Director: Steve Balderson
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Pleasant Gehman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.dikenga.com

[Please bear in mind when reading this review that it is based on an incomplete advance copy of the film. - MJS]

Steve Balderson has made five feature films and I have loved every one of them. Two dramatic features – the blackly comic Pep Squad and the achingly beautiful Firecracker; two extraordinary documentaries – Wamego and Wamego Strikes Back; and one fascinating avant-garde film – Phone Sex. At the end of October 2007 Steve was honoured with a three-night mini-season of his work in New York, which Film Threat called “the most deserved tribute of all time”. The day after the last NY screening, I received a screener disc of Steve’s sixth feature, his belly-dancing documentary Underbelly. I couldn’t wait to see what he had come up with.

I have always strived for honesty in these reviews and that’s why it breaks my heart to say that I was disappointed with Underbelly. Not just a bit, but really very disappointed. It’s not that it’s a bad film, it’s not that it’s dull. No, Underbelly commits a sin greater than either of these. It’s ordinary.

This is, in a nutshell, 100 minutes of talking heads and documentary footage about the world of belly-dancing and specifically a dancer/teacher named Princess Farhana, aka Steve’s friend Pleasant Gehman. And that’s all it is. It’s a Steve Balderson film and there should be something more, but there isn’t. None of Steve’s first five films could be put into a nutshell, not even something as simple in its premise as Phone Sex. But I could stop this review now and you’ll have learned everything you need to know about Underbelly. It’s not, to coin a phrase, Balderson-esque. Frankly, this could have been made by anyone. And that’s got to disappoint any film fan who has started exploring the director’s oeuvre.

There are other problems with the film, not least that it doesn’t know whether it’s a documentary about belly-dancing or about Princess Farhana. It tries to be both and ends up being neither. We learn very little about Pleasant, other than that she had Hollywood parents and was involved in the punk scene (we don’t even know whether this was real, 1976-77, safety-pins-and-spit British punk or whether it was the late 1970s, CBGB’s New York punk scene). She comes across as a loud, friendly, confident, enjoyably filthy-minded party person who genuinely enjoys both performing and teaching. Most other interviewees seem more sedate although some of them are not as articulate as a documentary usually requires: too many ‘so yeah like’s and unfinished sentences. One or two people who speak to camera in the documentary scenes have the love-me-look-at-me-love-me desperation of the low-ranked, low self-esteem performer-wannabe which is actually perversely fascinating from a pop psychology point of view.

So if we learn comparatively little about Pleasant Gehman, what do we learn about belly-dancing? Again, the answer sadly is not much. There is virtually nothing on the history of the art-form, beyond a couple of observations that it has been around for a few thousand years, and nothing at all on how it has spread across the globe. The physics and anatomy of belly-dancing is fascinating: what sort of muscle control is required to ripple your belly like that and how can the head be held so balanced while the torso moves? In short: how do you do it? But that’s not touched upon. There’s nothing at all on the music or the costumes. One lady comments that she was dancing in a club during the period that the hostages were held in the American embassy in Tehran and that she was worried about people’s reaction and this could have prompted a potentially fascinating examination of how this facet of middle-eastern culture is regarded in 21st century America, given the current antipathy towards (and ignorance of) the Middle East in that country. But no, that’s not here either.

Probably the biggest omission is the audience. We see several shows of various sizes in unlikely venues ranging from an Iowa car dealership to a Northampton cattle market but the question is never asked, let alone answered: who watches belly-dancing, apart from other belly-dancers?

There is a lot of stuff about how empowering it all is and the confidence thing and women being happy with their bodies and suchlike but frankly a lot of the comments could be applied to all manner of female-dominated physical activities, from lapdancing to lacrosse. We are given no insight into what makes belly-dancing different, only what makes it good and special – and everything is good and special to those involved in it.

There are a few references to the different styles of belly-dancing but, frustratingly once more, we are told nothing about these different styles or their various cultural origins. From the neophyte’s viewpoint, it all looks the same, with a fairly limited repertoire of moves. Of course there’s a great deal to it and layers of complexity which could be peeled back, but any artistic form looks much of a muchness to someone with an outsider’s view. Someone who knows nothing about hip-hop probably couldn’t tell A Tribe Called Quest from 50 Cent; someone with no knowledge of classical music would have difficulty distinguishing between Vivaldi and Rimsky-Korsakov; to someone who can’t stand anime (such as myself), Miyazaki’s work seems no different from any of the rest of it. Do you see where I’m going with this? A feature-length documentary about belly-dancing is an opportunity (God knows they don’t exactly come along very often) for experts within the field to impart some knowledge, to enlighten the general public about the hidden complexities of what they do. But that doesn’t happen here.

I’m not suggesting that Steve should have tried to cover every aspect of the history, geography, sociology, politics and anatomy of belly-dancing in one film; it’s up to him as director to decide what to concentrate on and what approach to take. But a film like this needs to concentrate on something in order to justify the exclusion of areas about which the audience might be curious. Underbelly doesn’t concentrate on anything, as far as I can tell, but still excludes stuff, leaving the viewer not much wiser about belly-dancing – or indeed, about Pleasant Gehman - than he or she was before. There doesn’t seem to be a point to this film. What is it trying to say? All five of Steve’s previous films were very personal projects and this one clearly isn’t. It’s a film about his friend and her world and consequently there’s no real passion driving the work. It documents when it should explore and explain. Instead of a journey into the world of Princess Farhana, it’s just a bunch of talking heads and dance clips.

Surprisingly, the former outnumber the latter by a considerable margin. The one thing I would expect from a belly-dance documentary, whatever else it may strive to do, is plenty of footage of people belly-dancing. But we’re nearly half an hour in before we get the first decent look at a performance and even then it’s annoyingly short. We want movement and poise, we want beads and chiffon, we want shimmying and stepping. Where is the dancing? I’ve never seen a proper belly-dance performance – realistically, who has? – and it would help the film enormously to start off with an unedited, well-shot sequence of someone dancing, maybe combined with a few captions bringing us up to speed with the facts and figures of belly-dancing. How old is it? How popular is it? And so on.

The interviews themselves are shot in a low-budget style, with a single handheld or tripod-mounted camera, mostly by Steve himself although a second unit was used for the British footage. Sometimes the light is slightly too bright, sometimes the room is slightly too echoey, in places there is an almost guerrilla feel to the interviews but this is not reflected in the post-production which could have used this roughness for an effect of immediacy and in-your-face cinema verite. Instead these are just competently-but-prosaically edited-together talking heads with a little subtitle caption to introduce each person. Several of the interviews include cuts between sentences, where the soundtrack is continuous but the image jumps, and in most documentaries these would normally be covered up with a cutaway to a still or some other footage. In other words, this is exactly the sort of situation that requires more dancing footage. I can’t understand why Steve keeps showing us people sitting on sofas when we could be seeing them (or people like them) wiggling their stomachs to the sound of a funky tabla.

As for the interviewees, some of them are described on-screen as just ‘belly-dancer’ while others have either a website address or a note that they are the producer or organiser of something. The web thing, while it’s very 21st century, doesn’t actually tell us who these people are. Professional dancers? Teachers? Enthusiastic amateurs? And the events or organisations which we are told some people run are things that mean nothing. What is really needed, to give these people’s views some context, is a fuller caption at the start, maybe over some footage or stills of them dancing: “Nora Jenkins has been dancing for five years since her husband Bill died. She is a 46 year-old bus driver from Chicago.” Something like that. Because without really knowing who these people are, what their interests are, what their relevance is, what their experience is, their words don’t mean a great deal.

Probably the best interviewee isn’t a belly-dancer at all but the owner of a shop specialising in world music. In fact it is precisely his semi-outsider view, from the fringe of the belly-dancing world, that makes his thoughts and observations more interesting than all the women sitting on sofas saying that belly-dancing empowers them and Pleasant Gehman is a great lady.

The film is divided up into chapters with little title cards but only two of these sections show real promise. One is a part of the film discussing male belly-dancers; who even knew there was such a thing? Three are interviewed and shown dancing, and various female interviewees give their opinions on how male dancers differ from female ones. There is a tremendously trenchant observation that men tend to dance externally, presenting themselves to the audience, while women dance more internally, dancing for their own pleasure.

The other part with some spark in it deals with fusion belly-dancing and the contrasting views of the young radicals versus the purists. There are goth belly dancers, there are burlesque belly dancers. Gehman is shown doing a routine which starts in a clown outfit and finishes with her wearing nothing but a thong and pasties. This undoubtedly incorporates some belly-dancing moves but it’s basically a Lily St.Cyr-style striptease. Ironically, the movie starts off with belly-dancers vigourously defending the art-form because some people ignorantly assume, what with the skimpy costumes and pelvic gyrations and all, that it’s akin to stripping. But then, an hour later, when a belly-dancer actually does strip, no-one is challenged over this, which seems a missed opportunity. Nevertheless it’s interesting to hear belly-dancing purists condemning those people who (as they perceive it) learn a few moves and then start mixing the style with other dance forms. The danger is that belly-dancing in its pure, traditional form may die out.

There is actually a fairly lengthy sequence about burlesque which, while it’s evidently another of Gehman’s enthusiasms, sits oddly in what professes to be a belly-dancing film. Ironically, this was probably the part I enjoyed most and found most interesting although this may be a personal reaction because, while I know absolutely zip about belly-dancing, I do have a passing interest in burlesque. I’ve read a couple of books, seen a couple of Bettie Page movies, so I’m not starting from a position of complete ignorance like I am with the belly-dancing.

Anyway, here’s what all this boils down to, and it’s something which occurred to me about halfway through the film. Underbelly has been made - whether deliberately or accidentally - for people who are already involved in the American belly-dancing scene. If you know who these people are and you’ve seen their websites and you’ve been to their events, then this will all make sense to you. There is, for example, discussion and footage of some big annual bash called Tribal Fest but no attempt to explain what it is, the assumption being that we all know about Tribal Fest even if we’ve never been there, the same way that we all know about the Cannes Film Festival or the Olympic Games. Except that we don’t. All it needs is a caption or one person telling us, in a sentence or two, what’s going on here.

The Wamego documentaries didn’t assume that we all knew about producing and distributing films (and in any case, as films about the film business, their target audience naturally has some interest in the subject matter). Unless Steve is planning only to show Underbelly at belly-dance events, I fear that he has seriously misjudged his audience.

Off on a slight tangent now. The deepest, darkest reaches of Amazon.com contain some unexplored tributaries where specialist documentary DVDs lurk. Every interest has them, whether you’re into cross-stitch or car-repairing, budgie-breeding or turkey-hunting. They’re usually rough and ready, from the Dad-can-I-borrow-the-camcorder school of film-making, but they sell in small numbers to the faithful and nobody else ever sees them so that’s all right then. Belly-dancing probably has its own films like that (one of the interviewees refers to “DVDs - and not even my DVDs”) and I suspect that Steve Balderson has made a film which, while it’s undoubtedly better produced than most of these things, has the same lack of appeal to anyone outside of the world it documents.

Steve’s not a belly-dancer (at least, I don’t think he is!) but ironically it may be his absence from the film which condemns it. He stays silent behind the camera, all his questions carefully edited out. Perhaps if this was a film about Steve Balderson exploring the curious world of American belly-dancing, it might be more personal - a film-maker’s journey - and thereby not only more like Steve’s other films but also more interesting for the non-dancer. There’s no authorial voice here; that’s why it’s just a run-of-the-mill documentary, rather than a Steve Balderson documentary.

Just as a drama or comedy requires a central character with whom we can emphasise, so does a documentary. The reason why far future stories from The Sleeper Wakes to Futurama often have a present-day protagonist is because that person is us, the viewer, and as this strange new world is explained to the sleeper awoken, so it is explained to us. Well, special interest sections of society, largely off the cultural radar, are like the far future. It’s a world where the basic truths remain the same but the details and the context are beyond our understanding. Who are these people and why do they do what they do? What are the rules, the structures and the limitations of this world in which we find ourselves? We need someone freshly awoken, who is as new to this world as us, to ask the questions for us and, if necessary, translate the answers. A wandering camera can’t do that on its own.

We also need a plot, a quest, the film-maker’s journey as hero’s journey. The reason why documentary features like Roger and Me or Supersize Me (spot the connection?) worked is because they documented the film-maker on a mission. Probably the best comparison to Underbelly among successful documentary features (at least, the ones I’ve seen) would be Spellbound, which introduced its audiences to competitive spelling bees, a world as alien to most of us as professional belly-dancing. But Spellbound had a plot and characters, following several children and their families as they competed through the regional and national levels of that odd competition. Underbelly doesn’t seem to have a plot, or any characters apart from Pleasant Gehman, everyone else either wandering in and out of their own scenes or sitting on a sofa and chatting.

This is a picaresque documentary, a series of seemingly unconnected episodes. Here is Pleasant Gehman in Northampton, here she is in a car dealership, here she is on a cruise ship, here she is at Tribal Fest. There is no sense of progression or how any of these sequences relate to any of the others. At the end of the film - and this is, if anything, it’s most inexcusable flaw - neither Pleasant Gehman nor the viewer has changed in any noticeable way.

Finally, in what I depressingly note has turned out to be a barrage of criticism (although, I hope, constructive criticism) there are two points to make. First, I could not work out why (a) almost all of the footage of Gehman is in black and white while everything else is in colour, and (b) some of the Gehman footage actually is in colour. It’s a curious decision which has not been carried out one hundred per cent. Mainly, I just could not see the point of monochrome belly-dancing footage. Surely colour - the costumes and the skin tones - is part of the art-form’s appeal. The second point - and this is the quickest, simplest fix of all but stung me personally - is that a caption misspells the name of my home town of Leicester. Unforgivable!

So what is to be done? As explained at the top, this is not the finished version so there will be some changes. But, the spelling of provincial English cities aside, these will need to be more than cosmetic. There are fundamental problems with the selection and arrangement of the footage which makes up this film. Documentary-making is a curious art; there’s no script and no way for the film-maker to know in advance precisely where he is going to end up, although it helps to at least aim for somewhere as a finishing point, however much that may change during production. If Steve was aiming somewhere with Underbelly, he got diverted along the way and has ended up just wandering through the world of belly-dancing, without a clearly defined sense of purpose. His audience, inescapably drawn to travel with him, becomes frustrated when we realise that we’re not actually going anywhere specific, we’re just out for a leisurely stroll that will end up back where we started.

Somewhere on Steve’s shelves are rows and rows of tapes and/or discs, hours of footage from which Underbelly has been culled and constructed. I have no doubt that there is a terrific film somewhere on that shelf and I have absolutely no doubt that a film-maker as single-minded and undeniably talented as Steve Balderson can fashion that film in a way that no-one else could, surprising and delighting everyone who watches it.

But with Underbelly I think that Steve has sold himself short.

