Director: Shusuke Kaneko
Writers: Kodai Yamada, Masahiro Yokotani, Shusuke Kaneko
Producers: Toru Shibata, Toshiaki Harada, Kaori Momoi, Hidenori Tokuyama
Cast: Akiko Yada, Hideaki Ito
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

Films about pyrokinetics are few and far between. Firestarter of course (and its recent mini-series sequel), the under-rated Specimen and the dire Nice Girls Don’t Explode. Shusuke Kaneko’s Pyrokinesis (aka Cross Fire) is easily the best of the bunch.

For the first half hour this looks like it might be another Carrie-esque tale of a lonely girl with unusual powers. Junko (Akiko Yada: Mai in the TV versions of Ring and Rasen) is befriended by her colleague Tada (Hideaki Ito: The Princess Blade) and meets his younger sister Yukie - who is kidnapped and murdered by a gang of youths. A lawyer’s arrogant son, Kogure (Hidenori Tokuyama: Oshikiri) is accused but let off, and Junko offers to help Tada take revenge using her special power.

As killings continue - both by the gang (for, it transpires, snuff movies) and of the gang members, the police attempt to make some kind of sense of the situation. Detective Makihara (Ryuki Harada: Izo) suspects psychokinesis; his colleague Detective Ishizu (Kaori Momoi: Kagemusha) is initially sceptical but gradually comes to believe.

But there are wheels within wheels and fires within fires in this story, as Junko is approached by Kido (Yu Yoshizawa) ,a young man with his own, non-pyrokinetic, ESP powers, and a young orphan girl Kaori (Masami Nagasawa: Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, Godzilla: Final Wars) is discovered to have similar abilities. It transpires that Makihara has his own personal agenda for believing in pyrokinesis and investigating Junko - but more than that, there are multiple levels of police corruption at work, possibly involving a mysterious secret organisation called The Guardians.

The excellent script is supported by Kaneko’s superb direction. He sensibly holds back on the effects for the first part of the story, but gradually introduces bigger and bigger fire effects - and some truly grizzly deaths. Yet water is also a key motif and a brief romantic scene in the snow is shot magically from above as individual snowflakes melt a few feet above Junko’s head. Possibly because of his experience on giant monster movies (the 1990s Gamera trilogy and 2001’s GMK: All Monsters Attack), Kaneko is as adept at moving the camera in the vertical plane as the horizontal and there are some beautifully composed crane shots. It’s also interesting to see a squad of riot police moving like a giant reptile.

The effects never overwhelm the story but are sensibly used - both real fire and CGI flame effects - and integral. We care about the characters, even as some of them turn out to be not who we thought. Pyrokinesis is a fantastic modern horror film which should be watched by anybody interested in Japanese movies and, frankly, anybody who isn’t.

That said, Artsmagic’s presentation is sadly not up to their usual standard. The anamorphic picture is terrific but the disc’s extra features betray both laziness and carelessness. Filmographies for the principal cast have simply been cut and pasted from the notoriously inaccurate IMDB, reproducing that site’s inconvenient reverse chronology and predilection for nonexistent alternative titles. A bio for Shusuke Kaneko not only fails to mention his Godzilla movie but is apparently missing several paragraphs. It jumps from 1985 straight to 1999, thereby losing any mention of Necronomicon or the Gamera films. Even worse, the outer sleeve inexcusably misspells Shusuke’s name as ‘Kanedo.’ Some stills and promo material round out the extras; what, no trailer?

Despite this, Pyrokinesis is wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommended as one of the best serious horror movies of recent years. (Oh, and watch out for Kaneko’s friend, Fangoria’s Japanese correspondent Norman England, in a cameo as ‘suprised westerner in restaurant’!)

MJS rating: A

[Since first posting this review, Artsmagic have asked me to compile biographies and filmographies for their future releases! - MJS]

Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: Matthew Jason Walsh
Producer: David DeCoteau
Cast: Kristopher Turner, Ellen Wieser, Landon McCormick
Country: Canada
Year of release: 2002
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS

Here’s what I don’t understand about Young Demons (which was originally Part III of the unconnected Brotherhood series of films): although the screenplay is credited to Matthew Jason Walsh (Witchouse I and III, Deep Freeze, Bloodletting etc - plus the other three Brotherhood pictures), the story credit is shared between him and David DeCoteau.

Now, I have a lot of time, both personally and professionally, for both Matt and Dave. But this film has a story so basic that you could write it on the back of a postcard and still have room for the address and the stamp. How could it take two grown men to come up with this? Here’s what I envisage:

Matt: “Here’s an idea: a group of highs school students doing a live-action role-playing game in the school after dark, and something is stalking them.”
Dave: “Cool.”

Sorry guys, I love you both but this is not your finest hour, is it? (The Inaccurate Movie Database also credits someone named Ryan Carrassi with the script but he’s not credited on screen. The IMDB also credits him with “adaptation dialogue” on The Pool and with writing and executive producing an Italian sequel to that film. I find it all highly dubious. Anyway...)

A very, very long prologue sees two students break into their school at night, somehow, in order to place some props and stuff around the place in readiness for ‘the game’ the following night (gee, I hope nobody finds and moves them tomorrow). Mike (Matthew Epp) and Tony (Carl Thiessen) spend ages wandering the halls and corridors before being caught by a weird guy wearing, frankly, what appears to be a burqa. I think he’s meant to be some sort of medieval knight but he just looks like a devout, female, slightly warlike Muslim.

The next day, we meet the students who participate in the game. Lex (Kristopher Turner, who was in a Canadian kids SF series called 2030 CE) is the equivalent of a dungeonmaster - called 'the leader' here - and is the school’s token goth, complete with black nail varnish. We also meet Megan (Ellen Wieser), Victoria (Julie Pedersen), Kip (Andrew Hrankowski - who played ‘third man having sex’ in an episode of The L Word!), token slightly black guy Stan (David Johnson) and Roger (Landon McCormick), who is a bit of a jock but is offered the chance to take part in ‘the game’ without knowing what it is. He accepts because he has a crush on Victoria.

Lex’s brother Ramsey (Paul Andrich) has just returned from an archaeological dig in Egypt where he has unearthed a gold pendant depicting Anubis and a bound volume of Ancient Egyptian scrolls (written in hieroglyphics but not in cartouches and on amazingly white paper for what is supposed to be four thousand year-old papyrus). Ramsey gives these priceless artefacts to Lex which is, to say the least, bloody generous of him. Lex decides to use the pendant as the prize for that night’s game and the book as... well it’s not clear but he’s going to use it somehow.

That night, everyone turns up dressed in medieval costumes (apart from Roger). Lex has a 'radio controlled headset' which apparently not only connects him to the school PA system but also allows him to hear anything that anybody says anywhere in the building. He gives occasional pretentious ‘clues’ but doesn’t take part in the action till the very end.

Well, I say ‘action’...

The majority of the film, the whole of what would be the second and third acts if this had a three-act structure, is the five ‘players’ being stalked, one-by-one, by the guy in the burqa, sometimes assisted by Mike and Tony, who are now outfitted in leather shorts and chain-mail cowls. (One character later describes this look as a “Mummy Returns outfit” because, yes, the Ancient Egyptians wore a lot of chain-mail...)

Kip falls over and somehow gets red stuff (presumably blood, presumably not his) underneath his clothes so he takes a shower, keeping his white briefs on. This being a David DeCoteau film, he takes the opportunity to stroke his firm, manly, masculine pecs while apparently being quite unconcerned about whether he has washed all the red goop off his back.

Kip falls victim to the burqa guy, as do Victoria and Stan, but “falls victim” may be a slight exaggeration. All that happens is that burqa guy, when he catches them, puts his hand on their head and lowers them towards his waist in an unsubtly suggestive manner. Don’t go thinking that this is a horror movie. There’s no gore apart from a couple of brief, unexplained shots of a decomposing head in a saucepan in the school kitchen.

The majority of this film is people being chased through the school but there’s absolutely no tension or thrills whatsoever. This is partly a deficiency of the script: we don’t care about these characters because we know nothing at all about them - and we know even less about the bad guy in the burqa. It is also a deficiency of production because about half of this film is shot in slow motion. It runs 77 minutes (the UK video sleeves claims “approx 90 minutes”) but if everything was run in real-time it would probably last less than an hour. Slo-mo can be effective when used sparingly but in this film no-one walks or runs anywhere at faster than half-speed. Anyone who has ever seen Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace will be put in mind of that great gag: “Some of the episodes were under-running by up to eight minutes so any scene that didn’t have dialogue was done in slow motion.”

For most of this film nothing happens - and it happens very slowly. Once Victoria is captured, she wears leather shorts too and spends an inexorably long time rubbing Mike and Tony while they’re chained up somewhere. For some reason, token slightly black guy Stan doesn’t have to do the same thing.

Eventually Megan (who doesn’t want to play ‘the game’ any more) and Roger (who thinks it's all weird anyway) confront burqa guy who turns out to be... the one character with a name and dialogue who isn’t in ‘the game’. That’s right, it’s Lex’s brother who informs them that he is not only a reincarnation of Ramses II (Ramses, Ramsey - get it?) but also a direct descendant. Yes, he looks so North African...

Ramses/Ramsey has a knife to Megan’s throat, which somehow causes her dress to change colour. There’s some guff about him planning to rule the world if he can do something or other by sunrise but this is swiftly defeated by Lex and Roger with a completely arbitrary deus ex machina move which makes Ramsey collapse in a heap and restores Mike, Tony, Kip, Stan and Victoria to their original costumes (but not Megan, for some reason).

Young Demons makes no sense at all. Oh, and the title? There’s no suggestion that anyone is a demon, although Victoria, once she has fondled the boys’ chests, develops blue veins on her torso and a Buffy-style frowny forehead. But demons? No mention. Somebody does say at one point that the kids who play ‘the game’ are called ‘the Brotherhood’ so I suppose we should at least acknowledge that. As for ‘young’, well, this is a cinematic American high school and as such all the students appear to be in their mid-twenties.

Young Demons is just dull and let me reiterate that it makes no sense at all. It’s not just the smoke and coloured lights that cause ‘the game’ to lack believability, there’s the whole concept which just isn’t explained - because it can’t be explained. It looks like DeCoteau had access for a weekend to a high school and nearly enough medieval costumes, shot a bunch of scenes and then tried to fashion a film out of them. That’s not how this film was made, obviously, but that’s certainly what it looks like.

Looking for someone to credit, I should mention DP Paul Sudermen who also lit The Sisterhood for DeCoteau. He does a good job of making the school look spooky, but that’s undone by not only the relentless slow motion but also an obsession with tilting the camera from side to side which eventually leaves one with no other option but to assume that the school has been magically relocated to the deck of a storm-tossed ship. It’s difficult to make your audience feel seasick with a film that is entirely set on land, but Young Demons damn near manages it.

Walle Larsson contributes the music, and there’s a great deal of it. Shawna Balas (The Brotherhood II) was production designer. Patti Henderson (Wishmaster III and IV) designed the costumes. Special make-up effects, such as they are, are credited to Doug Morrow who also worked on eXistenZ, Wishmaster III and IV, The Brotherhood II and, most horrifically of all, Inside the Osmonds.

It’s really difficult to see who could get anything out of Young Demons. It’s not terribly sexy, it’s certainly not horrific in any way, it’s not exciting and the cast (few of whom have done any other features) are pretty wooden. It feels like a contractual obligation, but Dave DeCoteau is his own man nowadays and shot this for his own company, Rapid Heart. I suppose there was a market. On the other hand, as there’s no sigh of The Brotherhood V, maybe there wasn’t.

The various video/DVD sleeves follow the traditional Brotherhood design of clustering the characters at the bottom of the image. None of them show the slightly black guy.

MJS rating: C-

Director: Sam Zalutsky
Writer: Sam Zalutsky
Producers: Sam Zalutsky, Chip Hourihan
Cast: Daniel Sauli, Patti D’Arbanville, Sherman Howard
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Peccadillo Pictures)

You Belong to Me is a tense, well-crafted chiller in the Misery subgenre of enforced captivity horror. Adapted by writer-director Sam Zalutsky from his student short film (not included on the DVD, sadly), the movie stars Daniel Sauli (United 93) as Jeffrey, a young man who rents a New York apartment almost by accident, having trailed an unfaithful former lover. Patti D’Arbanville (Time After Time, Flesh, Big Wednesday) is Gladys, cheerily buxom, middle-aged owner of the building, and Sherman Howard (Day of the Dead’s Bub) is Stuart, the hulking, deaf-mute super.

Jeffrey (who is an architect) sets about decorating the place, which was still full of the suddenly departed previous owner’s clothes and belongings when he first looked around. Repairing some water-damaged floorboards in the corner, he hears what sounds like a person moaning. Tapping sounds suggest there is somebody right below him - but didn’t Gladys say that her own apartment was directly below Jeffrey’s? (She did indeed and so it is, although her door is on the left at the bottom of the stairs and his is on the right at the top, which is a curious continuity problem.)

There’s a sense of tension bubbling underneath the apparently calm proceedings of the first half of the film. Gladys is perhaps a little too eager to befriend and look after her latest tenant and the presence of Jeffrey’s ex in the same building naturally leads to tension, plus there is the hulking person of Stuart and a weird guy in another apartment who says he is looking for his wife. Oh, and a guy called Michael (Kevin Corstange) turns up, possibly drunk, looking for the previous occupant of Jeffrey’s flat - who was called Geoffrey.

There is nothing actually bad or scary, in fact even the sound from under the floorboards isn’t really creepy - until we make out the words “help me”. When Jeffrey decides to investigate, things suddenly take a turn for the worse and he finds himself a captive of a seriously deranged couple. We were of course waiting for this to happen - we have read the sleeve blurb, seen the trailer - but it’s still a shock and leads into the second half of the film as the captive desperately tries to escape from the woman who only wants to look after him. Meanwhile Jeffrey’s ex-flatmate Nicki (Heather Simms) is wondering what happened to him and his dog Max is starting to look gaunt, up in the empty apartment.

Zalutsky’s script and direction combine to turn the screw on the tension which doesn’t flag, even when Jeffrey’s most concerted and semi-successful escape attempt is frustratingly thwarted (in a not entirely believable scenario, it must be admitted). After that, he starts playing more subtle games, apparently playing along with Gladys’ delusions but actually working to drive a wedge between Gladys and Stuart. Although these mind games contribute to the denouement, they are not developed quite far enough and the final events - after a revelation which definitely tips the story into the horror genre - seem slightly rushed. Without wishing to give away the ending, one character is deliberately killed and one is accidentally killed (or it may be considered self-defence) and the story would, in my view, end more satisfyingly if it was the other way round. You will know what I mean when you see this.

And I do encourage you to see it. You Belong to Me is a great little film, not a moment too long at 82 minutes and adroitly directed with some fine acting performances. Also in the cast are Linda Larkin (the voice of Princess Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin and its various spin-offs), Rafael Sardina (who had a bit part in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds) and French actor Julien Lucas. Most of the cast have been in The Sopranos at one time or another. Cinematographer Jonathan Furmanski mostly works on documentaries and music videos (including camp cult classic 'Gay Boyfriend' by the Ukes of Hazzard) while production designer Tamar Gadish’s coolest credit is Sesame Street spin-off Elmo Visits the Doctor.

