatres two months after the Russian Luna 2 probe became the first manmade object to reach the Moon. So either its timing was perfect or it was rushed through production. Possibly both.

Richard Travis (Mesa of Lost Women) stars as Steve Dayton, who has been helping rocketry engineer Dirk Green (Michael Whalen - The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues - in possibly the worst toupee ever seen in a sci-fi movie) with a project to design, build and test a manned space rocket capable of reaching the Moon. On an evening when a senior military officer (Henry Hunter: Secret Agent X-9) has called to tell them that private space exploration is not allowed and the government will be taking over the project from now on, they are also visited by the local sheriff (Lee Roberts, topping off a career consisting of about a hundred westerns) out hunting for two escaped convicts.

Young, blond Lon (Gary Clarke: the teenage werewolf in How to Make a Monster) is a good guy who was six months away from release and regrets the robbery which landed him inside; short, pugnacious Gary (cartoon voice artist Tommy Cook - the character is identified as 'Gene Fennell' on the Inaccurate Movie Database for some reason) persuaded Lon to join his breakout and they are now hiding in the rocket. Searching the launch site with the sheriff, Dirk spots the two escapees but doesn't alert the law, although he does lock them inside. He later returns and asks them to help him launch the 'missile', which obviously doesn't require a great deal of training. Just before blast-off (stock footage of a captured V2 being tested by NASA, which looks nothing at all like the model rocket seen through the window of Dirk's office), Steve and his fiancee June (Cathy Downs: The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, The She-Creature, The Amazing Colossal Man) climb aboard to find out what is going on.

The surprisingly swift journey through space sees Gary making a crude play for June and Dirk being fatally injured by a falling battery during a meteor storm. Just before breathing his last, he says something which sounds like 'leader' and gives Steve a medallion containing a big diamond while exhorting him to make sure the rocket lands in the location for which all the controls have been set.

This turns out to be Bronson Canyon, home to 90 per cent of all sci-fi movies, horror pictures and westerns ever filmed in Hollywood.

The quartet go exploring and encounter some absolutely hilarious rubber-suited 'rock-men' from whom they escape, though it is not clear in what way the aliens present a threat. They move at the glacial speed of the average mummy and seem entirely devoid of claws, jaws, weapons or anything else dangerous. The costumes are basically large, squarish chunks with slots to create arms and legs and while that is quite a neat design idea - standing still each rock-man becomes a seemingly solid slab - it is also really, really unthreatening. I don't like to mock low-budget special effects, so I will instead extend plaudits to whoever was inside these costumes and discovered a way to walk in them without falling over. Escaping into a cave, the gang discover that there is oxygen aplenty (somehow) and remove their aviators' face-masks.

At this point the film lurches into one of those tiny sub-subgenres that we all know and love: the matriarchal space-babe society. As far as I know, said subgenre consists of this film, Cat-Women from the Moon and Zsa-Zsa vamping it up in Queen of Outer Space. There are about a dozen or so hottish chicks living on the Moon, lead by a leader named the Lido (daytime soap regular KT Stevens) - which is what Dirk was saying before he died. Three others are named: scheming Alpha (Nina Bara: Tonga in Space Patrol, who, like several others in this cast, seems to have given up acting after this film, and you can understand why), gentle Zema (Marjorie Hellen: The Giant Spider Invasion, The Manchurian Candidate) and got-a-few-lines Lambda (Laurie Mitchell: Attack of the Puppet People, Queen of Outer Space).

All the others are played by beauty queens from the USA or abroad, including two girls who were also in Queen of Outer Space the same year, playing such similar non-speaking roles that it was hardly worth their getting changed. Remarkably, every one of these ladies seems to have accrued at least a few other credits: others were in The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, The Giant Gila Monster, Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars and episodes of Burke's Law and The Beverley Hillbillies.

Well, it seems that old Dirk was actually the Lido's husband and constructed his rocket-ship not to explore the Moon but to get back to his Missus. However, as none of the Moon-babes recall much about what he looked like and Steve now wears that diamond medallion, he is assumed to be Dirk. There is a network of caves beyond the women's exotically decorated rooms in which can be found lots of huge diamonds and a giant spider-thing played by a giant spider-thing-puppet.

Long story short, Alpha murders the Lido, proclaims herself the new Lido and arranges to 'marry' Steve (who, they have determined, isn't really Dirk). The women all have some sort of psychic power so that whatever the Lido says, all the others have to accept and obey, even if it basically boils down to: "I'm the new Lido and I didn't kill the old Lido who is lying here next to the throne with a dagger sticking out from between her shoulder blades." There are also some weird little bombs and a vague plan to leave the Moon and colonise Earth.

Good old Zema, who has rather fallen for Lon (and he for her) helps the two ex-cons to escape then blows up the throne room, bringing Steve out of his Alpha-induced trance but leaving herself trapped under the wreckage. The three lads rescue June from where she has been shackled up as a Kong-style offering to the giant spider-thing and head off back to the ship. Unfortunately for avaricious Gary, who is lagging behind the others, carrying two heavy bags of oversized diamonds, he gets cornered by a couple of rock-men. Backing away from them, he steps into direct sunlight which, as we all know, is far more deadly on the Moon than it is on Earth. Before you can say 'Dracula' his space-suit burns away leaving only a skeleton.

Steve, June and Lon make it back to the rocket-ship which successfully blasts off by superimposing that old V2 footage over a shot of Bronson Canyon and hoping nobody will notice the launch gantry. There is some desperately weak, sexist joke at the end that seems to have been tacked on to satisfy some sort of union regulation, and then it just stops.

Director Richard E Cunha had a brief but notable career. After learning his trade as a newsreel cameraman for the US Air Force he shot some largely forgotten TV shows before lunging into fantastique movies in partnership with producer Marc Frederic. Together they made Giant from the Unknown, She Demons, Frankenstein's Daughter and this picture - all within about a year of each other! Cunha shot a couple more non-genre pictures before disappearing.

