Director: Hal Sutherland
Writer: Robby London, Barry O’Brien, Dennis O’Flaherty
Producer: Lou Scheimer
Cast: Scott Grimes, Tom Bosley, Jonathan Harris
Country: USA
Year of release: 1987
Reviewed from: UK VHS

One always approaches with trepidation an old non-Disney animated feature, especially when it is an original sequel to a classic tale already filmed to great acclaim by the House of Mouse. Anyone who has ever suffered through Happily Ever After will know how bad such things can be. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by this 1987 picture which features an engaging story, likeable characters, some genuine tension and horror, reasonable songs and some frankly terrific animation.

The story kicks off with Pinocchio (Scott Grimes: Critters I and II, Band of Brothers, American Dad) celebrating his first birthday - that is, the first anniversary of his becoming a real boy - when he is visited by his fairy godmother, referred to as such or as ‘the Good Fairy’ but never ‘the Blue Fairy’, despite her hue (she is voiced by singer Rickie Lee Jones). She reminds him that freedom, especially freedom of choice, is the most important thing, which I suppose ties in with the idea of not being somebody’s puppet. Geppetto (Happy Days star Tom Bosley, who played the same character in the 1985 Italian animated series The Adventures of Pinocchio and returned to the role in 2005 for the computer-animated prequel Geppetto’s Secret) has manufactured a beautiful jewel box for the local mayor, for a price of ten gold pieces, and gives his son the responsibility of delivering it.

But along the way, Pinocchio encounters con-artist ‘Professor Scalawag’ (Ed Asner, whose innumerable other voice credits include Gargoyles, Recess, Freakazoid!, Fish Police, Spider-Man, Olive the Other Reindeer and assorted Star Wars video games), a smooth-talking racoon with a monkey sidekick of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin named Igor (ubiquitous voice legend Frank Welker). These two effectively fulfil the fox/cat roles from the original story - unscrupulous and untrustworthy but not actually evil - and they persuade the boy to swap the jewel box for a large, fake ruby. Back home, Pinocchio is ashamed to have failed his father and resolves to avoid any repetition by running away.

He makes his way to a nearby travelling carnival which we saw, in a prologue, disembarking from a spooky-looking ship and setting itself up using dark magic. There he sees a pretty blonde puppet named Twinkle (Lana Beeson, whose recorded credits are limited to this film, the original All Dogs Go to Heaven, a He-Man/She-Ra Christmas Special and a 1985 TV version of Alice in Wonderland). Staying to the end of the show he is approached by the looming puppet master, Puppetino (William Windom: Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Children of the Corn IV), who somehow magically transforms Pinocchio back into a puppet and adds him to his collection.

Although Pinocchio escapes from Puppetino, he is forced to return, accompanied by Scalawag and Igor, to retrieve the jewel box which the two con-merchants had sold to the carnival proprietor. The carnival having upped sticks, they travel down the river in a small paddle-steamer and are eventually swallowed by the carnival’s dark steamer in a scene which evokes at one and the same time the tanker from Thunderball and the whale from the original Carlo Collodi story.

Inside, the puppet-turned-boy is introduced to ‘the land where dreams come true’, a place where children have unlimited toys and, in a particularly disturbing sequence, unlimited booze (it is never explicitly stated that the drink is alcoholic, but it leaves Pinocchio’s vision blurred and distorted). After living out his dream as a star (Scalawag and Igor drag up as dancing girls in an effort to rescue their friend), Pinocchio comes face to face with the towering Emperor of the Night, a huge, four-armed demon voiced by - who else? - James Earl Jones, who is apparently the Good Fairy’s nemesis. Every time someone gives up their freedom, the Good Fairy grows a little weaker and the Emperor grows a little stronger. He has, it turns out, captured Geppetto and shrunk him to bug size.

As it happens, a couple of real bugs are on Pinocchio’s trail in a subplot that fits neatly into the main one. Willikers (voiced by Mayberry’s finest, Don Knotts, who more recently added his vocal talents to Chicken Little) is a ‘glow-bug’, carved from wood by Pinocchio and given life by the Good Fairy as a birthday present to the boy. He is the equivalent of, maybe even a lampoon of, Jiminy Cricket who was of course a Disney invention. Willikers (who takes his name from Pinocchio’s expression of surprise, “Gee willikers!”) has teamed up with Lieutenant Grumblebee, a bluff-talking RAF-type bee, complete with flying helmet, handlebar moustache and devotion to his duties as a member of the ‘Royal Air Bugs’. Grumblebee is voiced, with impeccable English accent, by Dr Smith himself, Jonathan Harris.

The characters - good, bad and uncertain - all come together at the climax when the Emperor is defeated by Pinocchio’s realisation that he has the freedom to choose, leading to an exciting escape from the ship which goes into a meltdown remarkably similar to the one that Godzilla experienced a few years later! I’m sure it will come as no surprise to learn that it all ends with everyone living happily ever after, including a normal-sized Geppetto and both Pinocchio and Twinkle in human form.

You just can’t review animated features without making a comparison to Disney, especially when the story is a nominal sequel, but this Filmation offering stands up on its own very well. The character design isn’t quite as polished as one might hope for and some of the comedy is slapstick which is funny but could be timed better or more integrated into the main plot. But there are a lot of animated features far, far worse than Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night. This is a children’s film where the funny bits are actually quite funny and the scary bits - and all good children’s film should have scary bits - are actually pretty scary. The Emperor in particular is a magnificent demon whose complexity suggests that he may actually have been partly rotoscoped (especially as there is a credit for a ‘motion control camera supervisor.’

The voice direction is fine, the background paintings are wonderful and there are some terrific fantasy sequences, notably Pinocchio’s big song and dance number when he believes he has become a star, which demonstrate a love of the more abstract and impressionist possibilities of animation. And all done with cels, mind you, no computers here (Basil the Great Mouse Detective, the first animated feature to use computers, was released the previous year).

Director Hal Sutherland and producer Lou Scheimer must have been on the staff at Filmation as they made episodes of many of the company’s TV series, including the animated versions of Star Trek and My Favorite Martian; they were also the team behind the 1974 animated feature Journey Back to Oz. Associate producer and art director John Grusd later worked on shows such as Bravestarr and Sonic the Hedgehog; the other two associate producers are screenwriter Robby London and Scheimer’s daughter Erika who was music supervisor on both this and Happily Ever After (and provided the voice of Marcia in the Brady Bunch cartoon spin-off The Brady Kids!).

London also co-wrote Happily Ever After but mainly works as a producer, his credits including the 1997 animated feature version of A Christmas Carol and a series that no-one was waiting for: Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century. Of his two colleagues, Barry O’Brien was a veteran of Happy Days so presumably already knew Tom Bosley, while Dennis O’Flaherty’s credits include Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Tom Tataranowicz, director of Bravestarr: The Legend, The Magic Paintbrush and urban festive special The Night B4 Christmas, is credited as ‘storyboard supervisor’ while Bruce Heller (All Dogs Go to Heaven, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet) is ‘special effects animation supervisor.’

I really rather enjoyed this largely forgotten movie. The 1989 British video release was packaged in a special box with a raised, three-dimensional image of the main characters and tiny lights which illuminated when a ‘magic jewel’ was pressed. That no longer works on the copy I found in a charity shop and I suspect that finding one that was intact and working would be nigh on impossible today. Fortunately, the film was released on budget-price R2 disc only a few weeks after I saw it.

The Inaccurate Movie Database (and various sites which take their information from it) claims that Liza Minelli provides an unspecified voice for this film, which is pretty ludicrous even by the standards of the IMDB. I can only assume that this comes from somebody misreading the music credits: the song ‘Neon Cabaret’ is written and performed by Brian Banks and Anthony Marinelli. (Another song, ‘You’re a Star’, is by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.)

MJS rating: B+

Director: Mark Stirton
Writer: Mark Stirton
Producer: Michael Clark
Cast: Mike Mitchell, Patrick Wright, Scott Ironside
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: Festival screening (FFF 2007)
Website: www.stirtonproductions.com

The Planet is a massively frustrating movie. On many levels it’s very good. In fact, considering that this was a low-budget British indie by a first time feature-director with a largely neophyte cast, it’s a magnificent achievement. I don’t know how much it cost. The figure of £8,000 was bandied about in publicity but you never know how reliable a figure like that is. The point is that this film looks like it cost a couple of million quid and it clearly cost a tiny fraction of that

Great special effects, terrific production design, effective props and costumes, excellent photography, good acting and direction, an impressive score and an absolutely stunning sound mix. The problem - and you may have already guessed where this is going - lies with the one thing that doesn’t cost a penny. The script was... less than magnificent.

Even having said that, much of the script was great. The characters were clearly identified and all had something to do. This is a movie about ten men all dressed roughly the same in one location and it would be easy for them to be nameless, faceless blanks but these were ten characters - mostly that was done through the dialogue and the way they reacted to things. Throughout the middle act, when the plot was developing, the script told the story well and showed how it affected the characters. If the whole film was like the second act, it would be stunning.

There was one line of dialogue which did get an unintentional big laugh from an otherwise respectful audience: when the captain asked a badly injured young man to go on what is effectively a suicide mission because the doctor has decided that he’ll probably die in two days anyway. Mmm yes - that’s the sort of sensitive commanding officer I’d like in charge of me. That line was out of character and should have been caught, but it’s one bad line in a 75-minute film. Hardly a major problem.

There is however a major (albeit solvable) problem with the first act. And the third act... well, all in good time.

We open with an impressive CGI spaceship sailing through the void. Actually we open with an interminable series of credits, with each actor’s name listed separately on screen, just white on a black background. Yes, the music is good but this goes on forever and has the audience begging for the next name to be the last. Why do indie film-makers do this? Okay, it’s great fun at the cast and crew screening but in commercial terms it’s pointless. We have never, ever heard of any of these people. No-one has, except you and their respective mothers. If you have inveigled a star name into your film, sure, put their credit above the title. Maybe put two or three lead actors above the title, but not the whole damn cast and certainly not one at a time.

Anyway - that spaceship. A digital readout tells us that this freighter is commanded by Captain Morgan and has a crew of 126. Being really pedantic, one character later refers to there having been 126 men on the ship but a captain is not part of the crew so a Captain and a crew of 126 is a ship’s complement of 127 men. And the cargo? One prisoner. (So that’s 128 really.)

Suddenly the large, cumbersome freighter is attacked by a dozen or so small, fast fighter spaceships. This is all done very well. Not Hollywood blockbuster quality effects but certainly Hollywood straight-to-video B-movie special effects. Of course there’s lots of whooshing and whizzing and guns blasting and explosions and while it is, as I mentioned, a seriously impressive bit of sound-mixing, it has the same effect on me that such space battles always have. It makes me long for a film-maker who will realise that the lack of sound in space can work to their advantage. One day I’ll see a film where the sound during the interior shots on the spaceships is deafening, all crashing and exploding and thumping and banging and every time we cut to the exterior the spaceships are zipping around in complete and utter silence. Wouldn’t that just kick arse?

Not in this film though, and I can’t really blame them for following Hollywood cliche but still, it was a chance for them to do something different.

But that’s not the problem.

Before the ship blows up, twelve people make it to individual escape pods or ‘e-pods’ which blast away from the ship. They’re not much more than automatic metal coffins and the poor sods inside are trapped, cramped and have no real idea where they’re going - but that makes sense. I like the e-pods - they’re an excellent idea done very well and make more sense than a nice, roomy escape capsule. I also like the way that we are specifically told, later, that they are designed for ship-to-ship escape but can just about make planetfall in an emergency - because, let’s face it, these guys were bloody lucky that their ship was blown up so close to a planet. That said, it doesn’t look to me like there are 116 unused e-pods still on the freighter and you have to wonder how the prisoner is able to get into an e-pod - but in he gets. (And it has just occurred to me: shouldn’t the Captain have gone down with his ship rather than being the first guy out of there?)

Anyway, the e-pods all land on a barren planet with nothing but sand and sparse vegetation - or at least on a sandy, sparsely vegetated part of the planet which may have icy wastes and lush jungles elsewhere. Nah, it’s a planet in a sci-fi movie - it will be exactly the same all over. We have to accept that all the e-pods come down within a few miles of each other so that the ten survivors are able to meet up, firing flares into the sky to locate each other.

The other two pods contain the prisoner - a bald chap with an odd tattoo above his eyebrow who wanders off into the desert - and one guy who didn’t make it. Something went wrong with his e-pod and he died on re-entry. He was, it turns out, the brother of the youngest member of the group, David (whom everyone calls ‘Kid’).

Okay, here’s where the problem starts. That ship was a freighter. We were told that in a caption on screen. So why do all ten of our survivors wear camouflage gear? And why do they all have big fuck-off guns? One of the characters later refers to the group as ‘mercenaries’ but in that case, what the hell were they doing on a freighter? We were told it had a crew of 126. That’s not a crew of a couple of dozen and a hundred or so professional soldiers. You specifically explained to us, in green computer writing that beeped as it appeared, that this was a freighter and these ten men (plus the 117 dead ones) were the freighter crew. Now suddenly they’re military.

Either they had those big guns on board ship - erm, why? - or those guns were stowed in the e-pods, which is an even bigger ‘why?’. Why would you have a damn great gun in a cramped metal box primarily designed for evacuating a person to another spaceship?

And then there’s the tent. Even assuming that these ship-to-ship e-pods contain emergency supplies just in case they need to land on a planet, surely there would be one small bivouac per pod. Instead, we have a large frame tent, big enough to sleep 15-20 men, which the team erect. Hello? Where did this come from? Are we supposed to accept that out of the 128 e-pods they fortunately picked one that had a large tent included? Kid has his own small ridge tent - so why haven’t the others?

We also have to accept that although less than ten per cent of the crew escaped the ship, the team assembled on this planet includes not only the captain but also a doctor, a cook and an engineer. That’s convenient.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? We start with an attack on a freighter (their word) crewed by more than 120 men but when we reach the planet surface we have a planned, prepared and apparently carefully selected military squad. Well, I say planned but we see them huddling together for warmth around a small fire after the sun goes. Shame there was no heating device included with the e-pods (instead of that enormous tent) but then again, it’s a good job they didn’t land on an ice planet, or simply near the pole of this one.

A film should not contradict itself to this extent. Tell us nothing and we’ll make assumptions about what we see, but tell us one thing and then show us something incompatible and we’ll be distracted. Trying to work out why a randomly selected group of freighter crew are suddenly a small military detachment means we’re not paying full attention to what is going on.

There was an easy way round this. Just don’t tell us it’s a freighter! Tell us it’s a military expedition, an army ship with a complement of eleven men (plus one prisoner). That would make sense. You might need to rejig the few brief scenes on the ship itself but that’s no hassle. As it is, you’ve confused your audience from the start and that’s never a good idea.

Once we’ve worked out that it’s best to just ignore everything we were told at the start and simply view this as an eleven-man military expedition which has already lost one of its members, things settle down somewhat. The camp is attacked by an almost invisible humanoid thing and the ‘blaster weapons’ have no effect - though that doesn’t stop everyone pouring whatever it is those things fire into the see-through beastie. One guy finds his gun has jammed or the battery is flat or whatever but fortunately he carries with him, for back-up purposes, an antique revolver. And it turns out that actually shooting the transparent monster with a solid projectile causes it to explode, while the energy bolts (or whatever) from the highly advanced guns can do nothing but piss it off.

This is a really neat idea, but that’s all it remains. An idea. It’s never explained or explored.

The Captain, a muscular mountain of a man who could have a pretty good career in action flicks if he gets the right agent, decides that they should try and contact ‘Captain Behan’ with whom they were intending to rendezvous. But they cannot do this from the planet, they need to get into orbit. The engineer says that if they combine the power units from two e-pods they can probably give one of them enough juice to lift itself on anti-grav doodads high enough to blast above the atmosphere. It can all be done on automatic but it will need a ‘pilot’ to send the signal. The captain valiantly volunteers for this but in a commendably sensible move the engineer points out that putting the heaviest man into the somewhat dodgily repaired e-pod is ridiculous and that it needs to be the lightest member of the team. That’s Kid. I really liked the way that he now points out that his name is David and the Captain starts using it, treating him with dignity and respect. That was good storytelling and good characterisation.

Unfortunately, the Creature from the Id (or whatever it is) attacks again, David/Kid is mortally wounded and we then get the previously mentioned hilarity of “you’re going to die in two days anyway.” Which is a shame.

While all this is going on, along with a subplot about the cook working out what local roots are edible, a team hauling a two-ton e-pod across the dunes and so on, what about that prisoner? Well, he wanders off to an apparently completely random point in another part of the desert, digs away the sand and finds, just below the surface, a rusty sword. Standing this upright, he smacks his hand down on the blade and as the blood trickles down the weapon it is restored to its full ceremonial glory. Quite why he does this is unclear as we never see the sword again.

Clearly something odd is going on and the prisoner knows this planet - and this part of the planet.
But then, out of the blue, one of the squaddies - for so they effectively are - announces that he is actually a traitor and belongs to the same cult as the prisoner (or something) and that he is responsible for guiding them to this planet because it is the portal to another universe. Or something. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the planet does not show up on the charts they have with them, although the other worlds in the star system do. One of the soldiers says at one point, after the beast attacks, “I thought this planet was meant to be uninhabited” which doesn’t square at all with the planet being unknown. But maybe he was just confused, poor dear.

Quite what the cult’s intentions are regarding this new universe malarkey isn’t clear, but we can see that letting them get away with whatever they plan to do would be a bad thing. What I don’t understand, however, is why we needed the prisoner in the story at all, if one of the squad was arranging everything for his own nefarious ends. Ooh, and I also forgot the money: a big bag of cash which the Captain accepted for transporting this prisoner (and which he decided to bring down to the planet with him). And it’s only at this point that any of the others question what is so special about the prisoner.

Dude, you had one prisoner being transported on a giant spaceship with a crew of 126 - did you not wonder at the time why he was deserving of such special treatment? Mind you, the audience is still wondering, because although we now know he belongs to some weird cult, we don’t know where he was being taken from and to or why, and certainly not why he couldn’t be put on a smaller ship (or at least, the ship could have carried some other cargo while it was making the trip).

And the bag of money? They put it in the e-pod with David. Hang on a mo, I thought you were trying to keep the weight down?

With the e-pod launched, the three surviving squaddies trek off across the planet until they find a large, amorphous blob, which they blast with their energy weapons. Then one of the fighter ships from the start of the film turns up, piloted by a bald guy with a tattoo on his eyebrow. I thought this was the prisoner (so where did he get the ship?) but other people at the same screening thought it was another member of the cult, come to get the prisoner (so why does he approach the squaddies instead?).

Wait, wait, wait! Suddenly a giant, transparent creature makes its presence felt and attacks the squaddies who blast back with all their firepower. This is a brilliantly produced and directed sequence. The special effects are simply amazing, the camerawork and editing and sound is far in advance of anything you would expect to see in an indie B-movie. But nothing is explained so we have no idea what the hell is going on.

What was that blob? What is this giant monster? What are the smaller monsters? Where did the fighter-ship come from?

What the hell is going on?

And then the planet blows up.

That’s it. The world blows up; final shot of David in his metal coffin floating in space; roll credits. What the bloody hell...?

The beginning of the film, the first act, all the stuff with the spaceship battle (which, truth be told, goes on for too long, although it’s still preferable to the interminable opening credits because at least it has things blowing up) - that could be fixed. It can be fixed in the short term by audiences astute enough to ignore it and create their own simpler, more coherent and credible back-story for these men, and it could be fixed in the long term, if someone wanted to, by slightly re-editing that whole opening sequence and substituting different captions.

But the third act, the climax of the movie - that’s beyond help, I fear. There’s no resolution. It’s one of the most unsatisfying endings to a movie like this that I have ever seen. Yes it’s all terribly exciting and - I will reiterate - very well made, but we have no possible way to know what is going on. We don’t even know whether the planet blowing up is a good or a bad thing.

What was with the magic sword? What was the amorphous blob? Why did the traitor bring them all there? Who is Captain Behan? What (and I forgot to mention this, sorry) was the giant, buried, humanoid statue all about? We are told nothing. Nothing. It’s just staggering in the way that so much time, effort, dedication and undoubted talent has been wasted on this bizarre script that starts in confusion, settles down into a pretty good SF-military action movie and then descends into chaotic and unexplained cataclysm.

I so, so wanted to like this movie. It so deserves your attention. It’s a magnificent technical and artistic achievement. And it makes not a lick of sense. We can only assume that the film-makers think it does and that there are some clues as to what is going on - but if so, they are extremely well hidden and nobody at the festival where I caught The Planet spotted any of them.

Some people, dissatisfied with this movie but unwilling to spend 3,000 words analysing its strengths and weaknesses, will tell you that the acting is wooden. It’s not, it’s very good. Mike Mitchell as Captain Morgan is excellent. He was 49 when this was shot in 2004 and is built like the proverbial brick shithouse. A former Mr Universe (or WWF Mr Universe - I don’t know if there’s a difference) he carries the biggest handheld gun since Predator and brilliantly captures the mixture of toughness and sensitivity required of a man commanding an isolated group of frightened but well-trained soldiers. Also in the able, professional cast, mostly making their feature debut, are comedian/presenter Patrick Wright and this film’s producer/art director, Michael Grant Clark.

Stirton Productions, the Scottish indie company behind The Planet, is run by Mark Stirton, holding down at least four jobs on this film as director, writer, cinematographer and editor. (The other credited crew are co-producer/modelmaker Kerwin Robertson and composer Nicky Fraser, a popular Aberdeen DJ). All credit to Stirton for making this film (which can be purchased in both PAL and NTSC form direct from his website). It really is hugely impressive in every respect - apart from the story. Oh, it just makes you want to bang your head against a wall. Stirton is following The Planet with One Day Removals, a black comedy about two men and a van which is a feature-length remake of one of his shorts. It will star two actors from The Planet, Patrick Wright and Scott Ironside. It should be good - but please, please make sure the script is ready before you shoot it.

MJS rating: B

Director: Tristan Versluis
Writer: Tristan Versluis
Producer: Tristan Versluis
Cast: Andre Gilbert, Jennifer Evans, Jonathan Klahr
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD

Special effects maestro Tristan Versluis turns director for this imaginative and well-produced 13-minute short, although as one might expect, there’s plenty of effects work on show too.