Oh, one final thing. Jeffrey is gay. Which has no bearing whatsoever in the story - so I decided it should have no bearing whatsoever on this review. Although this isn’t really ‘gay cinema’, it has been released in the UK by Peccadillo Pictures, a company specialising in gay and lesbian films. They also released Vampire Diary and have several other genre pictures in their catalogue including Make a Wish, Poltergay and The Wolves of Kromer, plus Boys on Film 1: Hard Love, a collection of shorts including Michael Simon’s Gay Zombie.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Frank Strayer
Writer: Edward Lowe
Producer: Phil Goldstone
Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Dwight Frye
Country: USA
Year of release: 1933
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Classic Entertainment)

What a terrific movie. Let’s just take a look at that list of principal players: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and Dwight Frye. How can any film with a cast like that fail?

In a sleepy mitteleurope town, a series of murders have been committed; each victim was found, entirely drained of blood, with two small puncture wounds in their jugular vein. The locals suspect a vampire but Detective Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) maintains a sceptical attitude, convinced that a more Earthbound killer is abroad.

Karl is enamoured of Ruth Bertin (Wray) who is the ward of hypochondriac comic relief Frau Schnappmann (Maude Eburne: The Bat Whispers, Return of the Terror, The Boogie Man Will Get You). For some reason that is never explained, Ruth and her aunt live with Doctor Otto Von Niemann (Atwill) who shares Karl’s scorn for the villagers’ superstitious beliefs. When Martha the local apple seller (Rita Carlisle, who was in both the 1931 and 1940 versions of Waterloo Bridge) becomes the next victim, suspicion falls on local simpleton Herman Gleib, played with full-on, bug-eyed intensity by the always reliable Frye. The town’s night-watchman, Kringen (moustachioed George E Stone: ‘The Runt’ in the Boston Blackie films and ‘Toothpick Charlie’ in Some Like It Hot) leads the clamour for Gleib to be strung up - and when he is the next victim, even Karl starts to believe that Gleib is guilty in some way.

A torch-wielding mob chases Gleib into a large cave where he falls to his death down ‘the Devil’s Well’. (Isn’t that...? Why, yes it is. Bronson Canyon! The most heavily used natural location in California, instantly recognisable from a million westerns and only slightly fewer horror and sci-fi pictures.) The mob were obviously pretty prescient in equipping themselves with flaming torches since it is clearly still bright daylight outside the cave.

While this is going on, the up-to-now avuncular and clear-headed Von Niemann is seen up to no good, using some sort of psychic hypnosis to control the distant movements of his manservant Emil (Robert Frazer: White Zombie, Black Dragons, the 1944 Captain America serial and scores of silent westerns) as he attacks the doctor’s housekeeper Georgiana (Stella Adams). The problem for the viewer here is that, more than halfway through the film, we don’t know who either of these characters are. Emil first appeared briefly - unnamed and without dialogue - in the previous scene with Von Niemann, Karl, Ruth and Frau Schnappmann; Georgiana has never been seen or even mentioned before, to the extent that I assumed Ruth’s aunt was the housekeeper. Emil brings the woman’s body down to Von Niemann’s lab where all her blood is drained off.

When Georgiana’s body is discovered, back in her room, Von Niemann tries to pin the blame on Herman Gleib but his theory suffers a setback when the Burgermeister (London-born Lionel Belmore, instantly recognisable as the Burgermeister from Frankenstein; he was also in Son of Frankenstein and Ghost of Frankenstein) arrives to announce that Gleib was killed two hours earlier. Von Niemann claims that Georgiana had brought him coffee less than an hour earlier, meaning that Gleib could not possibly be the killer, not even through supernatural means as his heart was staked in the cave, just in case.

Karl is thoroughly frustrated with fewer clues than ever as to the murderer’s identity so the Doctor advises him to get some rest and gives him some sleeping pills (from a jar clearly labelled ‘poison’ but with a small label underneath the poison warning reading ‘sleeping pills’). That night, Von Niemann sends Emil to bring him Karl’s body and we see a mysterious figure climbing across the rooftops towards the detective’s open window. Ruth sees the Doctor doing his psychic hypnosis schtick and realises that he is the murder so he explains to her what is really going on - and it’s a real doozy.

In his lab, Von Niemann has created life: not a hulking great monster but a pulsating blob that looks like a giant prune, sitting at the bottom of a tank of water. He is enormously proud of this, but it can only survive on a constant diet of human blood. Quite why he would need the full contents of a human body every 24 hours when he seems to add the blood to the tank using a pipette is just one of many inexplicable aspects of this brilliantly daffy scheme. Anyway, unsurprisingly Karl has not been poisoned and returns to rescue Ruth from Von Niemann, who dies at the hands of Emil for some reason.

This whole film is deliriously bonkers, combining almost every subgenre of the 1930s. Although ostensibly a vampire film, it is in fact a mad scientist picture (or becomes one halfway through) but also shows a clear influence from The Bat, The Cat Creeps and other ‘masked maniac’ thrillers. Emil prowls the town’s rooftops clad in floppy-brimmed hat and dark cape; in fact he can be seen briefly in the opening scene of Kringen patrolling the streets, something which I only noticed on a second viewing. After Georgiana’s death, Karl fears that the murderer, presumably Gleib, may still be in the house; this seems to be for no other reason that because that’s what normally happens in these films.

Atwill, best remembered as the police inspector in various Frankenstein sequels, is never less than terrific in anything. He and Wray starred together in three films within the space of a couple of years: Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum and this one. The wonderful Wray, here sporting her natural brunette look, also made The Most Dangerous Game and, of course, King Kong around this time. Frye was midway between his two iconic roles as Fritz in Frankenstein and Karl in Bride of Frankenstein and had an uncredited role in The Invisible Man this same year.

Douglas makes a great leading man; there is real chemistry between him and Wray and his straight-faced mockery of the locals’ beliefs, together with his gentle ribbing of Frau Schnappmann, makes him a believable and likeable character. Although he appeared in dozens of films in the 1930s and 1940s, including The Lone Wolf Returns and Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, Douglas didn’t return to the horror genre until shortly before his death in 1981, when he appeared in The Changeling and Ghost Story.

Also in the cast are William V Mong (who was in Benjamin Christensen’s House of Horror/The Haunted House and played Merlin in a 1921 version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - I wonder if that still exists), Harrison Greene (The Case of the Black Cat, Charlie Chan at the Opera, The Devil Commands, Dick Tracy Returns), Fern Emmett (The Mummy’s Tomb, Captive Wild Woman), William Humphrey (who was in some Lon Chaney silents and also played Napoleon in a 1909 biopic!), Carl Stockdale (Intolerance, Mad Love, Revolt of the Zombies) and Paul Weigel (Dracula’s Daughter, The Black Cat, The Great Dictator).

Director Frank Strayer had helmed The Monster Walks the previous year and would direct The Ghost Walks the following year. From 1938 to 1943 he directed fourteen Blondie films. Writer Edward Lowe had started out in the mid-1910s writing scenarios for films with great-sounding titles like The Devil’s Signature and The Mystery of the Silent Death before co-writing the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame. Other credits include three Charlie Chans (in Paris, in Shanghai and at the Race Track), three Bulldog Drummonds (Escapes, Comes Back and ’s Revenge), two Houses (of Dracula and of Frankenstein), one Tarzan (‘s Desert Mystery) and one Sherlock Holmes (and the Secret Weapon). In a busy career, cinematographer Ira Morgan also lit The Unholy Night, Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, Mark of the Gorilla, The Cyclops and three classic superhero serials of the late 1940s: Superman, Batman and Robin and Atom Man vs Superman.

One reason that this film is so enjoyable, despite the creaky plot, is probably the contribution of art director Charles Hall who pretty much defined the look of early horror. His extraordinary CV includes The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Cat and the Canary, The Man Who Laughs, Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein (not to mention One Million BC, various Laurel and Hardy films, Show Boat, Waterloo Bridge, East of Borneo and All Quiet on the Western Front!). Born in Norwich in 1888, Hall designed scenery for Fred Karno’s troupe and continued his association with ex-Karno star Charlie Chaplin over numerous films. He is credited here as Daniel Hall, possibly to disguise his involvement in a non-Universal picture. Because, despite the presence of so many Universal stalwarts, this was actually produced by the obscure minor studio Majestic Pictures, their only foray into horror.

The print on this Classic Entertainment triple bill is not in great condition though it’s perfectly watchable. However, it only runs for sixty minutes rather than the normally listed 71 (like the Classic Entertainment version of The Ape) but apparently no versions actually run 71, most being between 62 and 67 minutes. (There is a 74-minute version but it only manages that by randomly inserting obviously nonmatched footage from Hitchcock's The Lodger!) At several points the screen goes black for a few frames and the only reason I can think of for that is that the original source material, way back when, had a soundtrack on disc. That was a technique still in use in 1933 which required, in order for the synchronisation to work, that any frames damaged were replaced with the exact number of blank frames.

Despite its truncated running time and the scratchy, crackly print, I am extremely pleased to have finally had a chance to see this marvellous film which has instantly become one of my favourites. Atwill is outstanding, Frye is brilliant and Wray and Douglas make a wonderful screen couple. Even the broad comedy of Frau Schnappmann is tolerable: Maude Eburne is much funnier than the ghastly and irritating Una O’Connor who normally filled those sorts of roles.

There is some lovely direction, effective use of shadows, some impressive (for the era) camera movement. It’s a wonderful package which makes for one of the best 1930s horror films to emanate from a minor studio.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Victor Halperin
Writers: Victor Halperin, Rollo Lloyd, Howard Higgin
Producer: Edward Halperin
Cast: Dean Jagger, Dorothy Stone, Robert Noland
Country: USA
Year of release: 1936
Reviewed from: DVD (Classic Entertainment)

Everybody knows White Zombie. I mean, seriously, I can forgive you if you haven’t seen Bride of Frankenstein or Creature from the Black Lagoon or Dracula has Risen from the Grave but really, there’s no excuse for not having seen White Zombie. It’s a public domain film that has been released about five thousand times. Look, if you’ve never seen it, stop reading now, go off and get a copy, watch it, then come back.

Right, now have we all seen White Zombie?

This film has no narrative connection with the 1932 classic White Zombie. But it was made by the same people and released four years later, making it only the third ever zombie film (Michael Curtiz’s 1934 voodoo picture Ouanga popped up inbetween them). What makes Revolt of the Zombies particularly odd is that it is set not in Haiti, not even in the Southern USA - but in Cambodia.

Actually, a lengthy prologue is set in France during World War One, making this (I believe) the first war/horror crossover picture. There have been many, many war/horror films since - off the top of my head: The Keep, Deathwatch, The Bunker and on this site the likes of Hellraiser III, Night Wars and The Darkness Beyond - but this must surely be the first.

Twenty years before he worked for Hammer on X - The Unknown, Dean Jagger stars as Armand Louque, a translator in the French army, newly arrived at Cambrai (or somewhere on the western front, at any rate) with a Cambodian priest named Tsiang (according to the IMDB although it sounds like ‘Neo’ on the soundtrack). The Priest (William Crowell, who is about as Cambodian as I am) knows the secret of creating ‘zombies’ - not reanimated corpses but hypnotised men who will follow orders unquestioningly and who are impervious to pain. The French High Command wants none of this but Tsiang creates his zombie army anyway and there is a terrific sequence of unblinking soldiers advancing on a German trench, not even flinching as the terrified Bosch unload bullets into them. If the whole film stayed like this - or was even just about this - it would be a bona fide classic.

But a representative of ‘the Central European Powers’ appeals to the French High Command about this terrible weapon and the Frogs, assuring the Kraut that this attack was unauthorised, decide to lock up Tsiang where he can cause no more trouble. Two things strike me about this great prologue. The first is that the zombies, while they’re pretty much invincible, are only armed with regular guns so they don’t seem a particularly unfair weapon (compared with, say, mustard gas) and it’s difficult to believe that any army would agree to stop using an effective weapon because the enemy said it wasn’t fair. That’s not how war works, is it?

The other thing of note is that the slave-soldiers are referred to not only as ‘zombies’ but also as ‘robots’, a word which was coined only 16 years before this film and which had evidently still not settled down to meaning only a mechanical man but was capable of being applied to any non-human worker. Of course, a word coined in 1920 (in Karel Capek’s famous play RUR) is somewhat anachronistic when repeatedly used in scenes set during the 1914-1918 war.

So anyway, the priest is placed in solitary confinement where he is stabbed by an arm reaching out from behind a statue of Shiva (who’s going to notice one more arm?). This arm belongs to Colonel Mazovia (Roy D’Arcy, who for a cheap laugh I will point out was in both The Gay Deceiver and The Gay Buckaroo) who seems to be semi-oriental in terms of his goateed, quasi-demonic, sub-Fu Manchu appearance. Basically he looks very much like Bela Lugosi did as Murder Legendre in White Zombie.

Let’s just pause here to observe that Murder Legendre is absolutely the best character name in the history of cinema.

There’s no real explanation of who Colonel Mazovia is or why he is attached to the French army, but then there’s not much explanation of anything. For some reason it is decided among the various officers at this particular HQ that after the war they will all go on an expedition to Cambodia to discover the secret of zombification.

So we jump forward a few years to a back-projected photograph of a Cambodian temple. Louque is here along with another junior officer, his friend Clifford Grayson (Robert Noland - who seems to have done nothing else ever). There’s bluff General Duval (George Cleveland, who had a bit part in The Ape and played Gramps in the 1950s Lassie TV series), wiry Dr Trevissant (E Alyn ‘Fred’ Warren, who was in The Devil Doll the same year), Duval’s daughter Claire (Dorothy Stone) and the diabolical - but apparently completely unsuspicious - Colonel Mazovia. Plus a few other chaps. Louque, a shy, retiring chap, has the hots for Claire and they get engaged but she becomes enamoured of the more outgoing Grayson, which is ironic as he was the one who persuaded Louque that faint heart never won fair lady.

Somehow Louque discovers the secret of zombification. ‘Somehow’ in the sense that there is a carving that Mazovia has a drawing of (which he stole from the priest before he killed him) and Louque finds a photograph of this carving which leads him to a series of tunnels where he spots Mazovia up to no good and... it’s no use, this part of the plot is all over the shop. Anyway, the important thing is that Louque, consumed with jealousy, experiments with various substances until he creates the magic smoke that can turn men into zombies, which he tests by blowing it into the face of his servant Buna (Japanese actor Teru Shimada: The Snow Creature, You Only Live Twice).

Buna is now completely under the control of Louque who he is so delighted with this that he not only creates an army of native zombies, he also somehow enslaves General Duval and his associates. Quite how he does either of these things, given that the process seems to involve blowing magic smoke into someone’s face, is not explained. He also enslaves Grayson but he can’t bring himself to enslave Claire, the woman he loves.

Nevertheless, we see thousands - well, hundreds - well, scores of natives, marching in silent obedience to Louque’s will. We can tell when someone is under Louque’s power (the word ‘zombie’ has long since disappeared from the script by this point) because a pair of hypnotic eyes are superimposed on screen. Back in 1936, I imagine audiences accepted these as Louque’s eyes but watching this on DVD decades later with a background knowledge of classic horror, we can instantly spot that this is exactly the same shot of Lugosi’s eyes which was used when Murder Legendre imposed his will on his enslaved servants in White Zombie.

See, that’s why you had to watch that film first.

And isn’t Murder Legendre a great name? I wish I was called Murder Legendre.

Eventually Claire agrees to marry the now clearly bonkers Louque instead of Grayson if he will release all his zombie slaves. But when he does this, Buna immediately sets about leading the ex-zombie army to find and destroy the man who enslaved them. What is completely brilliant about this is that the shots of the ex-zombies advancing on Louque’s home are exactly the same shots that were used when these extras were zombies, just with ‘rabble noises’ dubbed over the top.