Cinematographer Meredith Nicholson (who also lit The Amazing Transparent Man) went on to a busy TV career, working on such memorable shows as M*A*S*H, Batman, The Invaders and Mork and Mindy. Special effects are credited to Ira Anderson whose career extended from Rocky Jones, Space Ranger through a brace of Tarzan pictures to the likes of The Deep and Damien: Omen II.

Missile to the Moon is cheesy 1950s B-movie sci-fi at not only its cheesiest but also its B-movie-ist and frankly its 1950s-ist. It stems from an age when the idea of launching things into space had become viable but was still sufficiently outrageous that any old nonsense could be applied to it. And an age when having the Moon populated by a dozen young ladies, a bunch of sentient rocks and a single giant spider-thing was a cinematic possibility. Bless it.

The version on this triple bill DVD is very odd. The first reel (a reel is about twenty minutes long) is a lovely crisp image with only a few minor scratches, but the first few minutes of the second reel are not just scratchy but tatty, with both image and sound jumping and massive gashes appearing on screen. After that, the print is all over the place, sometimes too dark, sometimes heavily scratched, sometimes completely out of focus! And yet sometimes nice and crisp and clear again. I've never seen anything like it.

MJS rating: C-

review originally posted 27th April 2005

↧

Monster from Bikini Beach

March 2, 2014, 2:55 am

≫ Next: Moontrek

≪ Previous: Missile to the Moon

Director: Darin Wood
Writer: Darin Wood
Producer: Christy Savage, Amy Slockbower
Cast: Stephen Vargo, Galen Howard, Stephanie Hyden
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.trashfilmorgy.com

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this film. Something cheesy, something deliberately lo-fi, something silly. When a production company calls itself Trash Film Orgy, you don’t raise your hopes too high.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this is a well-produced, professional-looking, enormously entertaining... cheesy, lo-fi, silly film. There’s nothing desperately new here; everything in Monster from Bikini Beach has been done before, sometimes better, often worse. Without ascribing specific influences, one can construct a melange such as this from easily available ingredients: a touch of Attack of the Giant Leeches here, a smidgeon of The Pink Chiquitas there...

But this isn’t a movie which claims to be the big new thing, it’s an hour and a half of fun: sexy chicks, surfin’ guitar sounds, narrating detectives and an impressive monster.

Stephen Vargo (The Final Job) stars as Sammy Payday, a bent cop with a loud shirt, a gammy knee and a 1966 Cadillac. His silent, also bent partner is Charlie Snaps (David Ainsworth, who also has several crew credits on the film) - the only man in Camaraville who owns a shirt and tie, apparently. Together they are on the trail of a supply of cocaine which has gone missing somewhere in the city, threatening an inter-gang turf war. When not running protection rackets or investigating disembowelled corpses, Payday likes to sit by the pool watching his bikini-clad squeeze Honey ‘Boom-Boom’ Stacks (Laura Stahl) go-go dancing.

In another, overlapping plot strand, there’s a love-hate relationship between two young journalists whose paths have diverged since college. Cool geek Archie ‘Scoop’ Barclay (Galen Howard: Homeworld, Canary) is a freelance photographer, making no money but determined to uncover the truth while well-preened Raquel Vanvanderzander (Stephanie Hyden: Sukeban: Octopus Pot) is an on-screen reporter for Channel 13, selling her independent spirit for local fame and a decent wage. Archie is convinced that a putative local serial killer is actually a monster but Raquel is more sceptical: Scully to his Mulder.

The other main characters are gun-toting local catfish-tickler Noodlin’ Stu (Keith Letl) and his dynamite-toting ‘niece’ Fanny Jo (Liesel Hanson), who together play the Bert Gummer role, plus goateed entrepreneur Lonny Valente (Adam Saake) who plans to launch his new beach-front nightclub with the first ever Camaraville Midnight Gogo-a-thon.

The monster itself is never fully explained. There is a suggestion that it’s a giant catfish mutated by toxic waste and there is also talk of it having been worshipped by Indians in the area for centuries. Basically it’s a ten-foot-tall, green mouth on legs, looking not unlike the thing from The Host only vastly cheaper and less Korean. Josh Lashells is inside the suit for most shots but occasionally it’s worn by Nick Roberts or the tireless David Ainsworth.

Some people get eaten, some people get killed and lots of hot chicks and crazy guys party the night away, oblivious to the terror in their midst. But what makes the movie really work is that it is played completely straight. There are no winks to camera, no cheesy grins. Sammy Payday is a corrupt and frankly quite unpleasant character, the two young journos are sincere, Noodlin’ Stu and Fanny Jo are downhome, honest folk. People question the existence of the monster, people scream when it appears - and people’s guts get ripped out in surprisingly good (but not gratuitously unpleasant) gore scenes. Of particular note is the way that the T&A is integrated into the movie and relevant to the plot rather than the film simply stopping dead every ten minutes for a cheesecake sequence. Many film-makers could learn from this.

With a coherent plot (which is a rarity nowadays), good acting, decent camera-work, clear sound and above-average production values, Monster from Bikini Beach is the sort of film that I thought they had stopped making. And the whole thing is back with the twanging guitars of some kicking surf bands. The credits list them as Necrobeach, the Hypnotic IV, the Pyronauts, blackbird RAUM and Danny Amis with Lost Acapulco and the Mexico City Brass. Phill Baldwin provides the score inbetween surf tracks.

This is the debut feature from writer-director Darin Wood, who shares editing duties with his wife Christy Savage, who was DP and one of two producers. The other producer, Amy Slockbower, also supervised special effects. These three are the main driving force behind Trash Film Orgy which is much more than just a B-movie production company.