Set in a grimy, run-down nowhere, our main protagonist retires to a graffiti-covered public toilet cubicle to wash blood and bruises after being mugged. But something is watching, something is in there, and before you know it the protagonist is trapped down and the unwilling donor in that old horror staple, the face transplant. An epilogue shows the face’s new recipient, very happy with her latest addition.

That should be enough to show that there’s very little story here and almost no character - this is an exercise in atmosphere and effects. Central to this is the slicing and removal, using fingers as much as scalpels, of the face, an extraordinarily well-done effect, by which I mean it is appreciable as an effect, rather than being realistic (though it may be - who’s to say?). Suffice to observe that we have come a long way in these matters since Georges Franju.

Plastic Reality is a nightmare, an almost wordless dream in which someone we care about but don’t know is subjected to horrific treatment by ... people? things? You’ll have to see to find out and even then you won’t know. The main (unnamed) character is played by Andre Gilbert who is also credited as set designer and whose other work includes sculpting costumes for Dungeons and Dragons 2. The girl at the end of the film is my pal Jenny Evans who worked with Tris on Evil Aliens. The other credited cast are Jonathan Klahr (a model designer who worked on the Harry Potter films) and Val Oliveira.

The credits are a bit of a British horror who’s who. ‘Doctor Versluis’ (as he styles himself here) wrote, directed and edited - and presumably produced as no producer or executive producer is credited. Alex Chandon (Cradle of Fear) was camera operator while Adam Mason and Simon Boyes (who together made Broken) are credited as runners but, curiously, only on the ‘2 min version’ of the film. This is a much more concise edit, missing the prologue and epilogue entirely, which actually runs about three minutes and is slightly retitled Plastic Reality (Curta Versao). Also on this screener DVD is a three-minute behind-the-scenes photo slideshow.

Almost everyone here seems to be a make-up or effects artist in their day-job. ‘Sound design and score’, for example, is by Ian Morse who helped with prosthetic effects on Doctor Sleep and 28 Days Later while costume designer Jo Glover made creatures for the Harry Potter pictures and was ‘prosthetics technician’ on series two of Doctor Who. Justyna Dobrowolska was responsible for the actual make-up design on this film while Sunita Parmar (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) handled prosthetic effects.

Tristan Versluis has clearly called on his mates to help out with his first film, and why not? His own effects career includes Evil Aliens, Cradle of Fear, Frank Scantori’s still unreleased Warrior Sisters, LD50, Broken, Hellbreeder, Darkhunters and Doctor Who.

As a calling card for his film-making skills, and as a disturbing short horror film in its own right, Plastic Reality works brilliantly. It is available to view on MySpace but of course works much better on a proper TV screen.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Ch Ratchapol
Writer: Yodnam
Producer: Jirun Rattanaviriyachai
Cast: Nantawat Arsirapojanakul, Julaluck Kittiyarat, Sushao Phongwilai
Year of release: 2002
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

In the jungles of Thailand, a group of young men gather, armed with swords and bows. In another part of the forest, atop a sort of altar thing, a ceremony is taking place. A young woman in a white dress stands before a priest. Behind her is an older woman (her mother?) in a blue dress, and numerous villagers are stood around.

The girl in white (let’s call her Su) gives the priest a small statue. He invites her to touch a sort of stone font with a candle in the centre; when she does so a small, golden snake magically appears from her arm and melts into a pool of blood-like liquid which runs down carved grooves in the stone into a brass cup. The priest takes this cup and anoints a baby held by one of the other women.

Suddenly the men we saw at the start attack, brutally cutting down men and women left right and centre. There are even young boys of 12 or 13 hacking away with their swords. Only Su (Julaluck Kittiyarat aka Ying Jularuck, also in epic mermaid-vs-giant fantasy Phra-Apai-Mani), her mother and the priest escape to a big temple, but the young men follow them there. The priest is cut down, Su’s mother is grabbed and spits two jets of poison from her open mouth into a man’s face, but is then killed with a flaming arrow in the back.

Bad idea. Su glowers, her eyes glow, her skin starts to change colour, and before our eyes she transforms into an eighty-foot long giant cobra! She whips men with her tail, crushes men in her coils - and we even get a quick POV shot as she eats one whole.

Eleven minutes in and this is instantly the best snake-woman film I have ever seen! (And regular readers will know that it’s a genre I’m very fond of!) This isn’t just a very large snake, this is a supernaturally giant serpent rendered in very good CGI. If Bert I Gordon was alive today and making snake-woman films, this is what he would make.

The only downside is that this VCD, distributed by Right Beyond, has no English subtitles. That’s why Su (and everyone else) will have to have made-up names in this review. There are apparently English subs on the DVD - maybe I should have spent that extra five dollars.

One hundred years later...

Five young men and a woman, laden with cameras and video-cameras, arrive at the altar. I think they’re shooting some footage for the Discovery Channel or something. The altar looks a good location but one guy (let’s call him Andy) is unhappy about shooting at what was obviously once a sacred place. So they all pack their equipment again and set off. Across a river, through an amazing cave.

As they walk through the jungle, Andy is suddenly shot dead. And so are three of the others. This is a shocker. We’ve spent the past ten minutes with these people and assumed that they were the main characters. Now suddenly they’re under attack from a couple of dozen bandits armed with M-16s and AK-47s. The leader of the video team (let’s call him Joe, played by Nantawat Arsirapojanakul aka Tor Nantawat: Lhob Pai Tang Ar-kad, Bullet Teen, Rang Pen Fai, Hunch) shoots back with an automatic pistol as he leaps for cover (someone has been watching too many John Woo movies, methinks).

Joe escapes, along with a moustachioed guy but to be honest there’s no point inventing a name for him because he took a hit and he dies shortly afterwards.

The bandits - whose leader wears a Ramones T-shirt! - make their way through the forest and suddenly come across a young woman who seems to appear from nowhere. It’s Su, dressed in white still though a more modern dress. They challenge her but are distracted when one of their number is bitten by a snake, and when they look back she’s gone. The bandits continue through the jungle but suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds of snakes which attack and kill several of them, including the Ramones fan.

Joe is hungry, tired and lost when he comes across Su sitting by the river. She takes him to the temple, which is well lit with flaming torches, and explains something that is probably important but I don’t speak Thai. At one point there’s an insert shot of her naked except for a twenty-foot snake strategically wrapped around her.

In the dark jungle - actually it’s extremely well-lit, considering that it’s the middle of the night - the bandits continue under a new leader, whom we’ll call Zack. He spots a snake in a tree ahead and shoots it. Back at the temple, Su feels a sharp pain in her arm. She goes out into the jungle to confront the bandits but they evidently now know who/what she is because they hold her with two magically glowing lassoes. But Joe appears and shoots through both ropes, makes the bandits drop their weapons, then helps a weakened Su back to the temple. He spots a patch of scales on her shoulder and she explains everything to him, including flashbacks to the prologue.

To be honest, the film goes downhill on the second disc and I had to keep reminding myself “Eighty-foot cobra, eighty-foot cobra...” to stay interested. Joe carries Su through the jungle to a road where the video team parked their vehicles - blimey, that’s easily found! He takes her home and tends to her and there are lengthy, soft-focus romantic scenes. With no subtitles, these are just boring.

Then who should turn up, in a very expensive red sports car, but Joe’s girlfriend Amanda (or whatever), evidently very rich and beautiful but not a truly nice person. Joe explains that he has found someone new and she slaps him and runs out crying - straight into Zack...

Another night-time scene of Su and Joe together by a lake is interrupted by the arrival of Zack and co., with Amanda and with plenty of guns. Jealous Amanda grabs a pistol and shoots at Su but Joe leaps forward to protect her and takes three bullets in the back. Su is mad now and does the eighty-foot cobra thing again - yay! - but rather than attacking Zack and Amanda she just grabs Joe in her coils and disappears into the lake.

Back at the temple, Joe is stretched out on the stones and Su is praying to a broken statue of an eight-armed god. Zack, Amanda and the bandits arrive and there is a tense stand-off. Unfortunately, rather than another giant cobra, we get the clichéed spectacle of Zack and Su blasting bolts of magical energy at each. She knocks out all the bandits and knocks down but doesn’t stun Amanda, but Zack has her cornered when - zap! - Joe comes to her rescue with his own bolts of magic.

That’s right, once again we have someone with no magical ability suddenly acquiring it in the final scene to save the day. It’s a shame the cobra didn’t reappear but as if to make up for this, Su turns Amanda into a snake which slithers away.

The first disc starts with unavoidable trailers for dreadful Vin Diesel action stinker A Man Apart, the latest one-word-will-do film from Nu Image Submarines (which evidently reuses sets and CGI models from Octopus) and Japanese scarecrow horror flick Takashi. After the film finishes, disc 2 has trailers for Australian train-surfing film The Pact and Hong Kong human-canine soul-swap comedy Every Dog Has His Date.

Nantawat Arsirapojanakul and Julaluck Kittiyarat seem to be quite big stars in Thailand (Julaluck has even released her own yoga video!) but I can find nothing on any of the other cast. If you know anything at all about Sushao Phongwilai, Lakkhet Wasikachart, Tasanawalai Ongartsittichai, Krt Suwanaphap, Yanwisat Bokert, Orawan Terrakirilin, Jinsujee Namthong, Arch Wangtaweephaiboon, Sakwich Timsan, Tanapon Teerasin or Thuanthong Teerawat Phokasap - please drop me a line!

Nor can I find anything else directed by Ch Ratchapol, though that certainly doesn't mean he hasn’t done anything else. The excellent cinematography is by Artit Hongrat with special effects by Michelle Thi and Jeab Ssi.

The Poison (original title Asirapis) is a mixed bag. A terrific first half is let down by a slow, talkie second half (though I’m sure it’s more interesting if you can understand what they’re talking about) and the ending, though it notches up the interest again, is an unimaginative hoary old ‘you zap me, I’ll zap you’ cliché. But that can’t take away the fact that the production values are top-notch, the effects are great, the direction is slick, the acting good, the cinematography superb and, most importantly, a woman turns into a giant cobra! The first eleven minutes alone are worth the price of admission and although this VCD was very good quality (almost no artefacting) I would recommend the DVD.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Boris Von Sychowski
Writers: Lorenz Stassen, Boris Von Sychowski
Producers: Benjamin Herrmann, Werner Possardt
Cast: Thorsten Grasshoff, James McAvoy, Anna Geislerová
Country: Germany/Czech Republic
Year of release: 2001
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Mosaic)

Twelve teenagers (most of whom, in the tradition of these things, are clearly in their early twenties) are stalked and despatched one by one by a masked psycho. It’s not something we haven’t seen plenty of times before. Nevertheless, The Pool turns out to be a decent example of the genre and an enjoyable 90 minutes.

What attracted me to this tape was that the names in the credits block suggested that this was a Czech movie - and indeed it is. Well, it’s a Czech/German co-production, with a Czech director, a largely Czech crew, filmed entirely in Prague and Liberec and funded with a mixture of Marks and Korunas*. It was shot in English although there are credits at the end for a German dubbed version, and it was released in that country as Swimming Pool.

The film kicks off with a Scream-derived prologue starring Anna Geislerová, who was in a 2003 British sci-fi short called Ozone but more relevantly here is easily the biggest star in the movie - in Czech terms - justifying her role as the equivalent of Drew Barrymore. Catherine (Geislerová) is on the phone to her mother while preparing a dinner for her boyfriend Oliver (Josef Pejchi). She seems to be dubbed and I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular scene was originally filmed in German or Czech. Oliver’s car arrives but the driver is dead and bloodied, and Catherine then plays cat and mouse in her house with an assailant who is revealed to be a machete-waving psycho dressed all in black with a white skull mask. Catherine leaps out of a window but is dragged back in by her feet, across the broken glass, hacked up some more and thrown into the indoor swimming pool.

But that’s not the pool of the title. We’ll come to that.

We are introduced to our main characters as they sit their finals at the International High School in Prague. This is a clever sequence which is designed to show their characters as it cuts between them answering questions in verbal exams - but it’s all a bit too hectic and in fact one of the film’s major faults is that there are too many characters and it takes most of the movie to work out who is who. On the other hand, that helps to make the killer’s identity even harder to guess. Or maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, here’s who we have. The nominal leader of the gang is local boy Gregor (Thorsten Grasshoff): cool, tall and handsome but a bit of a knob. He has a timid American girlfriend, Sarah (Kristen Miller: Cherry Falls, Team America: World Police), and an Argentinean sidekick, Diego (Maximilion Grill). There’s the rather aggressive German girl Carmen (Elena Uhlig) who, we later discover, has some sort of secret history with Gregor, and there’s American Chris (Jonah Lotan: NY-LON) who is a bit of an arse. Scottish Mike (James McAvoy: Shameless, Children of Dune) is an item with nervous New Zealander Kim (former Home and Away star Isla Fisher, who was born in Oman to Scottish parents and raised in Oz, but her accent here definitely sounds more Kiwi) who is convinced that she has failed her exam. Making up the numbers are English Frank (John Hopkins: Sergeant Scott in Midsomer Murders) who carries a torch for Sarah, Svenja (Linda Rybová: Dark Blue World), Mel (Cordelia Bugeja: The Calling, MindFlesh - who is British, despite her exotic name) and Carter (Bryan Carney: The Devil’s Tattoo). They’re all rich kids and they’re determined to celebrate the last day of school with a party. Not just the official party, but a private party at a special secret location, chosen by Gregor.

The location that Gregor picks is a health-spa/hotel/thing with an absolutely huge and fabulous swimming pool (the Aquapark Babylon Centrum in Liberec is the actual place if you want to visit). It has fountains, it has slides, it has grottos, it has a well-stocked bar - and it is all closed up for the night. But Gregor calls on the lock-picking skills of Martin (Jason Liggett), once part of the gang but now a motor mechanic, and carrying his own torch for Mel. The students drive to the venue in four cars, drinking and laughing, late at night. Martin is there already, with the burglar alarm disabled and the door unlocked.

Director Boris Von Sychowski does a great job of capturing the exuberance and sexiness of a dozen horny young people in swimming cossies, knocking back the beers and spirits and generally having a whale of a time in a luxury swimming pool. Actually it’s only eleven young people because Kim isn’t there. Mike thinks it’s because she has dumped him, but in fact it’s because she went out walking alone earlier that night and met our skull-faced friend. Also of note is that Sarah is the only one not swimming, due to some unstated childhood trauma involving water.

The first sign that something is seriously, seriously wrong is when Carter and Svenja are found dead in a cloud of blood in a subsidiary pool at the bottom of a water slide. Neither was exactly a clearly defined, well-rounded character, but nevertheless their deaths - which we witness before the bodies are discovered - are nasty and rather shocking. This happens about halfway through the film and while it hasn’t dragged - there has been plenty of plot development and characterisation - the killings really make you sit up and take notice. Especially poor old Svenja who is killed on the water slide in a way that will make you want to avoid any such ‘entertainment’ after seeing this film.

The group has already split up as various individuals and couples go exploring, and a return to the door reveals that it is now locked, as are all the others - and the killer has taken Martin’s lock-picking tools. Is it one of the students, or an outsider now on the inside? Accusations and recriminations fly as the group are gradually whittled down by the methodical, machete-wielding maniac. There is a particularly tense and nasty scene in an air-duct - one of those big ones with unscrewable grills that real buildings never have - which ends with blood dripping down the wall. Intercut with all these goings-on are the investigations of a grizzled old detective, Kadankov (Jan Vissak: Dune), assigned to the death that we saw in the prologue.

The Pool keeps you guessing until fairly near the end, kills off some sympathetic characters whom you would expect to survive, and though it doesn’t end up with a single, lone female survivor, nevertheless the ending is a little bit of a cheat - though not enough to really spoil things. For its genre, this is a pretty good film which has a unique setting, a handful of original ideas and a mixed cast portraying a mixed bunch of sympathetic or not-so characters. I enjoyed this, and I’m not usually a slasher fan.

Of particular interest are the early scenes in Prague which, unusually, here represents the city of, um, Prague. The Czech capital has been vastly overused in recent years as a substitute for 18th or 19th century London (Shanghai Knights, From Hell) or Paris (the Scarlet Pimpernel TV series) and it doesn’t even vaguely resemble either of those cities. Even people who have never been to Prague can recognise it on screen nowadays. Well, here’s a brief chance to see this beautiful city as itself: the churches, the bridges, the whole thing.

Although the Czech Republic has played home to many international productions since the fall of Communism, actual Czech movies released in the west are few and far between, the aforementioned WW2 drama Dark Blue World being a rare example. As for Czech horror movies, the only other one I know of is the recent zombie comedy Choking Hazard.

This was the first film from director and co-writer Von Sychowski, who has subsequently directed a TV movie that wasn’t horror but did feature more good-looking teenage boys in states of undress. The Pool is ‘based on an original idea’ by Andreas Bütow, but the really interesting writing credit is ‘script polished by Mike Hurst’. Apart from the sheer rarity of seeing a script polisher receive a credit (largely because, under WGA rules, they wouldn’t be allowed one on an American studio picture), the good news is that this is the same Mike Hurst who wrote, produced and starred in the excellent ultra-low-budget British sci-fi/horror feature Project Assassin.

There aren’t too many obvious special effects but what there are were supervised by Jim Healy who also worked on Dune and Children of Dune. Producer Benjamin Herrmann was co-producer on the German psychological thriller Das Experiment. His colleague, Werner Possardt, was one of the victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami while on holiday in Thailand.

The video sleeve gives a copyright date of 2000 but in the end credits it’s 2001 and that’s what I’m going by.

MJS rating: B+

* A popular high street clothing store.

(Update: I have now spoken with Mike Hurst who tells me that he did in fact write every word of this screenplay. He was asked to completely rewrite an existing script and the only things he had to keep were the character names and the number of visible nipples - which apparently is six! Because of the various tax concessions involved in this German/Czech co-production, however, British-born, LA-based Mike could not be credited as anything more than 'script polisher'.)

Writer: Vasili Livanov
Cast: Oleg Anofriyev, Muslim Magomayev, Anatoli Gorokhov
Country: USSR
Year of release: 1973
Reviewed from: Russian VHS

This direct sequel to the 1969 classic Bremenskie Muzikanty demonstrates a clear progression, not only in the quality of the animation and design but also in the infiltration of western culture into the Soviet Union (as was).

In this story, the King decides that he wants his daughter back from that vagabond Troubadour who is carrying her around the countryside with his four animal friends, and to this end he employs the services of a weaselly private detective. Clad in a garish check suit and driving a rather eccentric old car, this character reminded me of the Sherlock Holmes lampoon Coke Ennyday in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish - but surely that must be coincidence.

In a fairly simplistic storyline, the detective manages to snatch the King's daughter and takes her back to the city, chased by the animals and the Troubadour in a scene which could almost come out of Wacky Races. Back at the city, the Troubadour rescues the girl while the animals distract everyone with a swinging pop concert in the town square. That's about it, the whole thing enlivened with a bit more knockabout comedy than in the first film - the bandits make a brief reappearance - and of course all set to a bunch of folk/pop songs by Genadi Gladkov and Yuri Entin.

What is most interesting here is that in the intervening four years (some sources wrongly list this sequel as 1971) the influence of western pop and pop culture has clearly increased. The musicians in the first film looked like a Russian folk band accompanied by a ballad-singer in bell-bottoms. Here they have been transformed, not too much, but enough to make them recognisably a pop band. I don't know whether Yellow Submarine was ever shown in the Soviet Union - maybe somebody just saw some stills from that film - but the scene of the four animals performing in the town square shows a definite influence in my view.

I haven't been able to find out the name of the director, only that it was not Inessa Kovalevskaya who directed Bremenskie Muzikanty. The film runs about 20 minutes, the title means (and is sometimes cited as) On the Trail of the Musicians of Bremen and it is available on the same tape/DVD/VCD as the first film.

MJS rating: B+

 Directors: Albert Band, Charles Band
Writer: Mark Goldstein, Greg Suddeth
Producer: Charles Band
Cast: Brett Cullen, Austin O’Brien, Stephen Lee
Country: USA
Year of release: 1993
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Prehysteria is a movie which gives the impression that it exists primarily to showcase the effects work of David Allen. Which is great effects work, so that’s okay. But really, the central premise doesn’t make a lick of sense: miniature dinosaurs. I mean, come on.

It looks like Charlie Band wanted a dinosaur movie, David Allen could supply the effects - excellent rod puppets and a small amount of stop-motion - but only on a small scale. So either the dinosaurs would need green-screening into every scene, or - hey, what if the dinosaurs in the story were only as big as Dave’s puppets? Thus was born a three-film franchise. Who would have thought it?

In actual fact, that’s not how this came about, but it sure looks that way to those of us with a cynical turn of brain.

Brett Cullen (CAPCOM in Apollo 13, an astronaut in From the Earth to the Moon, the Governor of West Virginia in The West Wing) stars as Frank Taylor, the obligatory single parent, who is raising teenage daughter Monica (Samantha Mills: Beanpole) and 12-or-so son Jerry (Austin O’Brien, inbetween roles in The Lawnmower Man and The Last Action Hero) on a farm where he has a sideline in finding fossils and selling them to the local museum. This is run by slimy, overweight Rico Sarno (Stephen Lee: Dolls, The Pit and the Pendulum, RoboCop II, Ghoulies III, Black Scorpion and Carnosaur III; he also played the Big Bopper in La Bamba) and has two employees, sexy Vicki (Colleen Morris, who was in episodes of Cheers and Baywatch) and old janitor Whitey (Tom Williams, who did some voices for Batman: The Animated Series and the old Planet of the Apes cartoon). Outside views of the museum show a large building with steps and columns, but our only interior view looks more like a junk shop to be honest. Quite why this establishment would buy common fossils from Taylor isn’t clear, but that whole side of things exists only to get the Taylor family into the shop/museum in order for a mix-up of picnic coolers, after which it is entirely forgotten.

Sarno’s cooler contains five odd-looking, sacred, ancient eggs which we saw him steal from a South American temple in a prologue, despite the dire warnings of local guide Jefe (Peter Mark Vasquez: Robot Wars, Sleepstalker). The Taylors’ cooler has the remains of their lunch so it’s a mystery why they don’t just leave it in their pick-up truck. The family labrador Ruby (played by two dogs) is responsible for grabbing the wrong cooler. She manages to open it and remove the eggs, which she swiftly incubates. The implication is that she views the hatchlings as substitutes for her own recent little of five puppies which Taylor had to give away, much to his children’s annoyance, because he couldn’t afford to keep them.