Buna and his friends break into the place and kill Louque and everyone else lives happily ever after. Or something.

I quiet enjoyed Revolt of the Zombies, which has ‘guilty pleasure’ written all the way through it like a stick of rock. The acting’s no great shakes but for the era it’s okay. Production design isn’t up to much but how many of this film’s intended audience would have any idea what Cambodia looked like. The climactic action sequence is pretty good as Buna and his comrades smash their way into the building and, as mentioned, the scenes of zombified troops advancing across No Man’s Land are actually very effective indeed.

But to be honest the only reason this film is remembered at all is because it has the word ‘zombies’ in the title in an age when zombie films were almost unknown and long, long before George Romero invented the cinematic zombie as we know it today. Revolt of the Zombies is no worse than many other independent horror films from the 1930s but it has the good fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you view it) to be made by the Halperin bothers - director Victor and producer Edward - who had a few years earlier struck gold with White Zombie, possibly the finest independent horror film of the decade and still regarded as a classic today. Revolt simply pales by comparison.

Also in the cast are Carl Stockdale (The Vampire Bat, Intolerance), Adolph Millard (the 1929 version of Bulldog Drummond), Selmer Jackson (The Atomic Submarine, The Ape, Mighty Joe Young) and Sana Rayya (who was in the 1936 Flash Gordon serial) as a dancer. The uncredited script is generally accepted as having been a three-way collaboration between Victor Halperin, Howard Higgin (The Invisible Ray) and actor Rollo Loyd who allegedly had a hand in the screenplay for Bride of Frankenstein!

Director of photography Arthur Martinelli (White Zombie, The Devil Bat and a 1921 sci-fi obscurity called A Message from Mars) was assisted by ‘operative cameraman’ J Arthur Feindel who later handled photography on Day the World Ended. Special effects (such as they are) were provided by Ray Mercer who worked for thirty years on pictures such as Blake of Scotland Yard, The New Adventures of Tarzan, Return of the Ape Man, Strange Holiday, White Pongo, The Feathered Serpent and Mesa of Lost Women).

Very little is known about the Halperin brothers, independent cinema of this era being less than assiduously chronicled in contemporary publications. Victor made at least two dozen pictures from the early 1920s to the early 1940s of which his brother Edward collaborated on about half, but it’s really only their four horror films for which they’re known - and truthfully that’s three because who has ever heard of 1939’s Torture Ship (in which Edward apparently had no hand)? White Zombie of course is famous as one of Lugosi’s finest movies from the early 1930s when he was a horror icon almost without peer (that’s ‘almost’, Karloff fans). In just four years or so after Dracula, Bela made Murders in the Rue Morgue, Island of Lost Souls, Chandu the Magician, The Black Cat - and White Zombie. In none of those other films did he have a character name as cool as Murder Legendre.

Supernatural, produced one year later, is less well-known but the presence of Carole Lombard and Randolph Scott assures it a place in Hollywood history, while the titular notoriety of Revolt of the Zombies is something I have already touched on. The most detailed biography of the Halperins is, I believe, included in Gary Don Rhodes’ book White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (McFarland, 2001) but even that is apparently patchy. Yet, frustratingly, Victor Halperin died as recently as 1983.

Revolt of the Zombies is a mixed bag: mostly corny but with occasional bursts of brilliance. It is deservedly more obscure that its predecessor - and would undoubtedly have been vastly improved by the presence of Lugosi as more than a pair of stock footage eyes - but it’s still worth watching if you’ve never seen it. (The Classic Entertainment triple bill partners Revolt with Attack of the Giant Leeches and The Amazing Transparent Man.)

MJS rating: C

This interview with Ivan Zuccon was conducted by e-mail in February 2002. Thanks toUnknown Beyond/Shunned Housescriptwriter Enrico Saletti for help with translation - although Ivan speaks and writes pretty good English (certainly better than my Italian!). An edited version of this interview appeared in issue 216 of Fangoria.

What inspired you to become a film-maker?
“It's something that grew up along with me. Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated by cinema. I really loved Sergio Leone's westerns. I remember planning to shoot a sci-fi western, and starting to put down a plot.

”The real passion came years later, when I got acquainted to the horror genre. I had always been scared to death of horror movies, but one day I decided to face my fears and watch the movies of the horror masters. I rented ten movies and closed myself in a room, alone with my VCR. I was impressed by Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Sam Raimi and John Carpenter. I was mostly interested in the technical side of Raimi's films and the visionary approach of Bava's ones. I decided I would make horror movies, because they would allow me to use more creative shooting techniques.

”I fished out my father's old super-8 camera and shot some very short movies, which I edited myself. It was fun, and very gratifying. Since then I've never stopped thinking and making cinema.”

Tell me a little about the short films you made before The Darkness Beyond.
“I started shooting short films in 1995, and I still shoot some, waiting to find the money for my next feature-length movie. You learn a lot shooting shorts. I shot 12 short films, mostly horror.

”Some of them don't have proper distribution, and are shown rarely because of their political incorrectness. One example is L'Ultima Cena (‘The Last Supper’), a sort of re-examination of the Gospel, set in the future and with a cannibalistic turn. Another is Degenerazione in which I showed a matricide [Later remade as the featureBad Brains- MJS]. These shorts were screened at several important festivals, resulting in a hell of a lot of arguments and resentment towards the festival boards.

”Recently I shot a couple of different shorts. One is L'Albero Capovolto (‘The Upside-Down Tree’), where I tell the story of a lonely painter, a girl, who finds a lock implanted in her belly. The latest, Neve (‘Snow’), is a very intense family drama. Right now I can't wait to shoot another full-length horror.”

Why did you make an 'HP Lovecraft' film?
“I love Lovecraft, although I'm much more interested in the man than in his stories. I'd like to make a film telling his life story as it really was. His literature comes from the way that he felt a ‘stranger, an ‘alien’ to this world. That’s something I share with him. My interest in HPL comes from this feeling: not the terrible creeping creatures he described but what those creatures really meant to him. Often I get more exited by how one of his stories was conceived than by the story itself. And I appreciate his efforts in trying to describe what cannot be described.”

Can you me some technical details - budget, schedule etc. - for The Darkness Beyond?
“I started shooting The Darkness Beyond during summer 1998, with a ridiculous budget, about $2,500. The actors worked for a very small wage and I called a friend of mine, Massimo Storari, to take care of special effects and make-up. We worked nine days from 7pm to 6am inside an abandoned farm. We wanted to make a horror short which could bring attention to our work and enable us to find enough money to shoot a real film. Darkness Beyond was shot on digital; the camera I used was really good and the lighting was designed to make everything very alien and disturbing, in the style of Mario Bava. Massimo Storari proved himself to be an excellent special effects artist, and the actors were good and competent. The result was an amazing and really scary 30-minute short.

”Then everything went to sleep. It took us two years to find someone interested in our work. I showed some scenes of the short to Prescription Films (who were then a Los Angeles-based distributor), pretending they were part of a feature-length movie. They really liked it and told me they would distribute it. So I hurriedly wrote some more scenes to turn it into a full movie and shot for ten more days, with some new actors I had just recruited. The $7,500 budget had to be enough for editing and soundtrack too. I had the film ready just in time for the Cannes Market, and that's how our international adventure began.”

What are the problems of making and distributing an independent horror film in Italy today?
“It's like tilting at windmills! Horror doesn't sell much here... well, Italian horror doesn't, actually. This situation has caused our ‘horror directors’ to turn to other genres. And Italian distributors don't trust Italian horror. They want to be safe, I mean completely safe. They want stars in the cast and idiot-proof stories, so there's very little to understand. The audience has become accustomed to this logic and this is how things work now. If I had a star in my films (Asia Argento, for example), I wouldn't have had problems at all finding distribution. We don't give up, though. We're knocking on every door, and sooner or later someone will open up and listen to us.”

Your film has very few special effects, but is very scary. Is atmosphere more important to a horror film than lots of blood?
“Absolutely! You can make the scariest movie without a single drop of blood, and at the opposite side you can't scare anyone with splatter effects only. I believe special effects and atmosphere must co-exist in horror movies, but priority goes to atmosphere! It’s better to be evocative than visual. What our mind can conceive by itself is always much more terrible than what our eyes can see.”

How is Unknown Beyond different to The Darkness Beyond: for you, and for the audience?
“The Darkness Beyond was born from a short film with a dream-like structure, so it was hard turning it into a full length work. But in spite of that I'm very satisfied with it. It's pure atmosphere, it's very ‘Bava-esque’. If someone tells me they don't understand it, I reply that there's simply nothing to understand. It's a ‘vision’, and the vision is approaching pure cinema. And it's a really scary experience for the watcher, because fear hides itself behind things our consciousness can't completely grasp.

"Unknown Beyond is more like a parallel film than a real sequel. Something that can be understood by audiences who haven't seen the first chapter. Its structure is much more straightforward, and it's technically superior to the first one. Though the atmosphere is similar, the actual events rush on frantically. The first 45 minutes are very satisfying to me. The actors gave their best, the rhythm is good, the atmosphere is dark and disquieting. In the second half the film tends to return to the dream-like feeling of The Darkness Beyond. This makes it all a little mad, but as the film’s screenwriter Enrico Saletti always says: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.’

”The budget was quite small and with what we had we made real miracles. We shot nonstop for 30 days, 13 to 18 hours a day. It was a consuming experience but also a very satisfying one. We mostly shot at night, on very evocative locations, such as our city Ferrara's medieval walls and the dungeons of its beautiful castle. We had a lot of complex action scenes to shoot and time never was on our side. In the end we did it on time and on budget - not without giving something up, of course, but sometimes lack of resources helps you sharpen yours skills.”

Where have your films been shown/distributed?
“The Darkness Beyond has so far only been distributed in Japan although its sequel, Unknown Beyond, has been distributed in Italy, Japan, Thailand and the USA. LeoFilms will shortly release it in DVD in the USA. Both films were shown and appreciated at several international festivals, such as the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester, England in 2001, and the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Salem, USA in 2000 and 2001.”

What other productions have you worked on?
“I was assistant to Pupi Avati for the film La Via Degli Angeli, and I still work for DueaFilm, editing TV shows produced by Avati himself for RaiSat2000, a satellite channel. Since my own movies still don't make me enough to live on, I set up a digital editing studio and I edit TV shows, fiction, shorts, independent movies and documentaries made by others. I use most of my earnings to produce my own films.”

What are your plans for the third film in the trilogy?
“We're working on in. We've got a plot, we’re not short of ideas. Our problem is, as always, budget. Actually, LeoFilms seems to be interested in co-producing with us this third chapter of the Beyond saga, but we're all waiting to see how Unknown Beyond will go on the US market, before applying ourselves completely to the project.

”Right now our creative team, formed by Massimo Storari, writer Enrico Saletti and myself, is working on a new Lovecraft-ian project [The Shunned House], which has nothing to do with the Beyond trilogy. It's based on three stories by the Master, linked together and interconnected in a quite complex structure. The story, set in the same place at three different periods of time (just after WWI, just after WWII and nowadays), is getting quite scary and disturbing... The screenplay is almost ready and I hope to start shooting by next summer.”

website: www.ivanzuccon.com

Mark Zarate was Visual Effects Supervisor on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I interviewed him by phone on 22nd February 1996 for a big Lois and Clark feature in SFX. Tragically, Mark passed away in September 1998, aged only 39, from complications which arose during an operation to treat appendicitis

What does your role as Visual Effects Supervisor actually entail?
“I'm in charge of co-ordinating different departments: pyrotechnics, practical effects, wardrobe, art department, storyboards. Then I supervise it all through post-production. I'm also a 2nd unit director so I do a lot of green screen work. I work with effects editors and compositors.”

Although a show like this needs effects to work, they seem to be secondary to the characters and their relationships. How does the production team balance the two key aspects of the show?
“I think it's beneficial that it's a character-driven show, so there are no gratuitous effects. The effects are there to enhance the Superman/Clark character. They also appeal to a younger audience. I try to let the effects live within the environment of the show. Stylised is the word I use for our effects. We always bear in mind that this is a comic book genre. We pick bright, wild colours for things. We try to stay true to the comic book nature of the original.

“For example, we add a blue cast to Superman's superbreath. Originally we had quite realistic looking breath, but it was just kind of grey and uninteresting, so we gave it a slight blue cast. For his laser eyes we photographed real lasers, but they looked too real, so we pumped up the red chroma on them and made them look more like we wanted them.

What did you do before working on Lois and Clark?
“This is my second season. I joined after the first season. Before this I did mostly commercials. I did big-screen effects for Michael Jackson's Dangerous tour and Paul McCartney's world tour and a couple of music videos. I worked on Shocker for Wes Craven and did some work on Total Recall. I also designed the titles for the Sharon Stone movie Basic Instinct.”

What differences do you find in working on a weekly series rather than a one-off movie or commercial?
“I really enjoy working on a regular series. It allows you to develop the effects further, and give them co-ordination. A commercial is really a one-trick pony. But the more times you see an effect, the more boring it becomes. We are able to put in lots of neat little gags, on things like the various gadgets that the villains come up with.

“Obviously we have budgetary and time constraints. The schedules are pretty hectic. Sometimes the writers do come up with ideas that we really can't do on the show and I say well that's great, but that's really going to have to wait until we do Lois and Clark: The Feature.”

How many effects do you have in an average episode, and how many people do you have in the effects team?
“The visual effects crew - including editors, supervisors and so on - all told there are about a dozen of us. There are about 30-35 visual effects per episode. But on 'Virtually Destroyed', which is the episode that Dean Cain wrote, there were 97 separate effects that we had to do in eleven days. So we got some freelancers in, and worked hard, and fortunately they tripled the budget for that one.

“It's very much a team effort on this show. We, the visual effects team, could not achieve what we do without the co-operation and smooth running of the other departments. It's unusual for me, coming from commercials, to work with the same team for so long. I really think I'm going to miss the atmosphere of this show when it ends.”

Were you responsible for the terrific time machine in the ‘Tempus Fugitive’ episode?
“Jim Paul designed the time machine. We wanted to go for that real HG Wells/Jules Verne look, but use 21st century effects for its appearance and disappearance - actually give it some glow and some effects rather than just have it fade away.”

How do the cast cope with some of the physical requirements of the special effects sequences?
“I'm a big guy, and I've gotten into some of the rigs that we've worked with to try them out and see what they feel like, and let me tell you, it was less than pleasant. The cast are great about the effects. We put them on platforms or hang them from wires. None of that feels comfortable, but they're all troupers.

“Obviously, Dean has to work with most of the effects, but he's in great shape, he really is. As for Teri, well Lois gets into all sort of precarious positions, trapped on ledges or falling out of helicopters or whatever. But they're really good, and they're always in a harness so there's no danger.”

I can imagine there might be a bit of competition to get the task of strapping Teri Hatcher into her safety harness. Do you use your seniority to claim that job?
“No, I don't get to put the harness on Teri. I put my name in the hat but I didn't get picked. I wish it was me, but no, we have a couple of people whose job is to put on the harnesses and check that they're properly secured.”

Sam Zalutsky, director ofYou Belong to Me, kindly answered a few questions by e-mail in March 2009. My thanks to Simon Savory for arranging this.