MJS rating: C+
review originally posted 2007

Director: Paul Burrows
Writer: Paul Burrows
Producers: Paul Burrows, Carole Derrien
Cast: Troy McFadden, Carole Derrien, Laurent Guyon
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.naturemortemovie.com

I’m hopeless with thrillers, me. I can’t follow them at all. Take a look at the stuff on this site: comedies, monster movies, science fiction, horror, action, animation, even the occasional documentary. Frankly I just don’t watch many thrillers because anything more complex than a straightforward whodunnit leaves me struggling to keep track. All these people double-crossing each other and pretending to be someone they’re not. What’s going on?

So I can’t say it’s necessarily a failing of this film that, after 90 minutes, I was left staring at the telly saying, “What on Earth was all that about?”

Nature Morte is, it should be said from the start - well, almost the start - impossibly stylish. Just take a look at the website and you’ll get some idea. Everyone in it is very cool and smokes a lot and hangs out in bars and has either a deeply cool job or no obvious means of support. They’re all either intense or laid-back and most of them are, or speak, French. Watching this movie is like having a succession of Blue Note jazz LPs repeatedly smashed over one’s head - it’s just too deeply stylish.

The plot concerns John Stephenson, a serial killer who tied up and killed ten women in Marseilles, fetishistically scarring them and - the bastard! - painting their portrait. At the scene of the tenth murder, the killer’s body was found too, he having committed suicide. The tenth, unfinished painting has been carefully guarded by the French police since then, so that not even Oliver Davenport (Troy McFadden), the world’s leading authority on John Stephenson, has seen it.

Davenport finally gets to see the painting when the gendarmes call him in to compare it with a copy they have found - except that the copy is finished, and scientific analysis shows that it was painted very recently. Davenport confirms the new painting as a genuine Stephenson, which raises the question: was the ‘suicide’ actually John Stephenson? Is he still at large? Where has this new painting come from?

It has come, apparently, from Ladang Geta, a tiny island republic off the coast of Thailand, to where Davenport travels, accompanied by undercover cop Capitaine Albert (Jeso Vial). Ladang Geta is some sort of anachronistic post-colonial hang-out, full of rich, decadent Europeans throwing parties or sipping cocktails in the beach-front bar which doubles as passport control. It is accessible by boat, but only when the local ferryman isn’t busy relaxing.

Among the locals is the enigmatic, decadent and wealthy Blanche de Ladang (producer Carole Derrien: MindFlesh) and her lover, a deeply intense and pretentious artist named simply Lec (Thai-based French actor Laurent Guyon), who painted the ‘new’ Stephenson and has others for sale. Is Lee actually the Marseilles killer? If not, is he just forging the killer’s paintings, or is he copying the murders too? There is also an American pimp on the island, Randall Sparx (John Lamond Jr, a Bangkok-based film-maker whose feature Killing Time 24/7 shares several cast with this picture) who seems to know more than he’s telling.

Around this point, I started to lose track of things amid a succession of images involving paint, naked women, sexual fetishes and the occasional murder. I think - only think - I worked out the identity of the killer(s) right at the end, but obviously to give you my suggestions would potentially spoil it for you. And anyway, just because I think I solved the whodunnit doesn’t mean I understood how or why they dunnit.

Also in the cast are model/presenter Morrigan Hel, fetish model Lydia Morgan, Michelle Esclapez (Asylum Night) and Romain Roll, director of the Cinenygma Luxembourg Film Festival.

For a debut feature, Nature Morte is incredible. In an interview on the film’s website, Paul Burrows freely admits that he had never even been on a movie set before (and also recounts some of the problems involved in doing such an ambitious film on such a wee budget). The cinematography is superb, although as there are three credited cameramen and two uncredited ones, it’s difficult to single anyone out (one of them is John Raggett who also worked on The Witches Hammer and Nightmares).

Production design is fabulous too. This is a film that is all about image: both in terms of the film and in terms of what the characters think they know about each other. It’s in the editing that I think the movie goes overboard with a few too many ‘sequences’ which seem to stop the action and character development to dwell on cinematic style.

Originally, much of the film was going to be in French but that has been reduced to just the odd subtitled line here and there. Most of the cast do still speak with strong French accents and this makes some of the dialogue sound rather stilted, but I think that actually fits in with a film where affectation and pretence are such major themes.

This is a terrifically impressive movie which somehow manages to be arty while steering just clear of pretentiousness. I just wish I could follow what was going on.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Charint Phromrangsi
Cast: Kwanphirom Lin, Withid Ladd
Year of release: 1990s?
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD (Solar Marketing)

In the jungles of South East Asia, a group of hunters are trampling through the undergrowth in pursuit of a large snake, but a young village woman hides the serpent behind her basket and misdirects the hunters when they come looking for it. Returning home, she falls into a river and is saved from drowning - by the snake.

So begins this entry in the surprisingly extensive snake-woman sub-genre of Asian horror movies. Unfortunately the version I’ve got is in Thai and has no subtitles, so I will struggle through the plot as best I can.

The young woman (I don’t know any character names but we’ll call her Anna for convenience) lives in a hut in a village, where she takes in washing. One night she is visited at night by the great snake, which magically transforms into a handsome young man and makes love to her. Nine months later, heavily pregnant Anna is ostracised and criticised by her neighbours for being a single mother. She gives birth alone, in the jungle, in a torrential downpour. At first she fears that the baby is dead and covers it with broad leaves, but she hears a cry and takes her daughter home with her.

Several years on, we meet the daughter (let’s call her May) as a happy child playing with the other village kids, but something strange happens to her head. Unwrapping the girl’s headscarf, her playmates find that her hair is a mass of snakes and run screaming to their parents. Anna and May prepare to flee the village but before they can leave, a mob of angry villagers - carrying flaming torches in the grand tradition of horror movie angry mobs - surround their grass hut and set light to it. As the girl and her mother huddle together in terror, the heavens open and a sudden rainstorm douses the flames.

Anna and May move into a cave outside the village, and we jump ahead another ten years or so - May is now a gorgeous young woman with a propensity for sexy sarongs and leopard-skin bikinis (actually it looks more like civet-skin, but you get the picture).

Two scientists (let’s call them Fred and Joe) are out capturing lizards for study when Joe catches sight of May in the jungle and is instantly smitten. Later that night, Joe and Fred are attending some sort of festivity where an extravagantly dressed, jewel-draped entertainer sings... ‘Hava Nagila’! Joe spots May on the edge of the clearing and follows her, but is bitten by a snake in the jungle. May sucks out the poison and they’re in love.

At this point, the film turns into a completely different movie as we meet various gangsters, starting with a drugs deal which ends in a shoot-out between rival gangs. The movie gets very talky from here on in, so the plot is necessarily more vague.

Joe and May are now living in quite a nice house on the edge of town. Joe runs afoul of the gangsters and is beaten up but escapes. As he runs through the jungle, he is recaptured but May tries to save him. With Joe unconscious on the ground, one gangster attempts to rape May but she spits a small poisonous snake out of her mouth into his face. The other hoods run away in fear but one of them is brought down by a group of cobras which appear in their path.

It’s clear that the gangsters have a hold on the entire community, but the final straw is when three of them encounter Anna, washing clothes down at the river. She tries to run but is grabbed and has her head smashed on a rock. When May finds her mother’s body, she swears revenge using all the supernatural powers at her disposal.

Cue the finale, in which May transforms into a full-on snake woman, as depicted on the VCD inlay, with a full body-paint make-up job of serpentine scales. Her hair is again a mass of snakes, and there is another mass of coils around her hips to preserve the actress’ modesty. The effects budget doesn’t extend to making any of these snakes actually move, but it is still a pretty impressive sight. And in any case, there are plenty of real snakes on show.

May uses her mastery over snakes to summon dozens, maybe hundreds of the things, of all sizes and species. They swarm into the gangsters’ house and one by one the terrified bad guys fall prey to their attack. The villains are dead, Anna’s death is avenged, the local people are safe from the criminals - May and Joe live happily ever after.

Ngoo Keng Kong is a surprisingly well-made film. Despite the rigidity of the snakes attached to May (as both adult and young girl) there’s enough of them that the appearance is pretty scary - though not as scary as the vast numbers of real snakes on show. All the animals - except those actually growing out of May - appear to be very real and very much alive, and all the actors interact with them on screen, especially the actress who plays Anna, who has to lie down and let a large python crawl all over her. There is very little by way of gore - mostly people are just seen screaming as a snake winds round them - and no sex or nudity.

The cinematography is extremely good, with rich blue shades in the many night time scenes, skilful photography of the fire attack on the grass hut, and other very credible uses of coloured lighting. The direction is slick, and the acting seems good. The only descents into comedy are ‘Hava Nagila’ (are these Jewish villagers?) and a speeded-up shot of Joe pulling his trousers on as he runs from a snake, following his first night with May.

So what is this film? What can we find out about it? Answers: dunno and not much. I thought at first that I might have bought the acclaimed 2001 Cambodian-Thai co-production Snaker, which is widely available on VCD. The original title of that film is Kuon Puos Keng Kang (‘The Snake King’s Child’) but I have also seen it on dealer’s lists as Ngu Geng Gong. However, I have tracked down some frame-grabs from Snaker[And in fact I’ve seen it since I wrote this review - MJS] and this very definitely isn’t it.

The story of the snake woman seems to be common currency throughout the region; The Illuminated Lantern website has some information on other Asian snake woman films.

Assuming that the various synopses/reviews which I’ve found are correct, I can definitely state that this film is not any of the following: The Snake Girl, Snake Girl Drops In, The Snake Woman, Nagin, Devi, Naag Shakti, Valetina, Hungry Snake Woman, The Snake Queen, Green Snake, Phantom of Snake, Sex Medusa, Love of the White Snake, Killer Snakes, Lady Master Snake/Snake Woman’s Marriage, Madame White Snake, Blood Snake Human Devil, Snake Devil, Snake Devil Woman, Snake Charmer, Calamity of Snake or The Ugetsu Story. The closest I’ve found so far is a 1970 Hong Kong/Philippines production called Devil Woman; the plot summary in Pete Tombs’ book Mondo Macabro has some similar elements to Ngoo Keng Kong - birth in a rainstorm, gang of toughs - but too many differences. So it’s not that either.

So it looks like I’ve got yet another First English Language Review. My disc is on the Solar label, catalogue number SZVCD 0027 - but there’s not one other word of English anywhere on the packaging or print. The disc itself is not great: the print is quite scratchy in some places and the image is very pixilated - even by VCD standards - in fast-moving scenes. Withid Ladd was also in the awful ghost movie Hunch.

Nevertheless, should you have a chance to see Ngoo Keng Kong, you should certainly take it. It’s a well-made film and an interesting example of the prolific Asian snake-woman subgenre.

MJS rating: B+

Addendum: After I first posted this review, the Marketing Department at Solar very kindly replied to my enquiry about this film, providing me with the names of the director and lead actors, and also a translation of the title: ‘ngoo’ means ‘snake’ and ‘keng kong’ is, I’m told, a species of snake.

Director: John Gilling
Writer: Jim O’Connolly
Producer: Ronald Liles
Cast: Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines, John Saxon
Year of release: 1965
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

It’s easy to think that British SF cinema never extended much beyond the Quatermass trilogy and a handful of other Hammer outings. In fact, there were a fair few science fiction movies made in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and here’s an odd one.

Professor Morley (Maurice Denham: Night of the Demon, Countess Dracula), Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines: Virgin Witch) and Dr Jack Costain (token yank star John Saxon: Tenebrae, Cannibal Apocalypse, Enter the Dragon) are three scientists who investigate an unusual meteorite which crashes to Earth just outside London. It turns out to be a sphere, about 18 inches in diameter, which has somehow landed without causing a crater - or even a dent - and is several degrees below zero. Back at a military research base, under the command of John Carson (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Plague of the Zombies) - in an excellent performance - the sphere is investigated. Something tries to attack Ann when she is in the lab alone that night, but there’s no sign of a break-in.

It transpires that the sphere is some sort of matter transmission device that allows an alien being to come to Earth. Dr Costain investigates, to his cost, and the alien escapes from the base in a stolen car. But don’t start wondering how he knows how to drive, because half an hour in, this suddenly turns into a completely different movie.

More than 20 young ladies have disappeared from London in less than three weeks and the police are baffled. Costain has told the papers about the escaped extraterrestrial because he thinks it has some connection with the missing girls. Eventually, it transpires that all the girls had answered an ‘amateur models wanted’ ad in a magazine called Bikini Girl(!), placed by someone named ‘Medra’ (an anagram of dream, though I don’t know if that’s relevant). The replies - more than 200 so far - are going through Thorburn’s, a porno bookshop run by the great Aubrey Morris (A Clockwork Orange, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) in a deliciously slimy, perverted role. Medra picks up the envelopes every couple of days so they could just catch him - but Ann has answered the ad herself and arranged to meet Medra at the shop (eh?).

She goes in, watched from across the street by Costain and Scotland Yard Superintendent Hartley (Alfred Burke: Children of the Damned); she walks right past Thorburn’s corpse, and finds Medra is already there. He kills her just before the police enter, and escapes through a barred but unguarded window. The army and police track down Medra to a derelict farmhouse where it transpires that he is (of course) the alien, from the Jovian moon Ganymede. The girls have been taken for genetic transplants (or something) but he says they will be returned unharmed. Then he leaves.

Has ever a film looked this good and made this little sense? Though the first 30-minutes is great stuff, the rest of the film is Z-movie nonsense of the lowest level. How does Medra know so much about Earth culture, not just how to speak English and how to drive, but how to spot the sort of dodgy establishment which would act as cover address for a scam like this? How has he rented and decorated his suite of offices? Why does he only need attractive young women, and why has he gone to all this trouble instead of just grabbing unwary girls off the street?

Throughout most of the film, all we see is a tall figure in a long coat with face covered by hat and scarf - but his hand is a silly-looking rubber claw. Right at the end he reveals himself as looking completely human (even got a small beard!) apart from some small patches of scar tissue on his cheek. So if he’d just kept his huge right hand in his coat, he could have passed for one of us!

I get the impression that director John Gilling realised early on how daft all this was (it’s based apparently on a novel by someone named Frank Crisp) and decided to play some scenes for comedy. There’s a lengthy scene of Costain and Hartley interviewing the parents of one of the missing girls: Dad is Warren Mitchell, Mum is prolific Hammer actress Marianne Stone, the whole thing seems semi-improvised and is laugh-out-loud funny. The great Ballard Berkeley (Fawlty Towers) is enjoyable as a senior army sort, and Jack Watson (From Beyond the Grave, Konga) plays a Sergeant-Major straight out of The Army Game.

Gilling directed Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, a whole bunch of Hammers, and episodes of various ATV adventure series. Writer Jim O’Connolly went on to direct Berserk and Valley of Gwangi! Technically the film looks great, packed with all the squaddies and scientists that characterise the best British SF. The cinematography is by Stephen Dade (Dr Blood’s Coffin, The Avengers) and the art director was Harry White (Behemoth the Sea Monster, Curse of the Fly). The film was retitled Night Caller from Outer Space in the United States.