Sarno wants his cooler back but Taylor sends him packing, unaware of the contents. Jerry is the first to discover the mini-dinosaurs, then he shows them to his sister after she discovers what she thinks is a bat but is actually a pteranodon. Jerry is a big fan of Elvis (though there’s little evidence of this and of course no Elvis on the soundtrack) so he christens the tiny T rex ‘Elvis’ and frequently refers to him as “the new King.” Monica, whose tastes in music are more up-to-date, decides that the pteranodon’s name is Madonna. There is also a brachiosaur, a stegosaurus and a triceratops.

Sarno’s increasingly desperate attempts to retrieve his ‘sugarbabies’ - which he of course plans to exhibit to make himself rich - lead to an altercation with Vicki who has the mutual hots for Taylor and ultimately to the abduction of the four non-flying dinosaurs, along with Vicki herself and Ruby the dog. He is assisted in this by a Latino henchman double act: Louis (Tony Longo: Splash, Suburban Commando, The Flintstones in Leaving Rock Vegas) and Ritchie (Stuart Fratkin: Teen Wolf Too, Dr Alien, I’m Dangerous Tonight). It looks for a while like Vicki has fallen in with Sarno as he prepares to unveil the dinos to the media on the museum steps, but of course in fact she has been tricking him and all works out okay in the end.

If you examine the story of Prehysteria, it’s absolute tosh with no serious attempt (how could there be?) to explain the microdinos - either why they exist at that size or why their eggs were still hatchable after being stored for thousand of years in a freezing cold temple, or indeed where they came from in the first place. And the story feels very, very rushed towards the end, with great leaps in the story. Whitey has very little to actually do and Monica’s jeep-driving teenage stoner boyfriend ‘Braindead Danny’ (Gill Gayle: Death Tunnel) has nothing to do at all. The film runs about 80 minutes, including a fairly lengthy title sequence of stone carvings and a very long (but not painfully slow) end credit crawl. It certainly looks like scenes in the script were dropped for time.

What saves the film is David Allen’s superb dinosaurs. There’s real character there and an extraordinary range of movement, especially from Elvis, all achieved by having one leg or the tail extend off-screen or bolting the dino by one immovable leg to a raised surface. Great puppeteering adds to the realism, with the only example of repetitive movements being a sequence when Jerry puts an Elvis tape on and the dinosaurs all dance to it.

The acting is decent throughout with the expected broad pantomime villain and his stooges. Cullen and Morris make a personable couple, Mills and O’Brien make believable siblings - squabbling yet supportive - and the stuff about their late mother isn’t laid on with a trowel.

Writers Mark Goldstein and Greg Suddeth also wrote Pet Shop and both Oblivion films for Band, who shares directorial credit on this with his father. The original story is credited to Pete Von Sholly whose IMDB entry gives the impression that he is primarily a storyboard artist by trade, having worked on the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street III and IV, The Shawshank Redemption, Heathers, Darkman, the remake of The Blob, Puppet Master II and III, Bride of Re-Animator, Demonic Toys, Dollman vs Demonic Toys, Return of the Living Dead Part III, Freaked, Roger Corman’s legendary Fantastic Four movie, Bride and Seed of Chucky and Mars Attacks.

Von Sholly has also worked in animation, comics and children’s books and even recorded an album with fellow dinosaur enthusiast Donald F Glut. According to his website, Prehysteria was based on his childhood dream of having little dinosaurs as pets. He directed second unit on the film, as well as co-producing and, of course, drawing storyboards. He also worked on Pet Shop and both Prehysteria sequels. His wife Andrea designed and sculpted the five mini-dinos.

Cinematographer Adolfo Bartolli was a regular on Full Moon pictures from The Pit and the Pendulum to The Exotic Time Machine II, taking in Leapin’ Leprechauns!, Fowl Play, Trancers II-V, Puppet Master II-V and even a few non-Band films such as Octopus. Production designer Milo was another Full Moon regular throughout the 1990s and also worked on House IV. Costume designer Mark Bridges went on to work on such major films as Boogie Nights, 8 Mile and the remake of The Italian Job.

This film (which was called Prehysteria! in the USA but lost its exclamation mark when released in Britain) was the first release from Moonbeam, a ‘family films’ division of Full Moon which also produced Beanstalk, Magic Island, the six Josh Kirby features, Dragonworld and a few other films. It sold 70,000 copies, making it the bestselling DTV title ever (or at least, up to that point). This Paramount UK video includes the trailer for Prehysteria 2 but not one for Prehysteria 3 (which I reviewed years ago for SFX when it was released as a rental tape). None of the three films are connected in any way except through the dinosaurs.

TF Simpson (two and three quarters) enjoyed watching “the baby dinosaurs film” so for pleasing its target audience I’ll give it a...

MJS rating: B+

Director: Brett Kelly
Writer: Jeff O’Brien
Producer: Anne-Marie Frigon
Cast: Brett Kelly, Anastasia Kimmett, Amanda Leigh
Country: Canada
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.brettkelly.net

Prey for the Beast is equal parts formulaic Don’t Go In The Woods picture and good, old-fashioned monster movie of the sort that they don’t make them like any more. It is not overly burdened with characterisation or plot but makes up for this with decent acting, smart direction, a highly credible sound mix and a frankly terrific monster suit which is worth the price of admission on its own.

Four blokes go off into the woods for a weekend of male bonding to help one of their number get over his wife’s infidelity. I couldn’t actually tell you what any of their names are but there’s a tall one who is described as a ‘survivalist’ and has brought a pistol with him. Elsewhere in the woods are four young ladies (again, I couldn’t differentiate or name them although two are lesbians of course - it’s a tradition or an old charter or something). When these eight people discover each other’s existence and meet up, they also discover that there is a savage creature in the woods from which they must escape.

Actually before we get to any of this we have three earlier scenes. A pre-credits prologue has a couple (Kerri Draper and Dan Tait) in a tent getting amorous but disturbed by noises outside. She goes out to investigate then he goes to find out where she’s got to - and both meet an unpleasant end from something unseen.

After the credits there is a sequence with an old guy who is some sort of wildlife photographer (Lenard Blackburn) and the local guide (Kevin Preece) he has employed to show him the unnamed creature - which seems to be well-known, at least to the locals. Then we see the ‘survivalist’ guy and his missus (Thea Nikolic) discussing why he has to attend this jolly boys’ outing.

Thing is, the first prologue is entirely unnecessary, serving no real purpose except to boost the running time. Yes, it introduces us to the idea that there’s a nasty something in these woods, but so does the photographer/guide scene. And those two will later connect with our main characters and influence the plot whereas the couple in the tent are entirely unconnected to the main story. You don’t need two prologues; the second renders the first redundant.

Once the octet discover that there is a beastie in the woods the plot becomes a fairly simple progression as they are killed off one by one. Unfortunately this generally happens because someone decides to wander off away from the group for no apparent reason and without telling anyone where they’re going. Only towards the end, when the numbers have been radically reduced, do we get any sense that this monster is actually hunting and killing the humans, rather than just helping itself to victims who inexplicably choose to wander around the woods on their own.

The men arrived by boat, which they didn’t bother to tie up and which has subsequently floated off. However, the ladies (and the photographer and guide) ‘hiked in’ so there should be no problem in hiking right out again. Indeed, when the survivors make it to safety (I can’t give you any spoilers here because the characters are so interchangeable that I genuinely have no idea which ones they are) we find out that they weren’t anywhere terribly inaccessible after all. After what seems a fairly short hike - even allowing for editing, it’s plainly still the same afternoon - the survivors end up on a tarmac path which leads to a car park - and quite possibly some sort of picnic area and visitor centre. It’s not as bad as the Camp Blood films and their ‘isolated’ woodland locations that are about five minutes walk from a busy main road but it certainly deflates the threat in retrospect.

While I’m picking holes, the other two major problems are that neither group of ‘campers’ seems to have much camping equipment and the locations chosen are relatively sparsely vegetated for woodland. Small trees and saplings with few leaves mean that we can see a considerable distance into the woods from any location so it’s difficult to understand how the monster is able to creep up on anyone. A chipmunk would have difficult hiding in some of this foliage.

But let’s sing the praises of the monster because this is a belter of a suit and director Brett Kelly is spot on in balancing the early scenes when we see only a claw or a flash of fur and the later scenes when we get a good (if usually brief) look at the beast. Shaggy of main, large of claw and in desperate need of a good orthodontist, this is something inbetween a bear and warthog. Actually it’s curious that no-one ever wonders whether they are dealing with a bear, especially when characters have actually seen the thing so they know it’s about eight feet tall, covered in shaggy brown hair and bipedal.

“What is it, some kind of animal?” says one character, burdened with the movie’s worst (and funniest) line of dialogue.

Because of the large number of potential victims, Kelly adds something extra to the mix by giving the creature some sort of hallucinogen in its saliva (I think) so that one of the men who gets scratched on his hand starts hallucinating (he was the cuckolded guy and we get a flashback to the discovery of his wife’s betrayal). Unfortunately there seems to be either a continuity error or some post-production rejiggery of events because his hand is bandaged (by one of the women) for no apparent reason, then later we see him with an unbandaged hand and subsequently it’s bandaged again. Even when he has the bandage on, that hand is still strong enough to grip a decent-sized automatic pistol apparently.

The culmination of the creature’s pursuit of its victims happens in and around a small wooden shack which the ladies say they passed on the way in but which they neglected to mention prior to that point, even though it’s full of handy, heavy, sharp tools and should have been their first thought when people started dying. It is also surprising that, given that this group have one gun (with half a dozen bullets) and one bow (with a presumably small but never specified number of arrows), no-one bothers to improvise a weapon by, say, sharpening up the end of a handy branch.

Once the survivors are besieged in the shack the interest and excitement picks up considerably, especially as one of them is hallucinating. I would have liked to see much more of this and less of people walking through the pleasant and slightly leafy woodland, presumably along a well-trodden path as they make it to the car park quite easily without the benefit of a map or compass.

Running to 75 minutes, Prey for the Beast has about eight and a half minutes of glacially slow end credits, including a reprise of all the names of its fairly large cast and its principal crew who were all introduced individually in two and a half minutes of opening titles. I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again: we don’t know who these people are so we don’t need to be introduced to them one by one. Yes, it’s a thrill at the cast and crew screening but it’s a pain in the neck for the viewers. As for the Charlesband-ian creeping credits at the end, there is no point in watching them at all. If film-makers must drag out their end credit sequences at least put something under the words (or split screen or whatever) to justify our sitting through them. A few bloopers, in the Jackie Chan style, would suffice.

The four main male characters are played by Ray Besharah, Mark Courneyea, Jodi Pittman and Kelly himself. The female quartet are played by Anastasia Kimmett, Amanda Leigh, Lisa Aitken and Sonia Myers. Many of the cast have been in other Brett Kelly movies before or since but few if any of them have done anything else on screen. In the infidelity flashback Tara Lee Gerhard appears as the chap’s wife (she also handled make-up although her surname is spelled ‘Gerhards’ there; someone else provides the character’s voice on a phone in another scene) and Jody Haucke (a Kelly regular) is the other man.

Cinematographer Jera Kenez is aka Jeremy Kennedy and has lit several other Brett Kelly pictures as well as directing the almost wordless horror short Influence; Kelly and Kenez share the editing credit.

Brett Kelly has rather cheekily bolstered the film’s credits by putting a number of friends and associates in there as fake/spoof credits. How do I know this? Because I know Brett (through Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia forums), because he has never mentioned that he knows anyone else named ‘MJ Simpson’ and because I’m pretty damn sure that I did not work on this film as an electrician... (I also spotted ‘materials consultant’ Lou Vockell.)

Unusually director Kelly (whose previous films include The Bonesetter and sequel, the remake of Kingdom of the Vampire and a version of The Tell-Tale Heart) and writer Jeff O’Brien (Insecticidal, Alien Incursion, Bone Dry) never met during production. Having become acquainted through the aforementioned Fred Olen Ray forum, they collaborated by e-mail with O’Brien getting screenplay credit and Kelly getting ‘story by’. Still, it’s very modern, isn’t it? Both parties are evidently pleased with their joint effort (as well they might be) as they subsequently set to work on a remake of - would you believe? - Attack of the Giant Leeches. Composer Christopher Nickel had previously worked with both gentlemen on separate projects.

But the biggest plaudits here go to the make-up and effects guys. Ralph Gethings was responsible for ‘special make-up FX’ and also gets a ‘second unit DOP’ credit. He also worked for Kelly on Kingdom of the Vampire and My Dead Girlfriend and directed the short film Reckoning and here he does sterling work on the various injuries and eviscerations.

And then there’s the creature suit itself, which is the creation of Matt Ficner. Or, as the end titles have it: ‘Bruno the Beast created by and appears courtesy of Matt Ficner Productions Inc, www.mfproductions.ca.’ Ficner has really gone above and beyond the call of duty here, designing and constructing a believable, scary and practical monster suit. Ficner is also the man behind a series of short films under the self-explanatory title The Creepy Puppet Project.

Prey for the Beast is an entertaining hour and a quarter of relatively likeable (if not especially interesting) people being stalked and killed by a natural (rather than supernatural) predator. It’s a fun way to pass the time and has been put together with the skill and talent that one expects from people as experienced as Jeff O’Brien and Brett Kelly. I think it could have been more than it was with a bit more characterisation but from an action/horror point of view this ticks all the boxes and is well worth your attention.

Now, bring on that Giant Leeches remake!

MJS rating: B+

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Writers: Shinya Hidaka, Mitsutoshi Ishigami, Ryuzo Kikushima
Producers: Hiroaki Fujii, Masaru Kakatani, Junichi Shinsaka
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Yasuko Sawaguchi, Katsuo Nakamura
Year of release: 1987
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

In feudal Japan, poor bamboo weaver Taketori-no-Miyatsuko and his wife mourn the death (from illness) of their young daughter Kaya. One night, there is a massive light from the bamboo forest behind their house, and when Miyatsuko investigates he comes across a strange metal capsule, half-buried in the ground next to his daughter’s grave. A mysterious light flows between the two, then the capsule opens and out crawls a baby which grows, before his astonished eyes, into a little girl who is the double of Kaya.

Miyatsuko takes the girl home, where his overjoyed wife sees her as a gift from Heaven to replace their daughter. Meanwhile, other locals have discovered a huge, smoking pit in the middle of the forest. Miyatsuko sells a piece of the capsule and discovers that it is pure gold; shortly afterwards he and his wife return home to find that Kaya has grown into an elegant young woman.

Suddenly wealthy, the couple move from their shack to a huge house in the rich part of town, where all the men are bewitched by Kaya’s ethereal beauty. But the local Shogun hears tell of gold being traded in town and wonders where it has come from.

Kaya receives proposals of marriage from three suitors: two slimy old guys and a sincere young councillor. On the advice of a blind friend she sends the three men on impossible tasks. The two slimeballs apparently succeed but are shown to have cheated, while the youngest man, barely surviving his fruitless attempt, proves that his love for Kaya (or Kaguya as she has become known - meaning ‘shining lady’) is true.

But by this point, Kaya/Kaguya’s true origin has been discovered: she came from the Moon and must return at the next full moon. Squads of soldiers are posted around the family’s house but Kaguya is taken anyway, in a shaft of light, leaving behind her adopted parents, her blind friend and her suitor.

Princess from the Moon (Taketori Monogatari) looks fabulous, a terrific recreation of feudal Japan with amazing costumes (by Emi Wada: Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams) and great sets (by Shinobu Muraki: Ran and - blimey! - ESPY). Unfortunately it’s also very, very long and very, very slow. The Mona Lisa looks fabulous too - but you wouldn’t want to stare at it for 122 minutes. The great Toshira Mifune - looking a lot older than he did in Yojimbo! - is good as Miyatsuko, as are the rest of the cast. Miho Nakano, the girl who plays young Kaya - blank expression, pale blue contact lenses and all - is undoubtedly the creepiest child actor you’ll ever see. Adult Kaya/Kaguya is played by Yasuko Sawaguchi (Godzilla 1985, Godzilla Vs Biollante, Orochi the Eight-Headed Dragon).

There is one very brief sword-fight (not involving Mifune) and a fantastic giant sea-serpent which appears far too briefly - allegedly left over from the unmade Toho/Hammer co-production Nessie - but little else to get excited about for the first 100 minutes. (Special effects are by Teruyoshi Nakano, his last credit after a career at Toho which started with The Secret of the Telegian in 1960 and took in pretty much every SF, horror or monster movie after that, including Lake of Dracula, Evil of Dracula and 13 Godzilla films.) Princess from the Moon is a fairy tale, but is unfortunately presented as a soap opera with endless scenes of people talking - often in locked-off longshots which make it hard to tell, on the small screen, who is speaking at any given point.

Then in the last 20 minutes it turns into a full-blown special effects fantasia, with an alien spaceship straight out of Close Encounters accompanied by a faux John Williams score that also hints at Also Sprach Zarathustra! It’s a complete change (though still, it must be said, not terribly exciting) which sits oddly with all that has gone before. But there just seems to be no moral; there’s no sense of Kaya, in her short time on Earth, teaching people anything or learning anything about humanity. A fairy tale (a very long one) without a clear moral seems somewhat pointless, however beautifully designed and shot.

Also be warned that the end credits play under an unspeakably dire ballad (in English) by Peter Cetera.

Artsmagic’s anamorphic widescreen presentation, on their Shadow Warrior label, is a typically flawless transfer. Although there is a cast list - and biographical notes on Ichikawa (Seishun Kaidan, 47 Ronin etc) and Mifune (The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress etc) - the disc lacks the cast portraits seen on some of the label’s other films, which is annoying as many of the characters are never actually named in the dialogue, rendering the cast list somewhat superfluous.

MJS rating: B-

Directors: Andy Hurst, Robin Hill
Writers: Andy Hurst, Robin Hill, Mike Hurst (as 'Michael Hanson')
Producers: Andy Hurst, Robin Hill, Michael Hanson
Cast: Michael Hanson, Kit Corcoran, Robert Hill
Year of release: 1996
Country: UK/Germany
Reviewed from: screener VHS

The best ever British film never released in Britain, Project Assassin is a stunning piece of ultra-low-budget film-making which propelled the Hurst brothers into careers on international productions working with big-name stars. This is a remarkable debut, but unless you live in Germany, you’ve probably never even heard of it.

A prologue set on 25th December 1972 sees a baby born in a laboratory; the birth complete, the restrained, screaming mother (Rose Mathews) is shot at point blank range and the baby is injected with... something.

Twenty three years later we find five people sharing a Brighton squat in a dilapidated old villa: long-haired drug-dealer George (Robin Hill), clean-cut Ellis (Michael Hanson), slightly drippy Lucy (Atlanta Cook), sensible Sarah (Sasha McGann) and self-righteous prick Jack (Nicholas Quirke). George and Lucy are sort of an item, while Sarah has a crush on Ellis. Into this group comes a mysterious sixth figure, Christian (Kit Corcoran) - long of hair, wispy of beard, short on words - and a 3-2 vote sees him moving in.

But Christian is not all that he seems. He is being monitored by the mysterious Dr Waltham (Robert Hill) and his assistant Richard (Chris Orr, who played several roles in a stage production of Frankenstein the following year). Christian, who was evidently the baby born in the prologue, is referred to as ‘the weapon’ and Ellis is ‘the primary target.’

The next day, two policeman call, leading to indignation about ‘rights’ from the pompous Jack and a frantic flushing away of evidence by George. But it’s not drugs they’re looking for, they just take a polaroid of Christian that Jack took and then destroy the camera. They don’t want any evidence that he is there. What is going on? That night, as Christian undergoes some sort of fit, Jack goes into sympathetic spasms and starts haemorrhaging from every orifice. The next morning Jack has gone - and so has all his stuff...

Waltham has the house not only under surveillance but fully bugged with both audio and video equipment. Some scenes, such as the one where the housemates debate what has happened to Jack, are shown split-screen, shot from up to four ‘hidden camera’ angles, predating similar techniques in movies like My Little Eye by more than five years.

The housemates and anyone else who visits the squat are, one by one, killed or abducted by mysterious figures, all working for whatever shady government organisation is headed by Waltham. Eventually Ellis goes on the run, leading to a terrifically original chase scene set in a bus garage, but he is cornered and taken to the underground base of the ‘Eugenics Division’.

Christian, it seems, is carrying a genetically engineered virus which can kill by telepathy; the virus has become self-aware and wants Ellis as its new host. Waltham and co have complete control of the media and the film climaxes with Jack broadcasting surveillance footage from the house to try and convince the public about what’s going on. There is a whole religious subtext to Christian - his name, his birthdate, even his hair and beard - but I’m not entirely sure what the implication is, unless it’s just emphasising the apocalyptic nature of the virus if it gets out of control.

Believe it or not, this entire 90-minute movie was shot on Betacam for only £4,000. The producers took it to Cannes where it was picked up by Marco Weber, an associate of Roland Emmerich on movies like The Thirteenth Floor. He spent a quarter of a million dollars on a state-of-the-art tape-to-film transfer and gave it a theatrical release in Germany, where it has since been released on VHS and DVD, variously subtitled as Project Assassin: Der Gedankenkiller (‘the thought-killer’) and Project Assassin: Wenn Gedanken Toten (‘when thoughts kill’).

Andy Hurst followed Project Assassin with the thriller You’re Dead starring John Hurt and Rhys Ifans which had a UK theatrical release in 1998. He was cinematographer on a 1999 documentary about Michael Reeves and wrote a screenplay called The Glades which has been filmed and released as a fake sequel to the 1998 Denise Richards/Neve Campbell movie Wild Things. Most recently he wrote Earthquake for one-word-will-do producers Nu Image (Spiders, Octopus). As well as writing, directing and producing, he also acted as cinematographer on Project Assassin, using coloured lighting and filters to help disguise the tiny budget. Though the constant use of red and blue is perhaps slightly overdone - at times it’s like watching a tinted silent movie! - nevertheless it’s effective and skilfully managed. In fact all the camerawork is of a very high quality.

Hurst’s brother Mike - credited here as Michael Hanson - went on to direct second unit on You’re Dead and wrote and directed the thrillers New Blood (with John Hurt and Carrie-Ann Moss) and Babyjuice Express before returning to horror with House of the Dead II and Pumpkinhead IV; he also got the unusual credit of 'script polisher' on The Pool. Fight choreography is by John Carrigan (recently seen in the interactive DVD Advanced Warriors) and Glen Salvage (Left for Dead). Special make-up effects are credited to Chris Archimedas.