In your opinion, is this a gay film or a horror film or both or neither?
“I think it's a love story really (in my own twisted little way). Yes, it is a gay movie, but it's not about being gay so I think it's different than what most people or the industry define as a gay movie. The male lead's gayness is not really the focus dramatically or thematically. Yes it's horror - psychological horror is what I'd call it.”

What does the film have in common with the earlier short that you mentioned in the Making Of?
“That was really an exercise in film school so I don't really consider it a short. It was more an exploration of ideas that were percolating in the deep recesses of my mind.”

How did you assemble your cast and crew?
“For the cast I had a great casting director, Jordan Beswick, whom I had worked with before on a previous short, Stefan's Silver Bell. We get along great, have some similar ideas and also he challenges me in ways that are really exciting. So we went out to ‘big names’ and when they didn't bite, we did auditions and meetings and found these great actors. Also, I had worked with Kevin Corstange, who plays Michael, the drunk guy who breaks in to Jeffrey's apartment, on a previous short, and he's fantastic, so I knew I wanted to work with him again.

“For the crew, some people I knew or had worked with from my time at NYU grad film school, others were recommendations, word of mouth, others were people my producer, Chip Hourihan found. A hodgepodge of folks committed to independent film.”

What's with the long-haired guy looking for his wife? Was he intended to be part of a subplot or is he just a red herring?
“Calvin is my father... Just kidding! Yes, Calvin is there to add to the scenery, to make the building seem more dangerous and bizarre and hopefully inspire some questions in the minds of the audience.”

How has the film been received by audiences and critics?
“It's been received really well. The screenings that I've attended at film festivals have been fantastic! Our premiere at Frameline had 900 people shrieking and gasping all at the same time, and my whole family was there too. It's always an amazing experience to see it on the big screen with an audience. I've also gotten lots of feedback from people about the DVD release, and the Pay Per View and Logo airings. So that's good. Also some really good press, especially a great Variety review.”

What are you working on now?
“I have a few scripts I'm working on, a couple comedies and a coming-of-age drama about a 14-year old girl based on a short story. Also I am looking at some book properties to adapt and looking for opportunities to work with good people. Hopefully I'll get to make another movie soon! I'm jonesing to get back on set!”

website: www.sazamproductions.com

I have a lot of interviews in the archive which have, for one reason or another, never seen the light of day and occasionally I’m reminded of one of these when I read an obituary. In December 2008 I read that Derek Wadsworth had passed away and I instantly recalled the lovely bloke who gave me a smashing interview when I met him at the Fanderson Gold convention in August 1996. Derek was best known for writing all the music for the second season of Space: 1999.

You came in halfway through Space: 1999 to do the music.
"Yes, I came in halfway through. There were big changes happening at the time, between those two series, not the least of which was that Gerry had just divorced and separated from Sylvia. Because they'd always been a husband and wife creative team. At that point they were going their separate ways, which was obviously a very traumatic time for both of them. There was also all sorts of changes within the business and in a way I kind of represented a new start for Gerry as far as the music was concerned."

Without wanting to go into personal details, was the break-up between Gerry and Sylvia very evident in the production itself, on set?
"Not at all. Because I'd come in as a new boy, I never met Sylvia anyway. But Gerry's such a hard-nosed professional that his private life would never spill over into his professional life. There are so many divorces in the world, aren't there? But people just get on with their lives and go on doing what they've always done. I wasn't able to compare Gerry's behaviour before and after because I didn't know him before. He was just a new character to me."

Were you familiar with the first season of Space: 1999?
"Yes, I was. In fact I was familiar with most of Gerry's work because I was a big fan. Especially Thunderbirds, because I had children who grew up and watched every episode. And all the Joe 90s and Stingrays. Oh yes, great fun. For me it was a big thrill to be part of that team. It was just wonderful."

How did you get the job?
"I'm a freelance writer/composer/musician. I have been for 38 years now; even then I'd been about 16 years in the business, when I started in 1976. So you get all sorts of odd jobs. One night you're playing in a pub for a pub crowd, the next minute you're flying on a jet with Diana Ross or something like that. You get all sorts of jobs come on the phone. Sometimes you have very quiet periods, sometimes you're flavour of the month and get a lot of work. Like any other sort of freelance business.

“I'd been musical director of the show Hair in the '60s, the hippy rock musical, and I'd put a band together for that with some people I knew, including a rock'n'roll star called Alex Harvey. Well, he wasn't a rock'n'roll star then; he was a rock'n'roller but not a star. I'd heard Alex Harvey singing in a club in the West End when I went to play my trombone. I played ‘Girl from Ipanema’ and all those sort of standards that you play in hotels and things. And I thought Alex was a great player. So when I got the chance to be musical director of this show, I got him in on guitar. Subsequently there was another guy too in that band, Mike Oldfield, who went on to make Tubular Bells. So they were both in the band. And Alex went on to be a big star in the '70s - The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. They were all very theatrical and camp, dressed up a bit and did kind of comic-strip routines.

“As he became a star, Alex always used me as his musical director if he wanted things like strings or brass or anything like that on their recordings. And he was sponsored by a guy called Bill Fehilly, Mountain Management. Bill made all his money out of bingo halls up North. He'd made a big empire for himself and it was his idea he was going to get into music. So his first promotion was this guy - sorry, it's a long story - Alex, who used to stick fly posters up for him in Glasgow. So, as Alex got bigger, Alex said, 'Why don't you do something for Derek? See if you can get him some films or something like that.' I had been doing some films already before that with Manfred Mann.

“So we got together in the office, thinking up crazy ideas. And somebody said, 'These bloody pop stars, they're so much trouble with their egos and their prima donna behaviour. Why don't we have a pop star who we can put in a box at night?' So it was a kind of a joke. So somebody said, 'Let's have a puppet for a pop star.' And somebody else said, 'Oh yes. We can promote him just like those guys on Thunderbirds and let's make him into a star.' So we said, 'Well, who makes puppets?''Gerry Anderson, he's the best.'

“So Tony Prior - who now owns Telstar Records, he's become very successful - he was a bit of an accountant, so he made an appointment with Gerry Anderson. And of course Gerry's always been open to crazy ideas. His antenna's always open. You can go to Gerry with almost anything and he would never laugh in your face because he's a very serious-minded bloke about his work. So he was kind of taken with this idea. And this was just the particular time when it looked as though Space: 1999 was going to finish in its first series. There'd be no more. So what Gerry had done to keep the company going, he'd made a pilot film inbetween times on Space: 1999 using some of the equipment from Space: 1999, some of the sets. While it was there, he made use of it. So he made a thing called Into Infinity. He'd just done this.

“So for some reason, I can't remember quite why, Gerry was suddenly too busy to do the puppet pop star. So he was saying to Tony - they became friends - 'We've got this film, we're trying to put this pilot together, but we haven't got a music score because I'm splitting with Barry Gray now.' So Tony pipes up: 'Well, we'll do the music.' Because somebody had to pay for it. So this company that I was working with, Mountain Management, said they would pay for the music and they said, 'Derek will write it.' So Gerry said, 'Fine. That's fine by me.' Even though he didn't really know me. So I did the music for that. The puppet pop star didn't happen. Into Infinity was made and finished; it was a pilot but it was never taken up as a series. But in the course of it all I'd met Gerry Anderson and he'd heard what I could do, and I suddenly got a call: 'We've got a second series of Space. Would you like to do it?' So that was really how I got it.”

How did the process work on Space: 1999? At what stage of production did you come in?
"The first thing of course was a signature tune. In those days of course we didn't have computers and synthesisers, it was all very new. These days people expect you to give them the finished product and say, 'That is my idea'. Or pretty near the finished product, because you can get synthesised strings and other stuff. In those days there was nothing like that and nobody had even twigged on the idea of having a demo for a tune anyway. It was just: if they liked your work, they gave you a job and left you to it, which was wonderful. In the event, when I did record the signature tune I did three different versions and they chose the one that they liked.

“When it came to the episodes, they used to have these things that they don't have any more called Moviolas. It was a bit like the old Singer sewing machine, with a foot treadle, and the film goes through. Of course, this was all before video. You know the effects of the video: stop, start, frame move and all that business. Well of course, that was unknown to the general public in those days. The only thing you had was this machine, the Moviola; which, with the foot peddle, you could move the film back and forward and then spot it.

“Now, it's not just as simple as making up the music and put in what you like. The first thing you have to think about is the very practical considerations, because there are Musician's Union rules that you have to abide by. Not least of which - and this still applies today - is that you can only record twenty minutes of music in one recording session. Which is a three-hour recording session in which you're allowed to record a maximum of twenty minutes of music. So therefore, when we had a session, you usually had twenty minutes of music maximum for a one-hour episode. So the first thing is to decide in the episode where the most important bits for music are, bearing in mind you've only got twenty minutes. You might choose lots of places then suddenly realise there's a big important scene at the end. But you've used all your points up earlier on, so you have to go back and drop something.

“So there was those kind of things. And the budget of course, you've got to think about the budget. That's the hard bit, working out the cost of the studio and the cost of the players and whether you're doubling the instruments and whether people are dragging on the main performance. You're doing all this kind of logistics. Then comes the creative bit, which is picking out the bits in the episode where the music goes: the start point and the end point. Then you've got some horrendous calculations, which is another thing. Because one foot of film is two-thirds of a second. So the editors give you the timing in footages. So if you decide that the start point is when someone opens a door, then at 17 and a half foot someone thumps somebody on the nose or something like that, you've got 17 and a half two-thirds of a second to work out. You can't even work it out with a calculator because it's not a decimal thing. And I'm not very good at maths anyway. So there's a long list of sums to be done.

“Having then done your sums, you then get the score. First of all, you decide in your head what the tempo will be. It's better in a sense not to use a tempo and just to play it wild. But of course you've got your budgetary factor coming in: you don't want to be in the studio with any risk factors, you want to get it while you possibly can. So nearly all of us work with click tracks. The musicians work with headphones on: they can hear tick-tock-tick-tock in their cans, so that's an exact frame-beat click track. Then you end up getting your score paper, putting little crosses at certain bars actually where things are supposed to happen. You've got your tempo with it. Then bar three, you put a little cross because a spaceship lands; bar five, beat four, the dialogue begins between Koenig and Maya or something like that; then the dialogue ends. So you mark all these things on top of your score, so you've actually got like a painting-by-numbers kit before you start. That's the hardest part of the work. Then you can see exactly where these spaces are, where the music can come through, where the effects are and so on.

“Then really just like anybody would, you make up a tune. Dress it up; put a little bass line on it or things like that. And I was typical really of anyone who was fairly new to the game. I was talking about this recently with Bill LeSage who used to do a lot of black and white movies in the '50s. Anybody that's in my business who first gets their break, who does music on an important programme, you try too hard. You want to prove to the world how brilliant you are, and you put too much in. And it's wrong. Music is just an effect. There are spaces. There are some directors who will give you the space. But on the whole, you shouldn't be thinking about your own little ego trip. And that's the fault that I did. When I see these things today, I cringe. That's me trying to be clever. If I were to do it now, older and wiser I'd be a lot sparer in what I do and really use it more as an effect, rather than me saying, 'Aren't I clever?'"

Finally, how much contact did you have with Gerry?
"I've got nothing but respect for Gerry Anderson, because once he's decided he's going to use someone, he gives them total freedom to do what they want to do. He'll prod you, but he doesn't breathe down your neck. A lot of people do in the film world. They're knocking on your door in the wee small hours of the morning, leaning over you as you're trying to play the piano and worrying themselves to death. I think Gerry sizes you up and if he thinks you're worth your salt, he'll let you get ahead with it. When it comes to the rushes and he gets to hear the music for the first time, if there's something he doesn't like, he doesn't throw a wobbly and say, 'What's all that about?' He discusses it in a very, clear, rational way. He's got this quiet, slow manner. He'd say, 'Derek, we've decided that we're going to have more effects in here, and I think' - he'll put it to you - 'Do you think the music would be better if it was less busy and a bit more quiet at that particular point? What do you think?' He doesn't say to you, 'For God's sake! There's too much going on there? What the hell are you doing?'

“In my time in the business, looking back, there are three or four people I've worked with who were great motivators, people who bring the best out of you. I once toured America with a band leader who, before you went on, would come up to you in the wings like a cheerleader. He'd say, 'Oh, you were fantastic last night, Derek. We're going to knock the socks off them tonight, aren't we? We're a great band. They won't believe it when they hear us!' So you'd go out and do the concert and feel really good in yourself. Yet only a few months later I toured America with another artist who would come on and say, 'God, you screwed that up last night. What a load of shit you played. You're going to get it right tonight, aren't you?' But Gerry's one of those motivators. He flatters you, and brings the best out of you.

“And when you're working for him, you're the greatest in the world. He tells everybody, 'This boy here, he's the best.' When your turn has come not to do something, then the next person in charge is the greatest. He's a great motivator, a terrific person to work for. I subsequently applied for one or two more of his other productions in the past. I didn't do Space Precinct, but I would have liked to have done. But it's a competitive field. What's expected now of composers is that you put in a demo, and if the demo's good enough, you'll get the job. Gerry would have liked to have worked with me. In fact, I came very close to getting Space Precinct, but there was a decision between him and his backers and I didn't get that one, which is fair enough. I do other television series; sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't. It's a competitive, open field and if you get them of course it's great because it's a very lucrative field. If you get one out of ten then you're doing very well.”

Director: Guy Davis
Writer: VZ Montengo
Producers: Guy Davis, Quentin Dodd, Paul Dodd
Cast: Scott Ganyo, Kate Rudd, Sally Weatherston
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.zorgandandy.com

I always feel guilty when somebody sends me their film that they’ve worked hard on and I watch it and, not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s awful. Part of me says ‘Hey, don’t review this. Give these guys a break.’ And another part of me says ‘Write what you genuinely think because to do otherwise would be a disservice to your readers and indeed to the film-makers themselves. Any creative artist, especially one just starting out, can learn more from detailed analysis and constructive criticism than from unalloyed lauding of their work. So tell the truth.’

A bit more verbose, that second voice.

It’s difficult to know where to start with Zorg and Andy, a 65-minute, self-styled ‘indie comedy sensation’ but I would suggest that its biggest failing is that it isn’t even slightly funny. Not only did I not laugh once, I didn’t even smile. It’s clearly not meant to be a serious film because the central premise is ridiculous and in fact there is tremendous potential for comedy in said premise, but none of that potential is mined here. It’s like the film is one enormous joke-oid; it has the shape of a comedy without actually being one. It’s not that the gags are weak or unfunny, it’s that there don’t seem to be any. Not only did I not laugh, I couldn’t work out where I was supposed to laugh if I had found it funny.

Which is a huge shame because the premise is very good. A student doing work experience in a museum is left in charge of an ancient idol which goes missing and it turns out that his university is full of secret cults and cabals, all of whom want to get their hands on the idol for their own nefarious purposes. I like that idea. It’s clever and original. I work in a university and I can well believe that secret ceremonies go on behind certain faculty doors.

Well, when I say “full of secret cults and cabals” I’m paraphrasing the sleeve blurb (“their idyllic campus is overrun by pagan blood cults”) and the website blurb (“his idyllic campus is home to a network of bloodthirsty pagan cults”). In fact there are precisely two cults with about 15 or 16 members between them.

The plot, in a nutshell, is that an archaeological dig by a German team in Turkey uncovers the stone idol and a mysterious woman who has a mind-control drug in the heel of her stiletto persuades the lead archaeologist to ship the item to the States.