Trash Film Orgy is a festival of alternative culture held annually in Sacramento since 2000, a mix of big-screen movies, stage shows, bands, audience participation and general good-natured, tacky mayhem. It sounds freaking brilliant. In 2005, Wood and co. produced Curse of the Golden Skull, a serial starring masked wrestler ‘El Tigre Diablo’ which was screened before the movies at that year’s TFO. Stephen Vargo was in the cast of that too. Now the TFO team have put all their knowledge and experience of ‘trash cinema’ towards the task of creating their own instant cult classic and by George, I believe they may have succeeded.

There is a tremendous sense of fun and joie de vivre in Monster from Bikini Beach. For example, not content with simply listing bit parts as ‘second beach girl’ or ‘man in bar’, every character has their own very groovy name: Desdemona Nova, Retro-Chic Monique, Pinky Moldanato and White Pants Dutch. Even among the crew, the fun continues. What other movie can boast such enviable jobs as ‘break-away bikini-top technicians’, ‘psychedelic naked girl painters’ or a ‘director of nonsense’?

Enormously entertaining but made with a professionalism that demonstrates a true understanding of what makes B-movies great, this is a film you shouldn’t miss.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 27th February 2009

↧

Moontrek

March 2, 2014, 2:05 pm

≫ Next: Mr Blades

≪ Previous: Monster from Bikini Beach

Director: Jean Image
Writer: France Image, Jean Image
Producer: Jean Image
Cast: Who can tell?
Country: France
Year of release: 1984
Reviewed from: UK VHS

I love animation, me. I love it all (with the sole exception, as previously mentioned, of anime, but let’s not go into that here). I love Disney and Warner Brothers and Terrytoons and Fleischer and Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network and Klasky-Csupo. I love American and Canadian and European and Australian animation. I love feature films and TV series and six-minute shorts and student films and weird experimental stuff. I love cartoons. Cartoons kick arse.

Except this one.

Le Secret des Selenites (to use its original title) is far and away the worst feature-length animated film that I have ever seen. It makes Bevanfield’s Beauty and the Beast look like, well, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

Apart from being diabolically awful in every respect, the other extraordinary thing about this film - which one cannot guess from either the French or English title - is that it is about Baron Munchausen. Who knew? I expect that most of us are familiar with Terry Gilliam’s gloriously extravagant The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and I have fond memories of catching the 1940s German Munchausen movie - a stunning film riven with alarming Nazi subtexts - on a rare TV screening many years ago. There have been a handful of other Munchausen movies, but I had no idea that there were not one but two French animated features about the notorious liar.

In 1979, Jean Image released Les Fabuleuses Aventures du Legendaire Baron de Munchausen which premiered at no less than the Moscow Film Festival; I have no information on any English language version of that. Le Secret des Selenites was the sequel, produced over 1981-82 and eventually released in February 1984.

And good sir, it’s bobbins.

In 1757 ‘famous astronomer’ and/or astrologer Sirius is convinced that there are sentient creatures living on the Moon - “according to my teacher, the eminent Dr Keppler” - who have the secret of eternal life. He is visited by his good friend Baron von Munchausen and we see a flashback as the Baron relates how he was captured by the Turks and forced to work as a beekeeper. Attacked by some particularly fierce bees, he defended himself by throwing a hatchet which flew up to the Moon. The Baron then planted a magic 'Spanish bean' which grew into a beanstalk “faster than a jolly green giant” and enabled him to retrieve his hatchet.

After assorted inanities, Sirius puts his entire personal fortune at the Baron’s disposal if he will agree to fly to the Moon and take a look. Munchausen hires a sailing ship, the Claire de Lune and rounds up his five loyal servants: Hercules (who is very strong), Hurricane (who can blow very hard), Earful (a little fellow with huge ears who can hear at great distances), Nimrod (who can run very fast) and Cavalo (the nature of whose special talent, frankly, eluded me).

The ship heads for the South Seas where it is becalmed. The captain and crew leave in a longboat for ‘Paradise Island’ while Munchausen and his servants raise up three large balloons which are sufficient to fly them to the Moon. Descending towards a large crater, they breathe oxygen from a barrel.

Landing on the Moon, Hercules fights off a giant, blue bee before the expedition is attacked by three-eyed, two-legged red dragons; fortunately they are rescued by large, flying, green seahorses. Then some blue rock monsters attack but the humans are saved by some friendly Selenites. These are roughly humanoid but have three legs and a detached, floating head which is in the shape of a crescent moon, with a pointy chin and a single, large horn in the centre of the forehead. Shown around the Moon, Munchausen is told that the Selenites eat solid honey, that they use vegetables as weapons and that they are hatched from giant nuts.

The Selenites are threatened, however, by the Green Means, little pepperpot-like aliens with concertina jaws who fly down to the Moon in small flying saucers, intent on stealing the Selenites’ ‘Talisman of Life’. The Green Means capture and threaten the Selenite’s King and Queen, who wear Inca-style head-dresses, but Munchausen and his servants successfully repel the invaders. As a reward, all six are given a talisman by the King which will grant them eternal life.

Presumably they are given a spare one too because the epilogue sees Munchausen and Sirius, with long grey beards, still alive in the far distant year of 1997, while the Baron’s five servants fly between the futuristic skyscrapers in a variety of advanced aircraft.

This is just terrible. The animation is some of the worst I have ever seen, based entirely on simple repeated loops of motion. Nothing happens that doesn’t then happen four or five times again in succession, sometimes in two alternating directions. This even extends to characters standing still - no-one stands still in this movie! Every character on screen is constantly bobbing up and down or side to side in a loop of animation - watching this is enough to drive you batty. The character design is really crude, almost like a child would do. And every character has a single angle from which they are seen: humans and Green Means in three-quarter, Selenites in profile, Selenite King and Queen full face. No-one ever turns in any direction except the opposite one.