Though you will need to spend some Euros to get a copy, Project Assassin is thoroughly recommended - it’s a thrilling, imaginative, original, blood-spattered SF-horror thriller. What a damning indictment of the British cinema industry that although we can make superb movies like this, we can’t find any way of letting people in this country see them.

MJS rating: A

Director: Peter Flynn
Writer: Peter Flynn
Producers: Daren Hicks, Simon Tams
Cast: Brian Knudson, Myron Natwick, Mary Louise Gemmil
Country: USA
Year of release: 1992
Reviewed from: UK DVD

When you come to a movie with no expectations whatsoever, you can sometimes be in for a pleasant surprise. I picked up Project Vampire on a double-bill disc with The Dreaded for a quid. I’ve never heard of it, I’ve never heard of anyone connected with it. It’s something to do with vampires. Let’s slip it into the machine and take a look.

About 20 minutes in, I started saying to myself, “You know, this actually isn’t bad.” By the half-hour point of this 92-minute film, I realised that I was actually enjoying it. I wasn’t over the Moon and I hadn’t discovered a forgotten classic, but this turns out to be a well-produced, nicely-directed, quite original, smart little horror flick.

Myron Natwick (Ice Pirates, The Dead Talk Back) plays Dr Frederick Klaus, ex-pat Austrian biochemistry professor who is secretly a vampire. He is assisted by Teutonic glamourpuss Heidi (Paula Randol-Smith: Deadly Illusions) and two henchmen: leather-jacketed skinhead Hopper (Kelvin Tsao: LA Task Force) and snappy-dressing, eye-patch-wearing, limping weasel Louis (Ray Essler). He also has a bunch of lab-coat-wearing helpers working for him on ‘Project A’ which is nominally a longevity serum which he is working on as part of his university tenure. Louis is the only person involved who has not been vampirised through the injection of Klaus’ serum: he is allergic to it, although Hopper comments that he is “almost more like us than human.”

The film opens as three of the lab-coat-wearers escape with a syringe of the serum, though it’s not clear precisely what they plan to do with it. Eddie (Oliver Leymarie) is recaptured by Hopper and Louis while Tom (Chris Wolf: Amazon Women on the Moon, Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000) goes looking for blood in a nearby motel. Our hero is Victor (Brian Knudson) who escapes a beating from Hopper by jumping into the car of passing nurse Sandra Jensen (Mary Louise Gemmil).

Victor and Sandra together set out to defeat Klaus’ plans for world domination, which involve psychically empowering hundreds of syringes full of ‘longevity serum’ so that not only will the users, around the world, become vampires, they will also bend to his telepathic will. Or something. There is also an ‘antidote’ to the serum which allows the vampires to move around in daylight for a limited period.

Slightly confusing though this plan is, it does give us the movie’s stand-out scene as Klaus climbs inside the device shown on the UK DVD sleeve, which is referred to in the end credits as the ‘psychifuge’. Power crackles between Klaus and the hundreds of syringes arranged around him as he strains and suffers, his handsome human face contorting into a vampiric grimace. The psychifuge is a terrific piece of production design and though one may not normally leaving the theatre whistling the production design, nevertheless let’s give credit where credit is due. (The image of a naked young lady in the psychifuge, used on some other editions, is definitely not in the film.)

Victor and Sandra are respectively helped and hindered by two of her colleagues: Korean scientist Lee Fong (Christopher Cho) and medical lounge lizard Paul Holt (John-Scott Taylor). At one point, she is injected with the vampire serum by Louis, but a pre-internet computer tells Fong that all the vampires victims will recover if the head vampire is destroyed.

A fast-moving and quite exciting first half (including a car chase shot largely from inside the second vehicle, which is both different and effective) gives way to a more formulaic second half, much of it set inside Klaus’ headquarters which is a much less successful piece of production design, not least because the ‘very heavy’ doors have a tendency to wobble. The finale, while somewhat clichéed and slightly anticlimactic, nevertheless is a terrific sequence, incorporating an impressive fire stunt and clever cutting to a life-size dummy.

Considering the promise shown by this film, it’s a surprise to find that it is the only feature from Peter Flynn, whose other credits include art director on Time Trackers and construction foreman on Tremors. The plot, which superficially resembles that of The Satanic Rites of Dracula, is a tad wobbly to say the least but Flynn works his camera well and elicits excellent performances from his cast, many of whom had little or no feature experience in 1992.

Producer Daren Hicks works mostly as a production co-ordinator, in which capacity he can count Addams Family Values, Deep Impact, Starship Troopers and Showgirls among his credits. His colleague Simon Tams constructed props for films such as AI, Batman and Robin and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Recently, the two have produced two unofficial live-action Batman shorts: World’s Finest and Batman: Dead End. Cinematographer Joe Mealey also has a connection with the Caped Crusader: he worked on a Making Of documentary for the Special Edition DVD of Batman Returns.

Alongside Hicks, Tams and Flynn, the major creative force behind this movie seems to have been effects man John Criswell who worked on a whole bunch of Charles Band movies in the 1980s including Creepozoids, Catacombs and Cellar Dweller. His more recent credits include projects as diverse as Ed Gein and Little Bigfoot 2. Project Vampire was shot at his studio in LA.

Though far from perfect, this movie nevertheless kept me interested and entertained for a good hour and a half, and for 50p you can’t ask much more than that. In the USA, this is currently available for ten bucks as part of a Brentwood four-pack entitled Blood Thirst which also includes Beyond Evil, Back from Hell and The Passing.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Newton Halifax
Writers: Newton Halifax, Andy Scrimpey
Producer: Clifford Quarry
Cast: Alan Pither, Soosan Thomson, Peter Dembery
Country: UK
Year: 2000
Reviewed from: Japanese VHS

When I wrote about this film in my book Urban Terrors: New British Horror 1997-2008, I said that it had never been finished. Imagine my surprise then to discover that not only was the film completed but it actually had a VHS release in the Land of the Rising Sun. I suppose, given that it was Japan which finally unleashed Queen Kong on the world, nothing should be a surprise now.

Also unsurprising is that The Cabinet of Dr Calamari was only worth the wait if, like me, you're a modern British horror completist. This is a cheaply made, hastily thrown together anthology, cobbled together from a few shot-on-video shorts, each competing to be worse than the last. Newton Halifax's website (long defunct but traceable through archive.org) indicates that he fair cranked these things out in the late 1990s, flogging them on VHS through small ads in Samhain, The Dark Side etc. This was his attempt to craft an ersatz feature out of his work, stringing unconnected shorts together with a framing story set in a restaurant.

Alan Pither, who played a drug dealer in Cradle of Fear, here plays the eponymous restauranteur, regaling his few customers with tales of horror that are unlikely to encourage return visits to his establishment. In the first of these, 'Spin Cycle' (video generated titles introduce each short but the original credits have been snipped) a woman faces off against a demonically possessed washing machine. Soosan Thomson is the woman - she presumably spelled her name that way to disguise her real identity (she could be the Susan Thomson who was in a couple of episodes of Brookside but I somehow doubt it). The voice of the washing machine isn't credited; Halifax implied on his site that it was a well-known pop star but if it is, they've done a good job of keeping their shameful secret, well, secret.

'The Curse of the Vampire's Curse' is the second story, and it's typical of Newton Halifax that one really can't be certain whether the title is meant to be funny or not. Three likely lads meet a vampire in a pub in this one, and there's a passable non-reflection effect which is probably the closest that Halifax ever came to competent. The vampire is played by Benedict Jolly (Unachievable, Virtual Terror) and one of the others is Peter Dembery, who was in an episode of Blake's 7.

The third and longest story is 'Deadly Blue Balloon', an absolutely unfathomable attempt at sci-fi about a malevolent alien represented - I kid you not - by a blue balloon with some paper fangs stuck on. This just drags and drags and drags as assorted people encounter the balloon/alien, scream and fall down dead, liberally swathed in ketchup (the balloon itself seems never to get touched by a drop of the stuff, despite the implication that it is ripping people's throats out). Andy Lewisham, later director of Zero Degrees Below, crops up as either a policeman or a traffic warden (honestly, it's hard to tell) and the other victims include Lucy Spillbrass (Sword-Death), Zack Felton (Dead Man's Shoes) and Billy Hershey, a veteran midget actor who sees to have done nothing of note between this and The Flesh and Blood Show!

Barely feature-length, The Cabinet of Dr Calamari finishes with Dr Calamari (Is he a restauranteur or a doctor? Make up your mind...) going into his kitchen where, for some reason, he finds the alien/balloon, the washing machine and the vampire (played by a different actor).

Well, I'm glad I've seen it and can tick it off the list. But good heavens, this is really indicative of how desperate the turn-of-the-millennium Japanese market was for product. Allegedly there was a single UK screening at the Grand Cinema, Skegness, although I doubt if anyone turned up who wasn't actually in the film, and even most of them probably gave it a wide berth. Somebody would have to be a Fool, an Absolute Fool, to want to watch something like this.

MJS rating: D-

Director: Jake West
Writers: Jake West, ‘Barbara Werner’
Producers: Brad Krevoy, Donald Kushner, Pierre Spengler
Cast: Doug Bradley, Lance Henriksen, Doug Roberts
Country: UK/Romania
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK DVD

It is always an odd feeling, watching a film on which I got to hang out during shooting. Back in 2006 I spent a fabulous couple of days at Castel Studio in Romania with my mate Jake West while he was filming what was then simply called Pumpkinhead 3. I got to chat with Lance Henriksen and Doug Bradley and spend time with Mike Regan, Mitch Coughlin and Blake Bolger from Gary Tunnicliffe’s FX company. Look - there’s a photo of me with the monster suit head. Holy crap!

The other thing that makes this film special is that it is, to some extent, a vindication of the stance which I have always had towards up and coming film-makers, which is one of encouragement and support, encouraging a potential future quid pro quo. When I used to write about obscure indie films in the early days of SFX (back when there were neither enough suitable blockbusters to write about nor sufficient contacts to Hollywood which could be exploited, leaving me to write multi-page features about any old stuff I fancied) and also when I founded the ‘Independents Day’ column in the early issues of Total Film, what I said was this: we should write about these little indie films because, while many of the film-makers will disappear or stick at this low-key level, one or two will go on to greater things and will thank us/me for giving them a boost at the start of their career.

I still do this today through this website. If someone sends me a film then I will always find something good and quotable to say about it. Because it’s no skin off my nose and it matters to them. And maybe one of them will hit the big time and remember me.

So anyway, back in the heady days of the late 1990s I wrote about Jake West and Razor Blade Smile. It wasn’t the greatest movie ever made but it was a light in the darkness of a period when British horror cinema was almost extinct. There was a quote from me on the poster. Actually there were two: one from SFX, one from Total Film but both written by me! I remember someone accosting me at a convention and pointing out that I had called it “the best British vampire film for nigh on two decades” when in fact it was pretty much the only British vampire film for nigh on two decades. To which, I believe, I responded along the lines of ‘well, duh.’ That’s the skill of providing great quotable review copy.

From that coverage of RBS came a friendship with Jake who went on to direct various shorts, documentaries, title sequences and all sorts of stuff before his sophomore effort, the gloriously OTT sci-fi splatterfest Evil Aliens. Jake invited me along to the set but alas, it was at a time when I was unemployed and skint and TF Simpson was on his way to make life even more complicated. A day return to Cambridgeshire was simply not something that I could afford. Still, I got to go along to the UK premiere at Frightfest and hang out with Jake and the cast and crew, which was cool.

So then Jake gets back to work on DVD extras and whatnot until - holy cow - he e-mails me with some amazing news. He has been selected to direct a sequel to Pumpkinhead!

Pumpkinhead: directed by the mighty Stan Winston, starring the legend that is Lance Henriksen, inarguably one of the best monster movies of the the 1980s. My pal Jake was directing a sequel to this. In Romania. And he had got Lance Henriksen signed up to revive his character from the first film. Oh, and Doug Bradley was in the mix too.

And because I had supported Jake when he made his first feature and had stayed in contact since (which I would have done anyway - Jake’s a deeply cool guy) and because I now freelance for Fangoria, I got to fly over to Bucharest via Milan with a camera, a dictaphone, a change of undies and a toothbrush. And I got to hang out on the set for two days. And if that doesn’t make you jealous, my friend, then frankly I’m a bit puzzled what you’re doing here because in my world (and you’re welcome to it) this is about the coolest possible thing that could ever happen.

At this point you were going to be treated to a lengthy travelogue account of how I got out to Romania, what I did there, what a strange country it is and how I managed to get back to Leicester about twenty minutes before I was due on stage at Phoenix Arts to introduce a screening of, ironically enough, Evil Aliens.

But I accidentally deleted it. So we’ll just crack straight on with the review, shall we?

Pumpkinhead 3, to no-one’s surprise, turns out to be better than Pumpkinhead 2 but not as good as Pumpkinhead (and I have yet to see Mike Hurst’s take on the story). Although Messrs Henriksen and Bradley understandably have their names above the title, the film is actually carried by a marvellous performance from Doug Roberts (who was in episodes of Angel, Strange Luck and Quantum Leap) as Bunt Wallace.

Bunt, you may remember, was the kid in the redneck Wallace clan who had some notion of morality, however confused, and who is the only person to survive an encounter with Pumpkinhead, the vengeance demon which  personifies the old saw ‘Be careful what you wish for...’ Although Brian Bremer who played Bunt in the first film 18 years earlier is still a jobbing actor he couldn’t be tracked down when Ashes to Ashes was shot. Which is a shame on the one hand but on the other Roberts is absolutely terrific in the role and really holds this film together.

Bunt, together with his junkie sister Dahlia (Lisa McAllister) and largely non-speaking brothers Junior (Iulian Glita) and Tiny (Aurel Dicu, a stuntman whose credits go back to Subspecies and Trancers III), runs a crematorium assisted by town doctor Doc Fraser (Doug Bradley hamming it up like there’s no tomorrow). The basic set-up is that, before the corpses go into the flames Doc removes salvageable organs which he then flogs to a junkie organ bootlegger named Lenny (Emil Hostina, who was in the Matt Lucas/Mark Gatiss version of The Wind in the Willows) who resides at the Sunny Days Motel. In a line of dialogue which I might have missed had I not had it specifically pointed out to me, Doc explains that this little one-horse town in the middle of nowhere could never afford his services as the local GP without this illicit sideline boosting his earnings.

None of this really stands up to close examination of course. Apart from anything else, transplant organs are only useful - on the black market or wherever else - if removed very promptly. By the time someone is ready to be cremated, post-mortem metabolic changes have rendered their organs pretty much useless. But we’ll gloss over this.

One also has to wonder at what seems to be a pretty small, isolated town having such a decent-sized crematorium. And a motel? Who would want to stay there? And although this is supposed to be the same town that we visited in the first film, the whole area seems to be a lot more wooded than before. Which is of course because Castel Studios are surrounded by woods.

Anyway, none of this matters. I’m even prepared to bite my biologist’s lip and ignore the floppy piece of offal which Doug Bradley removes from a corpse and refers to as a kidney, even though it’s plainly too large (a human kidney is about the size of your computer mouse) and looks more like a liver, although it’s too small to be that either. Maybe it’s a pancreas. I don’t know much about the organ-legging sector: is there a trade in secondhand pancreases?

Now all this would be fine and nobody would know anything except that a passing hiker wanders in when someone leaves the door unlocked and sees what’s going on. Hiding in a barn, he is found by Junior and Tiny who ironically use the chap’s own dog to locate him then stick him with a pitchfork.

Even this wouldn’t be a problem if the damn crematorium furnace was working but it has been kaput for some time now, requiring the Wallaces to dispose of the eviscerated corpses out in the woods. They throw the dead hiker into the same remote, muddy pool but he’s not dead. He drags himself from the water, staggers to a nearby road and flags down a passing pick-up truck, in the passenger seat of which he promptly expires. Still, that’s a more comfortable place to die than a muddy pool. All credit to Romanian-based American actor Bart Sidles here for his scenes. Rest assured that what you see is not some artificially created studio set. That muddy pool is a genuine muddy pool in the middle of a Romanian forest, full of Romanian pond-slime and Romanian leeches and Sidles actually, voluntarily lay down in it not once but several times for a number of takes. All that and all he gets is a small pay-cheque and a minor role in a Sci-Fi Channel creature feature. What a trouper! (Sidles had a different role a few weeks later in Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud and was also in Planet Raptor and Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors.)

The woman driving the car is Molly Sue Allen (Tess Panzer, subsequently in Adam Mason’s Blood River) who takes her deceased passenger to the local sheriff (Dan Astileanu: Subspecies IV, Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis) who then arrests the Wallaces but not Doc Fraser who has no apparent connection with the matter. As the desiccated corpses that everyone assumed had been cremated are recovered from the swamp - and from the barn too, for some reason - Doc Fraser tuts and shakes his head with the rest of them. Among the ungrilled dead is Molly Sue’s own baby.

It’s not clear whether anyone is able to spot that these decomposing cadavers are missing certain vital organs. I would imagine that only Doc would recognise something like that and he ain’t telling. So I think it’s just the opprobrium of their relatives festering in a barn or muddy pool when they should have gone up a chimney which upsets the locals. Molly Sue, together with her brother Oliver (Emanuel Parvu, who was stills photographer on the two sequels to Wes Craven’s Dracula 2000) and some other friends decide that they should take revenge on the Wallaces and enlist the help of the old witch Haggis (Lynne Verrall doing a great voice under prosthetic make-up which unfortunately makes her look like Zelda from Terrahawks) who helps them to resurrect Pumpkinhead.

Now this all seems a bit much to me. Back in the first Pumpkinhead Ed Harley raised the demon in revenge for the death of his son, struck down by some irresponsible and unrepentant townies roaring around on motorbikes. I can’t remember why the demon was raised in Pumpkinhead 2; I don’t think there really was a reason but that film’s not really part of the franchise, is it? It is to Pumpkinhead films what Halloween III: Season of the Witch is to Halloween movies.

My point (and I do have one) is that Ed Harley sought vengeance for the death of his child. Molly Sue and her pals seek vengeance just because an already dead child was tossed into a barn instead of being cooked to a cinder. It’s undoubtedly illegal and indubitably immoral but does it merit slicing your hand open to mingle your blood and resurrect a twelve-foot tall killing machine? Not in my book, especially when the perpetrators are already in gaol (well, jail I suppose, this being the USA). Ed Harley lost the most precious thing he possessed through someone else’s careless and selfish action and he had no other means of restitution, Molly Sue’s baby was already dead and wasn’t even lined up for a decent Christian burial. She’s been defrauded if she paid for a cremation because all that got cooked was a small coffin. No, but hang on. If the crematorium furnace isn’t working, not even the coffins get burned and there ought to be a stack of decent wood and some brass handles somewhere, Mind you, there’s no indication that this little town, despite having a motel, a church and an enormous crematorium has any sort of undertaker.

Let’s just try and think this through logically. When someone local dies, presumably they have a funeral in the church, then the coffin (obtained from, I don’t know, a mail order firm?) is taken to the crematorium out in the woods, where Doc Fraser and the Wallace kids open it up, dispose of the wood and brass somehow, snip out the body’s pancreas, then chuck the thing into either the neighbouring barn or a muddy pool in the middle of the forest. No-one else ever visits the crematorium and no-one has even been close enough to spot the total lack of smoke emanating from the building, which is sort of a distinguishing feature of crematoria.

This has evidently been going on for a good while now because there are a lot of corpses, almost as many as the total number of live people we see. This is a small town and unless half the population died last month, then the furnace has been out of action for a long, long time. But why don’t the Wallaces just get somebody in from another town to repair their furnace, which would make the organ-legging much, much simpler and safer on account of there being no bodies left? In fact, why not just burn the bodies on a funeral pyre round the back of the barn, thereby not only disposing of the evidence but also providing some smoke to allay suspicions if they arise? They must be burning something somewhere because customers are still being provided with urns full of ashes.

You know, I really enjoyed watching the film but the more I think about the plot, the less sense it makes.

Still, this is all just preamble to set up the unleashing of Pumpkinhead, first seen chasing Bunt in a dream prologue in order to satisfy the Sci Fi Channel requirement to show the monster within the first five minutes. Gary Tunnicliffe’s shop constructed the monster suit and Mike Regan was in charge of it during its time in Romania. One of the technical problems with the creature design is that the legs clearly won’t support the weight if there’s a person inside. In the original movie they got round this by suspending the suit on wires for certain shots but this wasn’t feasible on the sequels. So basically you don’t get to see the creature full-length. You can see most of it but not the feet (allowing the chap inside to stand on something) or you can see the lower half only (allowing him to hang from a bar or whatever). It pretty much works.

It is also notable that the creature design looks a bit different but that is entirely consistent with the mythology (if we ignore P2, which we should do because P2 ignored P1) which is that whoever raises the demon becomes the next demon. So this isn’t the same Pumpkinhead that was in Pumpkinhead, this is a demon created from the mortal remains of Ed Harley.

Speaking of which, how come Ed is back in the film when he died in P1? Well, he’s sort of a ghost who only Bunt can see, which works fine. Maybe he’s just an illusion, all in Bunt’s mind, because the fellow is pretty screwed up. But maybe he really is a ghost because if we accept a giant demon-thing then we can easily accept a spectre. Fortunately, Lance Henriksen looks pretty much like he did 18 years earlier - indeed like he did in every film he has made before or since - and some skilful make-up gives him the vague facial similarity to Pumpkinhead that is essential to this mythos. There is a particularly effective scene where Bunt, Dahlia and Doc Fraser are in a car and Bunt sees Ed Harley sitting in the driving seat, talking to him, instead of Doc.

Anyway, we’ve come to see Pumpkinhead stalking and killing people and that he does. He breaks into the gaol in the Sheriff’s office, he leaps through a church window and he drags someone (Tiny? Junior? not sure) up to the top of the crematorium and impales him on a weather-vain. This leads to a great scene of Bunt trying to remove the body which is obviously not as easy as it sounds. Meanwhile, crafty Doc spots that the young folk who raised the demon suffer the agonies of those whom it kills, just toned down a little bit.