Student Andy has had some problem in his previous work experience so he is assigned to a museum where the staff consists of brusque, downtrodden Jen and irritating, chirpy Pete plus an unseen ‘Professor Harpax’. While cleaning the statue, Andy gives it to a strange woman who calls it Zorg. When Jen finds this out she goes ballistic and sends Andy to get it back.

He goes to see two entirely unexplained characters, one of whom wears a large, papier-mâché pig’s head for no apparent reason. Identifying the woman from a bunch of staff photos as ‘Colette from Economics’, he then goes to the Economics Department where he finds a gaggle of middle-aged people wearing odd costumes who are planning to sacrifice Jen to Zorg.

Later, while Jen sleeps, Andy answers the door and Colette whacks him with a golf club and steals Zorg again but she is tricked by Professor Harpax who leads an all-female cult which already owns a female version of the Zorg statue. They plan to sacrifice Andy and Jen and Colette but the other cult turn up and there is a short chase until eventually two campus security guys arrive and arrest everyone.

There’s a good idea in there somewhere but a whole bunch of things let the movie down, not least a badly structured script (by the possibly pseudonymous ‘VZ Montengo’) which drags out the Turkey-set prologue and is nearly halfway through before Andy even sets off to find the statue, which is supposed to be the central quest of the plot. There is even the potential in there for comedy, for misunderstandings, for surprises and shocks and people going nuts and other people staying frustratingly cool and collected.

But the only thing that might possibly be supposed to be funny is the pig’s head schtick which seems to be just random surrealism and as such is totally out of keeping with what the rest of the film is (allegedly) trying to achieve. I’m wondering whether the pig thing is some sort of in-joke. If not, why is it there. Who is ‘The Pig’ and who is the other guy with The Pig?

Okay, enough beating around the bush. The script is terrible - in terms of both plot structure and dialogue - and nobody was ever going to be able to make a good film out of it. And there’s a whole bunch of bad choices and technical deficiencies which I shall detail in a moment. But something has to be said about the character of Andy and the actor who plays him, Scott Ganyo.

Meh.

I don’t mean that as an opinion or as a critical comment. I’m using the term ‘meh’ in its purely adjectival sense. Andy Monroe is the most ‘meh’ character I think I’ve ever seen in a film. He’s blank, he’s nothing, he’s a character with no character. Not in a fascinating way like, say Peter Sellers in Being There. No, this is just an utterly dull character played in an utterly dull way so that we never, ever care about him at all. We don’t care what he does or how or why he does it.

He’s given no background so we don’t know who he is and he’s given no goal (apart from the short-term task of getting back the idol he gave away) so we don’t know what he wants. And we don’t care. I have honestly never seen a central character so monumentally dull. Not even dull enough to be interesting or amusing. Just bland. He shows no expressions: no fear, no elation, no concern, no curiosity. Nothing.

Not that he’s given anything to say or do in the bland script. Every line of dialogue that Andy utters is a prosaically dull statement, invariably delivered by Ganyo in the same flat monotone after a pause of about half a second. It’s like he’s not even aware of what’s going on - yet not distracted by something else either. He never seems to make eye contact with anyone else. There’s no body language, no sense of urgency when threatened, no sense of relief when safe. Andy is a narrative and emotional void at the centre of this film. Notice how, in the plot synopsis above, I was able to apply two adjectives to both Jen and Pete but nothng to Andy.

And since the film is called Zorg and Andy, and Zorg is just a small statue, that doesn’t really leave much. Really, the film should just be called And.

If the central character was played as a bit of a wise-guy chancer we could laugh with him. If he was played as lovable slacker we could laugh at him. But he’s neither, he’s nothing. It’s like some background extra with one line was stuck in front of the cameras and made the centre of the whole film but without bothering to expand his character from that single line. For example, there’s one scene where Andy picks up some antique coins from a display and uses them to buy a drink from a vending machine and, because he’s such a bland non-character, we don’t know why. Is he so dumb that he didn’t realise they were antiques or is he so cocky that he didn’t care they were antiques? Either might work but we have no idea which (if either) is the case.

So the next question is this: is Scott Ganyo a terrible actor or is he just playing Andy like this? I must admit that I assumed, given the cheapo nature of the film, that the cast probably consists of director Guy Davis’ friends and colleagues but it turns out that Ganyo is a professional SAG/AFTRA actor. So presumably it’s not that he doesn’t know how to act, he’s just playing Andy as if the character were being played by somebody who doesn’t know how to act. Somebody who not only doesn’t understand how to convey emotions but doesn’t even realise that’s what he’s supposed to be doing when that camera-thing is pointing at him.

At some point in the film, a terrible thing occurred to me. And I apologise in advance in case anybody thinks I’m being flippant, but I wondered whether the character of Andy was intended to be autistic. No really, it seems the only way to make sense of his disconnectedness from everything around him. It’s like he has his own world and his own judgements and he’s not doing anything really strange but there’s something indefinably different. And it reminds me of what little direct experience I have had with autistic people.

And once I had thought that, I couldn’t unthink it. And everything after that made some kind of sense, at least as far as Andy’s behaviour went. Of course, if I’m wrong and the character is actually meant to be some sort of laid-back, goof-off slacker - in fact, if Andy is meant to have any character at all - then I’m afraid Scott Ganyo really is an unbelievably terrible actor.

The rest of the cast varies from adequate to dreadful. Sally Weatherston as Harpax is probably the best of a bad bunch although I must mention Nancy R’beck who plays one of the Economics cult members. She has about three lines yet still manages to stand out as one of the worst actresses I’ve ever seen in my life.

Davis’ direction and editing are okay but he’s a little too trigger-happy on the shot-reverse-shot sometimes which is distracting and creates one or two body-position continuity errors. Cinematographer Benjamin Weatherston comes off best from this film I think although he can’t do anything about the perpetual problem of day-for-night shots, which is that they have never, ever looked like night-time in any film that has ever used them. Ever. I don’t know why people still bother with them, I honestly don’t.

Look, while I’m lambasting this little film, let’s point out a few specific problems. The German subtitles in the prologue are tricky to read. Then when we first meet Andy he’s lying in bed and somebody is leaving a message on his answerphone. But if you’re going to treat a voice with a telephone distort effect, don’t stick music over the top, especially when the film is just starting so we’ve no clues or context to help us decipher what is being said. It’s something to do with Andy’s last work experience but it’s mostly inaudible.

The only thing we can make out is that he has been assigned to the Kungsbaden Museum of Natural History which may or may not be part of his university - that’s never made clear. What is clear is that this is a museum of natural history, partly because it is called that several times and partly because of all the stuffed beavers, mounted antelope heads and dinotherium skeletons around the place.

I mean, kudos for finding - and getting permission to use - a real museum. This isn’t just set dressing, this is a full-on natural history museum and numerous shots are packed with top-quality background inaction of impressive taxidermy and some superb fossils.

So, er, what is an archaeological item, an ancient stone statue, doing in a natural history museum? Jen says repeatedly that this is Harpax’s prized acquisition and nobody bats an eyelid at its out-of-placeness. There’s a throwaway line about the museum concentrating on ‘anthropology and ethnology’ but that doesn’t square with the fully mounted woolly mammoth skeleton out front. Apart from the previously mentioned antique coins there is nothing in the museum which has any connection with anthropology or ethnology or indeed anything except animals. Either this is a general museum with a natural history section and an archaeology section - which is not what we are told/shown - or it’s just a natural history museum, in which case it makes no sense for it to have the facilities to clean and prepare archaeological specimens.

It looks like Guy Davis got access to this fabulous museum location and decided to shoot there even though it contradicted the basic premise of his plot. Are we supposed to not notice that the idol is in a completely inappropriate place? Because the characters don’t. I don’t get it.

The ‘museum’ also has, for some inexplicable reason, an insect lab full of free-flying ‘flesh-eating bugs’ which are represented by lots of little black blobs whizzing around, a buzzing noise and occasional insert shots of a cockroach. Andy and Jen are locked in the lab which is supposed to kill them but the bugs (who don’t seem capable of flying out of the door while it’s open) cause no more bother than a swarm of house-flies would. A giant millipede can be clearly seen at the edge of one shot, crawling around its tank, but is never mentioned.

Andy and Jen escape through the traditional large, square air duct that has served characters in dodgy B-movies as an escape route since time immemorial. Except that this one is represented by a metal plate about 12 inches square that the petite Jen might just about get through but Andy stands no chance. And the other end of the ‘air vent’ is represented by the two actors emerging from a small cupboard! Sorry, but that was the point at which I started to lose sympathy with Zorg and Andy. That’s just amateur. This film wants to be treated like a real movie but it’s more like a home movie, a student project designed for playing to the people who made it but a chore for other folk to sit through.

An equally badly done scene is Andy’s rescue of Jen (and Zorg) from the Economics Department. At this stage, Andy is still hoping to apply a ‘fixative’ to the statue to protect it when handled but he finds that he accidentally swapped bags with a photographer friend whom he met on the stairs before seeing pig-head-man and other-man. The friend must be a keen photographer because he has a decent camera which he carries around in a large bag with nothing else at all. Andy uses this camera to ward off the cult members and force them to untie Jen - but how does he use it?

The dialogue has a threat to leave the incriminating photos where they will be found and published if Andy dies but that’s not a way to ward off physical violence. Once Andy has one shot of the group (he’s just firing off the camera randomly) then any additional photos won’t incriminate them any more - and they are evidently prepared to commit murder - so they might as well grab him, stab him and smash the camera. Or are we supposed to imagine they’re frightened of the flash? Unfortunately, between the people playing the cult members being such terrible actors and Guy Davis not knowing how to direct this scene, we can’t really tell why they’re frightened. (We also have no clue why they have kidnapped Jen in particular.)

There are plenty of other gaping holes in the plot. Why does Harpax travel all the way to Turkey with her truth-drug-heel-syringe (the one and only interesting thing in the film) then just use it to persuade the German archaeology professor to have the idol shipped to her university. She puts him under mind-control and then just hands him her address! Later, Jen talks of having spent ages overseeing the shipping of the statue. So why didn’t Harpax just take the bloody thing when she had a chance, avoiding all that bother and risk?

Similarly, when Jen is asleep, recovering from her kidnap, and Andy goes to answer a knock at the front door, he is careful to pick up Zorg and carry the idol through the house so that he can be holding it when he gets whacked with a golf club. He has no reason to pick up the thing and carry it. Jen’s asleep, he’s unconscious (from a blow to the stomach?) so Colette could have just walked in and taken the statue off the table. It’s more bad script compounded by poor direction.

There is some mention near the end that Andy is somehow the ‘chosen one’ of Zorg but this is neither explained nor explored - then the film wraps up at about 59 minutes. About six minutes of credits follow, more than half of which is an endless list of all the sound effects which Davis used from various websites. That still leaves the movie short of the seventy minutes required to classify it as a feature; it’s a measure of the film-makers’ inexperience and naiveté that they didn’t think to simply run the credits slower (or bigger) to drag the whole thing out. Have they never seen a Charlie Band picture?

If there is one word to describe Zorg and Andy it is ‘over-ambitious’. Guy Davis has bitten off far more than he can chew, working from an unsuitable script with an untalented cast in inappropriate locations. It’s a real shame because he has put a lot of effort (and fair bit of money from a large team of credited ‘executive producers’) into this movie. It looks like everyone involved had a great time making Zorg and Andy but that doesn’t translate into a great time for the audience. If anything, the reverse often holds true. Many of the best films ever made were hell on Earth for their cast and crew.

I was really looking forward to Zorg and Andy because it sounded great on paper. And, truth be told, I’m still looking forward to it. I really, really want to see a comedy movie about secret cults on a university campus fighting for possession of an ancient idol while some hapless intern tries to recover the sacred object just to save his job. That would be - well, could be - a great movie. I hope that Guy Davis spends some time shooting a few shorts, hones his craft, collects around him a stock company of talented actors and eventually remakes Zorg and Andy a few years down the line. With a decent script.

Sorry folks.

MJS rating: D+

Directors: Michael Bartlett, Kevin Gates
Writers: Michael Bartlett, Kevin Gates
Producers: Michael Bartlett, Kevin Gates
Cast: Russell Jones, Craig Stovin, Imogen Church
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc (Revolver)
Website: www.zombiediaries.com

It’s eight years since The Blair Witch Project was inflicted on the world and still the vogue for movies constructed from faux camcorder footage continues. Just last month I found myself reviewing Vampire Diary and now here comes The Zombie Diaries. Next month expect a review of Video Journal of Dr Jekyll and after that probably Frankenstein’s Blog.

Of course the one problem with this subgenre is that it requires the viewer to accept the conceit that, whatever happens, the person with the camcorder never drops it. Sure, you can have the odd crazy-shaky sequence of them running but really, any sensible person would just throw the damn camcorder away and run like bloody hell.

The Zombie Diaries actually has three diaries, the first being filmed by a member of a four-person TV news crew who drive out of London to interview a farmer in a Home Counties village. The background to the film is that a ‘virus’ is spreading from Asia across Europe in a clear parallel with avian flu. In fact there are some vox pops of people which left me wondering whether they were indeed talking about bird flu.

Anyway, the TV crew get out of London just as parts of it are sealed off and find the village deserted. Breaking into the farmhouse, they find a dead body and a blood-caked, cadaverous figure standing over it.

Now zombies used to be zombies. They were dead, they got buried, they came back to life, they crawled out of the ground and they shuffled towards you, possibly moaning “Bwaaains!” But since 28 Days Later zombies are infected living people too and it’s not really obvious from the film which these are. There’s all this talk about a disease but there is also talk about “dead things”, though no usage of the Z-word. The film’s publicity says that when people die from the virus they come back to life as zombies but this isn’t clear from the film itself.

The second diary is three people on a scavenging expedition to a village, breaking into shops looking for food and other useful items while trying to avoid the shuffling hordes. Then the third and longest video diary concerns a group of survivors holed up in a farmhouse, regularly blasting zombies as they approach and occasionally going off to forage for food. By this point the whole infrastructure of the country has collapsed, including the National Grid, and everything that happens after dark does so by candlelight. Which does make one wonder how the video camera is able to continue working, but maybe the guy who carries it collected a huge supply of batteries from somewhere.

It also makes you wonder who he thinks is ever going to watch his footage, and on what.

We’re allowed to get to know these characters more than the others but where the film gets really interesting is when we realise that the three diaries are starting to cross over. In fact there are sort of four because there was a prologue about some soldiers. It is a well-established fact that all great British horror movies feature squaddies. The film’s denouement is really rather shocking; it has little to do with zombies and more to do with people and that’s the only hint I’ll give you because I don’t want to spoil the film for you. I will say that I found it effective and consistent.

Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates shared not only writing and directing duties but producing and editing too. Gates studied film-making at college and has produced and directed a range of notable indie genre efforts including Earthbound, Shattered Lands, The Unseen and the Svankmajer-esque Insect Noir. Michael Bartlett is not the scriptwriter of that name whose credits include Jackanory Playhouse, Dramarama and The Archers. This Michael Bartlett is an enterprising young chap who, starting from scratch - no experience of film-making whatsoever - has documented his progress towards making a feature film. Since November 2001 he has been documenting his progress on his website Makingthefilm.com. For him, The Zombie Diaries is the culmination of six years of hard work.