To complement the pisspoor design and animation is an appalling script, devoid of wit, characterisation or interest. It should not be possible to destroy a character as wonderful as Baron Munchausen but Jean Image and chums have managed it. Obviously I’m working here from the uncredited American script, but given the general low quality of the film I very much doubt that the original was much better. A lot of the film is just characters saying “Aha. Um. Oh. Aha.” over and over again as they bob endlessly back and forth in an effort to pad out the flimsy storyline and stretch this to feature-length.

No voice actors are credited on the English-language but the original French version featured Jacques Ciron (Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier) as the lead Selenite with Dominique Paturel as Munchausen. Jean Image was born Imre Hadju in Hungary in 1910 and emigrated to France in 1932. Apart from the two Munchausen pictures, his other films were Jeannot l’Intrepide/Johnny the Giant Killer, Bonjour Paris, Aladdin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and his Magic Lamp, Joe Petit Boum-Boum/Johnny in the Valley of the Giants and Pluk, Naufrage de l’Espace/Little Orbit the Astrodog and the Screechers from Space which I want to see, just on the basis of its English title. All except the first were co-written with France Image who was presumably Mrs Hadju.

The Images also created an early 1960s cartoon series, Les Aventures de Joe, about a boy who was shrunk to the size of an insect, and a later stop-motion series, Kiri le Clown. One of Jean Image’s lesser known credits is the special effects in the 1951 British short documentary River of Steel, which was shown at Cannes.

But the most curious credit on this film is the annoyingly catchy theme song, based around the English translation of the French title. Words and music are by Haim Saban and Shuki Levy, who later went on to found Saban Entertainment and bring us, among many other things, Power Rangers!

Anyway, Moontrek is awful. I can’t imagine even the youngest, most easily pleased child being anything other than bored or frightened by this rubbish. It is a chore to watch and has no redeeming features whatsoever.

MJS rating: D

review originally posted 25th October 2005

↧

Mr Blades

March 2, 2014, 2:14 pm

≫ Next: Mr Friendly's Pizza

≪ Previous: Moontrek

Director: Thomas Lee Rutter
Writer: Thomas Lee Rutter
Producer: Thomas Lee Rutter
Cast: David J Nock, Leandro D’Andrea and, um, me
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc

Teenage auteur Thomas Lee Rutter follows up his dirt-cheap-but-enthusiastic feature debut Full Moon Massacre with Mr Blades, arguably the first ever West Midlands giallo. And young Thomas has advanced considerably. Mr Blades has a proper script, it has proper actors (and me) and it has a genuinely impressive third act that makes this more than just a cut-price exercise in bloody make-up effects.

David J Nock (also in FMM) stars as Jeffrey Jackson who finds himself held prisoner by the mysterious Mr Blades, a phantom-like figure, dressed all in black with an expressionless white mask and a voice like Darth Vader. Most of the film is a flashback to the investigation surrounding the murder of Jeff’s girlfriend Christina (Fay Chatwin). Among those involved are Jeff’s two friends Frank and Chris (Dave Pearson and Shaun Portman), sleazy newspaper reporter Chester Marwood (William Stafford) and Detective Cameron Atkins (Leandro D’Andrea), a police officer who refuses to make compromises in either the interrogation of suspects or the brewing of tea.

As the bodies pile up, reducing the range of possible suspects by one each time, Jeff suffers from nightmare-ish visions of violence and death. Are these dreams, repressed memories or images of what might happen? Adroitly mixing well-crafted, light-hearted characterisation with impressive-for-the-budget gore effects, Rutter keeps the pace moving and delivers a thoroughly satisfying resolution.

Among the cast, D’Andrea is a stand-out as the copper and Stafford is also impressive as the nosy journo while James D Messer (Jay in Full Moon Massacre) clearly has great fun as ‘Kristof the Mortician’. The director - who also wrote, produced, edited and shot the film as well as supervising the special effects - briefly hands the camera to someone else for a few scenes as Brad Beckley, Christina’s slimy ex-boyfriend.

Since you’re no doubt wondering, I play Raymond Burns, editor of the rag for which Chester Marwood writes. I have three scenes, two with Stafford and a final one where I am supposedly collapsing from a heart attack. I supplied my own costume and cigar but I wish to emphasise the characterisation is completely original and not based on any editors for whom I have actually worked. (In fact, on reflection, I was playing J Jonah Jameson, or at least a Brummie version of him.) We shot my scenes in the library at Tom’s college where a large collection of magazines and a lightbox for viewing transparencies actually gave a reasonable impression of a newspaper office.

I also get a thank you in the credits, presumably for my review of Full Moon Massacre, alongside David DeCoteau, who has been very supportive of Tom’s work.

Mr Blades is still ultra-low budget, of course, but it’s a real step up from Full Moon Massacre and if you can overlook the semi-amateur cast and the technical limitations that come from shooting without proper lighting or sound boom, there’s a thoroughly enjoyable seventy minutes of psycho-slasher fun to be had here. Tom Rutter is learning his trade the best way there is - by actually getting out there and making movies.

The DVD, when it’s available, will also include Tom’s Lynch-ian short film A Child’s Toy. The film’s soundtrack includes songs by Weak 13, Oxzide, Dressed*as*Girl and The Violent Professionals.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 13th May 2007

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Mr Friendly's Pizza

March 2, 2014, 2:20 pm

≫ Next: Mutant Hunt

≪ Previous: Mr Blades

Director: Anthony P Azar
Writer: Anthony P Azar
Producer: Anthony P Azar
Cast: Anthony P Azar, Tonya Hall, Craig Chamberlin
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

The last short that Anthony P Azar sent me, Happy Hour: The Movie, was a modest, conventional, rather overlong piece about a bar where the clientele get lucky one by one, with a vampiric twist that could be seen coming a mile off. He also sent me a disc of this film but it wouldn’t play so it was some time later that I got the chance to watch Mr Friendly’s Pizza, expecting more of the same.