After various bits of driving around and running around and the occasional thing blowing up, the film culminates in a scene so powerful and disturbing that it lifts the whole thing up a notch. Molly Sue’s brother “can fix anything” we are told in a slightly clumsy infodump although we see no actual evidence of this until it becomes relevant. With Bunt’s and Molly Sue’s help he gets the furnace working again and they start shovelling in the corpses, figuring that if the wrong is righted that way then Pumpkinhead will go. What this leads to - and I’m not sure it makes any more sense than the rest of the film but jiminy it’s a powerful image - is Molly Sue committing suicide (which will destroy the demon) by crawling into the blazing crematorium furnace. Ick.

Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes scores over Pumpkinhead 2 by actually using the ideas and themes from the first film. Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings was, you know, an okay monster film but it had a monster that just happened to look like Pumpkinhead (and had the same name). In other words, it just used the design as an off-the-shelf, generic creature and thereby completely missed the point.

P3 also benefits by having not just Ed Harley but Henriksen as Ed Harley plus the essential character of Haggis; it’s no coincidence that Henriksen and Verrall were the only two cast members to stay on in Romania for P4.

What this doesn’t really feel like, interestingly, is a Jake West film. Although it’s fabulous to see Jakey-boy given a decent budget to play with and some top-flight actors - and I know that Jake himself had a great time on this film and really put his all into it - nevertheless it’s evident to those of us familiar with his work that his individualism has been reined in. Sci Fi Channel creature features are fairly rigidly structured (although I believe they loosened up a bit with these films because they were sequels to such a popular cult classic) and there’s little room here for West-ian touches. Those of us who have seen Evil Aliens, Razor Blade Smile and Club Death know what a Jake West film should look like and there are only occasional moments when the authorial spark can be spotted in Pumpkinhead 3.

The acting is generally good although the various accents do tend to wander across most of the Southern USA, depending on which scene we’re watching. Erik Wilson (Broken, Dust) provides cinematography that is frankly terrific, bleaching the colour out of some scenes to an almost sepia tone that gives the film the ‘American Gothic’ ambience it needs. And the special effects are... well, some of them are good.

Can’t fault the suit. It’s a great suit which snarls and roars but maintains the emotions and sense of pathos which are evident in all the best movie monsters. There are a few scenes where the creature’s long tail is rendered in CGI and that works fine. But, let’s be honest, the occasional long-shots of a full-rendered CGI creature, such as when it climbs up to the roof of the crematorium, don’t work at all. They’re embarrassingly bad. I’m sure that Stephen Dryer at Black Magic Digital did his best with what was available - I met him on set where he was taking notes and checking things - but the results look nothing at all like Pumpkinhead. It’s just a half-formed, roughly humanoid figure with a tail, moving stiffly and unnaturally up a wall with which it seems to have little if any physical connection.

My guess is that all the effects budget went on the suit and the visual effects had to be knocked together for a tenner. Realistically, the film would be better without those shots. They’re not needed and they spoil the movie. A little bit of judicious editing, maybe a couple of close-ups of claw on brickwork and the same idea could be conveyed without making all but the most drunken and least discriminating viewers wince. Sci Fi Channel movies are not renowned for top quality CGI creatures but these few shots are simply awful. Let’s move on.

The script is credited to Jake West and the pseudonymous Barbara Werner; the Inaccurate Movie Database reckons this is John Werner (or rather, credits both the Werner pseudo-siblings, alongside Jake). John Werner wrote the Sci Fi Channel flick Manticore so that’s probably him but for contractual reasons it’s best if I leave that as speculation. The expected army of producers, associate producers, co-producers, assistant producers, line producers, executive producers and deputy acting producers third class includes Karri O'Reilly and Brad Krevoy whose Motion Picture Corporation of America was the main production company behind this brace of sequels. Pretty ironic for films that are nominally UK/Romanian co-productions! Krevoy was also a producer on Pumpkinhead 2 and his many other credits range from the brilliant Retroactive to the dire Dracula 3000.

Although Jake is an editor by training, on this occasion he left the cutting to Justin Rogers (director of the short thriller Callback). Rob Lord, who previously worked on various Discworld computer games, composed the music. Production designer Cristian Niculescu is a regular at Castle Studios where his previous films have included Mimic and Prophecy sequels and the astoundingly awful Incubus; further back he worked on some Charlie Band movies including Frankenstein Reborn! and The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes. The costumes were designed by Ioana Alboiu (Madhouse, Mammoth, Ghouls).

Henriksen and Bradley previously worked together on Hellraiser: Hellworld, the eighth (and to date, final) entry in that series which was filmed back-to-back with Part VII in 2004 at - where else? - Castel Studios. Henriksen, who makes about a film a week, shot this around the same time he was making Pirates of Treasure Island for The Asylum and Bone Dry, with Luke Goss, for Brett A Hart. The much less prolific Bradley subsequently appeared in The Cottage, narrated Ten Dead Men and added another title to his Clive Barker collection of roles with a part in Book of Blood.

Also in the cast are Ioana Ginghina (an uncredited role as one of the brides in Dracula III), Catalin Paraschiv (Return of the Living Dead: Rave from the Grave), Radu Banzaru (the Ray Winstone version of Sweeney Todd) and Philip Bowen (The Brides in the Bath) as the priest.

Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes is a respectable and respectful continuation of a franchise based around one of the classic movie monsters de nos jours. What is more, it’s a great vindication of Jake West as one of the most exciting and talented directors currently working in horror. Razor Blade Smile was shot for about twenty grand, Evil Aliens cost ten times that and this film cost a couple of million. Imagine what Jake could do if his budget went up another factor of ten.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Robert Mann
Writers: Robert Mann, Sheldon Silverstein
Producer: Sheldon Silverstein
Cast: Amy Weber, Michael Zara, Terrence Evans
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

While it’s not completely terrible, The Pumpkin Karver is quite some way from being what you might call ‘good’. It seems to have been made by people who love films but don’t understand how they’re made. There’s the germ of a good concept in there somewhere but it’s buried under a confused and confusing mishmash of half-hearted ideas which probably all sounded like they could be scary when someone thought them up.

But first, let’s deal with that title. There is no reason to spell it with a K. Although the word ‘carver’ is frequently spoken in the film it’s just used in its normal sense - one who carves - and as such is just ‘carver’. The one and only time we see it written down, on a sign welcoming people to the little town of Carver, it is definitely spelled with a C. Maybe this is some homage to the Monty Python sketch about the man who can’t pronounce C but can pronounce K (“Khaki, Kipling, Keeble Bollege Oxford...”) but more likely it’s just designed to make the film easier to Google. Mind you, Googling ‘pumpkin carver’ still gives you the IMDB page for The Pumpkin Karver in its first ten hits, so what was the point?

Really, the title perfectly encapsulates the film. It looks like it might be cool and interesting but in fact it’s just pointless and not worth bothering with.

Anyway, this is a film about pumpkin carving. It’s set on two consecutive Halloweens and the main character, Jonathan Starks (Michael Zara) spends as much time as possible carving faces into pumpkins. When we first meet him in a pre-credit sequence which lasts a watch-checking eight minutes, he has a whole bunch of carved pumpkins on the table and is working on still more. Again and again in this film the concept of pumpkin carving will be discussed as if it is some sort of Olympic sport or a profession in which the best talents can earn a fortune if they turn pro - instead of a hobby that people do one weekend a year.

As the local kids wander from door to door in fancy dress (including two with an amusing Men in Black act), Jonathan’s elder sister Lynn (Amy Weber: Starforce, Kolobos, Dangerous Seductress) is visited by her drunk, arsehole boyfriend Alec (David J Wright, who was in an episode of Tremors: The Series) who has devil horns on his head and spits lager over Jonathan (and mocks his pumpkin carving!). After Alec has left, Lynn is getting changed upstairs when a figure enters the room (introduced via a steadicam shot that pays clear homage to Dean Cundey's work on Halloween). This guy is dressed in overalls and has a mask like a rotting pumpkin. He attacks Lynn with a knife and, hearing his sister’s screams, Jonathan runs upstairs and repeatedly stabs the attacker - who turns out to be Alec, horsing around with a joke-shop knife.

At last, it’s the credits! Oh, just before the credits, as some cops clean up the mess there’s some sort of red herring about Alec’s blood not being natural or something, but this is never followed up on.

Right. The credits.

One years later, Lynn and Jonathan and their never-seen mother have moved from the city to the nowheresville town of Carver, population 666. Despite being such a poky place, the town (which we never see) is able to rustle up at least 20-30 ‘college kids’ for a wild Halloween party. (That’s college kids in the Hollywood sense of all being in at least their mid-twenties. In fact Amy Weber was 36 when she made this!) Lynn knows these youngsters but Jonathan doesn’t. She’s hoping that he’ll hit it off with a perky chick named Tammy (Minka Kelly: Devil’s Highway) and indeed he does, much to the displeasure of Tammy’s aggressive and jealous ex Lance (David Austin, whose grandfather George Irving was in Island of Lost Souls and Son of Dracula), who is dressed as a pirate. Other costumes on show include Austin Powers, the Hulk, a trio of Charlie’s Angels, a girl scout and two guys in togas who are out to have a seriously inebriated time.

But let’s just recap what is happening here. Jonathan is still upset and guilty over killing Alec last Halloween. It’s not clear if he’s been like this for a full year or whether the anniversary is setting off his depression - but to distract him from obsessing about stabbing a pumpkin-masked maniac last 31st October, his sister is taking him to a Halloween costume party full of pumpkins. Glad she’s not my therapist.

And boy, are there ever pumpkins. They pass an old guy on the road loading dozens of pumpkins into his truck, there are fields full of pumpkins, plus of course all the carved, decorated ones. These are bound to help Jonathan forget the manslaughter he committed exactly one year ago on a guy in a pumpkin mask while he was spending the evening carving pumpkins.

The party is swinging, including a rock band on an outdoor stage, and yet curiously whenever anybody wanders away from where people are dancing the night is silent. Apparently Carver is some sort of magic place where loud rock music and partying teenagers cannot be heard only a few hundred yards away. Or maybe this is just a film made by people who didn’t know and/or care what they were doing.

Jonathan encounters a creepy old guy, Ben Wickets (Terrence Evans: Crocodile, Curse II, Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and prequel), who claims to own the farm where the party is happening. He also claims that he personally founded the town of Carver sixty years ago because it was such a great place to grow pumpkins and he is a dedicated pumpkin carver, and if Jonathan devotes his life to it maybe he could be a great pumpkin carver one day too because he is the chosen one, or something. For Heaven’s sake, we’re not talking about ice-skating or violin-playing here - it’s carving faces into pumpkins for Halloween. It’s not a viable, long-term, full-time career.

Now things start to get confusing because Jonathan, when he’s alone, starts hearing a spooky voice calling his name and then sees the rotting-pumpkin masked figure from one year ago who fires little lightning bolts from his fingertips, knocking Jonathan to the ground. At the same time, one of the Charlie’s Angels girls, making out with Austin Powers in a car, gets all prissy and Austin leaves, then somebody else gets into the car, traps the girl’s head in the window and slits her throat. She is later found by the other two Angels (who look for somewhere to pee, then decide they don’t need to go after all but continue looking anyway) with her face all horribly carved up and generally screaming as she falls to the ground. Of course they help their friend by both running off and, when they return, she has gone.

In a prime example of how inept this movie is, the two girls repeatedly claim that their friend was dead even though we saw her running and screaming in front of them only two minutes ago. Looks to me like the “she was dead - and now she’s gone” scene was shot first, then there was some practical difficulty having the actress just tumble out of a doorway onto her face so they let her be not quite dead when they shot the earlier scene. And the film-makers either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the two scenes simply don’t match.

What else? Well, the Hulk guy gets pushed onto a drill that goes through his ample stomach and one of the toga guys is decapitated while pissing in a pumpkin field but doesn’t fall over, leading to a nonsensical but childishly amusing shot of the corpse continuing to urinate on its own severed head. Then Tammy gets killed too and her face is carved up like the Angel girl’s one was. That’s what lies behind the icky image on the DVD sleeve. So, we have a psycho attacking the teenagers who likes to carve up their faces like pumpkins... could he be a pumpkin carver? Erm, could be, but why does he also use drills and decapitation? And why does no-one - not one single person - who sees either of the pumpkin-carved faces comment on how they look like a carved pumpkin? (I mean, they don’t really but they’re obviously meant to.)

So what is happening? There are four possibilities.

1) There is a masked psycho killing the teenagers. Not killing them for any moral reason: arsehole jock Lance is fine but nice guy Hulk gets it and only one of the two toga guys loses his head. Also, at no point do any of the partying kids realise they are in danger. Even the two surviving Angels simply decide to go home. And who could this psycho be? The most likely explanation is old man Wickets, especially after a completely gratuitous scene where he tries to persuade Jonathan to stab him in the chest with a chisel. But how would he know what Alec’s mask looked like? And what’s with the lighting-from-fingers schtick?

2) Maybe this is Alec himself, back from the dead. But then why is he brutally killing random party-goers he doesn’t know while simply throwing Jonathan around with magic lightning?

3) Okay, maybe it’s not Alec per se but it’s some sort of demon. But then, why is it singling out Jonathan for special attention and why is its mask the same as Alec’s was?

4) Okay, okay, how about this? It’s all in Jonathan’s head. After all, he only sees rotting-pumpkin mask when they’re alone. But then who killed Hulk, First Angel and Second Toga Guy?

5) Wait wait wait! Here’s a fifth possibility. Maybe Jonathan is the psycho! Maybe he somehow got hold of a mask just like Alec’s and killed First Angel and imagined meeting his deadly alter ego and - no, hang on. That doesn’t work because of the climactic scene where Lynn and Jonathan both find dead Tammy and confront old man Wickets who admits to the murder and then turns into Alec. Except this is then contradicted by an epilogue where the cops clear up the bodies - apparently unconcerned by at least five brutal murders in a town of 700 people on one night - and the siblings get into a car only for Jonathan to turn into Alec and threaten Lynn...

In a nutshell, the maroons who made this film had no idea what the actual threat was so they tried to have it all ways by just throwing all sorts of shit together and as a result the film makes no sense. Not a shred of sense. Not one iota. What a load of crap.

There's no structure to this film, no pacing, no motivation, no empathy, no thing. Well, there is one thing...

Pumpkin carving. Thought I’d say it once more because it’s so important to modern civilisation.

In fact, even the pumpkin-carved faces don’t make sense. Look at that make-up, which is barely glimpsed in the film but plastered on the DVD cover. Are we supposed to think that carving crude eyes, mouth and nose into a person’s face turns their skin white and exposes black flesh beneath? And for Christ’s sake, you can still see the actress’s lips behind the make-up! It’s a real contender for the worst, most nonsensical sleeve image ever.

Also in the cast of this shambolic excuse for a movie are... hmm, that’s odd. Very few of the other actors seem to have been in anything at all. Crumbs, imagine having nothing but this rubbish on your CV. Okay, let’s name some crew names instead, starting with writer-director Robert Mann. As far as I can tell, with little to go on but the Inaccurate Movie Database, this guy is an actor but he’s not the Robert Mann who was in the remake of Black Christmas, as they have very different photos on their IMDB pages. He wrote, directed and starred in a thriller called Trapped in 1999 and beyond that his career is a bit of a mystery. Has he really not appeared on screen since a role in Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things in 1971? And has writer-producer Sheldon Silverstein really got no credits between a 1994 thriller also called Trapped(!) and The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1974? (Or was that the children’s author of the same name?)

The IMDB, as usual, is as much use as no use. However I did find an interview with Robert Mann on BloodyDisgusting.com where he comes across as thinking he has made some sort of masterpiece and calls this “a psychological/horror film”! Yes, Robert, it’s about as psychological as Dance with a Vampire.

There are half a dozen associate/executive producers including leading lady Amy Weber. Most of cinematographer/editor Philip Hurn’s previous credits seem to be golf documentaries. Could production designer George Stokes really be the same guy who was construction co-ordinator on Capricorn One, Spaceship, Buckaroo Banzai, Lethal Weapon and The Abyss and/or the guy who designs the background for the Justice League cartoon?


Ah, here’s a credit that seems apposite. 'Special make-up effects supervisor’ Jeff Colbert also worked on the unbelievably poor Camp Blood 2 (as well as Dead Seven, Endangered Species and The New Adventures of Robin Hood). He teaches make-up effects through his imaginatively named Motion Picture F/X Company; I hope the first thing he teaches his students is to stay away from crappy films like The Pumpkin Karver. ‘Visual effects supervisor’ Michael Webber is also a producer, his films including a ‘Christian-friendly’ horror flick called Thr3e and something called House which is apparently not a remake of House. Stunt co-ordinator Scott Blackwood (odd - I don’t recall any stunts in the movie) also worked on The Glass Trap, Cyber-Tracker 2 and Project Vampire.

The Pumpkin Karver is generally shoddy all round and it’s difficult to work out who could possibly get any enjoyment from watching it except somebody so drunk/stoned that they would watch anything. The DVD includes an alternate ending with the same dialogue but dead Tammy in a car boot and Jonathan waving a gun at old man Wickets instead of a pitchfork. Also a trailer and a few minutes of ‘bloopers’ which appear to just be random scraps of B-roll footage. The US disc apparently includes a director’s commentary.

MJS rating: C-

Director: David Schmoeller
Writer: 'Joseph G Collodi'
Producer: Hope Perello
Cast: Paul Le Mat, Irene Miracle, Robin Frates
Country: USA
Year of release: 1989
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Prism)

Charles Band has a thing about dolls. You can see it in his filmography: Dolls, Blood Dolls, Dollman (not actually a doll but easily mistaken for one), Doll Graveyard, Demonic Toys, Dollman vs Demonic Toys, the toy dinosaurs in the Prehysteria! films and of course this movie and its eight (so far) sequels/prequels. Dolls and puppets are so ubiquitous in his films that he has now released a 'greatest hits' package of clips entitled When Puppets and Dolls Attack!.

Did young Charlie Band suffer some sort of toybox trauma when he was growing up in Italy? He seems such a well-balanced, straightforward sort of bloke that it's difficult to believe he was ever savaged by an Action Man or attacked by a GI Joe. So why this theme in his work? I suspect it's because he has spotted that puppets and dolls make terrific monsters for a variety of reasons.

On a technical level, they're great because they can be animated without worry. Whether they're glove puppets, rod puppets, stop-motion macquettes or marionettes, there is no need to try and create completely smooth and fluid animation. Not only does it not matter if they move slightly jerkily, it actually helps to establish their character. Of course they're jerky - they're wood! They are lumps of stiff wood or plastic and all their joints are simple hinges. What better way to disguise the fact that you're using a puppet to create an effect than by having that puppet actually play a puppet. Consider something like the title characters in Ghoulies or Marvin the homunculus in Decadent Evil: we suspend our disbelief but we can clearly see that these are puppets, even if we can't see who is operating them. But that suspension of disbelief becomes irrelevant when they characters are presented to us as puppets.

So that's the technical aspect, though I don't want to take anything away from the skills of regular Band effects men like John Carl Buechler or the late David Allen. There is also a psychological aspect. Dolls and puppets are creepy and that's pretty much all there is to it. They represent living things and they actually move like living things, but they're not living things (or at least, we hope they're not). They are simulacra, they straddle the worlds of the animate and the inanimate, which really ought to remain separate. Above all it's those painted or moulded faces with their unmoving expressions. Just like clowns - and some puppets are clowns, which makes them twice as scary - the smile you see has no bearing on the individual's mood or intentions. One of our principal communication channels has been cut off. And we can't interpret body language either because it's that jerky, unnatural movement. Godammit, they shouldn't be moving at all!

Band isn't the first film-maker to spot and exploit this inherent horror and I'm sure he won't be the last. From the creepy ventriloquist's doll in the 1940s British classic Dead of Night to the Thai puppet theatre in Nonzee Nimibutr's segment of Three, from the little wooden figure in Trilogy of Terror to the CGI mannequins of Malice@Doll, these things are a standard device of film-makers and storytellers seeking to represent 'the other'. This is a subgenre which has close ties to the 'wax museum' school of horror, or at least that part of it where the figures come to life (not so much the dipping-people-in-wax movies). In those films the 'people' are just as artificial but they're life-size and it is probably no coincidence that one of Charles Band's biggest successes of his early years was the brilliant Tourist Trap with its psychically controlled mannequins.

What puts Charlie in a whole field of his own is his realisation that there is a third reason to feature puppets and dolls as his protagonists, beyond the technical and psychological. One word: merchandise. Fans like to collect toys and models of their favourite characters so why not go the whole hog and sell them exact replicas? Life-size, even. The Full Moon range of action figures was a canny move which has paid off handsomely, not just for Band but for those fans canny enough to save up the figures and the flog them years later on eBay.

Which brings us to this movie from the glory days of Full Moon when the time and the money was available to make films like this and there was an insatiable straight-to-video market that lapped them up.

The interesting thing about Puppet Master is that it is not primarily about the puppets, though they are much more than just a McGuffin or an arbitrary threat. We open in the 1930s at a fancy California cliff-top hotel, the Bodega Bay, where puppeteer Andre Toulon (William Hickey: Prizzi's Honour, The Name of the Rose) is finishing the final details on a puppet, delicately painting in the facial features. Two guys in sharp suits are making their way through the hotel - and so is something unseen, represented by a floor level Steadicam. David Allen's effects are terrific right from the off because we see so little of them. Under David Schmoeller's direction we have an occasional shadow or a movement in the corner of the frame, but mostly we know what is happening without anything having to be animated at all.

However, there is no skimping on actually acknowledging that what we have here are living puppets and when the little fellow arrives at Toulon's door we see what he looks like: black coat and hat, evilly grinning white face with deep-set eyes (allegedly modelled on Klaus Kinski) and a hook on one wrist, a mini-machete on the other. Although none of the puppets are given names in the film itself, the (non-dialogue) voices are credited so we know that this tiny chap's name is Blade.

Toulon puts Blade and the other puppets in a large travel case, along with a small scroll covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and hides the lot behind a secret panel in the wall. The guys in suits (credited as 'Assassins') take out their pistols and burst into Toulon's room but the old puppet master puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger before they can reach him.

Jump forward to the present day (well, 1989) and we are introduced to four friends who share some degree of psychic ability. There's Alex Whitaker, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University (Paul Le Mat: American Graffiti, Strange Invaders); white witch Dana Hadley (Irene Miracle: Argento's Inferno, Watchers II) who works as a fortune teller in a carnival; and sex-obsessed psychic researchers Frank Forrester (Matt Roe: Black Scorpion I and II) and Carrisa Stamford (Kathryn O'Reilly: Saturday the 14th Strikes Back). The four of them travel out to the Bodega Bay where they discover that their former associate Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F Skaggs: Solar Crisis, Oblivion I and II) is recently deceased. They haven't seen him in a couple of years and in that time he has married the young lady who inherited the art deco palace from her parents, Megan (Robin Frates: The Arrival, Man's Best Friend).