The cast, most of whom acquit themselves with commendably naturalistic acting (some of it improvised), include Jonnie Hurn (Penetration Angst, The Sick House), James Fisher (Hellbride), Russell Jones (who was in an episode of Torchwood), Craig Stovin (The Unseen), Anna Blades (who was in the shorts The Demon Within and Speak No Evil), Sophia Ellis (who had a bit part in Alien Autopsy), Jonathan Ball (not the recently deceased American actor, despite what the Inaccurate Movie Database thinks), Kyle Sparks (who was in a Doctor Who fanfilm), Victoria Nalder (who has since moved to LA and reinvented herself as Victoria Summer) and Ralph Mondi (who played Peter Townsend in a TV drama about Princess Margaret). Leonard Fenton (Dr Legg from EastEnders) appears as the TV news producer at the start of the first diary; he was also in Morons from Outer Space, Hammer's The Devil-Ship Pirates and dodgy British martial arts flick Underground.

The somewhat guerilla nature of the production means there aren’t too many crew credits. Special effects are credited to Mike Peel (The Unseen, Dead Wood, The Scar Crow and contributions to Casino Royale, V for Vendetta and Evil Aliens), Scott Orr and Cesar Alonso.

The nature of the film means that there’s not really scope for explanation, showing us what is happening, which is why using the standard Romero-esque zombie plague was probably a good idea. There’s a cinematic shorthand here: we know what zombies do, we know how to kill them, we don’t need to be told. But what is really interesting is that The Zombie Diaries is not the only cinema non-vérité movie using Romero-esque zombies. Romero is making one himself!

As yet unreleased as I type this, Diary of the Dead is Romero’s follow-up to Land of the Dead. But whereas the existing four films in the series are sequential (if not actually sequels), this new one will go back to the timeframe of the original Night of the Living Dead, with the zombies just starting to become a threat.

Zombie Diaries (as it was slightly retitled for its US release) has been in development long enough that it cannot be considered a rip-off of Romero’s film, although I fear that may be how it is viewed in years to come by people who don’t bother to check exact release dates. This would seem to be a simple case of parallel development. As observed at the top of the review, faux video diaries are still very much in vogue and it was only a matter of time before somebody applied this technique to the always popular zombie subgenre.

I don’t know what Diary of the Dead will be like - no-one has seen it yet - but The Zombie Diaries is a well-made, interesting and enjoyable slab of serious zombie horror and well worth seeking out.

MJS rating: B+

Every journalist has a wish-list - interesting people whom they would desperately, desperately love to interview - and occasionally the dice land right and you find yourself able to sit down, at length, with someone on that list. On 5th August 1999 I was able to talk on the phone with legendary comedy rock musician and pop parodist ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. The reason was because his new album Running with Scissors was being released in the UK and the lead track was ‘The Saga Begins’, which basically sets the entire plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of ‘American Pie’. Al has recorded several other sci-fi-themed songs, including ‘Jurassic Park’ (based on ‘MacArthur Park’) and ‘Yoda’ (based on ‘Lola’). He was extraordinarily easy to interview and genuinely interested to hear about how he is viewed on this side of the Atlantic. A few quotes from the interview appeared in a short piece in SFX, but here’s the whole thing.

When did you decide that The Phantom Menace needed a song written about it?
"Well, it was a few years before the movie ever came out. As soon as I learned that George Lucas was planning to do the first trilogy I smelled a pop culture phenomenon. I had a strange premonition that a new Star Wars movie might be popular, and since my career is based in a large part on doing my own take on pop culture phenomena I knew that at some point I wanted to take another stab at Star Wars. So I had my eyes set on The Phantom Menace for quite some time."

Did you try lots of different angles, or did the idea of using ‘American Pie’ just come to you in a flash?
"That was actually the first idea that I had and it was the one that I stuck with because I just thought it was the most appropriate. There were two different ways I could go. I could either pair Star Wars with whatever song happened to be very popular during the month that the movie actually came out, or I could pair it with a classic rock song. And I thought that the classic rock song would be the way to go because I think Star Wars feels more weighty than that. Since Star Wars is a classic movie and a classic genre unto itself, it merited a classic rock song to be paired with. And ‘American Pie’, besides being one of my favourite songs, is considered one of the all-time classics. In this country, at least, it’s almost like treading on sacred ground when you’re dealing with that song."

The original version of ‘American Pie’ goes on for about a day and a half...
"It’s eight and a half minutes, but it feels like a day and a half sometimes!"

Did you not feel that this warranted an eight and a half minute parody?
"It’s not that it didn’t warrant it. It’s just because I’m trying to get radio play and even having a five and a half minute long song was considered extraordinarily long. I just couldn’t artistically rationalise cutting the song down any more than that because I needed to have the slow intro, the slow ending and a couple of fast verses in the middle or else it just wouldn’t even feel like ’American Pie’. I cut it down as much as I possibly could, but it’s still five and a half minutes which for me is very long."

Given how much secrecy there was around the film, when did you actually write the song? You must have had a fairly narrow window to get it written, recorded and videoed?
"It was more of a narrow window to get permission because as it turns out I wrote the song about six weeks before I ever saw the movie. I was able to glean basically the entire plot of The Phantom Menace by looking at fan-based Star Wars websites. There are quite a few bootleg, unofficial websites out there that somehow were able to figure out the plot of the movie and post it on the internet. I carefully scanned those newsgroups and pieced together the plotline and wrote the song based on that. I did see the movie once before finalising the album. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting false information. But I did have the song written well in advance of the movie coming out."

Did you have to change the song at all when you saw the film?
"I actually changed three or four lines. Just subtle changes because there were a couple of things on the internet that didn’t wind up in the movie. A few lines of dialogue that would have subtly changed the meaning of some of the lines of my song. So I did change a few things, but it saved me the stress of having to write the whole song within a few days after seeing the movie."

What permission did you have to get from Lucasfilm?
"Basically just his blessing. I wouldn’t have done a parody of Star Wars if George Lucas thought it was a bad idea or was offended by it or basically didn'’t want me to have anything to do with it. I had done a Star Wars parody years and years ago called ‘Yoda’ which was a parody of ‘Lola’ by the Kinks, which George Lucas approved. So we had an indication that he had a good sense of humour about these things. So we thought we had a pretty good chance that he would approve, but of course that was a long time ago and you never know how people are going to feel from one day to the next. We just wanted to make sure, so it was very gratifying when we finally got the call from Lucasfilm saying that George loved ‘The Saga Begins’."

The video has not much happening, but it’s very funny.
"Thank you. It’s kind of down-scaled a bit because we don’t have an $80 million budget for the videos and it’s kind of hard to do a Star Wars video on a low budget. So we had to think in modest, low-budget terms and we thought that doing a kind of Star Wars Unplugged would be the best way to go. Especially since we’re covering five and a half minutes of screen time. That gets very expensive."

I don’t know if this is a blooper or a deliberate mistake, but as you walk up the sand dune looking at the twin suns, your shadow rotates through about 90 degrees so there’s obviously a spotlight or something just behind you.
"There’s no spotlight actually. That was shot in direct sunlight. But I think both of those suns were fakes and I’m sure the sun was coming from a much different angle."

Although the video has a Mace Windu lookalike and your cousin is dressed a bit like Queen Amidala, most of the people are generic weird aliens but not specifically Star Wars.
"Yes, we wanted to go with that because we didn’t want to take advantage of Lucasfilm’s good nature too much. We didn’t want to have too many copyrightable, trademarked characters in the video. We just wanted to kind of approximate the vibe of a ‘Star Wars cantina’ type of scene without exactly copying many of the characters. But we did get permission to use the photo of Anakin Skywalker in that one shot. And we did get permission to do the video obviously, but we didn’t want to push it too much."

Has there been any thought of Lucas including your video on the DVD of The Phantom Menace as an extra?
"If he wanted to, I’d be flattered and he’d be more than welcome to it! Actually the biggest compliment I’ve received is the fact that the official Star Wars website, starwars.com, gave my album and the video a very, very nice plug right on the front home page there. I was really thrilled that they did that. That’s very unusual."

I notice that all three of your sci-fi movie songs, including ‘Jurassic Park’, are based on classic songs whereas most of your parodies are of current hit songs. Is there any reason for that?
"I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes if I’m dealing with a very, very current theme I like to mix and match, and have a current theme with an old song. Or sometimes I’ll take a very current song and mix it with an old TV show or something. I just like to juxtapose things like that and go for the stark contrast."

Has ‘The Saga Begins’ been released as a single, or just for airplay?
"In the States at least, my record label isn’t releasing any singles period. They’re basically releasing albums only but they’re releasing singles to radio stations. It’s just their company policy. They basically want to sell albums and they’re not all that interested in selling singles."

Has it been getting a lot of airplay?
"It’s been getting a fair amount of play. The new single which has just been released over here is doing a bit better in terms of video play. I don’t really know how much airplay it’s getting because it’s not the kind of song that gets added on radio station playlists. It’s the kind of song that, every kooky morning team on a radio station will play the song a few times. So it’ll get a lot of airplay in the morning, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets reported so it’s hard for me to know how much airplay it’s getting."

Is the album selling well?
"The album’s selling very well. This may be my biggest seller to date, I don’t know. It’s kind of early to tell. My last album sold over two million copies here in the States and this current album is doing just as well, if not better, right out of the box, but it remains to be seen how long it can hang around."

It’s about three years since your last album, Bad Hair Day. Did you spend those three years gradually building up an album or do you normally sit down six months before an album’s due and see what’s topical?
"A little of both. I haven’t been working on this constantly for three years; I had a lot of other projects that occupied my time. I spent about a year doing my own Saturday morning children’s TV show called The Weird Al Show. And I’ve spent some of my downtime directing videos for other artists like the Black Crowes and Hansun and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, people like that. But I started this current album about a year and a half ago, I guess.

“I casually worked on the originals for the new album over the course of last year because I could take my time and there wasn’t any rush on that. But once we got closer to the release of The Phantom Menace, we set a release date because obviously we wanted to be timely and topical and come as soon after that movie as possible. I set a cut-off date and said: ‘By this date I want to know what parodies I’m doing.’ I wanted to make the parodies as timely as I can. So once we’d decided on the parodies and we had the go-ahead from the original artists, then it was a last minute crank to get everything done as soon as possible."

Modern songs aren’t as catchy as they used to be, and they’re not in the charts for as long. Is that affecting your ability to find good memorable stuff that you can parody?
"Not really, although it’s a little bit harder to determine what exactly is a hit because it seems like music has got so segmented. It used to be as simple as looking at the Billboard top ten to determine what a popular song is. But the top ten isn’t really a good indicator any more of what a popular song is because the top ten is based a lot on single sales and a lot of hits aren’t ever released on singles any more. So I have to look at the Billboard singles, the Billboard albums, the modern rock charts, the rock charts, the pop charts, the airplay charts, the sales charts, the MTV playlists. I have to consider a lot of different sources and a lot of different research material just to determine what’s a popular song these days."

I believe you considered giving this album a Star Wars-based title. What happened there?
"I considered that, yes. But we just couldn’t agree on a title, really. I thought that Album One would be a clever title and the whole gimmick would be that this album would be the prequel to all my other albums. But the record company thought that would be kind of confusing and nobody liked the title Album One. We kicked around a few other ideas but none of them seemed clever enough. And ultimately we decided to go with Running with Scissors which had nothing of course to do with Star Wars but we just thought it was a fairly good sight gag and a good generic album title and concept that didn’t tie us in necessarily to any particular song on the album."

For some reason a lot of your British fanbase is science fiction fandom.
"Really?"

Your songs get played a lot at sci-fi convention discos.
"I didn’t know that. That’s great."

A couple of years ago a small British convention called (for various reasons) Year of the Wombat, surveyed its members to ask what songs would they like played at the disco, and you were the only artists with two songs in the top ten.
"Oh, that’s terrific. I’m guessing ‘Yoda’ was one of them."

Actually, no. ‘Trigger Happy’ was about number eight and ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ was number two.
"Wow, that’s great!"

Are you a sci-fi fan?
"Yes, I am. Luckily I didn't have to wait on the street corner for a month to see Star Wars. I was able to go to a benefit screening. But I guess I am still kind of a fanboy."

What did you think of The Phantom Menace?
"I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I have to defend myself every time I say that because it got a little bit of a critical drubbing. I think it’s difficult, in the States, to put something out with that much hype. It’s a precarious situation to be in, because The Phantom Menace was perhaps the most highly anticipated movie of all time and it’s just hard to make everybody happy when they’re expecting that much. But I thought that Lucas did an incredible job. I thought he set up the whole franchise very well. I thought it was an engaging story and amazing special effects and it was thoroughly entertaining."

Be honest. Jar Jar Binks: funny or annoying?
"Hmmm… Somewhere in the middle for me."

You were in an episode of Amazing Stories many years ago. How did that come about?
"Tobe Hooper - who did the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist I believe - was the director of that particular episode and he cast me in it. And it was a lot of fun. I got to play a cabbage man from outer space and I got to work with Dick Shawn and Laraine Newman and some other very cool people. It was an episode called ‘Miss Stardust’ where the conceit was: Dick Shawn was this promoter who was having a Miss Universe pageant and I was very upset because I didn’t feel he was really representing contestants from around the universe. So I brought in Miss Uranus and Miss Neptune and all these odd, odd creatures that just completely ruined his little contest. It was a lot of fun. I was in special effects make-up for about a week and a half, so I got used to looking like a cabbage!"

I remember seeing the first Naked Gun movie with a bunch of friends and when you appeared in that cameo - ‘No, Frank. “Weird Al” Yankovic was on the plane.’ - we all whooped with delight, which worried everybody else in the cinema.
"I’ve always wondered how that scene went over overseas because I’ve never been all that popular outside North America and I know that the Naked Gun series was very popular in England. So I was always wondering: ‘How did audiences react when that scene came up?’"

Some members of the audience loved it and some were confused, but we’re used to seeing American things where a special guest star comes on whom we’ve never heard of. How did you get this regular cameo gig in the Naked Gun films?
"It’s kind of a mutual admiration thing. The Zucker Brothers are my all-time favourite directors, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. I just love their comedies. And Police Squad, the short-lived TV series that the Naked Gun series was based on, was my all-time favourite TV show. I knew Bob Weiss who produced the Naked Gun movies. In fact, I’d worked with Bob on some of my early videos. I told him: ‘Bob, I’ll do anything to be involved with this movie. I love these guys, I love this movie. I’ll run out and get their coffee, I’ll be in a crowd scene. Just please put me in the movie somewhere.' And he told the guys involved that I really wanted to be in the movie and they actually wrote that scene for me which was really, really nice of them."

Your own movie, UHF, came out over here on rental video and has been on TV a couple of times. It’s got a cult following.
"That’s exactly what it is. It came out in the States - it tested extremely well which is why Orion Pictures had put it out in the summer of ‘89 up against Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and a lot of major movies - and it quickly disappeared. Looking back on it, it’s kind of an uneven movie. There are parts that I still think are great and parts that make me grimace. But it definitely has developed a cult following over the years. In fact, we do live shows - I’m in the middle of a concert tour right now - and part of what we do is we play film clips during the show, during which we do costume changes. Whenever we play a clip from UHF, the audience chants along with the dialogue like it’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. It definitely has a very hardcore fanbase."

Are you going to do another film?
"Not in the near future. I’m going to be on the road for pretty much the rest of the year. I would really love to do another feature or another TV series, but that’s somewhere down the line, I think."

How is the tour going?
"It’s going great. We’re about two and a half weeks into it and we’re going to be going at least to the end of the year and possible after that. We’re having a great time - the audiences are really enthusiastic."

Your popularity overseas is mixed, but you’ve been released in a lot of countries. I’ve got German and Japanese releases of your records.
"Really? Wow!"