Most sources list this as 83 or 84 minutes, but this TV print runs only about 77 and omits a ‘romantic theme song’ referred to in some reviews.

MJS rating: C

Director: Ram Thanadpojanamart
Writer: Ram Thanadpojanamart (possibly)
Producer: Ram Thanadpojanamart (probably)
Cast: Peter Louis Mioxy, Areesuang Nilwan, Nukrob Tripoh
Country: Thailand
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

I feel sorry for Ram Thanadpojanamart. He made a storming, expensive-looking superhero film which was very obviously aimed at the international market. It’s not as good as the best that Hollywood can offer, but it’s a lot better than its worst. And yet Night Falcon seems to be virtually unknown outside Thailand. I can find one French language review on the web and that’s it. The film isn’t even listed on the Inaccurate Movie Database and you would expect something this flashy to be there. It looks like Night Falcon might have been a bomb, especially as Thanadpojanamart does not appear to have worked on anything else since.

Peter Louis Mioxy (Iron Ladies 2) plays the eponymous superhero, clad in a stylish red and black leather/kevlar outfit with a pointy, slightly birdlike mask. He has no superpowers, just top-of-the-range strength, agility and fighting skills. But the real star of the film is Areesuang Nilwan (La Fe’lina, Kiss) who plays a young woman named (I think) Mae.

Driving home one night with her husband/boyfriend, Mae’s car is forced off the road when she runs into a battle between Night Falcon and local drugs baron Mr White (the characters are all helpfully introduced with English captions in this surprisingly unsubtitled film). Mae’s boyfriend is killed and she blames the kevlar-clad vigilante that she saw at the scene, who left a red, falcon-shaped throwing star that she keeps as a reminder of the event. She trains herself up in martial arts, determined to track the costumed man down and take her revenge.

Mae has two friends who we will call Peter and Sarah because I don’t know their real names. They are close but we never see a kiss so my guess is that they’re brother and sister. I don’t know how Mae knows them or whether she knew them before encountering Night Falcon - maybe that’s in the dialogue that I can’t understand - but I do know that Peter actually is Night Falcon. I don’t think Sarah knows this and I’m almost certain that Peter has no idea that Mae was the girl who was peripherally involved in his battle with White (which ended when White’s face got accidentally hit with acid that spilled from a large barrel).

Mae and Sarah are sparring beside a public swimming pool when a drugged up guy wanders into the building and starts knocking people around. They do their best to restrain him but he pulls a knife and slashes Sarah’s arm. Fortunately Peter turns up and kicks the guy into the pool, then Peter and Mae take Sarah to the hospital.

By this time we have been introduced to our villain, Iron Mask, who wears a full-cranium mask and and 1920s-style greatcoat, both shiny silver (which is kind of odd because iron is a dull grey in colour - steel mask would have been a better name). He has a squad of anonymous masked goons and three equally image-conscious sidekicks: Nikolai is a big guy with a robotic left arm and semi-robotic head, a stock cyborg strongman as found in everything from Fudoh: The New Generation to Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn; Kojiro is a lean guy with a long ponytail, a deadly samurai sword and a painted face that makes him look like the fifth member of Kiss; Black Swan is Iron Mask’s moll, a whip-cracking redhead dominatrix pricktease sex-kitten with metal eyebrows and a leather bustier designed like a skull. These four are seen cracking down hard on a rival gang, establishing Iron Mask as the local Mr Big.

As well as his costume, Peter/Night Falcon has a high-tech computer at his secret base; one of those futuristic ones with a multiscreen interface that hangs in the air, requiring him to make dramatic sweeping gestures to do things and allowing us to see his face while he’s doing it. Basically it’s a rip-off of Minority Report, or possibly a rip-off of the Currys TV ads that ripped off Minority Report.

Mae is on her motorbike when she spots a suspicious lorry and follows it to find Kojiro overseeing some sort of drug-smuggling malarkey. Then Night Falcon turns up and fights Kojiro and Nikolai, watched by Iron Mask and Black Swan. Our hero takes a serious wound from Kojiro’s sword but he makes it into his high-tech car and drives off, followed by Mae on her bike.

At Night Falcon’s base, some sort of large warehouse-type building I think (we never get a good look at the exterior), Mae follows a trail of blood, slipping in through a closing door. When she finds Night Falcon in the corridor, she beats him up, determined to avenge her boyfriend but Peter removes his mask and reveals himself. Unfortunately, Iron Mask and his gang have followed Mae and confront them, the supervillain removing his own mask to reveal - good grief, it’s you - that he is acid-marked Mr White. At this, Mae realises that it was White, not Night Falcon, who shot her boyfriend; White’s distinctive pistol, now pointing at her, confirms this.

Peter/Night Falcon and Mae have a big set-to with Kojiro and Nikolai, escaping just before the building blows up (two of Iron Mask’s goons stand in front of Night Falcon’s computer, evidently confused by the digital countdown hanging in mid-air just underneath a big flashing caption that says ‘Red Alert’; possibly they can’t read English...). Anyway, Mae bundles Peter into his high-tech car which has its own mini-computer that guides them to somewhere which I initially thought was the hospital but is actually a second base (which we also don’t get a good look at). Here we meet a bespectacled young scientist - let’s call him Jeff - who is basically Deacon Frost to Night Falcon’s Blade. I think.

With Peter critically ill, Jeff tells Mae about the set-up and shows her a room where the Night Falcon costume and weapons are kept. This is a rather groovy bit of production design with a giant Night Falcon logo cut in the back wall, behind which are extremely long wind-chimes creating a slightly zen ambience.

And what of Sarah? She is kidnapped by Iron Mask and strung up by her wrists in a warehouse somewhere. The villain calls Sarah’s cellphone, Mae answers and realises it is up to her to rescue her friend. Fortunately Jeff is a dab-hand with a needle and a soldering gun and promptly runs up an outfit that resembles Peter’s but fits Mae’s hot body with satisfying snugness. Mae is now... Falcon Girl!

Mae/Falcon Girl tracks down the place where Sarah is being held and rescues her but then Iron Mask, Black Swan and Kojiro turn up. Fortunately Peter is back to full fitness and he arrives in the nick of time, all costumed up, to even the odds. (It’s a good job that Nikolai is on annual leave, or whatever.) Kojiro gets his arse kicked and Black Swan runs away but Iron Mask proves a formidable opponent, topping himself up at one point with a needle of his own drug (which we follow in extreme close-up through his CGI veins to his CGI heart).

Things get knocked over, flames leap around and it comes down to Night Falcon and Falcon Girl versus Iron Mask while Sarah looks on helplessly from beyond a flame barrier which doesn’t look insurmountable but we have to assume, is. Then, would you believe it, the silver-clad arch-villain grabs hold of a barrel of acid which tips up, depositing more of it on his face and blinding him. How unlucky is that? The two heroes give him a good kick as he flails around ineffectually then Night Falcon throws Falcon Girl bodily over the flames to the safety of Sarah’s arms, courageously sacrificing himself.


The building then blows up, although apparently not in the bit where Sarah and Mae are crouching.

There are two epilogues. The first sees Black Swan, now apparently defacto leader of the gang, with Kojiro and - where were you when we needed you, mister? - Nikolai, plus a couple of unidentified knife-wielding rogues. There are two bodies on trolleys, swathed in bandages. One of them opens its eyes - but which one is it? That’s intriguing but I didn’t fully understand it. What I did understand was the second epilogue which shows us that Jeff has now made a costume for Sarah - Falcon Woman, no less - so that she and Mae can take up the mantle of her brother. The final shot is the two women standing moodily atop a tall building, matching our initial view of Night Falcon at the start of the movie.

There is some behind-the-scenes footage under the end credits and the VCD finishes with two videos for songs from the soundtrack (one of which seems to actually be called ‘Night Falcon’). These consist entirely of clips from the film and include several plot twists so it’s a good job they’re at the end of disc 2, not the start of disc 1. (Before the film are trailers for Gra-hung, Lizard Woman and another supernatural horror movie that I could not identify, plus an advert for Re-teen soap!)

I’ve got to say: I enjoyed Night Falcon a lot. It’s a good, solid, unpretentious superhero movie, not bogged down by adaptation from a comic-book. Much as I enjoy the likes of Batman, Spider-Man, Superman et al, those are a different sort of film - and not just because of the A-list stars and enormous effects budgets. Night Falcon reminds me of Krrish in the way that it simply takes the concept of a costumed superhero, accepts it and runs with it, using the story as a framework on which to hang character development and action scenes. Any tale where the main protagonist leads a double life naturally leads to questions of identity and trust; that’s what Night Falcon does, and does well.

Billed on its cover (in English) as ‘the new ultimate Thai action hero on digi-film’, the movie has its problems although I’m always hesitant about discussing the script quality of any film where I can’t understand a word they’re saying. The first half is somewhat fragmentary with a series of apparently unconnected scenes showing the three friends in various situations or cutting away to other material such as news reports. Some of these seem designed to simply showcase flashy moves; for example a sequence in a skate park with lots of shots of Thai kids on skateboards and BMX bikes. We see Mae chatted up by a cocky guy in a pink shirt (toting a big ghetto blaster and an even bigger afro!), then Sarah and Peter arrive.

But did we really need so many cool shots of skateboarders jumping hither and thither? At 95 minutes, the film could lose a few minutes of this footage without coming to harm. There is also an all-pervading pop soundtrack, much of it just endless techno beats, which gets a tad irritating at times.
But mitigating this are sympathetic leads, delightfully over-the-top villains and a bunch of exciting fights. These are shot flashily - Ram Thanadpojanamart loves using his ‘digi-film’ to blur movement - and there are a lot of fast edits. We’re not watching a Tony Jaa film here, though I’ve no doubt that the actors are all accomplished martial artists who could kick my white arse. Thanadpojanamart has a nice eye for composition and frequently sets up the characters in poses which manage to look cool without looking silly.

Above all, what impressed me was the story. Granted, the whole drugs thing disappears fairly quickly (I assume that White/Iron Mask’s imported smack was responsible for the zombified knife-kid at the swimming pool) but in terms of character development through plot development I really can’t fault this. Even without understanding a word of dialogue I could understand motivations and actions (eventually) and in fact there are lengthy sequences with little or no dialogue.

A few subtitles and an international distributor could have made Night Falcon a hit, I’m sure and I’m intrigued about why the movie seems to have gone nowhere. It’s stylish, laden with neat-looking production design, rarely drags and delivers both plot and action. Maybe it will be rediscovered one day.

The film’s terrific website has now closed but fortunately most of the pages are archived at Thai Toku, a groovy Thai superhero website. The text is all in Thai but there are lots of great photos. The cast also includes Nukrob Tripoh, Prapimpom Kanjinda, Pinpetch Goonshorn, Taweesuk Suwanpist and Natawoot Chaijaroen although I don’t know who plays which character.

MJS rating: A-

Director: 'TC Blake'
Writer: Robert Jaffe
Producer: Robert Jaffe
Cast: Catherine Mary Stewart, Michael Praed, John Standing
Country: USA
Year of release: 1987
Reviewed from UK VHS

Nightflyers is another one those films which is unsure of its own title. It's one word on screen but two - Night Flyers - on the sleeve of this ex-rental VHS. I shall use the former, not because of some Kim Newman-esque obsession with 'right' and 'wrong' titles but because it is shorter and involves less use of the shift key. Though I have probably undone any saving in that respect by typing this explanation.

This is a notoriously incomprehensible film. I didn't understand it when I first watched it about ten years ago and I didn't understand it when I rewatched it this week. Ostensibly it involves a search for some sort of semi-mythical meta-being called the Volkron which travels through the galaxy creating stars. A scientist named D'Brannin (John Standing: Torture Garden, The Eagle Has Landed, The Elephant Man, Pandaemonium) has assembled a team to help him locate the Volkron and has hired a spaceship called the Nightflyer (or possibly Night Flyer - we never see it written down) to take them there.

There's cryptologist Lilly Cant (Helene Udy: My Bloody Valentine, The Dead Zone, Witches of the Caribbean); linguist Audrey Zale (Lisa Blount: Dead and Buried, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness); biologist Keelor (Glenn Withrow: Peggy Sue Got Married, Beverly Hills Cop II) whose bleached blonde hair, youthful visage and large spectacles make him look alarmingly like children's TV presenter Timmy Mallett; Darryl Fontane (James Avery: Will Smith's uncle in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, also in Deadly Daphne's Revenge and Beastmaster II) who is aboard as 'visual documentarian' and chef; and 'class 10 telepath' Jon Winderman (singer/actor Michael Des Barres: Ghoulies, Lost in Time, The High Crusade) with his accompanying empath Eliza Scott (Annabel Brooks: Cherry 2000, The Witches). What function a telepath's empath might serve is just one of many things left unexplained. All these characters are introduced to us in voice-over by 'project co-ordinator' Miranda Dorlac (Catherine Mary Stewart: Night of the Comet, Weekend at Bernie's, Reaper) who also has limited telepathic abilities. Although a caption tells us the story is set in the 21st century, everything looks very 1980s and everyone wears plenty of hair mousse and eye-liner (except Darryl who doesn't need either, being both black and bald).

The Nightflyer is described as a freighter, and as such it has plenty of vast echoing chambers where the cast bed down in their futuristic sleeping bags. The main area is a luxurious lounge, with sunken sofas, coffee tables, a small kitchen to one side and, for some reason, a pipe organ. It looks like a bizarre amalgam of the sets from Blake's 7, The Abominable Dr Phibes, Ready Steady Cook and TV-am. There's no suggestion of anyone strapping themselves down for take-off or anything like that, nor is any sort of uniform on display, with everyone wearing their own individual, awful 1980s clothes which they all brought aboard in small shoulder bags.

But what of the ship itself? Do you recall that episode of Blackadder II when Tom Baker, as a mad ship's captain, explained that there were two schools of thought on the need for a crew: all the other captains said you needed one, and he said you didn't? Well, something similar seems to be in operation here. The captain is Royd Eris (Robin of Sherwood/Dynasty star Michael Praed) who appears to the passengers in the form of a hologram. He explains that the ship doesn't have a crew because the hologram technology allows him to be in two places at once. Well, yes I suppose so - but since the hologram can't operate any controls and in fact can't actually do anything except communicate with the passengers, it's not much more use than, say, a standard intercom. Or a telephone.

While some of the folk on board are very suspicious of this whole set-up - indeed, some of them suspecting that Royd is nothing more than an avatar created by the computer which is really flying the ship - Royd forms a friendship with Miranda (based on, well, nothing in particular) and explains to her what is really going on. His mother Adara owned the Nightflyer which she operated on her own, but she became lonely and so created him as a 'cross-sex clone'. However, she died just before he was 'born' from the jar where he was incubated so he was raised by the ship's computer. This means, apparently, that he is too weak to ever set foot on a planet and even the artificial gravity generated on the ship is agony to him. When we finally get to see Royd for real, he is lying recumbent in a sort of comfortable-looking and very streamlined coffin.