It must be off-season because the hotel is deserted apart from Megan, one maid (Mews Small: Zapped!, Woody Allen's Sleeper and Frenchie in the original Broadway production of Grease) and the body, lying in an open coffin. The psychic quartet are uncertain why they have been summoned and puzzled as to how Gallagher could have died without at least one of them sensing it empathically in some way. Dana pokes him with a bodkin, just to be certain.

As the team settle in to their rooms, we start to get hints of something scurrying around the hotel. Carissa picks up memories from furniture of some of the wild sexual shenanigans which happened in the place in its heyday; Alex has disturbing dreams which are premonitions of something; and Dana gets drunk, talking to the stuffed lapdog that she keeps in her luggage and explaining to Megan what a shit her late husband actually was. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Gallagher is discovered out of his coffin, sitting on a chair.

What the plot boils down to is that Andre Toulon was the last possessor of an Ancient Egyptian magic which can animate the inanimate. Gallagher sought to locate that secret and, it seems, may have found it. And boiling that down further, we get a gang of tiny wooden terrors setting out to kill everyone in the building. But who is their master? Who is controlling them? Who, ultimately, will they obey?

As well as the previously mentioned Blade, there is: Tunneler, who wears a Nazi uniform and has a drill on top of his head; Pinhead, who has a tiny head but human-sized hands which he uses to punch or strangle people; Leech Woman, a glamorous white-skinned doll who regurgitates huge black leeches (really disturbing idea, that one); and Jester, the brains behind the team. It was Jester whom we saw being painted in the prologue although oddly the only time we see him with his jester's hat on is as a shadow behind a curtain. Pinhead is a particularly neat idea as the hands in some shots are actually real hands (or at least, real hands inside stubby latex gloves). Much of the puppet work is done by rods and hands, with just a few superb stop-motion shots that really remind us what an amazing animator David Allen was.

And this is all real. There was no CGI in 1989, no computers to digitally remove wires and rods and puppeteers. Anything that wasn't going to be in shot had to be kept out of shot, and it is. Above all, it's the sparsity of the effects work that impresses. The budget is kept low by only showing the puppets when needed and then often only as glimpses. It's the stop-motion scenes which eat up time and money and there are just enough of those to convince us that these puppets do have completely independent movement.

The cast work well together and the acting is good, just keeping to the straight side of oddness in scenes such as Dana talking to her stuffed dog. Stuart Gordon regular Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, Castle Freak) turns up briefly as a woman having her fortune told in Dana's first scene. The puppet 'voices' are provided by actors who specialise in ADR work.

The script credit to 'Joseph G Collodi' is of course a nod to the author of Pinocchio and disguises a screenplay by director Schmoeller from a story by Band and Kenneth J Hall (writer/director of Evil Spawn and The Halfway House). Schmoeller has directed six other pictures for Band: Tourist Trap, Crawlspace, Curse IV, Netherworld and kidflicks The Secret Kingdom and Mysterious Museum. The 35mm cinematography, making full use of the terrific location, is courtesy of regular Fulci collaborator Sergio Salvati whose impressive CV includes The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Ghoulies II and Spellcaster. Production designer John Myhre made the leap, in eleven years, from this to X-Men.

Puppet Master was a big hit and ultimately has proved to be Full Moon's most enduring success. It was followed in 1991 by Puppet Master II, with David Allen taking on full directorial duties, and David DeCoteau's Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge with Guy Rolfe (And Now the Screaming Starts, Mr Sardonicus) in the William Hickey role. Jeff Burr directed Parts IV and V, back to back in 1994, also with Rolfe. DeCoteau returned (under his 'Victoria Sloane' pseudonym) for 1998's Curse of the Puppet Master and then became 'Joseph Tennent' for the following year's prequel Retro Puppet Master in which Rolfe briefly reprised his role; this had apparently started life as a possible Part IV with a script by Matthew Jason Walsh although the finished screenplay was credited to "Benjamin Carr" (The Creeps, Totem, Frankenstein Reborn!), a Full Moon pseudonym for Neal Marshall Stevens (Hellraiser: Deader, Thir13en Ghosts).

2003's Puppet Master: The Legacy is an unashamed greatest hits package with footage from all the previous films (bar this one) presented as flashbacks in a new framing story, directed by Band, about a character from Part III. That was supposedly the end of the story but in 2004 the Sci-Fi Channel produced the long-awaited franchise clash Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, directed by Ted Nicolaou and starring Corey Feldman (The Lost Boys) as Andre Toulon's great-nephew. Charles Band received a courtesy credit on that but otherwise had no connection whatsoever with it.

It's a heck of a legacy, but as always there is the law of diminishing returns and the original film is still regarded as the best. It doesn't have a heck of a lot of story in its 85 minutes (the sleeve claims 'approx. 90') but it has style and tension to spare. The whole thing is played pretty much straight, the deaths are suitably bloody though there is little gratuitous gore. It's what happens to the characters after they die which is where the real horror lies.

Currently unavailable on R1, it seems, this budget price R2 disc from cheapie label Prism has a nice transfer of a good print and includes, as is typical for Charles Band movies, a 'making of' featurette. This is a seven-minute promo piece which concentrates on the effects, with some neat behind-the-scenes footage and comments from Schmoeller, Band, Le Mat, David Allen, animatronics engineer Mark Rappaport (Child's Play 3, Demonic Toys, Army of Darkness), make-up man Jason Simmons (who now sculpts licensed Disney figurines!) and uncredited dwarf actor Cindy Sorensen (Beanstalk, The Dark Backward) who provided Pinhead's live-action hands.

There are also filmographies for the main cast and crew but they are pretty useless. Copied direct from the IMDB (hence the special effects are by someone named 'David Allen (II)'), the films are lumped together by decade rather than giving individual years. Barbara Crampton's page has a photograph of Irene Miracle and Miracle's own page includes a biography which misspells Dario Argento's name. There's a trailer too, which refers to Leech Woman as 'Ms Leech;; names Miracle, Le Mat, Crampton and Hickey (in that order); and refers to Charles Band as the producer of Re-Animator which I don't believe is strictly true.

The original Puppet Master is a terrific piece of straight-faced, straight-to-video creepiness which has stood the test of time well.

MJS rating: A-

Director: various, cobbled together by someone on a Friday afternoon
Writer: as above
Producer: as above
Cast: Naoki Tachibana and a bunch of guys in rubber suits
Year of release: difficult to tell, probably late 1990s
Country: Thailand/Japan
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

When I invested in a VCD of this Thai film (aka Yak Wat Jang Vs Jumborg Ace, Yuk Wud Jaeng vs Jumbo A and many other varient spellings) I expected it to be an undubbed, slightly different edit of the Tsuburaya-produced, Thai/Japanese co-production which I had previously reviewed in its Italian incarnation as Mars Men. In fact, this is an almost entirely different film, sharing probably no more than 20 minutes out of its 80-minute running time.

What we have here is a mishmash of footage from the original Yak Wat Jang Vs Jumborg Ace, footage from the Jumborg Ace/Jumbo A television series (which ran for 50 episodes from 17th January to 29th December 1973), and newly shot footage. It is edited together so haphazardly, with characters appearing and disappearing at random, that it’s debatable whether there is in fact supposed to be a single narrative thread here or whether it’s just a compilation of Jumborg Ace’s greatest fights. I’ll try and sum up what happens, but be warned, this is a lo-o-o-ong summary!

We open on Earth with Dr Suriya and his wife Nipha from the Protective Attack Team exploring a Thai temple using their geiger counter. They don’t find anything but do stop to look at a giant statue of Yak Wat Jang. An alien then sends a bunch of cyborg-monsters down to earth and from five minutes in we have unfettered, unexplained, massive destruction of property by giant kaiju, which is frankly what we’re paying to see here.

In their control centre are a team of five people in silver suits who are possibly meant to be a new incarnation of the PAT. There’s a couple, a young boy (with a shaved head) and two extremely camp and unfunny comic relief characters, one with dark skin and red hair, the other very tall.

Cut to golden-haired Jump Killer and spiky-shouldered Antigone, two evil Martian types in their flying saucer who were the principal villains in Mars Men (one difference is that Jump Killer is female here). They watch some TV footage of Thailand.

A Cessna light aircraft is caught up in the big kaiju destruction and goes spinning into a blob of green light. When the pilot Naoki Tachibana (played by... Naoki Tachibana!) comes to, he is in a misty limbo, being addressed by an Ultraman-style character who shows him the mighty cyborg Jumbo A which can turn into his plane. Then he’s suddenly back in his plane so he tries transforming.

The alien we saw earlier sends a robot double of Jumbo A against our hero so we get to see the giant cyborg fight himself, or at least a version of himself with detachable flying forearms. He defeats the evil doppelganger by turning into an animated green streak which decapitates it.

Then we get the creation sequence of Jumborg Nine. The Ultraman-style character is seen again, this time giving Naoki the power to create a giant, world-saving cyborg out of, not a Cessna, but a Mini! The Italian Job was never like this... We then get a brief shot of the two Jumborgs fighting each other.

Jumborg/Jumbo Nine (wasn’t there a pop hit called ‘Jumbo Number Nine?’ oh, please yourselves) fights the alien we saw earlier (who is now giant) and a goofy muppet monster. He blasts the monster’s head and arms off with a fireball and stabs the alien with a sword from a slot in his chest; the alien collapses and spurts blood from his mouth.

Back in the New PAT’s control centre (the location of which is never hinted at), a strange, dark brown idol of an old man frightens the two camp characters, though it’s not clear why. This is the same character who battled Yak Wat Jang at the end of the Thai demon’s first cinematic appearance, Tah Tien, although I still don’t know who he is. Outside, there are a couple more Jumbo vs monster fights.

At 28 minutes in, we get the first bit of footage recognisable from Mars Men, as Dr Suriya and Nipha put on silver protection suits and helmets - complete with face-plates which steam up as the poor actors try and breathe - and explore some caves. There they spot Antigone fighting a three-headed dragon (not Ghidorah or even a rip-off of same) with his glowing sword - footage which was missing from Mars Men, possibly wisely given the awful dragon costume. Antigone takes from the cave wall a massive crystal, the solar eclipse diamond, which causes uncontrolled extreme weather conditions to suddenly hit the planet.

As a giant Antigone trashes the city, the boy and two camp blokes from the New PAT send the old man idol to become giant size and fight him, with all the traditional collateral damage that ensues.

Elsewhere in the city, the appearance of the Martians’ flying saucer causes stock footage panic. The Mini that can turn into Jumbo Nine (the Jum-Car or Jum-Z) stops and out get Naoki and Lin, the little kid from the original PAT who is (I think) Nipha’s little brother. A white-wigged woman dressed in black beams down from the saucer and says something to the crowd, before turning into the giant Jump Killer and trashing nearby buildings. Back in the control centre, the five members of the New PAT and the old man idol watch this happening.

Now we’re 47 minutes in, more than halfway through, and we get another bit of footage from the original film, as PAT aircraft blast at a giant laser which Jump Killer has set up on the Moon, using the solar eclipse diamond, to blast Earth. One of the craft crashes. At the old control centre, Naoki dashes off to his Cessna to create Jumbo A and other members of the team blast off in the, um, aircraft which we’ve just seen them piloting to the Moon. Hmm...

In the New PAT control centre, a doll of Yak Wat Jang which we saw earlier being waved about is made life-size somehow, then becomes giant and flies off, but this is new footage, vastly inferior to the creation scene in Mars Men (imagine - something actually being inferior to Mars Men!). Meanwhile, Jumbo A straps himself onto a space rocket to launch himself at the Moon, where he proceeds to fight Jump Killer and Antigone.

The second disc kicks off, 53 minutes in, with footage from the original movie of Yak Wat Jang and Jumbo A fighting each other on the Moon before realising their mistake and teaming up to battle Jump Killer and Antigone, plus a subplot of one of the PAT craft coming to rescue the downed ship. One thing that is very noticeable is that throughout the fights the giants never shut up. It seems you can never have just action, the character must always be saying something like, “Ah, Jumbo A! I will defeat you! You are no match for me! And then I will defeat Yak Wat Jang too! Hahahahaha!” and, “No, you will never defeat me! For I am Jumbo A!” etc.

After our two heroes defeat Antigone, Yak Wat Jang wanders off into a cloud of purple smoke, leaving Jumbo A to fight Jump Killer.

Next up is the most extraordinary scene of all, lifted from the old TV series. Jump Killer is back on Earth and is human-sized (continuity be damned!). She and three of her anonymous alien goons fight Naoki, who gets out of his Mini but obviously doesn’t think to turn it into Jumbo Nine and just squash her. Captured, he is strung up from a scaffold by his feet, while other members of the old PAT, even little Lin, are strapped up around him - crucified! Even by the outré standards of this ‘film’, this is an incredible scene, made all the more memorable by the soundtrack which eschews the normal vocal, orchestral pomposity (“Yak! Yak! Yak! Yak Wat Jang!”) for a lone trumpet. This plaintive music gives the scene the air of a spaghetti western, an idea exacerbated by numerous atmospheric shots of crows perched on the scaffolds and crucifixes. Sadly this can’t last long, as the PAT ship returns from the Moon, causing Jump Killer to grow giant and try to swat it out of the sky.

This is followed by inexplicable footage of Jump Killer on Mars looking at the graves of Antigone and two other Martians, Betagone and Satangone.

Jumbo A appears and fights her, then Jumbo Nine appears and fights her, but not both together because these are from two separate episodes it seems. She counters by transforming into a super-scary version of herself, complete with horns. Jumbo Nine grabs an enormous shard of crystal and rams it straight through Jump Killer’s stomach, causing an eruption of green blood and killing her.

Then, because continuity is for wimps, Jump Killer is fine and is setting two monsters against Jumbo A, the two who fought him on the Moon in Mars Men but we now seem to be on Earth (possibly, some of the time) because there is vegetation on the set. Defeated, Jumbo A lies on the floor but - hooray! - here comes Yak Wat Jang out of his cloud of smoke to kick Jump Killer’s arse! (All this with occasional cutaways to the New PAT team in their control centre, following the action on video screens.)

Jumbo A recovers and helps Yak Wat Jang defeat the monsters but Jump Killer disappears. The smoky atmosphere clears and the sun shines through on our planet. Huzzah!

But the solar eclipse diamond-powered laser is still on the Moon, blasting at Earth and causing millions of dollars of stock footage destruction. Jump Killer and Antigone appear on the Moon in their flying saucer but Yak Wat Jang and Jumbo A turn up to fight them, which they do by deflecting the laser onto each villain in turn, causing them to catch fire and then explode. Our two giant heroes destroy the laser, take the diamond, thank each other and fly back home to Earth.

Well, what the bloody hell was all that about? Here’s what I can determine: there are two Protective Attack Teams, the old 1970s lot which included Dr Suriya, Nipha and Lin and had access to the Jum-Cessna and the Jum-Car, and a 1990s version with two camp, irritating twats. Jump Killer is very much the main villain, or rather villainess, and has at least two other forms of herself into which she can transform. When I originally posted my Mars Men review I had Jump Killer and Antigone (aka Anchigoné) mixed up but I have now corrected this. Jumbo A, who was described in Mars Men as ‘il gigante robot Americano’ is very definitely Japanese here as he can be heard saying “Arigato” and “Sayonara” at the end. That’s about it.

Although the main plot of the original film - Antigone’s theft of the diamond from Earth and its use in a giant Moon-based laser - is still just about visible, it is mixed up with way too much footage from the TV series to make any sense. Characters die hideously and then are fine (and somewhere else) a moment later. And the inserted footage of the crappy new version of PAT is just horrible, especially their two gibbering ‘comic relief’ characters.

Actor Naoki Tachibana was also in a TV series called Kagestar and allegedly was imprisoned for murder in 1985! There are no on-screen credits on this movie.

I’m not fond of recommending bootlegs, but I have to say that if you only want one film of a giant Ultraman-esque cyborg hero teaming up with an enormous living Thai stone idol to defeat giant Martians - and it’s difficult to see who would want two - then you’re better off getting Mars Men, even with its Italian dubbing. I can also recommend the two other Tsuburaya-produced Thai kaiju movies Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman and Hanuman vs 5 Kamen Rider. This VCD on the Tiga label is only of interest as a sort of Jumborg Ace sampler.

MJS rating: D

Director: some Thai guy
Writer: some other Thai guy
Producer: some guy from Thailand
Cast: Sombat Methanee, Supuk Likitkul, Thep Tienchai
Year of release: 1973
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

Several reviews of Mars Men mention that the character of Yak Wat Jang, the giant Thai demon/superhero character in that Thai/Japanese co-production, also appeared in an earlier movie. Well now - here it is.

And let me tell you, folks: it’s bonkers.

In a prologue, we see a ragged-looking chap carrying a gold statue of Buddha which he has presumably stolen. Chortling with glee, he sits down at the foot of a large, gaily painted statue of Yak Wat Jang. Bad mistake. The statue lifts its staff and pounds the thief into the ground - literally. Hooray for Yak Wat Jang!

This is the last we will see of Yak Wat Jang for more than an hour.

So here’s what happens in the rest of the movie. A comet hurtles out of the sky and crashes into the sea (or at least, we see a still illustration of a comet followed by a small explosion in the water). From this comes a giant snake which crawls up onto the land and coughs up an egg. The egg is then eaten by a giant frog, which subsequently spits it out and expires. The egg promptly explodes to reveal a beautiful young woman, who somehow magically melds with the dead giant frog, who then gets up and walks away.

The snake (which we’ll see again) is basically a life-size prop. The frog is a man in a costume. It’s utterly, utterly extraordinary.

An old guy with a comedy moustache (let’s call him Roy) is riding his water buffalo along, minding his own business, when he is startled by a giant frog, which talks to him in the voice of a young woman. He takes her home to his shack, which has a tiger skin on the wall, and they share a comedy scene with a two-foot-long cigarette. Now tell me this folks: what other movie offers you a scene where an old man and a giant frog share an enormous roll-up?

Cut to an underwater kingdom where a woman with a head-dress like a cobra is discussing something with a young man who is probably her consort. I don’t know who this woman is, but we never see her again, which is a shame because it raised my hopes that this might be yet another snake-woman movie. Instead we see that old giant snake again, coming ashore and transforming into a young man (could be the one from the last scene but I really was by this point too engrossed in this weirdness to go back and check). He wears a snake-skin jerkin and red leggings and has a belt shaped like a snake. So this is a snake-man movie. Ooh, so close.

Back at Roy’s shack, we find that the frog can turn into the young woman but only does so when he’s not there. She magically creates a lot of food and drink, cushions and carpets, which impresses him, but he still thinks she’s a frog. The next day, she sees him off to work, but he sneaks back and peeks through the window, where he sees her in human form. Being a lecherous old comic relief character, he tiptoes in, grabs her from behind and steals a kiss - during which she of course transforms back into a frog.

Wait, what’s this? It’s some copyright-ignoring Sergio Leone music as another old guy rides up to Roy’s shack. He wears a stetson and a sheriff’s badge and a sarong. Clearly he’s a mate of Roy, unlike the young man dressed in black with a bandolier over his shoulder who follows him. I really didn’t understand this bit, which finishes with the young villainous guy chasing after the sheriff to give him his horse back. We never see either again, but we do get to see a giant frog chatting with a talking horse.

Okay, let’s leave Roy and Frog Girl for the moment and follow the adventures of Snake Boy as he comes across a small camp, occupied by a tall, good-looking hunter in a safari suit and his two assistants, who we’ll call Woolly Hat and Orange Vest. Snake Boy magically turns his belt into a (real) python which attacks Orange Vest, but Snake Boy then steps in and rescues him from the (drugged) snake. Snake Boy and Safari Suit swiftly become best friends.

Woolly Hat, being a lecherous young comic relief character, goes down to the river where he spies on two naked women. But who’s this coming up behind him? Why, it’s a man-in-a-crappy-suit gorilla. This movie just gets better and better. Back at the camp, the foursome pair off: Woolly Hat and Safari Suit forming one team, Orange Vest and Snake Boy the other. I assume they’re going to hunt for the gorilla but who can tell? The former pair are attacked by a rhinoceros, which consists of a combination of a dodgy puppet head and stock footage of a rhino clearly shot in a zoo.

Intermission. Change discs.

Snake Boy and Orange Vest find themselves in a rocky landscape where they see, well, a sort of dragon-dinosaur-monster. It’s about eight feel tall with a short tail, spikes up its back and a sort of beak - a stunning piece of ultra low budget suitmation. They kill it with a grenade but when Orange Vest checks the body the thing turns out to be still alive and promptly kills him. Snake Boy gives the beast a flying kung fu kick and knocks it over a cliff. Looking down, he sees that it has not only survived the fall but is now fighting a different dragon-dinosaur-monster! (This one has a longer tail and masses of big teeth.)

Wait a minute - the monsters are now fighting on top of a cliff, where they knock each other over the edge (cue shot of two monster suits being flung down a cliff). Snake Boy runs up and checks that they really are dead, despite the fact that he should technically be two cliffs above them.

Safari Suit, Woolly Hat and Snake Boy meet up back at camp where a sudden storm causes a flash flood which sweeps them and everything else away. Safari Suit is discovered the next day, unconscious, by... Roy, who is out spear-fishing. Roy takes him back to his shack where he meets and falls in love with Frog Girl (who is staying human for the moment).

We do briefly see what happened to one of the others - a bloody great crocodile (stock footage/puppet) chomps down on his limp body, causing vast amounts of blood to flow into the river. We can’t actually see if this is Woolly Hat or Snake Boy, and we never see either of them again.

Safari Suit and Frog Girl go to Bangkok where they visit various temples and speak with an ancient, white-haired hermit who magically disappears. Finally, 76 minutes into the film, Yak Wat Jang reappears. The young couple admire the 15-foot tall giant statue then discover the Buddha from the prologue hidden in some shrubbery. While Safari Suit is taking that somewhere, Frog Girl transforms into her amphibian persona and talks with Yak Wat Jang who magically turns into a human version of himself, retaining the extravagant costume and with a hat depicting the statue’s scary face.