How popular are you in these places? How do they even know what you’re singing about?
"Well, I’d love to ask you that. I don’t know. Up until this current album it’s been kind of spotty even finding me in record stores over there. I was in England about the time that UHF came out and I was going into record stores just trying to find my own albums and I could hardly come up with one. My previous record label, I don’t even think had an international deal in place. A lot of my fans overseas have had to buy albums through import shops and pay a lot of money for them, which is unfortunate. But the new album, Running with Scissors, is going to be released in the UK, I think on the 16th of this month, so it’s going to get an actual release this time which is great."

As far as I know only In 3-D and Even Worse actually got a proper release over here.
"So it’s been what, over ten years since I had a proper release."

Legend has it that you had a number one hit in Australia.
"Yes, ‘Eat It’ was a big hit in Australia back in ‘84 so I got an Australian gold record back then. And again, the same situation: I haven’t had proper international distribution so I haven’t really had any bona fide hits there for quite a few years. But the new album just got released in Australia. I’m told it’s doing extremely well there so hopefully we’ll have success over there once again."

Over here, British radio stations tend to have a knee-jerk reaction against novelty songs.
"Really? This is a learning experience for me. I was under the impression they really liked novelty songs."

Back in the seventies there were a lot of novelty hits.
"The Barron Knights I guess were very popular."

They had a lot of hits in the sixties and seventies. And Benny Hill, for example, had a huge number one hit. But now it’s pretty much died out. Although the South Park single got to number two at Christmas.
"Which single was that?"

‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ sung by Chef. It just missed by one week being the Christmas number one.
"Oh, too bad!"

Which would have been great because every time they had a Christmas hits retrospective they would have had to play it
"Oh yes!"

Finally, what would it take to get you to to do a concert over here in the UK?
"It would just take a promoter making us the right offer. I would love to play overseas. Hopefully, first of all, the new album will do well enough to justify us coming over and supporting it. But we’ve never done a concert outside of North America, so I would love to tour the UK. That would be great.”

‘Weird Al’ is such a great guy. When the interview finished I told him that I was going that weekend to a party where most people there were fans of his work and he kindly recorded a special message on the end of my tape to play to everyone at the party. What a top bloke!

Director: Rhys Davies
Writer: Kris Tearse
Producer: Rhys Davies
Cast: Kris Tearse, Ruth King, Christopher J Herbert
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: preview screening (Day of the Undead 2010)
Website: www.zombieundead.com

Zombie Undead, it has been pointed out, is a tautological title, akin to calling something Nosferatu Vampire or Lycanthropic Werewolf. That’s true, but then there has already been a film called Zombies Zombies Zombies so who’s complaining?

In any case, it’s rather appropriate that this long-awaited indie feature should have a generic-sounding title because it’s an unashamedly generic film. There are some people. There are some zombies. The zombies chase the people. That’s pretty much the plot in a nutshell.

Which is not a criticism because that’s all director Rhys Davies has aimed for here. He knows his audience, he knows what they want. They want an hour and a half of people running away from zombies and occasionally being eaten by them.

The modern zombie genre occasionally throws up something clever or original or remarkable - 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead or indeed Colin - but more often than not it is determinedly formulaic and frankly it’s often shit. No, let’s be honest here. The zombie film has a much lower hit rate than, say, werewolves or Frankenstein simply because there are so many of them and they are so easy to make.

So really, rather than seeking exemplary quality, what the fans actually want is that these movies refrain from being absolute shite. It’s a trap that many zombie films fall into but which Zombie Undead avoids by dint of its no-nonsense approach and the determined, professional attitude of those who made it.

One thing that marks Zombie Undead as unusual - virtually unique! - is that it was shot in Leicester. Not a city with a lengthy film pedigree, Leicester was the location for... well, absolutely nothing. Although the city only really features in a prologue and the very final sequence here.

Said prologue has a young man arriving at Leicester with a backpack containing some sort of terrorist bomb. Or something. It’s not entirely clear, especially if you haven’t read the script, but fortunately it’s not entirely relevant either.

The story per se kicks off with a young woman and her badly injured father being driven to a hospital just outside the city by a paramedic. At the hospital, where they and many others have been directed in order to alleviate pressure on the city centre facilities, they find a state of utter confusion, with injured people all over the place and a harried medical staff.

Exhausted, the young woman falls asleep once she has delivered her father into medical care. When she awakens, things are somewhat different. Those patients who did not survive have become reanimated, shuffling corpses (no fast-running 28 Days Later fellas here).

She teams up with a young man looking for his brother, who has already grasped the situation - and then the film becomes a picaresque series of scenes as they make their way through the hospital seeking the brother, the father and an exit. Others join them - a doctor (author Rod Duncan, who I actually used to know from a writing group we both belonged to), the paramedic who drove her there, an old lady (Sandra Wildebore), an untrustworthy youth - and various members of the party succumb to the zombies on their journey.

It’s not really where they’re going that matters, or even how they get there, it’s who will get eaten along the way and how much blood will be involved.

There is one directorial misstep where the group make it into a small courtyard which, from the dialogue, is evidently supposed to have no other access, requiring them to duck back inside the building. However, said courtyard is full of bicycle racks, many of them with bicycles in - plus the phrase ‘No parking’ prominently painted on one wall - all of which does rather suggest that there is some means of egress from that particular location.

Eventually, two survivors make it outside and set off across the countryside. This leads to a scene at a farm, with a survivalist farmer (Steve Dolton: The Wailing Well) whose motives are largely good even if his methods are questionable. This doesn’t really work at all as it’s far too short a scene, compared with the very lengthy sequences in the hospital itself, to really go anywhere or do anything. No sooner have we met the farmer than we move on.

It feels like a scene that has been put into the script just so that there would be something inbetween leaving the hospital and the final, bleak denouement back in the city.

Zombie Undead never really goes anywhere or does anything and it certainly doesn't break any new ground in the genre, Leicester location aside. The only really emotional scene involves the young woman eventually finding her father although there is also some characterisation around the paramedic and his fate. For the most part, this is a solid, unpretentious zombie chase, occasionally speeding up or slowing down its pace as the undead ghouls get closer or more distant. The ending is downbeat and open in much the same way that the ending of Night of the Living Dead was.

This is a real grass-roots production, a long-term commitment by Rhys and his cast and crew which has more than overcome the budget of about five quid and has resulted in a solid - and solidly enjoyable - zombie flick which ticks all the right boxes. Previewed at the 2009 Day of the Undead at Leicester Phoenix in an almost-complete version, Zombie Undead had its premiere proper at the same venue in mid-January 2010 making it the first new title in the second decade of the British horror revival.

All kudos to Rhys and his team. Zombie Undead does what it says on the tin - twice.

MJS rating: B+

Director: David M Reynolds
Writer: David M Reynolds
Producer: David M Reynolds
Cast: Christopher Dane, Ann Provice, Rachael Horne
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.zomblies.com

I mentioned in my review of Devil’s Playground that most great British horror and fantasy films feature squaddies. That’s how we deal with monsters in this country. American response to any alien/supernatural threat usually involved a nuclear bomb or at very least helicopter gunships (remember the ones in Godzilla piloted by USAAF goons so dumb that they tried to escape the beast by flying horizontally among the skyscrapers instead of just, you know, flying higher?).

No, in the UK we have always solved every crisis thrown at us, throughout history both real and fictitious, by sending in one or more of the four absolutely best military forces in the world: the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the Royal Marines or the good old British Army. In films, it’s usually this last lot, mainly because (I suspect) it’s easier to hire a couple of Landrovers than a Battle Class Destroyer or a squadron of Harrier jump-jets.

In the 1960s, there were squaddies in everything from The Quatermass Xperiment to The Night Caller. In the 1970s, the squaddies were mostly to be found on TV, helping the Doctor and the Brigadier defend the Earth against a succession of alien invaders. The ‘80s and ‘90s were a fallow period for squaddie-vs-monster stories but then they were fallow for SF and horror generally in this country.

Then along comes the British horror revival and what do we get? 28 Days Later - squaddies vs zombies; Dog Soldiers - squaddies vs werewolves; Deathwatch - squaddies vs ghosts; The Zombie Diaries - squaddies vs zombies again. No matter what gets thrown at us, the army will sort it out. Gawd bless ‘em!

Devil’s Playground managed to somehow forget to include zombies although there was a Royal Navy destroyer off-screen somewhere, heard over the radio. But never fear, because at the same Day of the Undead zombiefest where I caught Jonathan Sothcott’s film there was a screening of Zomblies. Which I missed. But the film-makers gave me and Jonathan screeners to take home and watch. Which I did. And you know what?

Zomblies is absolutely freaking great. Not just that, it’s: all squaddies, all the time! It’s the most squaddietastic British horror film you’ll ever see. That’s the one to give the troops!

It’s also about 50 minutes long which makes it a really odd length, but we’ll come to that later.

The story is simplicity itself. There’s civilisation and there’s the deserted, mostly unurbanised land where the zombies dwell and inbetween these is a bloody big wall. And occasionally, teams of squaddies are sent over the wall to do... something or other. Recce missions probably.

A prologue showing us the last moments of one such expedition is filmed with such realism that, taken on its own, it could easily be mistaken for an army recruiting advert. The film proper isn’t quite so gritty, which disappointed me slightly, mainly because some of the acting isn’t quite up to scratch and that can’t help but pull us out of the world we’re viewing. Suspension of disbelief is required, of course, isn’t it ever? But that prologue doesn’t require suspension of disbelief, it grabs your disbelief by the scruff of the neck and flings it out of the window.

The main part of the film concerns the troop of squaddies sent to find the troop that went missing in the prologue. Are they all dead or is it just that their radio has packed up? There’s some decent characterisation among the half-dozen soldiers, most memorably the big silent bloke with a big, gay moustache who carries big fuck-off guns. There’s also some military brass in a high-tech HQ behind the wall overseeing the operation.

And there’s zombies sir - ‘undreds of em. Fast-moving, injury-ignoring, chomp-yer-throat-out zombies. They’re among the trees, they’re in the buildings. They’re everywhere. Having located the survivor(s), the squaddies just have to get out of there and back to the wall, while avoiding being eaten. And there’s the usual stuff you expect - someone does get bitten: should they kill or leave or take with them? - and there’s stuff you probably don’t expect. The point is that, whether it’s generic zombie action or clever, character-based plot developments, it’s all done extremely well.

What really stands out, especially in the scenes that take place in some abandoned industrial buildings, is that Zomblies is very, very influenced by video games - but in a surprisingly good way. I’m not a video game player myself but there were several consoles set up at Day of the Undead where people were blasting away at the living dead so I know what these things look like even if I don’t care what they’re like to participate in.

And Zomblies captures this stylistic je-ne-sais-quoi, this kinetic, digital post-modernism perfectly yet without sacrificing its cinematic, narrative roots. Without which (let’s face it) the film would be as boring as actually watching somebody play a video game. Hollywood has made many attempts - mostly unsuccessful - to turn games into movies but their usual tactic is to ditch the game-y stuff and concentrate on expanding and developing the situation and characters. Zomblies is the first film I have seen which takes the diametrically opposite approach. Instead of co-opting characters and situations from games and trying to make them cinematic, it takes the characters and situations of an original film and makes them game-like.

The synopsis in the press pack reads thus: “When a private militia’s rookie zombie hunters send out a distress call, it’s up to the Rangers to cross The Wall and bring them back, as well as uncover the truth about a terrifying new breed of zombie.” To be honest, I’m not sure this all comes across in the film. I didn’t realise that the folks being rescued were ‘a private militia’s rookie zombie hunters’ nor did I get a real sense of the zombie threat having changed in a significant way. Zombies is zombies. Not that this impaired my enjoyment at all, on the contrary I think this is one of the best zombie films I have ever seen.

But it does only run about 50 minutes which is a terribly inconvenient length. It’s much too long for a short but it’s not long enough to be a feature. Which is a real shame because this film desperately deserves to be seen. In terms of commercial release, the two options would be to pair it with something running 30-40 minutes as a sort of buy-one-get-one-free anthology picture or to expand the film by at least 20 minutes. And given that there are aspects of the background which simply don’t come through, there’s clearly room for expansion (if the budget can be found).

A final interesting note on the story is the coincidental similarity between the ending of Zomblies and the start of the third act of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters which I saw after watching Zomblies but just before writing this review. One giant, futuristic wall is going to look much like another I suppose and there’s certainly no suggestion, or even possibility, that either film could have influenced the other. It’s just synchronicity. If anything I preferred the Zomblies wall which is completely devoid of gaps or doors and has big robot guns all along the top. When our survivors reach the wall, they have to climb, ramping up what is already a frenetic and powerful story into a jaw-dropping climax.

Finding fault would be picky although you really do have to wonder why anyone would patrol this wasteland on foot. You know, God gave us helicopters for a reason. These aren’t the Taliban, they don’t have second-hand rocket launchers. They’re zombies. You can pile into your Merlin or Chinook, drop into the combat zone, do what you have to do and get the hell out of there with complete impunity, providing there’s no trigger-happy, friendly-fire Yanks supposedly fighting on your side.

And no, there isn’t a huge amount of plot but there’s some, there’s enough. We’ve all seen zombie pictures with less plot than this. Anyway, it’s a calling card - and a very, very impressive one too - for director David M Reynolds and all his cast and crew. These include cinematographer/editor Eve Hazelton (Robbing Peter), composer Rob Westwood (It’s a Wonderful Death, Born of Hope), stunt co-ordinator Mark Ruddick and production designer Shahriar Abdullah. Christopher Dane (The Butterfly Tattoo, Dark Rage) is the only cast member with any sort of cinematic CV.

Zomblies premiered in March 2009 and received its second screening a few months later at Day of the Undead. I’m sure it’s only the unusual length which is stopping it from playing more festivals, where I have no doubt it would go down a storm.

For most of Zomblies’ cast and crew this was their first (or first significant) film. But it won’t be their last because just being able to say “I worked on Zomblies” will be an accolade to wear with pride in years to come.

MJS rating: A

Director: Takashi Miike
Writer: Hiroshi Takeyama
Producer: Jun Haraguchi, Tsukasa Ikegami
Cast: Satoshi Tsumabuki, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Kazue Fukiishi
Year of release: 2002
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: R1 DVD (Artsmagic)

Although Takashi Miike may be notorious for the broad variety of films he has made in his packed directorial career, nevertheless Sabu stands out as unusual. In fact it's unusual by being relatively normal, certainly by the standards of the man who brought us Ichi the Killer, Audition, Fudoh: The New Generation and Happiness of the Katakuris (all of which were photographed, like this film, by cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto). It's the only historical drama which Miike has (so far) helmed, an adaptation of a novel by Yamamoto Shugoro which was made to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Nagoya Television.

Satoshi Tsumabuki (Tomie: Rebirth) plays Eiji, sentenced to hard labour on an island prison for stealing from his employer. Tatsuya Fujiwara (Battle Royale) is his childhood friend and colleague Sabu who believes in Eiji's innocence and tries to find out who framed him. And that's about it in terms of plot but there's a great deal more in terms of character. For his first few months on the island, Eiji doesn't say a word. And when Sabu asks around about his friend - they grew up together in an orphanage and were apprenticed together to a maker of paper doors - he is warned not investigate any further. Complicating matters slightly is the boys' shared attraction to Osue (Kazue Fukiishi: Samurai Resurrection).