While Darryl is preparing dinner for everyone, there is an explosion in the kitchen which sends the whole team hurtling across the lounge amid a shockwave of candelabras and canapés and somehow tears off four of Darryl's fingers. There follows a hilarious medical room scene with D'Brannin using a computerised surgery system to reattached the digits. We see a graphic of a half-finger being moved towards a hand, magically joining at the knuckle - and then we see it for real! The missing part of the finger is carefully positioned next to the stump and then some sort of laser welds/cauterises the join. That might work if a finger was just a bone with some flesh around the outside, but aren't there, I don't know, nerves and blood vessels and things which might need aligning?

For reasons which, like much else in this film, are never clearly explained, Adara's body is still on board the ship, underneath a stone slab, but before she died she downloaded her mind/soul/spirit/consciousness/whatever into the ship's computer. Royd tells Miranda that when the mission is finished he wants to leave the ship, even though that would kill him, because he would rather spend five minutes as a human being on a real world than spend the rest of his life as he is. Adara becomes jealous of this and seeks to protect her baby by trying to kill the crew, initially by possessing Winderman (played by Des Barres with the sort of 'mockney' accent that sounds British to Americans but sounds like God knows what to British audiences).

Most of the second half of the film consists of the surviving crew members flying around inside and outside the spaceship (which has had its gravity turned off) in little personal vehicles that look like glass-topped dustbins, eventually joined by Royd in his coffin which can, of course, fly. Near the end, Winderman's semi-decapitated body is reanimated by Adara in an attempt to kill Miranda (who is now riding shotgun on Royd's flying coffin) and the final confrontation is between Royd and the reanimated body of his mother. (It's difficult to see, but as no actor is credited for Adara and bearing in mind that Royd is supposed to be a 'cross-sex clone', presumably that's Praed under the make-up facing off against himself.)

After all the science fiction hoopla the culmination is two immobile characters straining as they channel lightning-style energy bolts at each other. Oh great, it's Wizards of the Demon Sword in space. And we finish with the Nightflyer exploding, leaving Royd and Miranda to head off into the inky void in his (very cramped) coffin. Miranda's final voice-over discusses the Volkron again, even though that has barely been mentioned since the start of the movie and seems to have no connection with anything else at all.

What a load of old tat. This is the sort of quasi-philosophical, ideas-beyond-its-reach science fiction movie that might be acceptable if it had been made in the mid-1970s or if it was Russian or Polish, but as a US production from the late 1980s it just looks daft, not helped by the costumes and hairstyles. Once everyone climbs into their flying dustbins any semblance of structure disappears and of course we never again have any actual face-to-face scenes with more than one person - until we reach Royd and his mother doing their impression of the final scene in an Indonesian telemovie.

Nightflyers is based on a 1985 novella by George RR Martin, author of the Song of Fire and Ice series of novels. He was story editor on the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton TV series Beauty and the Beast and also wrote some episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone as well as the feature-length pilot for the 1990s Outer Limits, but he seems to have had no direct connection with this movie, which is probably a good thing for him. The screenplay is credited to producer Robert Jaffe (Demon Seed, Motel Hell, Scarab). Director 'TC Blake' is actually Robert Collector trying to distance himself from the movie. He wrote and directed a 1985 thriller called Red Heat, starring the unlikely pairing of Silvia Kristel and Linda Blair, and also wrote another film with unlikely bedfellows in its credits, the John Carpenter/Chevy Chase collaboration Memoirs of an Invisible Man.

This was an early credit for DP Shelly Johnson, later on Quicksilver Highway, Jurassic Park III and the Shining mini-series, though its difficult to judge the cinematography from this rather ropy VHS. The film's biggest asset seems to be its production design, courtesy of John Muto who started out doing odd jobs on movies such as Battle Beyond the Stars and Strange Invaders and worked up to major credits on Species and the Terminator II 3-D theme park ride. Set decorator Anne Huntley-Ahrens had previously worked on House, Critters and A Nightmare on Elm Street and between them they came up with some impressive sets for Nightflyers. No fewer than 42 carpenters and 20 painters are credited and it's easy to see where the money went. It certainly didn't go on the script which was altered out of all recognition in a radical and inexplicable last-minute rewrite by the producer.

The special effects vary enormously, although praise must be given to the miniatures in the launch sequence. Those credited include Robert Short (Piranha, ET, Beetlejuice) and Roger George (whose career goes right back to The Amazing Transparent Man and Beyond the Time Barrier in the early 1960s through such notable films as Blacula, The Howling, Repo Man, The Terminator, Ghoulies, Munchies and Night of the Demons). The flying dustbin sequences which dominate the second half of the film were handled by Bob Wiesinger (Labyrinth, The Bride, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Judge Dredd, Cheap Rate Gravity) and Bob Harman (Superman, Time Bandits, Return of the Jedi, Arena, The Rocketeer).

Ultimately Nightflyers' biggest failing is that it is boring and completely unengaging. Since we have no idea what the hell these people are trying to do or what is preventing them from doing it, we don't care a jot whether they succeed or not. At present this movie is not available on DVD - but that's no great loss.

MJS rating: C-

Director: Darren Ward
Writer: Darren Ward
Producers: Jonathan Holmes, Maria O’Reilly
Cast: Nick Rendell, Tina Barnes, Greg Clarke
Country: UK
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.giallofilms.com

Darren Ward’s Nightmares is an eleven-minute study of a serial killer who is haunted - not literally - by the ghosts of his victims. It’s nicely produced and has imaginative, well-done special effects, but... well, it just doesn’t really go anywhere.

Nick Rendell (who was in Ward’s Three Tickets to Hell and Sudden Fury) plays the nameless lead character, addressing the camera in a series of soliloquies in his dingy flat as distorted figures of angry victims wander aimlessly around him. We are shown two flashbacks to specific killings and a third, as an epilogue, which is without context. We are not told the extent of his crimes but there are other, unidentified ‘ghosts', notably a couple who repeatedly chastise him with the phrase “eight years old.”

There is no suggestion, either from the character or the script, that these are in any way genuine supernatural manifestations. They are externalisations of his thoughts, just as much as the way he talks directly to camera is not meant to be literal, merely a cinematic device. The problem is that, in our brief visit to this man, we really don’t find out anything about him other than that he has killed some people. He seems to be neither afraid of the ‘ghosts’ nor angry about them, just mildly irritated by the inconvenience of having glowing figures wandering past his bed, endlessly repeating “eight years old.”

Character studies of serial killers are nothing new but features such as The Last Horror Movie or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer give us enough time to get to know our protagonist and try to understand why he does what he does. Nightmares just doesn’t give us a chance. Is this man a sadist? Is he an emotionless automaton? Is he driven by fear, power, doubt, thrills? All we get is: hello, I’m a bloke who kills people and then they haunt my flat in a figurative way; here I am killing someone and someone else and someone else. There’s no beginning, no ending and not much middle and it’s frustrating because this is a very well-produced, professional-looking little film and you want to know more about this man.

There is a throwaway comment near the end which is something about violence being all around us but this feels tacked-on and frankly, so what? Lorries are all around us too and you are far more likely to be killed by one of them than by a serial killer. There is also mention of a rough childhood with his sister the favoured child but this doesn’t illuminate the character in any way.

Now here’s the biggest problem that I have with Nightmares. This character is described in the publicity as a serial killer - but he plainly isn’t. He may be a multiple murderer but that’s not the same thing. The first murder we see is a contract killing, shooting a stranger for £7,000 - so that makes him a hit-man. The second flashback shows him burgling a house to raise money to buy drugs; disturbed by the householder (Tina Barnes: Hellbreeder, Darkhunters), he rapes her (without removing his overalls!) and then stabs her. So that makes him a violent junkie and a thief. The third murder, of a girl on a dark street, is (as previously mentioned) devoid of context.

The blurb on the Giallo Films website says: “His victims random. His motive ... insanity.” - which is just completely contradicted by what we see on screen. Neither of the first two victims are random and the motive in both cases is money. Is he an amoral serial killer, an immoral thug or a professional hit-man (who may be immoral or amoral, depending on whether he enjoys his work)? The point is: one can be amoral or immoral but not both. (I also have difficult accepting that a hit-man who charges seven grand for an assassination would also be a junkie who breaks into houses to feed his addiction. Opportunistically raping and murdering people while burgling their houses is the sort of crime that would have you ID-ed and banged up in Wormwood Scrubs long before you could build up any sort of reputation as an anonymous contract killer.)

To be blunt, it seems that Nightmares has been built around the concept of a murderer who still sees his victims in his mind and the rather dandy special effect that portrays this. What has been skimmed over, and it’s rather important, is who this chap actually is and what he does. I don’t know whether there’s a legal definition of a serial killer but the literary/cinematic convention is that it is someone who deliberately sets out to commit a series of motiveless murders of strangers. Whether driven by lust, boredom, curiosity, religious fervour or whatever, this is completely different from contract killings or burglaries gone wrong.

Henry, Max Parry, Hannibal Lecter - these are not people you can pay to take out your love rival, nor would they ever be driven to break into a house and pinch the video to feed their cocaine habit. And I believe I’m correct in saying that nor would the Dennis Nielsens, Ed Geins and Harold Shipmans of this world. The unnamed guy in Nightmares just isn’t believable. We only have ten minutes or so to get to know him so to tell us things that are contradictory leaves the audience nowhere. Not only do we not know why he does what he does, we don’t even know what it is he does. It’s a fundamental problem which spoils what could have been a smart little character piece.

Technically, you can’t really fault the film. The cinematography by John Raggett (Nature Morte, The Witches Hammer, Forest of the Damned) and the editing by Pete Dobson (Sudden Fury, Hellbreeder) are both top-notch. But the script simply goes nowhere and does nothing and that’s a big disappointment.

MJS rating: C

Director: Colin Bucksey
Writers: Dan Witt, Rama Laurie Stagner
Producer: William Shippey
Cast: Sherilyn Fenn, Thomas Gibson, Steve Harris, Rena Sofer
Year of release: 1998
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

From an interesting premise, this American TV movie completely fails to develop, and ultimately wastes both its star and director. Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks, The Wraith) is Joanna Burke, a single mother who takes her six-year-old daughter to an event at the local park. Wandering off, the girl is nearly hit by a truck and, in saving her daughter, Burke is herself knocked down.

She comes to in a hospital, being called ‘Sarah Randolph’, with a sister she didn’t know she had. Her wallet has a driving license in her ‘new’ name and photos of a dead son instead of her daughter. She is somehow in a different reality where she is somebody else - shades of Quantum Leap, but with neither explanation nor exploration of the premise. Someone else lives in her house, and people she knew are now in different jobs with different names.

For some reason, her doctor (Dharma and Greg star Thomas Gibson, also in Eyes Wide Shut and Psycho Beach Party) comes to believe her - and they fall in love too, which is both clichéd and medically unethical. There are one or two nice touches - an acquaintance who passes her on an escalator recognises her and calls her by her ‘old’ name, then fades away - but these are, like everything else, neither explained nor developed. The closest the movie gets to an interesting plot thread is Burke’s growing realisation that in this reality her son’s death was not an accident but murder - and she was the killer. But like everything else in Nightmare Street, nothing is made of this.

Eventually she goes back to the park, where the crucial event has not yet taken place; it’s not explained whether she has travelled back in time too, or whether the event happens a few days later in this reality. Knocked down again (careless but convenient) she comes to as herself.

Nightmare Street is all street and no nightmare. There is no attempt to explore the alternative, rational-but-paranoid angle - that this is some massive set-up for some reason. Burke simply accepts, once she is over the initial shock, that she is somebody else. The script, based on a book by Margaret Tabor, has no depth whatsoever and the film plays more like a daytime soap opera than an SF/fantasy idea. British director Bucksey (Bergerac, Sliders, Space Island One, Miami Vice) does what he can with the material, but it’s precious little. Ultimately this is a bland, dull, disappointing movie, which is a shame because the central concept has a lot of promise.

Cinematographer Jan Kiesser previously shot Fright Night and The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space. Writers Witt and Stagner were respectively responsible for a Benji the dog film and a biopic of mother-and-daughter country stars the Judds. Special effects, such as they are in a not exactly effects-heavy film, are credited to Tony Lazarowich (Elf, Catwoman, Romeo Must Die, Sanctimony).

MJS rating: D+

Director: Rene Cardona
Writers: Rene Cardona, Rene Cardona Jr
Producer: Alfredo Salazar
Cast: Jose Elias Moreno, Armando Silvestre, Norma Lazareno
Country: Mexico
Year of release: 1969
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

You know you’re watching a Mexican movie when the first five minutes consists of two people in coloured costumes and masks hurling each other around a wrestling ring. In this case the luchadoras are Lucy Ossorio (Norma Lazareno: Vengeance of the Vampire Women) and Elena Gomez (Noelia Noel: Santo and Dracula’s Treasure) who suffers a brain injury when Lucy tosses her out of the ring. Lucy is engaged to Police Lieutenant Arturo Martinez (Armando Silvestre: Santo Contra los Zombies, Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy, The Batwoman - plus Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara and episodes of Mannix and Wonder Woman!) and is understandably upset at seeing her opponent lying comatose in a hospital.

But there’s more to Night of the Bloody Apes than wrestling babes, because this my friends is an honest-to-goodness video nasty - one of the list of banned titles compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1984. Nowadays of course most of the films on that list can be bought for £4.99 down Tesco but nevertheless there is still a certain cachet to them.

The video nasties were an eclectic bunch of films and ranged from the truly nauseatingly sick to the hilariously inoffensive. This is certainly one of the sillier films on the list and it sports a plot which is best summed up as typically barking for Mexican popular cinema.

A certain Dr Krallman (Jose Elias Moreno, who played the title role in the notorious 1959 Mexican movie Santa Claus) is the physician called in to examine Elena Gomez. He has a grown-up son, Julio (variously pronounced ‘HOO-leo’ and ‘JOO-leo’ on the dubbed soundtrack) who is very ill with leukemia (pronounced, at one point, ‘loo-SEE-mia’); Julio is played by Agustin Martinez Solares who was also in Santo and Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man. After Lucy and Elena’s wrestling bout we have another trademark of Mexican cinema (in fact, of all cheap-and-cheerful populist film-making) with a staggeringly bad day-for-night scene. As the sun beats down from the heavens, Dr Krallman and his scar-faced assistant Goyo (Carlos Lopez Moctezuma: Curse of the Crying Woman, El Hombre y la Bestia) turn off the headlights on their car and break into the local zoo.