Now appears the weird old man statue character who we previously saw in the cobbled-together-from-TV-episodes abomination Yak Wat Jang wu Jumbo A. Frog Girl turns him into a human version of himself too. The two gods argue like little children and eventually start fighting. In the last few minutes of the film, we finally get to see what the inlay promised: two giant beings devastating downtown Bangkok.

Well, it’s the cheapest, least thrilling giant-vs-giant rumble ever. The only miniature on show is a bridge, next to which Yak Wat Jang trashes some toy boats. All other shots achieve the impression of gigantism by simply shooting the two costumes in Bangkok itself from a very low angle. A few shots are even done over-the-shoulder, looking down at the tiny people and cars below, by putting the costumes on a hotel balcony! Eventually, the old man statue is defeated and Yak Wat Jang turns back into a statue. Frog Girl and Snake Boy live happily ever after.

Even by my standards - and I do have standards, believe it or not - this is one of the weirdest films I have ever seen. It looks like it might be based on some ancient Thai legend about a frog princess and a snake prince or something. The scenes with the giant frog are really quite creepy, like one of those scary East German fairy tale movies. In terms of battling giant demons it’s a bit of a swizz since they’re only on screen for about five minutes. However, the two dinosaurs and the gorilla go some way towards making up for that.

The only information on this film I can find anywhere is the list of three actors on the eThaicd website. Other than that I know nothing. Oh, but what a joy to watch such weirdness. It’s cheap and tatty but it is also clearly intended, at least in part, as a comedy. Whatever, it is a unique film.

MJS rating: C+

Update: In 2008, several years after this vague review was first posted, I received a very helpful e-mail from Eric Hurd, to whom I am indebted, not least for his kind comments about this site:

“Long time listener, first time caller” as they say here on the radio in the US. I’m a big fan of your website and love reading your reviews.

"I’ve especially enjoyed reading all the stuff you’ve written on the 'Yak Wat Jang' character’s appearance in films, most notably since it is the only major mention of these babies in English! I enjoy seeking out information on unknown giant monster films, particularly foreign ones (I hope to write a book on them someday) and finding anything at all not in foreign typefaces helps my searches greatly.

"Well, in my findings, I’ve come across some added info and links you may wish to take note of for your wonderful articles, especially in light of Chaiyo and company finally getting dusted in their whole Ultraman lawsuit fiasco. Firstly, you probably know good ol’ Yak is a character taken from real life, specifically from the statues in front of the temples in Wat Chaeng and Wat Pho (see these pictures). I’ve found that there is some sort of classic mythology there, which is the basis for the Tah Tien movie. The grey stone fellow is apparently, another temple guardian, which seems to go by the name 'Yak Wat Pho', pretty much due to his location. This was confirmed by a couple references to the same statue by that name online.

"In the picture link I mentioned above, Wat Pho’s picture is a couple shots down on the page. Note also the two Wat Jang guardians in the first two pictures on the page. Both ‘guard’ the same building on either side. One is the ‘movie’ green color while the other is white and seemingly painted in the colors of Chaiyo’s Hanuman! You wonder if that's where they came up with them? Note also the many varieties of stone guardian statues on the page, particularly the armless female. There was definitely wasted giant creature material there, I tell you.

"Meanwhile, another page has surfaced, showing some information on Tah Tien in English. It appears to be from a 2006 screening and gives a little more detail, chiefly that the two giants were fighting over money! You may also take notice of the biased information on Chaiyo creating Ultraman- Bwa ha ha ha!!!!!

"And finally, there may be even one more appearance by the big green guy, this time teamed with Chaiyo’s other franchise player, Hanuman! (I was always surprised this wasn’t an obvious pairing from the get-go.) Made in 1984, some 10 years after the last Yak appearance at the time (Tah Tien being made in 1973 and the first Jumborg Ace and Giant pairing coming in ’74- dates found by cutting and pasting the original language into online film databases), it’s called The Noble War aka Suk Kumpakan and is supposedly based on the Ramayana. It, like the others, is available at ethaicd.com."

Director: Dave Allen
Writer: David Pabian
Producer: David DeCoteau, John Schouweiler
Cast: Elizabeth Mclellan, Collin Bernsen, Steve Welles
Country: USA
Year of release: 1991
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Puppet Master II is notable for two reasons. Apart from a segment of the 1985 anthology The Dungeonmaster, this was the only film actually directed by special effects legend David Allen (who died in 1999). Also, this was one of the first attempts by Charles Band to extend one of his films into a franchise (Trancers II was also produced around this time but released six months later).

Despite the absence of any returning (human) cast members, this is a direct sequel to Puppet Master. Alex Whitaker, the only survivor of the original team of paranormal investigators, is now locked up in an insane asylum but his apparently lunatic ramblings have prompted the US government’s Department of Paranormal Investigations (or somesuch) to visit the deserted Bodega Bay Hotel, armed with surveillance equipment and a batty old newspaper psychic, Camille Kenney (Nita Talbot, who seems to have been in at least one episode of every drama series or sitcom produced for American TV since 1949).

The team consist of Carolyn Bramwell (Elizabeth Mclellan: Crash and Burn), her brother Patrick (Gregory Webb: Lifeform), vivacious Wanda (shapely Charlie Spradling: Mirror Mirror, Meridian, Bad Channels, Wild at Heart - who has a brief topless scene) and bearded Lance (Jeff Weston, who flashes his arse: Demonic Toys, Oblivion 2 and a 1989 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth which was eight minutes of one film with an entire other, unrelated film tacked on the end!), the last two of whom have the hots for each other. They don’t know what sort of phenomena they might encounter but we do because we have already seen the little stars of Puppet Master digging up and reanimating the corpse of their creator, Andre Toulon (a scene which was later remade as the title sequence to the Filmonsters shorts such as Frankenstein Reborn!).

Toulon himself turns up unexpectedly at the hotel, swathed in bandages so that he looks like the Invisible Man (although Darkman would be a better comparison and is a more likely inspiration as, like Sam Raimi’s hero who made his debut the previous year, Toulon is not invisible under the bandages, just hideously scarred). Although we know that this is Toulon, the character calls himself Enrique Chanée, prompting Lance to call him ‘Chaney’.

By this time, however, the original quintet is down to three, Camille having disappeared and Patrick being dead. Camille had said she was planning to leave anyway because of the hotel’s bad vibes so the team assume she has simply gone off into town, although she has left all her belongings behind. We, of course, know that a couple of the deadly puppets killed her and dragged her away. Patrick, on the other hand, is very definitely dead by extraordinary means: Lance discovers him, screaming and bloody, as Tunneller drills into his forehead. The puppet is grabbed and smashed but too late to save Patrick.

However, this does allow Carolyn and the others to examine the doll, dissecting and even X-raying it. They find that it is mechanically detailed but has no power source or obvious means of control.

Apart from Chanée, the other visitor to the hotel is Michael Kenney (Collin ‘Brother of Corbin’ Bernsen: Frozen Assets, Future Shock), who comes searching for his mother and finds romance in the arms of the grieving Carolyn. Neither of them trust Chanée, who claims that he is the rightful owner of the hotel, and frankly they’re spot-on in their character judgement.

What Toulon’s creations are trying to do is collect human brains to extract the serum which gives life to inanimate matter. Although they have lost Tunneller - and Leech Woman is later destroyed when she attacks a local redneck couple - the puppets have a new recruit in Torch, a sort of German army android with a flame-thrower for a right hand (there are a couple of really rather good flame stunts). Sage Allen (Servants of Twilight, Armageddon) plays the redneck wife while George ‘Buck’ Flower, a regular face in John Carpenter films, is the husband. His extraordinarily cool CV also includes two Ilsa movies, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Drive-In Massacre, The Capture of Bigfoot, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama, Maniac Cop, Back to the Future Part 2, Pumpkinhead, Waxwork II, Munchie, Wishmaster, Curse of the Komodo, something called Satan’s Lust and many, many more great movies.

A simplistic story about killer puppets would be enough for many stravisnuts but here we have a flashback sequence to Cairo in 1912 when a young Toulon (played by Steve Welles, who is also under the bandages - he had small roles in The Addams Family and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) purchases the secret of artificial life from a mysterious merchant who shows him a little green gremlin. With Toulon is his wife Elsa, also played by Mclellan, so naturally he sees Carolyn as a reincarnation of his long lost love (shades of The Mummy, and not just because of the Egyptian setting) and instructs the puppets to spare her.

What he’s actually planning to do is transfer his soul/lifeforce/whatever into a lifesize puppet of a young man (Michael Todd: Robot Ninja, Lurking Fear), and Carolyn/Elsa’s into a similar female puppet - so that they can live together. But when the puppets realise that this is what he wants the serum for, rather than to prolong their own existence, they turn on their creator in the traditional manner. An effective epilogue sees the little fellows heading off to pastures new as a children’s entertainment, headed by the female puppet (Julianne Mazziotti).

Puppet Master II is easily as good as the original, a fine example of a sequel that really works, taking the ideas into new areas and new directions without compromising the first film. Dave Allen’s direction is smart and assured so it’s a shame that he never followed this up. Cinematographer Thomas F Denove also lit The Last Horror Film, Steve Barkett’s Aftermath, Demon Keeper and episodes of Star Trek: TNG, Deep Space Nine and Ally McBeal. He won a Technical Achievement Oscar in 1990 for inventing a digital/analog exposure meter and now teaches at UCLA.

Production designer Kathleen Coates’ other credits include Trancers II, Crash and Burn and Night Hunter while costume designer Miye Matsumoto worked on Hard Hunted, Zipperface and at least two of the four 3 Ninjas movie. David Barton, later director of Dead and Rotting, handled the special effects make-up which is excellent, including a bandageless Toulon and the creepy, wooden-faced, lifesize dolls at the end (Barton also performed similar duties on Puppet Master III). Pete von Sholly (writer of Prehysteria) provided storyboards for this film. Two editors are credited: Bert Glatstein (Castle Freak, Subspecies II and III) and Peter Teschner (Scary Movie 2, Borat).

Co-producer and second unit director King Wilder was editor on Intruder, Deadly Weapon and the gloriously silly Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death and also worked in various capacities on the American Ultraman series. Charlie Band’s brother Richard provides the score, as he would do for all the Puppet Master films up to number five, and Band’s son Alex (later lead singer with The Calling) and daughter Taryn appear briefly in the audience for Toulon’s puppet version of Faust in the Cairo flashback.

The special effects that bring the puppets to life are credited to David Allen Productions but with Allen himself behind the camera, actually animating the wee things fell to various members of his team. John Teska (Tremors, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) was ‘puppet supervisor’; nowadays he handles digital effects on things like Star Trek: Nemesis and Hellboy. Other names among the puppet crew include Mark Rappaport (one of the few people to have worked on both this film and its predecessor), Yancy Calzader (stop-motion credits include Demonic Toys and Robot Wars, now does digital effects for pictures like Boa vs Python and Dragon Fighter), Chris Endicott (now animating characters on films such as The Polar Express and Monster House) and Randall William Cook - who took home three consecutive special effects Oscars for the Lord of the Rings films.

As in the first film, these special effects are a mixture of rod puppetry and stop-motion, sparingly and hence effectively used. There’s real character in the puppets - just things like a slight movement of Blade’s jaw, cracking an evil smile - which marks out a David Allen effect, even if Allen himself was behind the camera. The matting of the stop-motion is faultless and there are a few brief shots where you really can’t tell what technique was used, which is always a mark of quality.

But a film is more than just effects, it also needs a great script. Puppet Master II is one of only three Band films - in fact only three actual produced films - written by Dave Pabian. But as the other two are Subspecies and Dollman, that’s an impressive hit rate! Not that those are Pabian’s only writing credits; in fact he has worked in various uncredited capacities as story editor, script agent etc for big and small Hollywood studios for many years. He’s a perfect example of how one should never take a listing on the Inaccurate Movie Database at face value.

The characters in Puppet Master II are sympathetic, believable and clearly defined, the only less-than-realistic lacuna being the way that Carolyn continues her work after the death of her brother. The story makes a sort of sense, fits in with what we know of both the puppets and Toulon from the first film, and adds in new stuff like the Egyptian back story. This is a terrific movie, easily one of Charlie Band’s best (he gets executive producer credit as usual, as well as ‘story by’), right up there with Castle Freak and Trancers.

Finally, a note of sadness. Elizabeth Mclellan seems to have finished her brief acting career (which included a soap stint on Santa Barbara and an episode of the Friday the 13th TV series) after this film. What she did for the next eleven years isn’t recorded but she apparently died in 2002, aged only 38.

MJS rating: A

Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: ‘August White’
Producer: Charles Band
Cast: Tom Sandoval, Levi Fiehler, Jenna Gallaher
Country: USA/China
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)
Website: www.fullmoondirect.com

They say that you can’t go home again and that is often the case with films. Once successful series which have been dormant, when revived, often turn out to be a poor reflection of their earlier brilliance. Whether they really are worse than the originals or whether these Johnny-come-lately sequels suffer mainly through a lack of nostalgia, there’s no doubt that the general trend is disappointment.

A fourth Indiana Jones film? That was worth waiting for - not. Star Wars prequels? George, you’ve lost it big time. An American Werewolf in Paris - the dampest of damp squibs. The Lost Boys: The Tribe - ouch.

This is the first Puppet Master movie for six years and, in some ways, the first real Puppet Master movie for 16 years. Let’s take a quick run-down of this perennially popular series.

The first film (which, interestingly, has the title onscreen as one word: Puppetmaster) was directed by David Schmoeller for Charlie Band’s Full Moon way back in 1989. It featured great stop-motion work by David Allen and told of a group of people in an abandoned California hotel, menaced by deadly living puppets. A prologue set in the 1930s, when the Bodega Bay Inn was a fashionable place to be seen, depicted elderly puppeteer Andre Toulon, creator of the deadly figurines, who animated them using an Ancient Egyptian scroll. Toulon was gunned down by Nazi agents but his puppets were hidden away.

Two years later the puppets (well, the most popular ones) returned in Puppet Master 2 and Allen was given the director’s chair on a feature for the only time in his tragically short life. A direct sequel to PM1, David Pabian’s script concentrated on a US government team investigating what happened at the Bodega Bay Inn and encountering a bandaged figure who claims to actually be Andre Toulon (which would make him about 130, but clearly he has not been kept alive by natural means). The secret of the puppets’ animation is revealed to be a chemical manufactured from brain tissue, a process documented in the hieroglyphics on the scroll that Toulon purchased in Egypt. Or something.

I haven’t seen Puppet Master 3: Toulon’s Revenge which was directed by David DeCoteau that same year, but it is reckoned to be one of the best films in the series. In a revisionist move, this prequel is set in 1941, two years after the original. Remember this because it will become significant later in this review. Toulon is puppeteering in Nazi Germany where mad scientists are trying to find a way to reanimate corpses to use as cannon fodder (shades of Revolt of the Zombies). They try to get their hands on his life-giving formula, killing Madame Toulon in the process, so he takes his revenge. Hence the title. This film introduced a new puppet, multi-armed cowboy Six-Shooter and explained the origin of icky femme fatale Leech Woman.

Parts 4 and 5 were shot back to back by Jeff Burr and released in 1993 and 1994, the second being a direct sequel with shared characters and a continuation of the story. These films returned the story to the present day with a new set of people discovering Toulon’s trunk full of puppets in the Bodega Bay Inn and expanded on the whole Egyptian origin idea by introducing Sutekh, Lord of the Underworld, as the main antagonist. Sutekh’s Totem monsters subsequently turned up in Totem; well, there’s something I didn’t know when I reviewed that film. The fifth picture was subtitled The Final Chapter but we all know that final is never final in these sort of franchises.

The DeCoteau-directed Curse of the Puppet Master appeared in 1998 and is the other one of these films which I have seen although I didn’t review it for some reason. It has no real connection with the earlier films, simply taking the puppets and dumping them into a story about a bloke being turned into a puppet. Or something. This was the first film without any stop-motion effects by David Allen; from hereon in the puppets would be manually operated by rods and string in real time (as were, to be fair, many of the shots in the first five films).

The following year’s Retro Puppet Master, again helmed by DeCoteau was another prequel, going right back to Andre Toulon’s youth in Egypt in 1902 (with a framing story set in 1944 immediately after the climax of PM3 which saw Toulon escape from Germany into Switzerland). That was it for a few years until 2004 which brought us two films which are only of interest to real completists. Puppet Master: The Legacy was basically a clips show, revolving around an older version of a child character from PM3. It was at least produced (and directed) by Charles Band. Whereas Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, a SciFi Channel TV-movie, wasn’t produced by Full Moon and so is considered non-canonical to both franchises although it does have a character who is the great grand-nephew of Andre Toulon.

And now, eventually, we have Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, a film (or at least a title) much bandied about in earlier years. It’s technically the tenth film in the series but Charlie Band calls it the ninth, dismissing the Sci-Fi Channel picture in the same way that Bond fans dismiss Never Say Never Again. It sees the return to the PM director’s chair of the ever-reliable DeCoteau and a script from ‘August White’, the pseudonym who has written most of Band’s 21st century movies.

The first thing you notice, if you have seen PM1, is that the first ten minutes of PM:Axis is essentially the same as the prologue of that first film. Editor Danny Draven has skilfully intercut footage of the Nazi agents arriving at the Bodega Bay Inn, Blade running to Toulon’s room, Toulon hiding the puppet chest and then shooting himself - with newly shot footage of Levi Fiehler (Wolf Town) as Danny Coogan, a young man working in the hotel basement repairing furniture under the eye of his Uncle Len (Jerry Hoffman - who was in The First Nudie Musical back in 1976!).

This gives the opening a touch of class and an expensive sheen that the film could not otherwise afford: look at that location, look at those extras, look at those props and costumes, look at that 1930s car. But it also creates a problem, a huge, instant problem which then bedevils the whole film yet could so easily have been avoided. That first, establishing shot of the hotel has a caption, carried over from the 1989 film, reading ‘Bodega Bay Inn, 1939’. So this film’s action is established as taking place in 1939, yet Danny and his Uncle discuss the war and how Danny, who has been classified unfit for service because of a gammy leg, would really love to be in the army, sticking it to “the Krauts” or “the Japs”.

In 1939.

A full two years before America finally got round to entering the war.

Even if this was the last quarter of 1939, after Britain had declared war on Germany, that still wouldn’t cut it. Yes, a few Americans came over to the UK to sign up in the British forces but Danny’s not talking about that, he’s talking about the US Army. Which was sitting on its hands, looking the other way in 1939. Good grief, the tripartite pact that established the alliance between Germany and Japan (and Italy), which actually united the so-called ‘Axis Powers’ from which this film ultimately derives its name (via modern re-usage) didn’t happen until 1940.

Towards the end of the film, characters discuss things like Auschwitz and kamikaze attacks but Auschwitz was not public knowledge until June 1944 and the first kamikaze attack didn’t happen until October of that year.

It’s not like the film is beholden to established continuity. The sequels, as described above, show Toulon escaping from Germany, via Switzerland, in the early 1940s. So there was no reason why these events, which take place immediately after his suicide, could not be set in early 1945, thus rendering all the dialogue references relevant and realistic.

Of course, there’s the slight dichotomy that 1939, unlike 1945, was a time when it was still possible for Nazi agents to wander around the USA dressed like Herr Flick, talking in German and carrying Lugers, without unduly attracting attention. That’s kind of the point of the opening scene and the caption in the original film. But making allowances for the calm ease with which the German agents operate in the prologue is less of a demand on the audience than making allowances for a caption which explicitly contradicts not just much of the dialogue but in fact the whole story. Because this turns out to be a film about a young man, frustrated at being unable to serve his country, who finds he can do his bit by preventing Axis spies from sabotaging a munitions factory.

That opening caption is one of those head-scratching moments which spoils the cinematic ship for a hap’orth of tar. There are one or two other anachronisms, most notably and obviously a post-1960 US flag on Danny’s bedroom wall. I don’t know how familiar the target audience would be with US history during the 20th century and whether they would even notice this, nor have I any idea how easy or difficult it is to obtain a US flag with 48 stars, but it’s just annoying because it lowers the apparent quality of the film among nitpicking nerds.

So anyway, in this version of events, Danny goes upstairs in the hotel to see his friend Monsieur Toulon and the Nazi agents actually bump into him as they run out of the room. Discovering Toulon dead, Danny goes straight to the secret compartment in the wall and removes the puppet chest which he then takes home with him. (Of course, this completely contradicts the first film when the puppets are still there, but who’s counting?) An exact recreation of the original corridor and Toulon’s room enables new and old footage to blend together seamlessly.

Danny lives with his mother (the very hot Erica Shaffer who does lots of TV, theatre and anime voices) and his brother Don (Taylor M Graham: Blood Effects) in Chinatown for no other reason than, well, the film was shot in China. Not Hong Kong but mainland China. Specifically ACE Studios in Nanhai, Foshan, owned by Hong Kong-born Wall-Street-trader-turned-travel-entrepreneur-turned-film-executive Henry Luk.

Luk’s father Bong Luk directed many HK films from the 1950s to the 1980s including some for the Shaw Brothers. His most notable (translated) titles include Beauty’s Head is Misplaced, Swallow the Poison with a Smile, Ali Baba and the 40 Robbers, Lady Lightning Among Swordsmen, The Killing Sword, Bravest Fist and - get this - Carry On Bangkok. Now his son runs a film studio offering full production and post-production facilities to American film-makers at a rate that is clearly very competitive, even with air fares thrown in.

Luk, credited as executive producer, was able to offer Band facilities that he could never have afforded in LA including make-up, costumes, props. visual effects and four whole sound stages. They also collaborated on Killjoy 3 while Luk’s other films include Michael Morris’ backwoods psychodrama Dark Forest, Antony Szezto’s sci-fi chop-sockey Vela 734, Donald Jarman’s Black Sunday-style The Witch and The Blood Bond, an action flick directed by Michael Biehn of all people. The ACE Studios team also includes hardworking 1st AD Fred Sun and Michael Dinetz who gets an extraordinary four-part credit here starting with Make-up Department Head, then puppeteer, then ‘supplementary special make-up effects’ and finally - catering! His previous credits include The Asylum’s I am Omega and Jeff Brookshire’s Awaken the Dead.

So anyway, Danny’s brother Don will be off to Europe very soon to sock it to the Hun but Danny has been classified 4F because of his bad leg. Although evidently his disability doesn’t prevent him from lugging not only his own stuff but also a huge great puppet case all the way from the hotel to his mum’s front door. Only occasionally does Levi Fiehler remember about the bad leg and affect a limp; most of the time he seems fine.