What I found instead was a film that is surreal to the point of being avant-garde. In fact the adjective that popped into my head was Bunuel-ian. This is a Bunuel-ian film about pizza. It’s sort of a horror film too, I guess, because people sort of get killed and there’s sort of blood.

I don’t know where to start reviewing this as there’s no real narrative. There are characters and there are locations so I suppose I can review those.

Azar stars as a ‘scumbag film producer’ who orders a pizza to his office. Tonya Hall, the barmaid from Happy Hour, is the delivery girl with her hair in bunches. The film producer imagines a murderous arm emerging from the pizza box (quite a nice and imaginative effect) then wakes up but imagines the delivery girl killing him with a pizza cutter (another quite nice and imaginative effect). Intercut with all this are shots of the ‘Mr Friendly’s Pizza’ restaurant where the clientele include a white rasta and a guy in a leather jacket who complains about his pizza and insists on another one. The film finishes with the delivery girl murdering that guy in his bath. (He is credited as ‘The Jerk’ and is played by Craig Chamberlin; Crystal Louthan, the hot blonde babe from Happy Hour, is his stetson-wearing girlfriend.)

That’s about the closest the film gets to a story. Apart from some one-sided phone conversations that Azar has at the start, Hall’s repeated, cheery “Mr Friendly’s Pizza!” and the leather-jacket-guy’s food complaint, there’s no dialogue.

The colour balance is all over the place, to the extent that there’s a shot where Azar leans forward and in doing so changes the colour of the wall behind him! But when the film is so avant-garde in its construction and presentation, is that incompetence or deliberate artistic style (or indeed, accidental artistic style)? There’s no way to tell.

Looking at the Truth in Creativity website you could be forgiven for expecting MFP to be a trashy horror film set around a pizza parlour but if that’s what you think you’ll see then you’re going to be disappointed and very confused. There are lots of shots of people in the restaurant, including the kitchen staff, but none of them seem to do or mean anything. What is going on?

Azar is not quite a one-man band but most of the credits here are him under various names. I just can’t work out how one guy can produce something as straightforward (to the point of obvious) as Happy Hour and something as daringly experimental as this. I haven’t been this stumped by a film since I watched Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare but I’m going to have to give this a reasonably good grade for two reasons. Firstly, there is the same use of imaginative shots and angles that I saw in Happy Hour, and secondly I just can’t believe that anyone would make anything like this by accident.

Azar is still finishing off his debut feature, The Cops Did It. I can’t wait to see what that’s like...

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 13th August 2008

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Mutant Hunt

March 2, 2014, 2:53 pm

≫ Next: interview: Melanie Light (2014)

≪ Previous: Mr Friendly's Pizza

Director: Tim Kincaid
Writer: Tim Kincaid
Producer: Cynthia De Paula
Cast: Rick Gianisi, Mary Fahey, Ron Reynaldi
Year of release: 1986
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Entertainment in Video)

From Tim Kincaid, the Italian-born director of The Occultist, Breeders, Robot Holocaust, and similar nonsense, comes possibly the worst KCM (Kickboxing Cyborg Movie) I have ever seen. As we know, standards within this particular subgenre are not high but Mutant Hunt is even worse than the previous record holder, Cybertracker (although it only just scrapes into the KCM field as it has cyborgs and kickboxing but no actual kickboxing cyborgs).

The head of the Inteltrax Corporation is a shoulder-padded megalomaniac called Z (played by Bill Peterson according to the on-screen credits but by Michael Speero according to the sleeve). He has been working on a type of ‘cyborg’ (as so often, the film-makers have seen The Terminator but failed to understand what the word ‘cyborg’ means) called a Delta-7, which is basically a stunt man in a black jumpsuit and dark glasses. Three of these destroy three others and break out of the Inteltrax building.

The corporation’s head scientist, Paul Haynes (Marc Umile), and his sister Darla (Australian actress Mary Fahey) discover that the drug Euphoron has been introduced into the systems of these Delta-7s, by checking a doodad removed from the back of the neck of one of the destroyed cyborgs. Then two other Delta-7s come to arrest them but Darla escapes and runs off to find freelance bounty hunter Matt Riker (played by Sgt Kabukiman himself, Rick Gianisi).

She finds him in bed with a blonde girl, then two Delta-7s break in but are quickly despatched by Riker, who has crossbows, shotguns and underwater spear-guns hanging on his wall. Then one of the drugged-up Delta-7s turns up, and again presents no real problem, but does sling the blonde out of the window before being destroyed with a small ray-gun.

This is, like most other scenes in Mutant Hunt, extraordinarily painful to watch. Fahey and Gianisi are so wooden that one would assume they were playing robots, though in fact they’re the only human characters; the blonde turns out to be a ‘pleasure droid’. Leeanne Baker (Breeders, Galactic Gigolo) who plays her is rubbish but still manages to be the best actor in the scene. Mutant Hunt isn’t an action movie - it’s an inaction movie. Not only are all the fights spectacularly lame, but those not involved in the actual fights simply stand around looking bored while people they care about pretend to kick seven shades of shit out of deadly robots. As for dialogue, it really does look like some of the actors are reading off idiot cards.

Riker ropes in two colleagues: diminutive, moustachioed Johnny Felix (Ron Reynaldi, who also arranged the fights) and Elaine Elliot (Taunie Vrenon - as it says clearly in both opening and closing credits, though on the sleeve it’s ‘Vernon’) who combines her PI and bounty hunter roles with a sideline as a not-very-exotic dancer. Reynaldi stands out among the cast not for his limited acting ability but as the only person who actually knows kickboxing, or indeed any sort of fighting technique. Vrenon makes a reasonable stab at it, as does a Chinese guy seen briefly later on, but nobody else in this movie has a clue about stage fighting, certainly not the director.

And then there’s Domina, played by the wonderfully named Stormy Spill who, like many of the cast and crew, either never worked on another film or (more likely) used a pseudonym here to avoid embarrassment. She is some sort of rival to Z and has her own cyborg, the only surviving Delta-6, called Hydro (Doug DeVos: Breeders) who wears a different coloured jumpsuit to the Delta-7s.