After some shots of an orang-utan, overlaid with the sort of scary growls that orang-utans don’t make, we see Krallman put together a rifle and shoot a painfully obvious man-in-a-suit gorilla, which the two men then remove from its cage and take home.

Krallman’s plan - you may want to write this down - involves transfusing the gorilla’s blood into his son ... but, because a human heart would not be strong enough to pump gorilla blood, he has to transplant the heart too. This he does, using stock footage of a genuine human heart transplant. Rather wonderfully, the surgical close-ups show two pairs of hands at work, intercut with shots of another pair of hands holding the anaesthetic mask to Julio’s face. But long shots confirm that only Krallman and Goyo are involved - so whose are the other hands? I also love the way that Krallman tells his son he won’t leave his side for a moment then promptly leaves the room with Goyo to stick the ape carcass in a convenient incinerator.

But we all know what happens when you put a gorilla heart inside a human, don’t we, boys and girls? In possibly the most unconvincing lap dissolve in cinematic history, Julio transforms into (as the original title has it) La Horripilante Bestia Humana - and I think we can all translate that, even if we don’t speak Spanish.

The bestia in question is as muscular as a body builder and has an ugly grey, Neanderthal face with a crop of shaggy black hair. Except in occasional extreme close-ups of its eyes, when its skin turns pale brown and all the hair disappears. It’s the most mismatched pair of images since Night of the Demon.

Naturally the beast escapes through a window and goes on a rampage and this is where I think the DPP may have been shocked as there is a violent - but frankly nonsensical - rape scene. A young woman having a shower (Gina Morett) is disturbed by the beast but has time to wrap a towel around herself. He carries her, topless but with the towel strategically placed, to her bed where he proceeds to rape her - without removing either the towel or his trousers. Legend has it that a more extreme version of this film, using alternative takes of the horror and sex, was released under the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title Horror y Sexo. But in this version, there’s not much horror and the sexo is relatively tame.

The other odd thing about this rape scene, apart from the two (possibly three) layers of cloth between the participants’ genitals, is the amount of blood that is splattered over the victim and up the wall, despite the lack of any obvious injury.

Recovering his errant boy, Krallman decides to put a human heart back in, but as the donor must be alive, he uses Elena, the luchadora from the hospital. He subsequently has to help the hospital authorities come up with an explanation of how a comatose patient could disappear from their facility. Oh, he’s a bad man. The populace, meanwhile, are blaming the spate of attacks on the gorilla that went missing from the zoo. (This is, I suppose, the origin of the title with which the film was lumbered in English-speaking markets. But let’s face it, Julio is not an ape and even if he was, there’s only one of him. Although his victims get drenched in the red stuff, he never seems to get any on either his pecs or his trousers so he’s not really bloody. It’s possible that much of the action takes place at night but, as previously mentioned, darkness is a somewhat fluid concept in this sort of movie. Another title often quoted is Gomar the Human Gorilla but I have yet to see any evidence that this is genuine.)

Unfortunately the human heart only restores Julio’s humanity temporarily and before you can say “Madre de Dios!” he has reverted to his horripilante self like a sort of low-rent Latin American Jekyll and Hyde. He leaps out of the rather hamfistedly repaired window and sets off an another rampage, this time attacking a young couple in a park. He rips the man’s head from his neck and sets about raping the woman, who wears a green 1950s-style dress and has red hair piled high in a beehive, making her look rather like the loud one out of the B-52s.

There are two great aspects to this sequence. One is that, when the woman extricates herself from the monster and runs away her hair is frizzed and her dress torn to shreds, but when she runs into a nearby shop pleading for help her dress is once more intact, her hair is piled up high and she looks ready to launch once more into the backing vocals on ‘Shiny Happy People.’ The other amusing thing is the painfully obvious interior nature of the studio set claiming to be a ‘park’, which is hammered home not only by the astroturf on which the attack takes place but most especially by the way that the energetic monstrous rape causes the astroturf to bunch up, revealing the studio floor beneath it. It’s a real Ed Wood moment.

Police Lieutenant Arturo Martinez (remember him?) is investigating all this and it all ends up... oh, I don’t know. Who cares? Night of the Bloody Apes isn’t a film you watch to find out what happens in the end, it’s a film you watch to marvel at the insane stuff that happens along the way (which includes another two wrestling bouts).

Writer/director Rene Cardona churned out more than 200 films from the 1920s to the 1980s including at least nine Santo movies plus such legendary mexploitation pictures as The Brainiac, Tom Thumb, Santa Claus and Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy. He started out as an actor with roles in Mexican versions of The Count of Monte Cristo and Lady Windermere’s Fan. Cardona co-wrote this picture with his son, Rene Cardona Jr (the cause of much confusion for filmographers as he also directed about a hundred films including Night of a Thousand Cats and Tintorera - Tiger Shark). Some additional footage for this English language version was shot in the USA by Jerald Intrator (Satan in High Heels).

Composer Antonio Diaz Conde also scored The Aztec Mummy vs the Human Robot and a 1958 Mexican version of The Invisible Man. Cinematographer Raul Martinez Solares handled the camera on scores of wrestling movies and (allegedly) some episodes of the 1960s Tarzan TV series starring Ron Ely.

The history of Night of the Bloody Apes in Britain is as follows. Originally released in Mexico in 1968, it played British cinemas in 1974 with an X certificate from the BBFC and running 81 minutes after the censors’ scissors had been at it. In 1983 it was released on VHS by Iver Film Services, allegedly uncut but running only 79 minutes so more likely the cut 81 minute version losing a little running time because it was a PAL tape. This version was promptly banned as a video nasty.

In 1993 the notorious Vipco label planned a release but there is no record of a BBFC certificate. Some uncut review copies of this made it into circulation but the planned release was presumably a version still further cut. Six years later a 77-minute version (probably the intended Vipco edit) was released by Sovereign Multimedia on their Satanica label. This was given an 18 certificate by the BBFC and I remember reviewing it for SFX at the time. For some reason, the film was submitted again in 2002, in the same 77-minute version, by Film 2000 - and was again given an 18, naturally.

Redemption’s version runs 84 minutes, making it even longer than the original theatrical release although as I type this, about five weeks before the DVD comes out, there is no sign of this version on the BBFC website. But to be frank I can’t see what anyone could possibly object to. What little gore is on show here is hamfistedly edited - to the extent that it still looks cut - and is nothing more than a few brief shots of throats being ripped etc. There is that first rape scene but it’s not salacious or exploitative, just silly. And I can’t imagine there would be a problem with the heart transplant footage.

The Redemption presentation is full-frame, scratchy at reel ends and the colours are a bit intense (especially Lucy’s red costume) but to be honest, who wants a pristine version of a movie like this? The extras are... well, haphazard is the adjective that springs to mind. There are two trailers: one for Jean Rollin’s Requiem for a Vampire (with English captions but no narration or dialogue) and one for Rollin’s Les Demoniaques (with French captions but no narration or dialogue). Both of these are random collections of images which tell you nothing about the films (except that they feature nude woman and clowns) but a lot about how people cobbled together international trailers in the early 1970s. There is no trailer for Night of the Bloody Apes.

The stills gallery is simply five photos; they are shots from the film and are presented here in a small frame, taking up about a quarter of the screen - so what’s the point? You could just freeze-frame the DVD at those moments and see the same images four times as large. The ‘promo art’ has three images: the original 1983 British video sleeve; the Something Weird US video sleeve (which double-billed the film with Feast of Flesh) and an unidentified original poster which calls the film Korang - La Terrificante Bestia Umana and is more interesting than all the other extras put together. The sleeve blurb has two typos and the only quote they could find is from the plot summary on the IMDB!

Never mind the video nasty tag, Night of the Bloody Apes is bonkers Mexploitation of the highest order and for that reason is essential viewing.

MJS rating: B+

Director: David A Prior
Writer: David A Prior
Producer: Fritz Matthews
Cast: Dan Haggerty, Brian O’Connor, Steve Horton, Cameron Smith
Year of release: 1987
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS (Screen Entertainment)

I picked up this ex-rental VHS tape because (a) it was 50p and (b) it had a truly dreadful painting on the front. It turned out to be one of those double-sided sleeves so if you don’t want the awful painting you can see a ghastly, slightly out-of-focus photograph instead.

Trent Matthews (Brian O’Connor: Encounter at Raven’s Gate) and Jim Lowery (Cameron Smith), who calls Matthews ‘Sarge’, are Vietnam veterans. They were held captive by the enemy and tortured by a traitor from their own platoon, the clearly insane McGregor (Steve Horton). Somehow they managed to escape, taking with them their comrade Johnny (Chet Hood: Time Burst: The Final Alliance) - the end credits spell it ‘Jhonny’! - who was being held in a pit.

But Johnny/Jhonny was shot and they had to leave him, though he begged them not to. Since then they have been experiencing pangs of guilt and even nightmares, which are becoming more real. While test-driving a secondhand car (the insincere salesman is Jack Ott from Spiders), Matthews sees Johnny drive past and chases him - but of course it’s a complete stranger who looks nothing like Johnny.

Later, Matthews dreams that he, Lowery and the rest of the platoon are back in 'Nam, but if it’s a dream, how has he got a shrapnel wound in his hand when he wakes up? Things get worse: he imagines McGregor in the car next to him, jumps out and finds himself back in 'Nam again, where he sustains a cut to his neck while trying to rescue Johnny, who loses a finger to a Vietcong machete.

Matthews’ wife Susanne (Jill Foor: Moonstalker) is upset about her husband’s state of mind, about the unexplained injuries he is suffering - and about the finger she finds in their car! She takes this to family friend Dr Mike Campbell played by Grizzly Adams himself, top-billed Dan Haggerty. (Haggerty was also in Terror Night and a 1978 TV movie called Revenge of the Savage Bees, and he is the voice of Terl in the Battlefield Earth cartoon). Haggerty has the fing- wait a minute, there’s a Battlefield Earth cartoon? Ye gods! - has the fingerprint checked and it turns out to be Johnny’s.

What has happened is that time has somehow got twisted because Matthews and Lowery came home without Johnny, who they believe is still held prisoner by the Vietnamese and is contacting them through their dreams. The impression given is that Johnny is still there now, but he looks no older and has apparently been kept in the same hole in the ground for the past 15 years or so. McGregor is out to get the two men, and what they do in their sleep affects what happens in 'Nam, as when a dreaming Matthews runs out of ammo so the watching Lowery hands him a fresh clip in LA - and he suddenly has a fresh clip in Vietnam.

They buy $2,000 of weaponry from an arms dealer (Mike Hickam) who sells from the boot of his car. Dr Campbell initially tries to stop them, believing they’ve both gone loopy, but is convinced when he calls Susanne to tell her he has her husband under sedation and she says no, he’s right here. Of course it’s not Matthews. He looks like Matthews but after he has raped Susanne she sees it’s McGregor, who then stabs her violently. Dr Campbell rushes over but is too late to save Susanne from her invisible (to him) attacker.

Matthews seems entirely unfazed by the news that his wife is dead, and Campbell doesn’t even bother to explain the frankly unusual way in which she met her end. Instead he helps Matthews and Lowery to rescue Johnny. The two men suit up, black up and arm themselves with plentiful weaponry, then lie down on a double bed and go to sleep (the homo-erotic subtext is of course completely ignored!).

They somehow manage to rescue Johnny but bullets rake the bedroom and the doctor is (I think) killed. It ends with three sweaty men dressed in camo gear lying in each other’s arms on a plush double bed - and still there’s no hint of a gay subtext in any but the most jaundiced minds!

What a daft load of nonsense this all is. It’s basically Hamburger Hill meets A Nightmare on Elm Street and though it’s done sincerely enough it doesn’t exactly hang together, albeit the mixing between reality and dreams is adroitly handled. On the other hand, the pyrotechnics are dreadful (special effects by Chuck Whitton who has no other credits of any sort whatsoever it seems, unless the credits spell his name wrong too). All the explosions in the war scenes are clearly little thunderflashes which send up a shower of sparks but conspicuously fail to move even a handful of actual earth the way that real rockets and shells do.

Of course it goes without saying that all the Vietcong soldiers are lousy shots who can’t hit GIs standing in plain sight only a few yards away, whereas the Yanks can hit obscured targets, shooting from the hip while somersaulting. Speaking of which there is also a plethora of extras leaping in the air and flipping through 180 degrees as the feeble explosions go off behind them, very reminiscent of the two stuntmen employed on Space Mutiny.

The reasonable make-up is by Robin Slater (Severed Ties, Love Bites, the 1989 Masque of the Red Death) - the painted video sleeve tries to make it look like there are zombies in the movie but there aren’t. Cinematographer Stephen Ashley Blake also photographed the far more entertaining Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. The anonymous GIs include among their number Troy Fromin (Class of Nuke ‘Em High II and III) and none other than Joe Lara, a couple of years before he first donned the loin-cloth in Tarzan in Manhattan.

Writer/director David A Prior is a self-taught Alabama-based film-maker with nearly 30 feature films - almost all of which have two word titles - to his credit, including Death Chase, Future Force, Raw Nerve, Mutant Species and Codename: Silencer (aka Body Count). The original story for this is credited to Prior, his brother Ted (who served as art director) and casting director William Zipp

When it comes to Vietnam War/supernatural horror crossgenre pics, give me House any time.

MJS rating: D+

Director: Justin Timpane
Writer: Justin Timpane
Producers: Michael Mead, Liz Burgess
Cast: Jay Saunders, Daniel Ross, Devon Marie Burt
Country: USA
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener (Left Films)

Ninjas vs Vampires is a curiously bipolar film. Parts of it are absolutely superb and others are distinctly sub-par. But I believe that the former considerably outweigh the latter and so am happy to recommend it.

This is actually the sequel to an earlier film, Ninjas vs Zombies, which has not been released in the UK to date, but that’s not a huge problem. There are parts of this film which clearly refer to the first one, such as discussion of another ninja named Fitz who died, and these might be confusing without this knowledge, but it doesn’t seriously impact on the movie’s plot.

Sadly, this is because it doesn’t really have one. In a nutshell, a young couple are attacked by a gang of vampires, a team of ninjas turn up and fight off the vampires, so the vampires attack the house where the ninjas live, so the ninjas attack the house where the vampires live. That’s about it.

But here’s what’s odd. What Ninjas vs Vampires lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in characterisation. A combination of excellent acting, finely wrought dialogue and good direction creates, from the ninja team and the young couple, six thoroughly believable, sympathetic, rounded, coherent characters. There’s a quite magnificent scene near the start where Aaron (Jay Saunders) visits Alex (Devon Marie Burt: Ghosts Don’t Exist) who had disappeared in a puff of smoke with the ninjas after the initial brouhaha. He finds her at home, not only with no memory of the vampire attack and ninja rescue but unable to mentally process what Aaron is saying. If he mentions vampires or ninjas she hears him but instantly forgets what he has just said. This is a brilliantly scripted, brilliantly acted, brilliantly directed sequence, one of the very best individual scenes I’ve seen in a low-budget indie for quite some time.