Odder than the intermittent limping is the transformation between the prologue. Working on some chairs in the hotel basement Danny seems, to be honest, very simple, almost retarded. I don’t know why: maybe it’s a combination of the dungarees, the haircut and the slightly pathetic air he has about him. Reviewing this scene, it’s clear that my initial interpretation was wrong - but it’s our introduction to the character and that’s how he comes across. For the rest of the film he seems to be an ordinary, bright young man and the transformation between the hotel scenes and his scenes at home actually left me wondering how long had passed since the prologue but I think it’s meant to be only a few days.

So anyway, Danny is a dab-hand at carpentry and figures he can keep the puppets in good nick. In a nice nod to continuity, he finds Six-Shooter, who wasn’t in the original film, partly assembled inside one of the other compartments in the trunk. Now Danny has a girlfriend Beth (model-turned-actress Jenna Gallaher, also in DeCoteau’s Nightfall) who works in a munitions factory (represented by a nice effects shot). Her boss (Mike Brooks) doesn’t like Danny because he’s not in the forces and Danny is worried about the attention Beth is receiving from a colleague named Ben.

This ‘Ben’ turns out to be Max (Tom Sandoval, a DeCoteau regular who was also in Playing with Fire, Alien Presence and The Pit and the Pendulum), one of the German agents from the prologue, speaking perfect English with a perfect American accent. Danny recognises him and is sure the Teutonic swine is up to no good. It’s all a bit of a coincidence but on the other hand there probably weren’t too many Nazi spies operating in California during the war. (I don’t know how good the Yanks were at identifying and using German spies. Over on this side of the Atlantic the nascent MI6 knew the identity of every single Nazi spy in Britain, all of whom were being used to feed misinformation back to Berlin, either willingly as a double agent or unwittingly as a dupe. Anyway...)

Ben/Max and his largely silent colleague Klaus (Aaron Riber) are in uneasy cahoots with Japanese femme fatale Ozu (Ada Zhou Fang, listed on the IMDB and elsewhere as Ada Chao) who hides from the authorities in a Chinese opera house in the middle of Chinatown. “Where better for a Japanese person to hide than Chinatown?” she asks, neatly side-stepping the historical fact that America locked up every one of its Japanese citizens in prison camps for the duration of the war.

Maybe white Americans couldn’t tell Chinese from Japanese, but you would think that Chinese Americans would spot her and hand her in. China was on the side of the Allies in WW2 and in fact the Sino-Japanese conflict that became part of the war had started as early as 1936 when Japanese forces invaded China. So even if this is 1939, every one of those extras wandering past outside has a very good reason to call in the authorities.

Also, Ozu is in the habit of wandering around in a kimono, which would give the game away to anyone strolling in off the street or peeking through the window. (You see, there was a time when I could have made a joke out of peeking/Peking but it’s been Beijing for many years now and that doesn’t offer the same opportunities for weak wordplay.) Ozu has two black-dressed karate goons, Nozoki-ya (Gu Yingfeng) and Buta (Zhang Xiangfu).

There is of course a massive irony in the fact that all three Japanese characters, hiding out in Chinatown on the assumption that whitey can’t tell them from Chinese, are played by Chinese actors. Who look, you know, Chinese - although Ozu’s white geisha make-up disguises her features somewhat.

Ozu wants Ben/Max to put a bomb in the munitions factory which very conveniently stores the fuel in a room next to the tea-room. Danny discovers this plan when he sneaks into the opera house with Blade and Pinhead, then sets out to stop the evil Axis fiends with the help of his little wooden pals who can move on their own.

However, while Danny is secretly photographing two of the Axis agents in the opera house, the third is at his house because they have discovered that, very conveniently, the guy who took the magic puppets they were after is living just a few blocks away in the white part of Chinatown. In a surprisingly brutal (though not graphic) plot development, his mother and brother are gunned down and his girlfriend kidnapped. Although it’s not entirely clear why this happens. Frankly you have to question precisely why, instead of dragging Beth back to the opera house, the Nazi didn’t take the puppets or at least the puppet chest.

When Danny discovers his mum dead and his bro’ dying, he transfers some of Don’s life essence into a new puppet he has carved, Ninja, a black-garbed little fellow with some deadly throwing stars. You know about life essence, don’t you? It’s the glowing green liquid that we all have inside us which can be easily extracted using a large-diameter syringe. You should have covered that in anatomy class.

So Danny, who could easily have called in the police at any time, heads back to the opera house with a sack full of puppets and the mild-manned moderate mayhem begins. Leech Woman vomits one of her creations into a plate of sushi and it kills the eater from the inside, somehow. Another bad guy falls prey to Ninja’s throwing stars while Pinhead trips up a wrong’un so that Tunneller can drill into the top of his skull.

Meanwhile Max is busy doing what any self-respecting Nazi spy would have done under the situation: putting on a smartly pressed, clean dress uniform for no apparent reason. He’s not really going to be able to step outside dressed like that, is he? What, is he expecting a Fiesler Storch light aircraft to land in the street and whisk him off back to Berlin? Why would he even carry a uniform around with him? Mind you, he’s carrying a Luger and hanging around with a woman dressed like a geisha so he doesn’t have much to lose. It’s like some competition between the German and Japanese teams to see who can be the most obvious enemy agent without actually getting arrested or shot, a sort of WW2-espionage version of who-can-lean-out-of-the-window-the-farthest.

Actually, two points. One is that, if arrested in uniform, even in the middle of San Francisco, Max would count as an enemy combatant and would have rights under the Geneva Convention. But if arrested in plain clothes he can be considered a spy and the US military authorities would be able to do pretty much anything with him, up to and including execution. The other point to note is that this very obviously isn’t a Nazi uniform. For one thing, it’s brown (not just the shirt), a colour which was only worn by senior officials of the National Socialist Party. Also the cut is all wrong, the lapels are the wrong shape etc. We don’t get a close-up look at the various badges but none of them look like eagles to me.

Most obvious of all is the hat which Max briefly dons before leaving it to one side. The flat top of the cap is much, much wider than a WW2 German cap, indicating that this is very clearly either Russian or Chinese. And the peak is too narrow and high; Nazi peaks were low so that soldiers could only see clearly when standing rigidly upright. But it does at least have a swastika armband - which I at first thought had switched arms between shots until I rewound and realised he had been standing in front of a mirror.

The irony of all this is that Tunneller does actually wear a miniature version of a field grey German WW2 uniform, which we never see in close-up and which no-one ever comments on. Although Danny does at least observe the irony of creating a ninja puppet, telling his dead brother, “I hope you don’t mind being a Jap.”

So how to explain this inaccurate uniform without just scoffing at budgetary and logistical limitations? (I mean, where would you hire an authentic Nazi uniform in China? Would you be allowed to import one?) It is of course possible to read the film as all taking place in a parallel world. A world where, by 1939, the USA had already been at war with the Axis powers for several years, Auschwitz was known about, kamikaze attacks were happening, Nazi uniforms were subtly different and two other states had already joined the Union (wouldn’t have to be Alaska and Hawaii - could be Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone, could be Guadalcanal and Guam).

But that’s a cop-out. You can use that deliberate misreading to cover almost any problem with any film. Well, not any problem. It doesn’t really explain where the horses came from in the Planet of the Apes remake. It doesn’t explain what killed the boat’s crew in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. It doesn’t explain the contraventions of basic physics in The League of Explain to Me Again Why I’m Watching This Shit. And it certainly doesn’t explain the complete absence of jokes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It could explain the anachronisms in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, but I’m not going to go down that road. I’ve got another idea which we’ll come to in a moment.

In the meantime, the film dribbles to a frankly unsatisfying halt after a bizarre speech from Max about how the Germans love to torture Allied soldiers in their POW camps. Except in rare cases, Germany abided by the Geneva Convention under the eye of Swiss ‘Protecting Power’ investigators. Japan, on the other hand, paid no heed to the Convention and did torture Allied troops so this short speech sounds very much like something written for Ozu and transferred to Max in a last-minute rewrite.

Ninja, whose eyes glow red to show he’s alive with Don’s spirit, has been killed but he struggles manfully (puppetfully?) back to life in order to stab Max with Ozu’s sword at about the same time that Ozu grabs a sack of puppets and slips away without so much as a by-your-leave or a close-up. Danny points out to Beth (and the audience) that he’s only got Blade, Ninja and Pinhead left so presumably this means that Ozu has Leech Woman, Tunneller and Jester. And at that point it all sort of ends, like somebody lost the last few pages of script. We have to assume that it’s setting everything up for an immediate sequel but they didn’t film one back-to-back with this so goodness knows when, if ever, we’ll find out what happens. The next Puppet Master film might simply reboot the story again, like this one did.

All things considered, of the four Puppet Master films I have seen, this is the third best. It’s not as good as PM1 and PM2 - of course it isn’t, they’re both great - but it’s better than the silly and ephemeral Curse. David DeCoteau, who directed this under his own name, has 28 films on his IMDB page between Retro Puppet Master and this one including Voodoo Academy, Beastly Boyz, three Poe adaptations and all six Brotherhoods. This is August White’s 11th screenplay for Charles Band in the past five years although he wrote plenty of others before 2005 under another name that the IMDB surprisingly doesn’t know about.

The cast mostly acquit themselves well. I know some critics have poured scorn on Ada Chao. Who has the. Most amazing. Pauses like Will. Iam Shatner. But she actually sounds like somebody mastering a foreign language and the only thing that really stops me believing she’s Japanese is her Chinese accent. Fiehler is strong in the lead role, Sandoval glowers well and looks good in uniform while Graham brings a remarkable depth to Don, a likeable jock with simplistic values but a good heart.

Solid cinematography is provided by Terrance Ryker (Reicher on the IMDB) who also photographed the return of those other little wooden Band-pals in Demonic Toys: Personal Demons, released the same year as this film as well as Skull Heads, Dead Man’s Hand and Evil Bong 2. His previous collaborations with Dave DeCoteau were Alien Presence, Stem Cell and Nightfall. Production designer Joe Walser designed Evil Bong 3-D: The Wrath of Bong (good grief!) after a series of minor jobs on titles ranging from The Exorcist III to George of the Jungle.

Gage Munster was the main puppet guy, named in the opening titles as ‘Ninja Puppet, special makeup and mechanical effects designed by’ with an additional ‘special effects make-up artist’ credit at the end. This film adds yet another title to a CV that includes Halloween Night, Flight of the Living Dead, Penny Dreadful, Demonic Toys: Personal Demons and The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror. EDee Biddlecome (Dr Chopper, Doll Graveyard, Gingerdead Man, Dead Man’s Hand) designed the costumes which were all made in-house (including the dodgy Nazi uniform); she’s credited as ‘Edee Biddlecombe’ on screen and I’ve seen her as ‘E Dee Biddlecome’ elsewhere but according to her Facebook page she uses ‘EDee’ (so you can see why people get confused).

Most of the rest of the credits are Chinese names although a few obvious pseudonyms slip in towards the end: post-production co-ordinator ‘Bobby Booberman’, media manager ‘Chuck L Head’ and colourist ‘Lethbridge Stewart’ - a Doctor Who gag possibly inspired by RED workflow technician Tom Baker (or is that also a pseudonym?). There’s an incidental ‘Puppet FX’ credited for Liu Xiang, presumably not the former world hurdles champion of that name.

Full Moon fanboys expecting this movie to feature stop-motion like the early ones in the series were remarkably naive, but then such is the nature of fanboys, unfettered by notions of how time-consuming or expensive (or difficult) stop-motion effects are and eager to hang on any hint or suggestion as proof that a great white hope is coming. No, these are rod puppets, just like you would expect. And not very animated ones either.

The occasional head swivels, the odd hand moves but really they’re not depicted as ‘living dolls’ the way that they should be. In fact, when Beth sees the puppets come alive and squeals “They’re moving!” you honestly have to look quite closely to see that any of them are actually moving at all - and when you do, you see that Tunneller is slightly raising his arm. Wow, it’s uncanny.

More problematic is that the puppets don’t really do very much in the story. They’re neither protagonists nor antagonists, just the tools used by Danny on his first and third (brief) visits to the opera house. The actual story, about foiling a plan by Axis agents to blow up the munitions factory where a guy’s girlfriend works, could pretty much happen without the puppets.

And this set me thinking.

There is another way to read this film. Not one that any of the film-makers intended, but an interesting angle that might actually repay a repeat viewing. What if, what if ... the puppets aren’t alive? What if Danny is mentally ill? What if he has psychiatric problems, as his behaviour in that prologue in the hotel basement suggests? Maybe he was tipped over the edge by discovering the suicidal corpse of his friend Monsieur Toulon and after that he wandered through a fantasy world, unable to distinguish reality from imagination?

Think about it: the puppets never do anything except when Danny is there with them. No-one else sees them except Beth and the enemy agents. The Nazis and Japanese - and his girlfriend - could be twisted versions of real people, which would certainly make more sense than a German officer and a Japanese geisha-girl living incognito in the middle of Chinatown. (Don’t any of the local Chinese ever take a look in that opera house?)

I honestly think the most satisfying way to view Puppet Master: Axis of Evil is as the twisted reality of a disturbed young man. Passed over by the military - he says it’s his leg but he usually forgets to limp so maybe he failed the psychiatric tests - this young man creates a fantasy world around himself. A world where Kraut and Jap spies plot their deadly work only a couple of blocks away. A world where the cute girl he has seen going to work in the munitions plant is actually his girlfriend, a damsel in distress he can rescue from evildoers. A world where he can have secret friends, where his toys come to life and help him to strike a great victory for the American war effort right here on his doorstep.

This is a young man who’s not sure exactly what German uniforms look like, a young man who’s not sure himself of the difference between Chinese and Japanese people, a young man who’s not even entirely certain how many stars there are on the US flag. A young man whose confusion extends to not knowing what year it is or how long the war has been going on. Perhaps something happened to him in 1939 and he has been reliving that year ever since.

It all fits. It all works. It all makes sense.

Mind, it’s all baloney of course.

That’s not what ‘August White’ or David DeCoteau or Charlie Band intended when they made this film. Of course it isn’t. But that’s what they have made, by accident. In creating a cheesy B-movie horror sequel, they have accidentally brought forth a powerful and moving study of the psychiatric troubles of an innocent young man whose world is shaken up at a personal level - by the death of a friend - at the same time as the whole world is shaken up by global conflict. Deep within his own mind, he pieces together stories that make sense.

That guy at the factory talking to ‘his’ girl, he looks like he could be a Nazi spy. That deserted Chinese opera house, that could be where the spies hang out. These puppets, they could be magical avatars that do his bidding. When Danny stabs someone, he imagines that it was really Blade or Tunneller.

I’m on a roll now. How about this? When the news comes through that his brother has been killed in conflict, it destroys his mother and, unable to cope with her breakdown, he instead imagines her dead on the floor while thinking that his dying brother is in his arms. In the film, Don is lying on the living room floor then in the next scene he’s laid out on Danny’s bed. In Danny’s fantasy world, he can use the secret of his living puppets to give his brother new life.

I’m telling ya, the more I think about this, the better it fits. Holy cow.

Mind, it is definitely baloney.

But what if, what if - for the next film, it wasn’t baloney. Here’s where I would like to see the Puppet Master franchise go next: a story about a psychiatrist trying to understand a retarded young man who is sure that his puppets come to life, and obviously they don’t - but maybe they do. Instead of aiming for cheap shocks - and let’s be honest, frequently missing them - why not reinvent the franchise next time as a character drama with ambiguous supernatural undertones? Why not go for atmosphere? Why not play on doubt and uncertainty?

If the ‘natural’ movements of the puppets are limited and look artificial, why not take advantage of that to question whether those movements are natural or even real? If the budget won’t stretch to lots of effects-based set pieces, why not save them all up for one powerful scene at the end that makes the audience re-evaluate everything they’ve been fed prior to that point?

If the Full Moon fanboys are going to get excited anyway (it’s what fanboys do) and buy the film whatever it’s like (again, it’s what they do) and then moan and whinge on the IMDB that it’s actually rubbish (they do that too, all the time)... then why not stop trying to please the fanboys and instead reinvent the property to reach and impress a new audience? It can be done. This is my dream. This is the Puppet Master script I would write. Charlie, give me a call.

MJS rating: B

Director: Davide Melini
Writer: Davide Melini
Producers: Ezekiel Montes, Davide Melini
Cast: Cachito Noguera, Alessandro Fornari
Country: Spain
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.davidemelinidirector.blogspot.com

I don’t get sent many Spanish films so it makes a refreshing change to review something like The Puzzle, Davide Melini’s little five-minute drama. It’s a slick, stylish, impressive-looking bit of film-making and it makes a great showreel piece... but unfortunately Melini (who is actually Italian) has somehow forgotten to include a story.

Here is the entirety of what happens: a woman answers the phone and tells somebody that “it’s over” because he spends too much of her money. Then she does a jigsaw puzzle. She fixes herself something in the kitchen when suddenly all the lights go out. She hears someone outside the door. She sees that the jigsaw puzzle is now - somehow - a picture of herself, sitting at the table doing the jigsaw puzzle. Then it becomes the same picture with an arm through the window behind her, holding a gun. Now that becomes reality. Bang. The end.

I’m not being sarcastic or mean when I express surprise that there was a script (as seen in an accompanying Making Of) because there is only that one line of dialogue and the rest of the plot is as above. How could that stretch to more than one page? Tristan Versluis’ I Love You didn’t actually have a script and that had two lines of dialogue!

According to the back of the DVD sleeve (something I always avoid reading because a film should be self-contained), the man is her son but there is nothing to suggest that. We see a framed photo of the two together and he is clearly younger than her but both of those pieces of evidence would suggest a lover, not a son, as would the one line. Who would say “It’s over” to their son? What would that even mean? Murders are more commonly committed by jilted lovers than children.

In fact, here is the full sleeve blurb:

"A woman refuses to give money to her son, despite his continuous pressure. One night she decides to relax and forget her troubles with her favourite pastime: making puzzles. However, this simple table game hides strange features that can turn her peaceful night into a nightmare."

If you read this paragraph first, you can place this interpretation on the film I suppose, but without reading the DVD sleeve (which is how a film-maker must always assume an audience will approach a film), most of what is described above simply isn’t there.

As mentioned, there is no indication that he is her son. If a relationship between two characters is important it must be unambiguously indicated. Nor is there evidence of ‘continuous pressure’. We don’t know that jigsaw puzzles are her favourite pastime nor is there any indication that she is doing this one to “relax and forget her troubles”. The final sentence is an obtuse promise of puzzle-related spookiness which, though it does appear, has neither context nor rationale within the brief story.

It is not enough to put something onto the pages of a script and the sleeve of a DVD (or on a website or in a publicity brochure or wherever). If it ain’t on screen, it ain’t it in the scene and it ain’t been seen. (Actually, that’s quite a good motto. I might work on that.)

But to return to the promised puzzle-related spookiness - it simply doesn’t make sense. By which I don’t mean that it is surreal or abstract, I mean that there is no coherence about what happens. No indication that the puzzle is anything to do with the lights going off. No indication of what relevance the puzzle has to anything, in fact. Is it a metaphor? I assume it’s a metaphor but ... for what? What does it signify? What does it mean? What should we understand? Because, frankly, we don’t understand anything.

It is also worth pointing out that, although there is virtually no plot on show here, what little action there is involves a woman who is worried about someone outside her house backing away to stand next to an open window with billowing net curtains. Either she is afraid of a possible intruder or not. Make your mind up.

What we do have on show here, ironically, is directorial flourishes. Lots of them. Too many of them. Apart from that first answering-the-phone scene, everything else is treated in some way. Shots are sped up, shots are slowed down, shots are given ghost images or are done without colour or treated in some other way that might work in a music video but here just seems like - sorry, but it’s true - showing off.

Fancy post-production work on a scene of a woman doing a jigsaw doesn’t add one single thing to our understanding of what we’re watching: which is a woman doing a jigsaw, nothing more, nothing less. If she was clutching her forehead and frequently dropping jigsaw pieces on the floor, we might take the video effects to indicate that she was tired or mad or drunk or something similar. But we have no context whatsoever for this scene. In fact, no context for anything that happens in the four brief minutes of action inbetween the opening and closing credits. So all this fast/slow/monochrome malarkey might as well not be there. It seems to have been done because it can be, not because it needs to be.

The final scene with the changing jigsaw is a neat and original idea (we don’t get a good shot of what it looks like beforehand) but the idea is not used in any way. Has the jigsaw genuinely changed in some supernatural way? Is it a hallucination brought on by, well, tiredness, madness or booze? Is it another metaphor? Or the same metaphor?

Often with films that don’t have an obvious narrative, the viewer might wonder: what is going on? But with The Puzzle, the viewer is left wondering: is anything going on? As the end credits roll, with the killer leaving the gun on the table beside the dead woman’s body, the viewer sits, nonplussed, wondering what they have just seen. The only logical response is to marvel not at the film itself but at the gaping disparity between presentation and content.

Because presentation-wise, this is certainly very impressive. Clearly David Melini knows how to use the various video tricks on display, he just isn’t sure when or why to use them. They don’t detract from the paucity of plot here, they emphasise it. And that’s not good. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not expecting a complex beginning-middle-end in four minutes but something has to happen and it has to happen for a reason. There is no reason for anything here, or rather whatever reason exists is not shown to the audience, it is submerged underneath a lot of gratuitous flashy effects.

The greater package on the screener DVD is also impressive, perhaps overly so. There is a one-minute trailer which seems extraordinarily superfluous. Why does anyone need a trailer for a five-minute film? I have seen entire trailers that ran to more than five minutes. There is also a seven-minute unsubtitled Making Of (called The Puzzle: El Making-Of!). Most impressively, the film is available on this screener in four different languages: Spanish, English, French and Italian. Eschewing subtitles or dubbing, this has been achieved by simply having the actress record her one-line telephone scene four times (plus translating the credits).

This is Melini’s third short, following Amore Estremo/Extreme Love and La Sceneggiatura/The Screenplay. Cachito Noguera plays the woman and Alessandro Fornari (who was also in Extreme Love) is the killer. Ezekiel Montes, whose own short films as director include Ritual, Natasha and Granit, produced (with Melini) and was also cinematographer.

I really, really wish that I could like The Puzzle better but there is just nothing here. It’s not so much a puzzle, more an empty puzzle box, albeit one with beautifully designed, overly complex packaging.

MJS rating: B-