The Delta-7s have (we are told in a clunky infodump) about five times normal human strength and limited telepathic abilities - in other words if you hunt them, they will know about it and come looking for you. Which is convenient. They can also extend their arms, Inspector Gadget style, though we only see this happen twice and it seems entirely irrelevant. Their biggest failing (apart from no fighting skills whatsoever) is that they lumber along at the same slow pace traditionally associated with Frankenstein’s monster and the mummy, and are therefore theoretically extremely easy to run away from.

Riker and Felix set out to destroy the remaining two cyborgs, which they do, no problem. For something touted in the ad copy as ‘man’s ultimate enemy’, the Delta-7s are spectacularly easy to beat. The film climaxes at the one good thing this pile of dross has going for it - a spectacular location. The Inteltrax factory is a glass-roofed courtyard between two warehouses, each of which has big, concrete balconies at irregular intervals. Nice location, shame about the film. (All the other locations are bare bones rooms, seemingly inside these warehouses. Shots of doors, window, etc, are crudely edited in, and set decoration is limited to things actually required for the scene. If it’s a bedroom, it has a bed and nothing else; if it’s a lab, it has only a workbench...)

It’s all to do with this drug Euphoron. Apparently it is regularly smuggled in from ‘the Lunar colonies’ but then never reaches the streets. That’s because Z is stockpiling it, mutating it into the form which turns Delta-7s into psychopathic killers, and then selling it to terrorists and dictators. Domina has her own trick up her sleeve - a Delta-8 which she keeps wrapped, mummy-like in her lab. I would like to say it ends with a big, exciting fight, but in fact it ends with a pisspoor fight that’s as dull and uninspiring as all the others.

Christ, there was some crap made in the 1980s, when any old shit could make a profit in the video market. This dross (executive produced by an uncredited Charlie Band for Empire Entertainment) has nothing to recommend it whatsoever: no action, no thrills, no hot chicks, no impressive stunts. The ‘special effects make-up’, such as it is, is credited to Ed French (Rejuvenator, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town - he also worked on Terminator 2 and Star Trek VI!) with his assistants John Bisson (From Dusk Till Dawn) and James Chai (Muppets from Space!).

Among the general, lazy, shoddy workmanship on display here, two things stand out. One is the ‘fights’, which are so slow and unexciting that they look like rehearsals, not helped by the non-participants’ tendency to stand around waiting for their next line of dialogue. The other gobsmackingly poor work is in the editing. All the dialogue runs like this: cut to person A, half-second pause, person A says line, cut to person B, half-second pause, person B says line, cut back to person A, half second pause...

Amazingly, editor Barry Zetlin appears to be one of the few people who worked on this film and is still in the business! His other credits include Galaxy of Terror, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama, Mandroid, Cyborg 3 and Tim Bond's The Shadow Men and he’s still going, whereas very few of other other cast or crew have any credits after about 1987.

MJS rating: D (and that’s being generous)

review originally posted 3rd December 2004

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interview: Melanie Light (2014)

March 6, 2014, 11:50 am

≫ Next: My Little Eye

≪ Previous: Mutant Hunt

I last interviewed production designer Melanie Light in 2009. Five years on, in March 2014, Mel kindly answered a few questions to bring me up to speed on her film-making exploits.

What were you called on to design for Alex Chandon’s terrific Inbred?
"As Inbred was such a low budget - micro budget even! - feature film and at the time I would say I was still fairly new to the production design side of the industry, then I kinda was a 'make it happen' person. I did a lot of multiple jobs within the art department and this can make it hard to then focus on the real design of a film. Alex is very visual and has some great ideas and storyboards, which made my hard job easier. I loved the script when I first read it and cringed at the 'shit pump' scene. I could really see the story and loved the humour involved.

"When being told that you basically have no money and they have everything at the location you've not seen, it makes being the head of the art department very hard. You never know whether to believe them or not (this being the second time I've been told this). I took a few hero props up there with me and filled my crappy car with tools and a few dressing props from other twisted horror films I'd worked on. I was in Thirsk a week or so earlier than most people and was running about in my car finding set dressing, getting stuck in traffic, picking up a minibus, throwing things together, making fake dead goats and flame bars, organising masks and pub signs. Luckily Alex has some great connections in the SFX and VFX world and some art department stuff was already covered. Having a team of two other people and being in the middle of nowhere is something that we managed to make happen but I wouldn't like to have to do it again. I luckily got a stand-by the day before the shoot, otherwise I think the art department would have crumbled.

"I'm a very hands-on designer and art director. I like mucking in, lifting and dirtying down organs (hell, there was no one else to do it). Having the ability to do many things helps make a difference. We threw things together with what we found, which added to the style of the rustic 'inbred' British countryside.

"What I did get to dress and put together came really easy as, being a huge horror fan, I know what works for the right atmosphere with textures and colours. We had an awesome DOP who had a great grade set out in mind and the way the colours fell into place worked out really beautifully. I would love to work with Alex again and I see him as an inspirational creative person who has been very helpful within my own projects."

How and why did you make the move from production design to directing?
"Having worked on many horror films for my friends and and then a few as 'jobs' I started to feel some frustrations within the scope of the industry (not through friends' projects) and felt like: 'I could do this.' I felt like my on- and off-set experience was enough for me to make the move. I also felt the sudden confidence which I had lacked before. Switch, my first short film made for £400, was a starting point which I lucked out on with help from friends and the British weather forecast. It was my first born and a good little lesson. I was super happy with the way it had made itself into the Frightfest world and then into the BEV Festival of Horror that year too. Having a piece of work shown at the ICA, an arts venue I had visited ever since I was at art school. was a great honour for me. (It was also just down the road from the Queen! Haha!)