The ninjas themselves are a bit tricky to grasp at first, not least because one them, a goth chick named Lily (Carla Okouchi) is also a vampire. Apparently she’s a good vampire because she only drinks the blood of other (bad) vampires, never human blood. Oh, and also none of these ‘ninjas’ are Asian. In fact, come to think of it, there isn’t a single non-white person in the entire film.

The other three ninjas are bald Cole (Cory Okouchi - honesty, he’s not Asian), the nominal leader of the group; blonde chick Ann (Melissa McConnell) who is a witch (and Fitz’ widow); and Kyle (Daniel Ross, whose previous horror credits include Vampire Sisters and, wow, a 2007 feature-length version of EF Benson’s Mrs Amworth!), a great character who mixes dry, witty, cynical-but-upbeat humour with just the right amount of comic book references (“I thought you were going to go all Dark Phoenix on me,” he tells Ann at one point.). The ‘ninjas’ appellation means that the team (“There is no team,” says Cole, “We’re not the X-Men.” to which Kyle responds “But you do kinda look like Professor X.”) - means that the team dress in black, use oriental weapons and do occasional martial arts moves. Except for Lily who mostly just bites people and Ann who casts spells, mostly using a purple crystal which the vampires steal.

So really this isn’t ninjas vs vampires, it’s ninjas, a witch and a vampire vs some other vampires.

What we’re not told (and maybe we were in the first film, I don’t know) is who these ninjas are, where they come from, how they know each other, why they have taken on the responsibility (if they’re not ‘the X-Men’) of battling zombie hordes and vampire clans, The individual characters are fully realised, the team dynamic is glossed over.

On the other side of the coin are the vampires, who are equally unexplained but also suffer by being mostly very poorly defined characters. Sharply dressed lead vampire Seth (Kurt Skarstedt - would you believe, a 2011 remake of Plan 9?) is just awful, a lethal combination of terrible dialogue woodenly recited by an actor constructed from MDF. Most of the rest aren’t much better, including ‘The Bishop’ (PJ Megaw) who wears a metal mask and some sort of lame vampire double act wearing fancy dress hats. One of only two interesting and well-presented characters among the bloodsuckers is Seth’s brother Manson (Daniel Mascarello) who is kept chained in the dungeon for some reason and wear a crudely stitched together leather outfit that makes him look like Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (“Big Tim Burton fan, huh?” quips Kyle). The other is Lorna who is Seth’s main squeeze, an impish sex pixie wonderfully played by petite Elizabeth Taylor who looks like a 12-year-old Zoe Wanamaker.

The fights between the two groups are as diametrtic as any other aspect of the film. Mad mêlées like the first action sequence are just impossible to follow, not least because everyone wears black. There look to be some neat moves and groovy dismemberment effects in there but constant fast-paced editing means there’s no time to appreciate any of them. In fact that first fight is really quite comprehensively poor because how is an audience to follow what’s going on if a bunch of unidentified, black-clad vampires are attacked by a bunch of unidentified black-clad people, one of whom is a vampire. At night.

On the flip-side, any time we get a one-on-one fight, when the director is patient enough to let us see (a) what’s happening and (b) who’s involved, it’s terrific. There’s a particularly good training session when first Kyle then Cole take wannabe ninja Aaron through his paces which benefits from careful editing, fine choreography (by Megaw and Mascarello) and not taking place in the dark.

Naturally much of the action does take place at night and, even measured against the low quality that is implicit in the phrase ‘day for night’, the cinematography is bad. It’s not much better in the daylight, to be honest. There’s a particularly silly scene when the ninjas, sure they are safe from vampires during daylight, are attacked by bloodsuckers who use the cunning trick of holding blankets over their heads as they run from the car to the house. Really? Would that work? Is it that easy? So basically all that any nightstalker needs, to become a day-walker, is a large enough umbrella?

But in contrast (again!) to the often poor visual quality, the sound is great. A good range of music mixed at just the right level so it complements what’s on screen instead of dominating it. And I love the little ‘snikt’ sound effect every time a vampire extends their retractable fangs.

So a film of two halves then. Well, a film of about eight halves, really. However, the parts that are good are hugely impressive and enjoyable, and the lesser aspects not excruciatingly awful, so the balance is very much on the positive side. It’s great fun and these are characters (especially Kyle and Aaron) whom we really want to spend time with.

Writer/director/DP/editor/composer/tea-boy Justin Timpane is the main creative force behind both Ninjas vs pictures and also appears on screen as a beatnik named Reefer who helps Aaron find the ninjas in the first place. In interviews Timpane has stated that he prefers people to watch ...Vampires first then see ...Zombies as a prequel. There is also a Ninjas vs comic-book spin-off, discussed in a featurette on the DVD (check out the publisher; imagine a goatee and pony-tail on him...).

The cast also includes Leo Rogstad (Stakes, Skeleton Key 2), Teena Byrd (Witch’s Brew, Dead on Delmarva) and Matt Gulbranson (who had bit parts in Mars Attacks!, Eraser, The Osiris Chronicles and an episode of Seinfeld!)

The film concludes with a Halloween-set epilogue that sets up a mooted third picture, Ninjas vs Monsters. There’s a very different alternative ending included on the UK DVD (from Left Films) along with deleted/extended scenes, bloopers, a couple of music videos, the UK trailer and a choice of three commentaries.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Mitsumasa Saito
Writer: Ei Ogawa
Producers: Masao Sato, Izumi Toyoshima
Cast: Henry Sanada, Sonny Chiba, Noriko Watanabe
Year of release: 1982
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK VHS (VTC)

I had heard bad things about Ninja Wars (aka Black Magic Wars aka Iga Ninpo-cho), but surely they were mistaken. While the word ‘ninja’ in a title doesn’t in and of itself signify an enjoyable film - and can in fact sometimes indicate absolute crap - this was a supernatural fantasy starring Sonny Chiba. Sonny Chiba! The man’s a legend!

But you know what? The word on the street was right. Ninja Wars is toss of the highest order. The plot is hopelessly confused and I’m buggered if I could follow what was happening, a situation not helped by two women who look very similar (may even have been twin sisters) having their heads cut off and then magically restored to each other’s shoulders. So is that Woman A with Woman B’s head, or Woman B with Woman A’s body? More to the point, who cares?

There’s some sort of magical aphrodisiac which the bad guy wants to create so that he can administer it to his enemy’s wife and turn her into a nymphomaniac, thus shaming her husband. Or something. And for this aphrodisiac to work it must be made from the tears of a raped virgin. Or something.

And there is a thing called ‘the Frog Kettle’ which is essential to the preparation of this aphrodisiac - a metal pot basically - though this seems to be a completely arbitrary McGuffin.

One thing I did spot is that Sonny Chiba is barely in this movie at all, and when he does turn up (as a mysterious ninja on horseback) he has a scarf over his face. He doesn’t even merit a mention in the cast list although he does receive a credit as ‘Action Co-ordinator’ - or at least, someone called Sony Chiba does! (This makes the movie's DVD release as part of 'The Sonny Chiba Collection' particularly misleading.)

I couldn’t follow who was who, what they were doing or why. And worse than that, I was bored. There’s not much action, not much magic and no tension. There’s a big set-piece halfway through when an army of monks from one temple attacks another temple mid-ceremony, burning it to the ground. I have no idea why; I couldn’t follow the reasons for this or the consequences of it and I had no idea which bunch of monks I should be cheering for during the hopelessly ill-directed fight scenes.

The dubbing is technically accurate - it matches the lip movements - which means that it is painful to listen to. Japanese is spoken in short sentences with pauses between, while English tends to be long sentences flowing into one another (unless it’s spoken by William Shatner). So the only. Way that the dialogue can. Match is. To be broken up like. This and for. Occasional. Meaningless pro. Nouncements like. But Still.

Director Mitsumasa Saito (credited as Kosei Saito on the sleeve) also directed the 1979 WW2/samurai epic Time Wars/Time Slip/GI Samurai which is high on my want-to-see list [And which I have subsequently seen - MJS], although after sitting through Ninja Wars it has slipped down a few places. Screenwriter Ei Ogawa also wrote Toho’s three western-influenced vampire films, Legacy of Dracula, Evil of Dracula and Lake of Dracula.

Among the cast are Hiroyuki Sanada - credited as Henry Sanada on screen and Duke Sanada on the sleeve - who was in Message from Space and Time Wars but is best known as Ryuji in Ring, Ring 2 and Rasen. Akira Nakao, who plays the villainous Lord Danjo, also has some genre credits: Legacy of Dracula and four Godzilla movies. Despite what the Inaccurate Movie Database claims, Jackie Chan is not in this film (or if he is, his role is even briefer and more hidden than Sonny Chiba’s...). Special effects are by Hideo Suzuki.

MJS rating: D

Director: Jared Cohn
Writers: Jared Cohn, Ed Erdelac
Producer: Joe Accardi
Cast: Caitlin Gold, Clint Byrne, Lauren Klemp
Year of release: 2011
Country: USA
Reviewed from: YouTube

Not quite an hour long, Underground Lizard People gives every impression of being a student film, and probably is, but it’s still worth a watch. It’s well-directed, well-acted, atmospheric, creepy and slickly professional. I mean, it’s not going to set the world alight, but there are worse things you can do with 55 minutes of your time.

Five New York students are going into a set of abandoned tunnels to film a documentary – and yes, that’s not the most original set-up, I’ll grant you. But these are generally sympathetic, rounded, believable characters, even if what they’re up to is a bit dumb. Jason (Clint Byrne) is the main protagonist, accompanied by camera-man Jack (Colin Walker) who fancies himself a ladies man but is really kind of a dick. Sound-girl Lynda (Lauren Klemp) is helping as a return favour for Jason’s help in editing her own student film. Cheryl (Courtney Hammond) is described as the ‘executive producer’ – she’s not part of the ‘Communication Arts’ department but is a member of some sort of student Fortean society which has bank-rolled the project (although it’s difficult to see what costs are involved). The final member of the quintet is Jason’s girlfriend Rachael (Caitlin Gold) who has no purpose on the team – she’s majoring in costume design.

The ‘Banning Tunnels’ are long-abandoned railway tunnels full of graffiti and homeless people. The gang use bolt-cutters to snap a chain on a gate but there must be some other way in that the bums are using. As they make their way down the tunnels, the students pause occasionally for Jason to do to-camera bits.

What’s not believable is the lack of preparation. No-one seems to have come dressed for urban exploring – Rachael is actually wearing pumps and a short, strapless dress, although at least she’s not in heels. Lynda – asthmatic, claustrophobic Lynda – is shocked at the idea that there might be rats around. Really? You’re going filming in an abandoned railway tunnel and you’ve only just realised there could be rats? That might work if she was an airhead bimbo but she’s not. Like the others, she’s presented as reasonably intelligent.

Jason doesn’t seem to have briefed his team at all and it’s only once they’re underground that he mentions the legends of lizard people, blamed by conspiracy theorists for the disappearance of a gang of surveyors 18 years earlier. Although we’re actually very far underground at this point, reverse shots clearly showing the tunnel entrance about 20 feet away.

Taking a side-tunnel, the team explore further, getting more and more freaked out and splintering further as personal revelations come to light. The dialogue is good and the character conflict well-handled. This is not The Descent, I’ll give you that, but it’s a lot, lot better than The Blair Shit Project, for example.

Writer-director Jared Cohn plays a surprisingly well-spoken (and beard-free) bum whom they find reading a Lonesome Dove paperback by candle-light. An intriguingly ambiguous character, it’s really not clear how trustworthy he is – which is good.

About halfway through we get our first glimpse of a lizard person, or at least a lizard person’s arm. From then on the tension and horror gradually increases and we get more glimpses of the lizard people, who are effectively portrayed and photographed. They’re not reptilian monsters, more bums with dark green-brown, scaly skin, scary teeth and contacts, and animalistic tendencies. You know what, I think that, given the micro-budget, they actually work. Any more ambitious make-up would end up looking rubbish, but this has been judged just right.

Some parts of the film are seen through the lens of Jack’s camera, complete with little red ‘rec’ light, but this is far from being ‘found footage’. The whole thing is topped and tailed with some very effective talking heads of assorted witnesses and experts, including a former CIA guy shot in silhouette.

I enjoyed ULP which I picked pretty much at random off YouTube when I had some time to spare. Having watched the movie, I trotted over to IMDB to see if anyone involved had made anything else, and discovered that Jared Cohn has quite a CV, even though this was only made three years ago. ULP was actually his second feature after something called The Carpenter Part 1 – And So They Die. These two movies were enough to get him a gig with The Asylum, purveyors of finest DTV rubbish since 1997. For those guys he directed horrors Born Bad, Hold Your Breath and 12/12/12 (he also acted in the sequel 13/13/13!). Cohn helmed skinfick-comedy Bikini Spring Break for The Asylum as well as prison drama 17 and Life: Jailbait and even giant mecha-fest mockbuster Atlantic Rim (take that, Guillermo del Toro!). As an actor, you’ll find him in Alien Abduction, Bram Stoker’s Way of the Vampire, Legion of the Dead, Halloween Night, Blood Predator and a number of other pre-Lizard People titles. The IMDB reckons he’s attached to direct Zombienado!

Ed Erdelac, writer-director of horror western Meaner than Hell, shares script credit, from a story by exec-prod/co-prod Ron Dubey. Among the cast, all of whom acquit themselves well here, Gold has about two dozen credits including ‘pregnant zombie’ in something called Eat Me; Byrne went on to handle camera on Larry King Now; Klemp was in a short Twilight spoof; Walker seems to have mainly done stage work; and Hammond has done a couple of shorts.

Mike Bauman (Revenants) was the DP and does a good job of convincing us that this all happens underground, although realistically there was always going to be too much light, otherwise we would never see what was happening. The make-up was by Ingrid Okola whose credits include Devil’s Detail, The Blood Shed, David Gregory’s Plague Town, I Sell the Dead, ZombleBees(!), and Debbie Rochon’s Model Hunger.

Underground Lizard People turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a cheap and cheerful student film by a bunch of nobodies and found instead an enjoyable horror picture from the guy who made Atlantic Rim. A lucky dip indeed.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Attila Szász
Writer: Attila Szász
Producer: Dalma Hidasi
Cast: Ernõ Fekete, Dóra Létay, Vitéz Ábrahám
Country: Hungary
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.extremefilm.com/nowyouseeme

Invisibility has always been the poor relation of classic horror subgenres. While the concepts embodied in the Frankenstein story, vampire myths, zombies, werewolves, even Jekyll and Hyde have all been used by serious-minded film-makers to explore ideas and make serious points, invisibility remains largely ephemeral.

When not being used solely for the obvious opportunities for broad comedy which it offers, the subgenre nevertheless relies almost exclusively on effects. Good effects or bad ones, any invisibility picture uses them upfront because, apart from anything else, the only way that an invisible character can appear on screen is through their interaction with other people and objects. The character effectively becomes the effects which demonstrate their presence and their actions. This doesn’t have to cheapen the story but it usually does and there is rarely either incentive or opportunity for a film-maker to try something different.

The majority of invisibility pictures, even including James Whale’s seminal work from 1933, are comedies. A few try for outright horror. I can’t think of any which eschew both angles in favour of serious drama.

Well, now the invisibility subgenre comes of age with Most Látszom, Most Nem Látszom, a half-hour Hungarian masterpiece which is one of the most effective, moving, powerful fantasy films that I have seen in a very, very long time.

On the surface, the basic set-up is, remarkably, not dissimilar to that of Invisible Mom: a scientist father brings home from his laboratory an invisibility serum which then affects his family - except that here it is the son rather than the mother who is rendered transparent.

But that’s on the surface; superficial in every sense. Because what we perceive this film to be when we start watching (or from the trailer) is not what it actually is. It would cheapen this marvellous picture to say that it has a ‘twist’ but about halfway through, our understanding of the characters, the situation, even the order in which we are seeing events, is radically (albeit not abruptly) altered. And what starts out as a relatively straightforward fantasy piece becomes a dark, intense study of anguish and damaged relationships. In a sense, those themes were there from the start; but we couldn’t see them.

Dóra Létay is the mother, Ernõ Fekete the father, of a six-year-old boy named Alex (Vitéz Ábrahám). I won’t deny that this film affected me as the parent of a four-year-old. The wide-eyed, tussle-haired head on an impossibly thin neck, the stick-legs protruding from baggy shorts: Alex (like TF Simpson) is the epitome of a little boy. And like any parent, I’m protective of my son so I can sympathise with Alex’s mother when she warns him away from the hot pans on the stove. Only later did I realise that this seemingly innocuous moment is the first clue that all is not right in the household.

All is certainly not right. Alex’s parents exhibit a strained relationship that approached (but thankfully never reaches) that of the couple in Douglas Buck’s notorious Cutting Moments. Writer/director/co-producer Attila Szász uses impressive cinematic techniques to drive home the schism that exists between the mother and the father so that our initial sympathy is for poor little Alex, caught in the middle.

And yet there is something curious about Alex, even before he turns invisible. We never get a good close-up of him; he’s a shadowy character (literally so in one brilliant silhouette shot) who seems both incidental and central to whatever is happening.

What is happening, I can’t tell you. Because this film relies for its effect on at least one innocent viewing. Szász is playing tricks with his audience but ‘playing’ is a misleading word because this film is anything but playful. It’s a bitter, poignant - and for any parent, terrifying - exploration of remorse, guilt, grief and the vagaries of fate.

Attila Szász is the former editor of VOX, Hungary’s biggest movie magazine. It’s always good to hear about journos who have made the movie into film-making and gives hope to the rest of us, although Szász already has extensive experience of amateur and student films before he got the VOX gig. NYSMNYD was produced in 2004 and played a string of festivals including Dragon*Con, Moondance, Euroshorts, Palm Springs and Houston, winning prizes at some of them. Credit must be given to cinematographer (and co-producer) Tamás Keményffy who works marvels with the imagery of the film.

I can’t claim any great knowledge of Hungarian cinema but Now You See Me, Now You Don’t is hugely impressive by any standard.

MJS rating: A

Director: Michael Ferris Gibson
Writer: Michael Ferris Gibson
Cast: Jennifer West Savitch, Dominik Overstreet, Anne Goldman
Year of release: 2003
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (FFF 2003)

Here’s a novelty - a film which takes its title from the sensation it creates in you. Or at least, the lack of sensation in your bottom after sitting through 77 minutes of the most tedious, soporific science fiction film ever made. Numb is a film that makes you long for the fast-paced action and edge-of-the-seat tension of Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

In the future (apparently), a woman goes looking for her father (or something: husband? brother?) and enters some sort of hospital. There’s a guard at the entrance barrier though what he does all day is not clear because apparently only one person ever enters or leaves, and that’s Miles. Whoever he is.

The woman eventually meets Miles and they go off somewhere and I think they stop at a petrol station for some reason. But really I was having difficulty keeping my eyes open because this is just so, so boring. We don’t know who these people are or what they’re doing, let alone why they’re doing it. The lack of interest is not helped by two confusing decisions. First, the film is in black and white apart from the flashbacks to the girl’s earlier life which are in colour. That may be a clever subversion of cinematic convention but you know, those conventions are there for a reason and if you want to subvert them you had better have an even stronger reason pointing the other way.

But even worse is that scenes are all jumbled up, jumping backwards and forward in time almost randomly, often to scenes involving the same characters. Even if the film was interesting it would be impossible to follow what’s going on. It’s something to do with some sort of drug that everyone in the hospital takes by means of a drip. But the meaning or significance - or plot - is entirely lost on me.

Numb (originally titled Yerba City) is a film where not only nothing happens, but it happens very slowly. And in the wrong order. I guess the cinematography’s not bad but you don’t come out of a film whistling the cinematography.

I’m sure a great deal of work went into this and kudos to Michael Ferris Gibson for making a feature film, but it really is unwatchable. Quite a few people went to the bar after half an hour or so when it looked like it wasn’t going to get any better, but being a diligent reviewer I stuck it out to the bitter end.

Apparently Gibson is now making a film called either Craigslist: The Movie or 24 Hours on Craigslist. Craigslist is, we are told “the fastest-growing, grassroots cyber-community” though it needs to grow a bit faster if it expects anyone outside San Francisco to have heard of it. And this is a film about all the things that people post on this website during one 24 hour period. So that’s a film about a day in the life of a website. Presumably the idea is that once that film exists, Numb will only be the second least interesting movie of recent years.

MJS rating: D

Director: Ivan Zuccon
Writer: Ivo Gazzarrini
Producer: Ivan Zuccon
Cast: Tiffany Shepis, Allan McKenna, Caroline De Cristofaro
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.ivanzuccon.com

It’s fair to say that Ivan Zuccon is one of my favourite film-makers. This is his fifth feature and I have not yet seen one that I have rated less than A-. One day he may trip up and make a duff film, but it hasn’t happened yet because NyMpha is another great movie.

If you have seen previous Zuccon pictures, you’ll have some idea what to expect. A principal location in an old building where the paint is flaking and the plaster is crumbling; carefully composed lighting which makes the shadows as important within the mise-en-scene as the walls they fall across; time periods or realities which flow into one another, bringing together characters who are worlds apart; and a heavy dose of Catholic iconography. NyMpha is so drenched in Catholic guilt that it made me want to confess - and I’m an Anglican agnostic.

Although the cast includes some of Ivan’s regular repertory company, this is the first Zuccon film with an international star (it also has international funding with some of the budget coming from Epix Media in Germany). I related in my review of The Darkness Beyond how it was through Tiffany Shepis that I first met Ivan at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. Since then, Shepis has made more than 30 films, almost all of them indie horrors. She was in a biopic of Ted Bundy, the Lance Henriksen-starring bigfoot picture Abominable, Donald Farmer’s Dorm of the Dead, a sci-fi short called Man vs Woman that looks like the best thing ever made - and seven films for Rolfe Kanefsky (which is ironic because it was that meeting with Tiffany which required me to leave a screening of Rolfe’s Midnight 5 early and to this day I don’t know how it ends).

Shepis is much more than a ‘scream queen’ (a term which has become horribly over-used). She’s a fine actress and a savvy businesswoman who has carefully guided her career (she’s hot too, but that should go without saying). To the uninitiated, her filmography might look like a bottom-of-the-pile, I’ll-do-anything, scramble for cheap T&A roles: 40 films in ten years with titles like Bloody Murder 2, Delta Delta Die! and National Lampoon’s Boobies and characters occasionally identified as just ‘Girl Groupie’, ‘Biker Chick’ and ‘BDSM Freak in Bed’. But when you know and understand the independent horror scene, when you fully understand how much lower the bottom of the pile is and how limited the higher reaches of the pile are, you can see, if not a pattern in Shepis’ career at least an intent, a deliberation in choosing roles and pictures.

What it boils down to is this: she has credibility. There are some actresses who will appear in pretty much anything, basically riffing on themselves (or rather, their horror movie convention personas) and who add nothing to a project except the most limited amount of name value imaginable. But Tiffany Shepis in a cast list suggests that there’s something about the film that makes it a cut above the rest. NyMpha is, I believe, Tiffany’s first European movie since Shampoo Horns, a Spanish arthouse flick that she made back near the start of her career. I suspect - and hope - that this film will seriously enhance the professional standing and critical appreciation of both Tiffany and Ivan.

Getting down to the specifics of plot, Shepis plays Sarah, an American initiate who arrives at a creepy Italian convent ruled by a stern Mother Superior (Alessandra Guerzoni, a familiar face on Chilean TV, apparently). For most of the film, the impression given is that there are only two nuns in the convent (Caterina Zanca, who was in The Darkness Beyond and Ivan's short film Degenerazione, plays the other) but the final scenes show us eight or nine so the others are probably off praying for most of the time.

Over the course of the film, Sarah undergoes four excruciating tortures at the hands of the Mother Superior and alcoholic physician Dr Rinaldi (Giuseppe Gobbato, also in both the Beyond films). These are designed to allow her to hear God only with her soul, see God only with her soul, touch God only with her soul and speak to God only with her soul. They provide a significant part of the film’s gore, with make-up provided by creaFX, the Florence-based team responsible for the mutant-zombie-vampire-things in Alessandro Izzo and Guglielmo Favilla’s short Last Blood.

Relieving Sarah’s agonising pain is a connection she establishes across the years with Ninfa, a former inhabitant of the house before it became a convent. Sarah hears and sees episodes from Ninfa’s life from her birth and childhood (the little moppet who plays her is Zuccon’s own daughter) to her married life. Netherlands-based Italian actress/model Caroline De Cristofaro plays the adult Ninfa and does a magnificent job, opposite a typically strong performance by Michael Segal (The Darkness Beyond, Unknown Beyond, The Shunned House) as her husband Marco. But the dominant man in Ninfa’s life is her grandfather Geremia, played by British actor Allan McKenna whose previous screen roles include an executioner in a Discovery Channel programme about the Tower of London, a Victorian doctor in Michael Winterbottom’s Jude and Lord Salisbury in a Japanese TV show about Jack the Ripper.

Geremia is on the one hand a kindly, doting grandfather, raising Ninfa single-handed after her mother (also played by Alessandra Guerzoni) dies very messily in childbirth. On the other hand, he is a religiously obsessed psychopath who imprisons in the attic (which may or may not already have an inhabitant) anyone who crosses his path, including his neighbour (Federico D’Anneo) and the local doctor (Franceso Primavera, who was in another recent Italian horror, Maurizio Gambini’s Weekend). Geremia’s influence hangs heavy on Ninfa and permeates the bricks and mortar of the house-turned-convent; through the building the memories of Ninfa and Geremia (and Marco) affect Sarah, the shared suffering of the two women bringing them together (literally, in one scene).

As portrayed by De Cristofaro, Ninfa has grown into a confident young woman but shadows of fear lurk in her past; memories of Geremia and his bloody, painful death. Marco is Ninfa’s rock, providing the stability that she needs, having lost both her mother and her grandfather. The mystery of Ninfa’s father’s identity is not difficult to fathom - in fact one line of dialogue makes it plain - but the Ninfa storyline climaxes with a shocking scene that makes Marco much more (or much less) than just a supportive husband. And this scene explains much of what has happened to Sarah and also what will, or may happen.

An intense, powerful, sometimes beautiful horror film, NyMpha pulls no punches in either the physical or psychological horror. Shepis is superb, bringing a suffering and a humanity to a character about whose background we know virtually nothing. She does get naked within the first ten minutes, but in a decidedly non-erotic way, although there is a lesbian scene later on which is surprisingly tasteful and sensual (and certainly not gratuitous). NyMpha confirms what many of us have long known: that Tiffany Shepis, given a great role that she can really get her teeth into, is a terrific actress.

The rest of the cast aquit themselves too, the weak point being McKenna who sadly doesn’t give Geremia the intensity that the character deserves. Perhaps he is trying to play the old man as a frighteningly calm psychopath but he comes across in some scenes as flat, rather than level (it's a subtle distinction but an important one). That’s a shame but it’s only a minor criticism of what is otherwise a thoroughly solid production.

Ivan shot his first two features in Italian, his third in English and his most recent, Bad Brains, in Italian again. For NyMpha he has used both languages. Conversations between Sarah and the Mother Superior are in English; Geremia, Ninfa and Marco also speak English. But other scenes and characters are in subtitled Italian. This is a laudable choice which makes the film accessible to English-speaking audiences without losing its distinctively Italian flavour.

As usual, Ivan did his own cinematography and editing, with his regular collaborator Massimo Storari providing the visual effects which are impressive without overwhelming the story or characters. Other Zuccon regulars behind the camera include executive producer/set designer Valerio Zuccon, costume designer Donatella Ravagnini and First AD Eugenia Serravalli. Singling out any individual for praise would be unfair because everyone has done marvellous work and the combination of their efforts is greater than the sum of its parts. Another international aspect of the film is the score by Richard Band (Troll, Puppet Master, Prehysteria).

The screenplay, which is complex but not difficult to follow, was written by horror author Ivo Gazzarrini. He also wrote Bad Brains and Colour from the Dark, the Lovecraft adaptation which Zuccon and Shepis were planning to make after Brains but sidelined in favour of this movie. The origins of NyMpha however predate Zuccon's collaboration with Gazzarrini, going back to his short film The Last Supper and two unfilmed scripts, The Cross and New Order.

Which really just leaves one question: what does the title mean? Ivan says it's just the Latin form of the Greek 'nymph' but there's a great deal more to it than that. Apart from the phonetic similarity to ‘Ninfa’, this would seem to be an allusion to an early Christian martyr. Here’s what I found through a little Googling:

Nympha was a virgin from Palermo who was put to death for the Faith at the beginning of the fourth century. According to other versions of the legend, when the Goths invaded Sicily she fled from Palermo to the Italian mainland and died in the sixth century at Savona. The feast of her translation is observed at Palermo on 19th August. Some believe that there were two saints of this name.

The word has two other meanings, one sexual (either of the two labia minora, near the vulva) and one entomological (an alternative term for a butterfly’s chrysalis). Either of these could be seen as obliquely relevant to this story. As for the oddly placed capital M - that’s something we’ll have to ask Ivan about.

I thought Nympha was wonderful. It’s Zuccon’s most thoughtful and mature film to date; the violence is limited and controlled, the characters are fascinating and fully rounded, the oppressive air of religious fervour is cloying and grim. Powerful, powerful stuff.