"I much prefer directing. I feel like it's a true form of art. You are the catalyst of the whole thing from the words on paper to the details of costume, choosing the actors, deciding on the music and sounds, the look and the shots. I'm lucky to have been in the film industry for over seven years now and have seen and worked with some great people, so I have a standard of which I want to be a part. My abilites and visions have come a long way for each new project. The only downside is getting it out there, finding the time and money to make it happen. But when it does, it is very satisfying - no matter how hard it usually ends up being!"

What has the response been to your two shorts Switch and Escape, and how pleased are you with them?
"As I said before Switch was my firstborn and was a lot of fun. I even have a tattoo to represent it (zombie hands holding a clapper board with Switch on the title). It still entertains but now I do look back at it and see how it really does look like £400! I am so much better now. Escape was a hard one. I had a lot of personal issues going on behind the scenes that made the whole process a lot harder then it really needed to be. It was a huge labour of love and part of me really hated getting it all finished. I was so excited by the whole thing but it's like a bloody curse. I didn't get into any festivals but I think I should have aimed lower on that front.

"We had to ADR the whole thing. I felt like no one liked it. It looks fantastic, the acting is great and the location is beautiful. I wanted to make something cinematic and that I did, to prove that I have an eye. This I feel comes across. It seems strange now as Escape's time has become more present now then when it was first made. Part of me thinks I'm crazy for deciding to make a short film in the Nevada desert but I was adamant that I wanted to be different and make my short film abroad and out of the UK. I also love the landscape of Nevada. I am super proud of the final product, I just wish the bullshit that I had to deal with to get it done didn't attach itself to it like a dark cloud."

You’re very involved with ‘women in horror’ projects but, if I can plays Devil’s advocate for a second, in 2014, in an industry largely populated by young, modern people and with technology that allows anyone to make and distribute their own movies, what need is there to promote ‘women in horror’ as a concept?
"I am very much getting more involved into a 'sisterhood' of the film-making industry, and in life in general. The amount of patriarchy that is shoved before our eyes on a day-to-day basis without the notice of the regular human is ridiculous. For instance, standing inline at Sainsbury's I noticed a seaweed snack packet with images of fit men running on the front (eat these, boys, be fit). Hello, there are women out there too!

"Having been a part of male dominated industries for so many years from tattooing and film and being a part of that niche, the 'scenes' I am into are always largely male dominated. There is still a huge amount of sexism in the trades. I'm fortunate enough to be toughened to the years of experience of jibes on set and the realisation that as a minority group it is very hard to have your voice heard. I myself am a very strong woman and without being a voice in anyway I can, then how is there to be a change? Yes it is 2014 but this sexisim within the whole world every day is still very much present.

"'Women in Horror' month is a great way for us to prove our worth. I am not saying that we should shout out about anything and everything we do. I still maintain a quality control, why would we shout out about something that isn't very good in general? I focused on this within my Women in Horror calendar. I wanted to show how there are a few of us out there doing some pretty cool macabre shit and not just in film, in every aspect of the arts. I am a very creative person, I love horror and the macabre - why, I don't know. I will happily back up any sisters I can as our voices are very much muted. I can be on a tech recce for a film and myself and a female line producer could bring up a subject or an idea and it will not be until a male has repeated it that it is heard or taken onboard. We as women are a lot easier to bully at work as we are seen as weaker individuals. Unfortunately many women will let this happen as we are born into such a repressed society.

"Plus Women in Horror month is fun!"

What are your current plans for The Herd, and any other future projects?
"The Herd is going to be epic (probably in getting it made too). It is a story written by a dear horror fanatic vegan friend of mine called Ed Pope. It uses women as a human reprensation of the torture of the dairy farming industry. Women being forced to have babies and milked, males being drowned as useless. All for the creation of the ultimate anti-aging cream.

"So far I have already attached some great cast: Victoria Broom, Pollyanna McIntosh and Jon Campling. I have a wonderful DOP called Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz and our composer is Laurent Barnard from the band The Gallows. I'm super excited. The script has been in my hands for over a year and only now have I been in the postion to make it start to become real. I will have the SFX team from Inbred and my good friend Tristan Versluis. This film will finally have the production and costume design I have always wanted and the cinematography to match. It has a hard hitting moral and the subject matter, something which has never been touched on to such an extent. We are launching a crowdfunding campaign from April 1st! We have already have a keen support from many animal rights groups too. I just need to attach some names and we will be laughing (I hope). It will have a strong graphic and grungy feel for the true fact of real pain and suffering for the miserable industry that feeds the human existence.

"I have also written a 'female serial killer' feature-length film which I intend to re-write and then push for funding. I write what I know and understand and that is from a female protagonistic force."

What is the most important thing which you have learned since our last interview back in 2009?
"Since 2009 I have really chilled out and learnt a lot within the film industry as well as life in general. The only way to make something happen is to make it happen yourself. I use anything which could be a form of financial savings to put into projects and to progress my work. I've been non-stop these last few years and it has been a struggle to find the time to make my own work. I did manage to shoot a great little ident for the Frightfest 'Turn off your bloody phone' segment last year which went down a storm and had the primetime Friday night slot before VHS2. I was super proud of this and had once again a great team involved. That went off to LA and Portugal too!

"I'm really excited about 2014 as The Herd really has been a slow work in progress but the amount of love that has been already going into it and the time to find the 'right' team is going to really pay off!"

website: www.misartressmelanie.com

↧

My Little Eye

March 8, 2014, 2:51 pm

≫ Next: My Name is Sarah Hayward

≪ Previous: interview: Melanie Light (2014)

Director: Marc Evans
Writers: David Hilton, James Watkins
Producer: Jonathan Finn
Cast: Sean CW Johnson, Jennifer Sky, Kris Lemche
Year of release: 2002
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Can you believe the hype? My Little Eye comes to DVD as part of the so-called ‘British horror revival’ with the unfortunate setback (among discerning audiences) of having been widely and lazily compared with the utterly shit Blair Witch Project by know-nothing mainstream critics still labouring under the misapprehension that BWP was either good or popular. Do not compare the two: Blair Witch was all gimmick, all hype, no film and died a well-deserved swift death through word of mouth, whereas My Little Eye is a good, solid, traditional horror film which has the advantages of being (a) extremely well made and (b) very scary.