MJS rating: A

Director: John Eyres
Writer: Michael D Weiss
Producer: David Verod, Danny Lerner, Boaz Davidson
Cast: Jay Harrington, Ravil Issyanov, David Beecroft, Carolyn Lowery
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Hollywood DVD)

Nu Image are very much the Ronson’s Woodseal of film production companies: their movies do exactly what it says on the tin. Hence there are spiders (well, a spider) in Spiders, a crocodile in Crocodile and - quelle surprise - a bloody great octopus in Octopus (and for those of you still confused, there is of course Spiders 2, Crocodile 2 and Octopus 2).

After a prologue in which a Russian nuclear submarine is sunk by a US sub off the coast of Cuba, Octopus leaps forward a few decades. Terrorists (well, a terrorist) attack the US embassy in Sofia for no more reason than Nu Image have a studio in Bulgaria so it’s not far to carry the cameras (and it’s easier than trying to find bits of Sofia that might pass for other cities). This is the evil Casper (Ravil Issyanov: The Omega Code, Doomsdayer, Arachnid) who is captured by handsome young CIA agent Roy Turner (Jay Harrington from the US remake of Coupling).

Turner has to accompany Casper back to the States to face charges, and they are transported - for no obvious reason - on a submarine, commanded by Captain Shaw (daytime soap heart-throb David Beecroft, who had a small role in Creepshow 2). It’s really not clear why Casper isn’t simply being flown to the States, nor why a sub travelling from Sofia to the USA has to go via the waters around - guess where - Cuba. Also a passenger on the sub is sexy scientist Lisa Fincher (Carolyn Lowery: Candyman, Tales of the City). The only other discernable character is a crewman named Brickman, played by Ricco Ross (Aliens, Wishmaster) who also worked with director Eyres on Project Shadowchaser I and III.

Off Cuba, Casper somehow escapes (he shouldn’t be too hard to find - it’s a submarine for Heaven’s sake!) but worse than that, the ship is attacked by a giant octopus, presumably mutated by the spilled nuclear fuel from that old Russian sub, and sinks to the ocean floor. It must be said that the CGI octopus is not only pretty well-animated but also sensibly underused by Eyres, who has plenty of experience of this level of movie-making. That said, there is one deeply stupid sequence when a tentacle somehow gets inside the sub without depressurising the hull!

Eventually our heroes (and villain) escape in a mini-sub and are picked up by a passing luxury ocean liner which is promptly hijacked by Casper’s associates, who have come looking for him. But the octopus which they thought had been destroyed by the sub’s self-destruct mechanism is still around and rises to the surface.

Let’s be honest, Octopus - like most Nu Image films - is pure B-movie nonsense from start to finish. Characters are paper-thin, effects are adequate, the script (by Michael D Weiss, who subsequently worked on the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan Around the World in 80 Days) makes no sense whatsoever. But Nu Image films are also unpretentious and fun, suitable for a late-night screening with one’s brain in neutral. There are plenty of better films than Octopus, but there are also many, many films which, despite huge budgets, name directors and stellar casts, are far, far worse.

It’s called Octopus - it’s a movie about a giant octopus. You were expecting perhaps something else?

MJS rating: C+

Director: Yossi Wein
Writer: Michael D Weiss
Producer: Danny Lerner, Boaz Davidson, David Varod
Cast: Michael Reilly Burke, Meredith Morton, Fredric Lane
Year of release: 2002
Country: USA
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Hollywood DVD)

Nu Image - they like their titles simple and their sequels to just have a number stuck on the end (although in the USA this was apparently released as Octopus 2: River of Fear). Also, their sequels never have any connection with the previous films, so don’t expect this to relate in any way to Octopus.

The oversized cephalopod this time around is not hanging around out in the deep but has somehow made its way into New York Harbour. There is some talk of it having come down from Nova Scotia with the cold weather or something, but unlike the first film there’s no explanation of how the beast got to be so huge. Nor, bizarrely, does anybody comment on how much bigger than even the biggest ever recorded octopus this fellow actually is.

When some tourists disappear near the harbour, and then a tug-boat blows up, NYPD Harbour Patrol Detective Nick Hartfield (Michael Reilly Burke, who plays the title role in Ted Bundy) becomes convinced that the perpetrator is a giant octopus. No-one believes him of course, not even his partner Detective Walter McNair (Fredric Lane: Fortress II, Amityville IV) and especially not his superior Captain Hensley (Paul Vincent O’Connor).

But more people start disappearing, and then McNair is attacked underwater and Hartfield is unable to save him. Mixed up in all this is Rachel Starbird (Meredith Morton: Alien Fury) who works at the Mayor’s office. You see, these events take place over the few days leading up to 4th July 2000, when New York is expecting millions of visitors for “the largest Independence Day celebrations of the millennium” with “20,000 boats in the harbour.” That’s right, it’s yet another don’t-make-a-fuss-about-the-monster-it’ll-ruin-the-tourist-trade Jaws rip-off. Oh, and Rachel is chaperoning twelve kids from various countries who are going to make some sort of symbolic international gesture. Oh, and the American kid is in a wheelchair. I'm not making this up.

Hartfield teams up with a new partner called Tony (John Thaddeus: The Young and the Restless) and they arrest vagrant Mad Dog (Clement Blake: Minority Report) because he is found using the credit card of one of the dead tourists. But Hartfield continues his assertion that it’s not Mad Dog: “Not only have you got the wrong man, you’ve got the wrong species!”

It all finishes amid the 4th July fireworks (there is no sign of those promised 20,000 boats, by the way) with Hartfield, Tony and three expendable Harbour Patrol cops attacking the octopus with harpoon guns to no effect, then Hartfield attaches a bomb to it - I’ll just say that again: he attaches a bomb to the octopus - and blows it to kingdom come.

But wait: intercut with this we saw Rachel and the twelve kids heading off in a school bus to do their ceremonial schtick. Obviously something is going to happen to them. I assumed that the octopus would rear up out of the water and swipe the bus off the Brooklyn Bridge - but no! No, the bus takes the tunnel and the octopus’ hectic defence against the underwater cops is causing it to crack the tunnel roof, so for the last 15 minutes, with the monster defeated, the film turns into a rip-off of the Sylvester Stallone movie Daylight. Hartfield scoots down an airshaft, ends up right next to the school bus - nobody has made any attempt to head up back out of the tunnel - and helps everyone to safety.

Then the octopus reappears one last time but Hartfield and Tony fire explosive harpoons into it and blow it up. Again. Hang about...

The octopus in Octopus 2 is considerably smaller than the octopus in Octopus - this one certainly couldn’t sink a cruise liner. In defiance of basic octopoid physiology, it has a ridged, bony body and glowing yellow eyes. CGI is used for long shots but there is far more use of rubber tentacles than in the first film, which the actors have to physically wrap around themselves, struggling like a 1950s Tarzan battling a rubber crocodile. Willie Botha (Octopus, Spiders 2, Shark Attack 2 and 3) is credited as Special Effects Supervisor.

Unusually for a Nu Image movie, the scene depicted on the advance publicity - a giant octopus climbing up the Statue of Liberty - actually does occur in the movie. It’s only a dream sequence, but it is actually one of the more spectacular effects sequences. Of course, the giant mollusc’s threat to New York is rather overshadowed by the fact that the World Trade Centre is visible in several shots but had disappeared by the time this was released in late 2002.

Director Yossi Wein could probably do this sort of thing in his sleep, having helmed Cyborg Cop III and Operation Delta Force II and V among other StraViSNuTs, though he remains best known as one of the most reliable cinematographers in the field, with credits that include Cyborg Cop I and II, Shark Attack 2, etc). As often happens when a DP directs, everyone on the camera crew has moved up one place, so the cinematographer on this movie is Peter Belcher (Spiders 2, Operation Delta Force V) who is more often credited as camera operator (on Shark Attack 1 and 2, Cyborg Cop II, Project Shadowchaser II, etc). Impressively, the bulk of the film was shot in Bulgaria, as most Nu Image pictures seem to be nowadays, yet the second unit footage of New York is seamlessly integrated and it’s only the fact that 90 per cent of cast and crew names end in ‘-ov’ that gives the game away.

Octopus 2, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, has no connection with Octopus, and is a slightly better film. The characters are more interesting and more likeable, and the city harbour setting works much better than the first film’s submarine. Which is not to say that Octopus 2 makes sense. It’s packed with plot contrivances and dangling plot threads (there’s a subplot about a drug-smuggling judge that goes absolutely nowhere) and the scientific mumbo jumbo that enables Starbird to identify the monster’s lair is embarrassing gobbledegook about levels of caesium. Which she measures with what appears to be a handheld mass spectrometer. Hmm, yes. This is especially daft as it has already been established that all the attacks happened in the same place at the same time of night.

But the daftness is part of the appeal of these films. Without being flashy and ‘cult’, Nu Image are keeping the B-movie flag flying with films like this. They don’t make sense but they’re professionally made and they’re fun to watch.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Ian Hothersall
Writer: Ian Hothersall
Producer: Ian Hothersall
Cast: Mark Aguera, Johnny Williams
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc

This fun little four-minute short has a similar premise to Small Soldiers and Evolver: a dangerous weapon delivered by accident to the home of an unsuspecting member of the public.

In this case Robert Jones (Johnny Wilson, amusingly credited as ‘Concerned Customer’) takes delivery of something called the Omnicide 8000 and, while we’re never told precisely what it does, its destructive capabilities are amply hinted at as it sends bolts of energy, plumes of smokes and general mayhem throughout Jones’ suburban semi - and eventually beyond.

Fortunately there is a helpline number on the delivery note and on the other end of the phone is a bored customer care officer (Mark Aguera, playing ‘Quality Employee’) who wearily takes down the serial number and offers less than useful advice.

The Omnicide 8000 is basically a one-gag film but it’s an escalating gag with the tension and humour rising in synch to the inevitable, nicely handled climax. The effects are excellent and wisely underplayed, flashing and banging in the background and brief exterior cutaways, which makes them all the more effective and funnier.

Writer/director/producer Ian Hothersall directs with an imaginative eye, notably the shot of the crate being opened which is filmed from inside, and we’re never given a close look at the device itself, because it doesn’t really matter what it looks like. The only other person credited is camera operator Ewan Cassidy.

If anything, the film feels a little too short. There was probably a couple of minutes’ more comedy that could have been extracted from the situation, playing variations on the basic theme of the concerned customer and the bored employee. And it would have been funnier if the latter had been in an open plan call centre rather than a dark, cramped office - but with this sort of low-budget film, you take your locations where you can find them.

A smart little film which looks a lot more expensive than it has any right to, The Omnicide 8000 screened at the 2006 Sci-Fi London Festival and has apparently been picked up for DVD distribution on a Troma compilation.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ian Hothersall
Writer: Ian Hothersall
Producer: Ian Hothersall
Cast: Tova Leigh, Matt Marshall
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener

Frankly it’s a bit embarrassing when somebody sends me a film to review that’s only five minutes long and it takes me weeks to get round to reviewing it. But there’s always stuff in the TBW pile and it only goes down slowly because I have all these other things that get in the way like a day-job and a family and proper writing stuff and so on. Not to mention the sheer amount of writing that this site takes.

If this was one of those sites that just puts a couple of hundred words up online and calls it a review, then all I would have to do is watch the things. But actually watching a film, even a feature, is the shortest part of the review process. A long review of 3-5,000 words takes me quite a few days to write. Even this has already taken me nearly five minutes and I’ve not actually mentioned the film yet.

The film is Once Upon a Time on Earth, probably the most compact alien invasion epic you will ever see, and it was directed by Ian Hothersall who previously brought us The Omnicide 8000.

Like many really great sci-fi films, this combines a human story with a fantastical one. And by ‘combines’ I don’t just mean ‘overlays’, I mean interweaves.

An unnamed couple break up in a sequence of fast cuts and extreme close-ups that tells in about 40 seconds what could, in other films, take 40 minutes. In fact, we never really get a good look at either of our characters until near the end, but that’s very deliberate. They’re cyphers, not characterisations, and the plot of this little gem is a cartoon. In a nutshell, alien mechanoids are attacking London. Foom goes Big Ben although, in defiance of popular convention, we don’t see the Millennium Dome flattened. I suppose now that it’s the O2 Arena its destruction wouldn’t have the same impact as it had ten years ago.

The alien robots and the destruction they cause are skilfully rendered and seamlessly matted into the shots of London streets. There’s no dialogue except right at the end and that’s merely expedient rather than character illumination. We’re not told anything but we’re shown a great deal. We’re shown a break-up and reconciliation - the second and third parts of that classic boy-meets-girl three-act structure - against a backdrop of global devastation. In five minutes. As an exercise in brevity and concise storytelling, this is hard to beat. It’s also clever and original, slick and professional, and actually laugh-out-loud funny at moments.

Tova Leigh (Ant Apocalypse) is the woman, Matt Marshall (who can be seen demonstrating stuff in a B&Q instore video) is the man. The fine cinematography is by Ewan Cassidy who also shot The Omnicide 8000 but works mostly as a gaffer including a credit on Simon Rumley’s The Living and the Dead. Ian Hothersall did his own editing. Rick Altena is credited as ‘effects supervisor’ while Asim Girach and Ian are ‘effects artists.’ Girach is a Leicestershire lad, a graduate of De Montfort Uni (as am I, although I now work for arch rivals Leicester Uni) and some images of the ‘Zeus’ spaceship scene towards the end of this film can be found on his website.

Apart from key grip Mark Aguera (who was the customer service contact in The Omnicide 8000) and ‘special thanks’ to Frank Bates and Joolie Wood, that’s your lot for the credits, which shows how much can be done by a few people with talent, skills and the right hardware and software nowadays. There’s no credit for sound or music (certainly not for Marc Bolan, whose distinctive riff is an important part of the plot) so we must assume it’s all Ian’s own work. But there should be a credit (even if it’s just young Mr Hothersall again) as it’s very well designed, edited and mixed: the deliberately muffled dialogue, the sound effects, the music and the little swishes that underlie the swift-cut movements as surely as the thwack of a karate chop in a late 1960s Shaw Brothers film.

Once Upon a Time on Earth does what really good science fiction films should do. It tells a very human story set against a science fiction backdrop but shows how they interconnect. It shows how what is happening - the spaceships and the robots and the explosions and the lasers - directly affects real people. This isn’t just an action film or a comedy with sci-fi trimmings, it’s real solid SF. And funny. And dramatic. It’s a robo-rom-com-pocalypse. Or something. It’s also very nicely directed and really very funny. I particularly liked the robot checking that its latest victim is definitely dead and the cage-bird bit will have audiences cheering for sure. If the ending is a little reminiscent of a key scene from Hitchhiker’s Guide, no matter, they’re really just variants on a long-standing Looney Tunes gag.

A smashing little chunk of cinema that belies with its simplicity the amount of work that has gone into it, Once Upon a Time on Earth has been playing well at festivals and should definitely be viewed if you get the chance.

MJS rating: A-