The set-up is simple: five young people agree to spend six months in an isolated house, entirely cut off from the world and under the 24-hour surveillance of dozens of webcams. Their lives will be broadcast on the net and - here’s the challenge - if all five are still there at the end, they each win a million dollars, but if any one person leaves, all forfeit the prize money.

Welsh director Marc Evans’ third feature was shot on DV and, not having seen it on the big screen, I can’t say how that affected the theatrical presentation - but it makes no difference here. Very wisely, Evans uses the actual webcam footage very sparingly and most of the shots are either faux webcam or just straightforward set-up camera shots, while the (very good) editing is as mainstream as they come. This does not look like a 90-minute webcast (despite what those same idiot mainstream critics say) which is A Good Thing. Nothing is more irritating than a gimmick that overpowers a whole film

The other thing that didn’t raise my hopes was the ‘reality TV’ subject matter, which seems to have been done to death in movies now, from Halloween: Resurrection to Hell Asylum to Erotic Survivor. Reality TV is watched by - and stars - morons. There’s so much of it on the small screen, do we want it in our movies too? In fact My Little Eye, while using a supposed reality webcast as a set-up, owes more to old-style spend-a-night-in-a-haunted-mansion-or-forfeit-the-inheritance horror movies like The House on Haunted Hill or The Cat and the Canary. The webcast experiment is a good reason to have five strangers living together in an isolated location and reluctant to leave, but it is more than that. As the film progresses the situation becomes more and more relevant in the way that it affects the characters’ attitudes and fears, especially when they discover just what is - or isn’t - being shown on the web. (Returning to the subject of morons for a moment, one very unrealistic aspect of the film is that all five characters are reasonably intelligent and erudite, unlike anybody you might ever see on Big Brother.)

The small cast of young actors are all excellent, so kudos to both them and the casting director. Despite what the publicity claims, they are not completely unknown, especially Jennifer Sky (flirtatious Charlie) who played the title role in Cleopatra 2525. Kris Lemche (geeky Rex) was in Ginger Snaps and eXistenZ, while Sean CW Johnson (hunky Matt) was the red ranger in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue! Production design, music and DV cinematography all complement the film’s premise extremely well. Tim Bevan of Working Title executive produced.

On DVD, one can watch the film in standard mode, with optional commentary by director and producer, or in ‘interactive mode’ which makes full use of the multiple camera set-ups, but obviously is not recommended for a first viewing! A second disc has half an hour of deleted scenes (also with optional commentary), an excellent half-hour ‘making of’ which is really more of a ‘distribution of’ documentary and all the more interesting for that, plus trailers and a stills gallery (which, annoyingly, cannot be flipped through).

My Little Eye is terrific. It is credible, it is scary, it builds tension and character in equal measure and at just the right pace. The trepidation I felt slipping this disc into the player was largely based on its reputation as a gimmick film (not helped by the awareness of the ‘interactive viewing mode’) but I can reassure you all that this is no gimmick film. It is a down-the-line horror film which is shot in a perfectly normal way, using possible gimmicks, like webcam POV shots and infrared night-time shots, sparingly and only when required for plot or characterisation.

Forget the hype, sit back and enjoy. Heartily recommended. Oh, and it’s British!

MJS rating: A
review originally published 13th March 2005

[For a somewhat different, retrospective review of My Little Eye, see my bookUrban Terrors. - MJS]

↧

My Name is Sarah Hayward

March 8, 2014, 2:55 pm

≫ Next: Mystics in Bali

≪ Previous: My Little Eye

Director: Josh O’Brien
Writer: Josh O’Brien
Producer: Ben Williams
Cast: Charlotte Hunter, Edmund Dehn, Ryan Mathie
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: Festival screening (LIFF 2009)

I caught this impressive 15-minute short playing support to The Scar Crow at the 2009 London Independent Film Festival. It is set in the late 18th or early 19th century and is primarily a two-hander between a judge, woken from his sleep, and a young woman whom he had recently sentenced, who has broken into his room.

In carefully written, authentic sounding language she explains the background to the crime for which she was arrested and tried: the murder of her six-year-old son. Wary at first, the judge listens. As her tale, which starts with her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, reaches that tragic night, we fade to the actual events. It’s painful to any parent to watch a film about the death of a child and writer-director-editor Josh O’Brien’s film does a fine job of wringing emotion from the situation without becoming mawkish or maudlin.

And then the twist. The judge won’t change his mind about the sentence he handed down - but what was that sentence?

Cinematographer Pete Wallington (The Symmetry of Love) does a superb job evoking a candle-lit ambience that perfectly fits the atmospheric tale and intriguing characters. Edmund Dehn (Cradle of Fear) is the judge while the title role is taken by Charlotte Hunter who started off with a bit part in Forest of the Damned and went on to stunt double Emma Watson in a couple of Harry Potters. Both are excellent. The other small roles are taken by Ryan Mathie (Just for Fun), Graham Price (Intergalactic Combat), Luis Higgins and Bethany Webb (Sweet Tooth, Blood Red Letters). Stephen Frost (Necromantic, Is Anybody There?) provided the score.

A historical drama is an ambitious film to make, even at this length (despite a passing mention of ‘haunting’ there is nothing supernatural or fantastical here) and My Name is Sarah Hayward works marvellously. It also does a bang-up job of opening up and making visually interesting something which is essentially two people talking in a fairly dark room.

I don’t know whether Josh O’Brien has followed this up with anything but I do hope he continues his film-making.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 4th May 2009

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