The bulk of the film switches back and forth between Sabu's bewilderment, failing to understand the local politics and machiavellian going-on which surround his friend, and Eiji's life in prison where he is initially rejected as a loner but gradually becomes respected. There's a terrific scene when a destructive storm hits the island and the prisoners are granted their freedom in order to allow them to survive, yet Eiji rallies them and leads an effort to save the buildings and put out the raging fires.

Though there is a certain amount of violence, directed with Miike's expected realism and grittiness, and the involvement of some organised crime, this is not in any way a horror movie or yakuza picture. It is beautifully shot (and presented in terrific widescreen) and shows that Miike can direct wonderfully without any sort of gimmick. It's not like anything else he has done (at least, any of his other pictures that I have seen) but in that sense it resembles his other pictures in that most distinctive of Miike-esque ways - by not being like any of his other pictures.

Artsmagic's disc contains the two-hour TV version rather than the shorter theatrical edit and is packed with extras including interviews, promotional materials and Yours Truly's bio-filmographies of cast and director. They have for some reason used the Miike biography I wrote for Rainy Dog rather than the one I did for Sabu, but it's only one paragraph different…

MJS rating: A-

I interviewed Robin Sydney, star ofThe Gingerdead Man, by phone in February 2006.

How did you end up getting involved in a Charles Band film?
"I got an audition through my agent and manager so I went down and first I did a pre-read, then I went to call-backs twice. I got the part on Friday, I got the script on Sunday and we started working on Monday. So it was pretty quick! But it was great because it kept you on your feet and always in the moment."

Had you seen the script when auditioning, or just sides?
"I had only seen sides. Some of the girls had seen the script and they were asking questions about it but I never saw the script until the Sunday before filming."

Did you audition with any of the other cast?
"I did. On the final call-back I worked with the guy who ended up playing my boyfriend. During the session, they had the guys audition before the girls - so they hired this guy and kept him in the room and then all the girls came and read with him. I think that’s great because it really gives you a chemistry and a feeling."

Were you familiar with Charlie Band’s work before this?
"I actually wasn’t, but once I got it, I asked everybody. I was like, ‘So do you know Puppet Master?’ and one of every four people knew exactly who he was. It was amazing."

How long was the schedule?
"A two-week shoot. I worked every day and it would be full-day shoots. It was great, it was a family. It felt really good. Charlie is amazing, he is so fantastic. Sometimes directors will be critical and fussing and ‘go here’ and ‘go there’ - and he is not like that. He lets you be free. He gives you the space and he has a rehearsal and you do it, and you can move around and do this thing and that thing, you can change it a little bit. He has the camera follow you - and that is the most important thing for staying in the moment as an actress. He gives you little tips but he’s just very subtle, very nice, very free. He lets you feel like you can be on top of the world when you’re working with him."

What was Gary Busey like to work with?
"He was intense! He was crazy. I worked with him for one day because in the opening scene he’s there and then he’s the puppet. On the day that I worked with him, he was so crazy. I didn’t have to act scared, I was just so scared - there was no acting involved! On and off, he was something else. But he was very giving. I guess most stars would do their close-ups and then they would leave the set. So Charlie set it up that way so they did his close-ups first and then they would do everybody else’s, just in case he needs to leave or whatever. And he was so sweet. He did his stuff, then we had a break for lunch and he could have absolutely left, but he ended up staying, just so he could help us by being on the other side of the camera while we were doing it. That was very helpful, very sweet. He had the craziest stories, but he is so talented. He never stuck to the script; every take was different which almost made it scarier. It was freaky. He did an amazing job and it was really fun working with him."

In the rest of the film, was Gary Busey’s voice already on tape?
"Actually, what happened was that they ended up recording his voice after we shot everything. So it wasn’t even his voice, just people reading his lines off to the side. So we would see this puppet or sometimes there wouldn’t even be a puppet. I was so scared of this gingerbread cookie that I had nightmares every single night while I was filming. One take we did, the guy who played the puppet had to leave and so Charlie had this cup in place of where the puppet would be, that we had to look at. I got so freaked of this cup, when we were all walking away holding hands. Charlie threw this cup at my feet and I got so scared that I dropped to the floor and everybody had to drag me off the set!"

What did you think when you finally got the chance to see the film?
"I loved it. I think when you’re filming you don’t really know what it’s going to look like. It’s all in the moment and about the characters. It’s a little weird when you watch yourself, definitely. But I think Charlie is so talented and so amazing, and the music is phenomenal. It’s definitely a crazy movie, a movie that you see with your friends on a Saturday night. It’s one of those kind of movies. And it’s great, it’s fun, I really like it. I was really happy with the end result of The Gingerdead Man."

Charlie’s a bit of a one for sequels. Would you be up for Gingerdead Man 2?
"I would be."

You’ve also done a film recently called Big Bad Wolf. What’s your role in that?
"It’s a totally different character to Sarah-Lee in The Gingerdead Man, Sarah-Lee’s very innocent and sweet. In Big Bad Wolf, I’m Party Animal Girl - so there’s all that drinking and partying and teenage fun. Then there’s this... werewolf. So it’s fun. That’s that character, and then right after I filmed The Gingerdead Man I did a film called The Lost which is coming out, and in that I was a total bastard, a hardcore druggie bad-ass. So that was fun too!"

Is The Lost a horror film or more of a thriller?
"It’s kind of hard to categorise. I think, as a horror film, it’s almost a drama, as opposed to Big Bad Wolf or Gingerdead Man which are more serious horror, with people running around and stuff. This is more like a drama-horror. There’s four leads in it and I’m one of the leads. It was great, it was so much fun to play a bad-ass character. I loved it. It was a very sophisticated character because she has to deal with so many things: her mom’s schizophrenic and things like that."

Was there a lot of blood in the film??
"Not too much. Only towards the end of the film. For most of the film there’s not too much blood."

In Big Bad Wolf, do you have any scenes with the werewolf?
"I do, I get attacked by the werewolf. It was so scary! They had this blood spray. It’s called an ‘extinguisher’, this big blood pack, and they wire it up to your head and they have this blood that’s going to spray. It was freezing that night and I had these boots which I put on. Then, when the werewolf attacks me he’s throwing me around and eating me and gashing me and this blood is spraying everywhere - and it got all in my boots. So when I was walking anywhere it was like big swamps on my feet, it was awful!"

Did you have any scenes in Big Bad Wolf with American Werewolf in London star David Naughton?
"I wasn’t in the scenes with him but I did work with Clint Howard which was great."

How long have you been acting?
"I started acting when I was eight years old, in theatre in Colorado. I did over 20 productions with this particular professional children’s group. Then when I turned 14 I got into film, in Colorado, and I did every single film there was to do in Colorado. I moved out to Los Angeles when I was 17 and started out here, and it’s been amazing. Acting is a process and you just keep doing it, you keep growing and keep enriching yourself. I love it, I love the process, I want to continue to act and grow and explore different characters and different people. There’s nothing better than experiencing what other people are doing in their daily lives and living it and being in that moment."

You’ve done three horror movies in a row. Are you turning into a scream queen?
"I did a fourth film in there which was a comedy, which kind of broke it up, called Cattle Call for National Lampoon. But I think those were just the movies that I got. It wasn’t necessarily that I just wanted to do horror movies. But horror movies are fun, they keep you on the edge of your seat. I really enjoy doing horror movies - I really enjoy doing any movies. It’s just fulfilling the character and their needs and wants."

Have you got any movies lined up?
"I think I’m going to be doing another one of Charlie’s film. It’s called Dead Man’s Hand. Bill Moseley plays the evil guy. I’ve got the script and it’s going to be this killer, unbelievable movie. It’s about this haunted casino."

What’s your ultimate ambition?
"I just want to be able to work all the time, to just stretch myself and grow into characters that are very sophisticated. My goal is to just act.”

Director: Gav Chuckie Steel
Writer: Gav Chuckie Steel
Producer: Jess Sinclair
Cast: Sarah Gobran, James Chalmers, Phil Laslet
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: online
Website: www.facebook.com/Monitorshortfilm

Here’s a smashing British horror short with a brilliantly simple premise, effective execution and a chilling ambience. Monitor is the latest offering from Gav Chuckie Steel who first came to the attention of BHR fans with his 2012 feature The Shadow of Death.

Personally, I was no great fan of The Shadow of Death, a zero-budget comedy slasher about pot-smoking teenagers in a woodland cabin being stalked by a rentamaniac. But as I have observed in the past, a film-maker needs to make a first film and in today’s world that tends to be released in some form whereas once it would have sat on the shelf while the person honed their craft. Still, I gather that slasher fans liked it, and they were the target audience.

Monitor is an altogether different kettle of fish: a serious horror short which much better shows off Steel’s talent (or shows how far he has come in the past couple of years). Partly this is organisational, in that this time he has used a cinematographer (Phil Adams) rather than shooting it himself. Conversely, for the short Gav has handled his own editing (as well as the music, which he also did on Shadow). These are wise decisions and they show.

The monitor of the title is a baby monitor, and the brilliant conceit is: what would happen if you heard not just your baby sleeping but a creepy voice? James Chalmers (who was in Luke Massey’s unreleased 2008 feature Within the Woods) is the dad, Sarah Gobran (co-founder of the Guildford Shakespeare Company, last seen on screen ten years ago in Wolfgang Büld’s Lovesick: Sick Love) is the mum and neither looks like they are getting much sleep, which is accurate for the parents of a tiny baby. Each reacts as if the voice might be an intruder, naturally, their parental concern kicking in, but we the audience – awake and rationalising and having sat down to watch a horror film – can hear that it’s not a burglar, it’s something altogether spookier than that.

Adams’ low-light photography is very good, convincing s that it’s dark while leaving enough light to see clearly what is going on. The use of a real baby (Adams’ own daughter, apparently) certainly helps the film’s verisimilitude. Mark Kelly, who worked on Shadow of Death, provides the limited effects makeup on show.

Gav Chuckie Steel has shown that he can make a feature-length film (always an achievement in itself). He has shown that he can make an effective and spooky horror film. Now let’s see him combine those two levels of experience into his second feature. In the meantime, if Monitor is screening at your local festival – or if it’s publicly available on YouTube/Vimeo by the time you read this – then it is very deserving of your time.

(Not to be confused, of course, with David VG Davies’ 2012 feature Monitor.)

MJS rating: A-

On the Romanian set ofPumpkinhead 3 in April 2006 I grabbed a very quick word with cinematographer Erik Wilson.

How did you get this gig?
“I have known Jake West for three years through a common friend of ours, Adam Mason, and I have done a couple of small jobs with Jake: a little commercial and some extras for DVDs. We have been meeting for a while and always wanted to do something together. There was a plan that I was going to do Evil Aliens but then I had another job so I couldn’t do that so this was our first chance to work together. I’m doing IV as well with Mike Hurst.”

What are the problems of doing two films back to back?
“At first I didn’t think it was going to be a challenge because normally films are a seven-week shoot. But now, because of the schedule and the amount you have to cram into each day, it’s like two whole, separate films. Now we’re getting to the end of this one and I’m getting quite relieved, but knowing that I’m going to start the next one right afterwards. It’s going to be different and it’s going to be good to be different.”

How are you finding the Romanian crew?
“Great. I’ve been in Romania twice before. And in Morocco for The Hills Have Eyes, there were three people there from Romania. So I’m absolutely loving it, as a place to shoot and a place to come back to. Anka, who is now doing the second unit, was my focus puller for me for the last two films.”

Director: ‘Drake Floyd’
Writer: ‘Drake Floyd’
Producers: Brenda Norris, David Hills
Cast: Michael Stephenson, Robert Ormsby, George Hardy
Year of release: 1990
Country: Italy/USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Moonstone)

Troll 2 is rubbish.

What, you want a more detailed review? Okay: Troll 2 is dreadful bollocks in every respect.

Oh, okay then. You dragged it out of me...

This film is misnamed twice: it is not a sequel to John Carl Buechler’s Troll, and it doesn’t even have any trolls in it! The little nasties here are explicitly and irrevocably stated to be goblins, and instead of Buechler’s prosthetic make-up and puppetry, we have midgets in papier mache masks with pingpong ball eyes.

Young Joshua Wait, played by the spectacularly untalented Michael Stephenson, is the sort of whiny, gee-whillikers American kid that just makes you want to reach into the TV screen and give him a bloody great slap. In a prologue apparently modelled on The Princess Bride, he is being read to by his Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby).

In Grandpa Seth’s story, Peter (Glenn Gerner) is being chased through the wood by some goblins and thinks he’s safe when he sees a beautiful girl, but it turns out that the goblins can disguise themselves as humans, and Peter gets eaten after all. When Joshua’s mother Diana (blank-eyed non-actor Margo Prey, who looks like she’s on drugs) enters his bedroom, we find that Grandpa Seth is in fact dead and the boy has just been imagining him. Or has he?

Michael Wait (George Hardy) and his family - wife, son and teenage daughter Holly (Connie McFarland), and four less talented, uglier actors you are unlikely to ever see - are doing a house-swap with the Presents family, moving from their nice suburban house to a little farm in the middle of nowhere for a week or two. Before they leave, Michael spells out exactly what lies ahead in a phone call to someone: “It’s called Nilbog. That’s right. N, I, L, B, O, G. Yes, Nilbog.”

That’s correct folks, they’re off to the sleepy hamlet of Nilbog (population: 26) and no-one comments until almost the end of the movie on the unusual name or what it says, spelled backwards. Presumably the Waits are related to all those people in old horror movies who are taken in by characters called Alucard or Dr Acula. Or perhaps they’re only going to Nilbog because they couldn’t find a guest-house in the little Welsh mining town of Llort.

Now, Holly has an on/off boyfriend named Elliott (Jason Wright) who has the ultimatum of dating Holly or hanging around with his immature friends, nerdy Arnold (Darren Ewing), blond Drew (Jason Steadman) and making-up-the-numbers Brent (David McConnell: Bats - bloody hell, somebody who has been in another film!). Elliott was supposed to accompany the Waits on holiday but doesn’t show - that’s because he’s travelling separately in an RV with his pals.

After briefly meeting the oddball Presents family (the father is Lance C Williams - credited as L Williams - who went on to play Dracula in a 2003 half-hour short called Birth of the Vampire), the Waits find a sumptuous spread laid out for them in the dining room: “typical country hospitality”. But Grandpa Seth appears to Josh and tells him that the family must not eat the food, which frankly looks hideously unappetising as it’s all garish primary colours and looks like plasticine.

Freezing time briefly, Seth gives Josh only a few seconds to work out how to make sure that not a bite is taken. I expected the boy to yank the table cloth so that it all goes on the floor, but no, he stands on a chair and pisses all over the food! Whereupon he is sent straight to his room.

Nilbog itself proves to be populated by redneck extras even uglier and less talented than the featured players including Sheriff Gene Freak (Gary Carlson) a hellfire-and-damnation pastor (Mike Hamill) and a really scary shopkeeper (Don Packard). But the oddest person of all - and the only entertaining actor in the entire cast is weirdo, pasty-faced, panda-eyed, bespectacled lady Creedence Leonora Dru (Deborah Reed) who lives in a converted church in the woods.

To cut a long story short, the population of Nilbog - all 26 of them - are goblins in human form but they’re vegetarian goblins. So while they want to eat the Waits, they need to transform them into plants first, which they can do by persuading them to eat some of the disgusting looking food on offer (the only item sold by the town store is Nilbog milk, for some reason). Of course, Joshua realises this but no-one believes him, nor do they think he is really seeing Grandpa Seth.

Of Elliott’s friends, Arnold gets caught by Creedence and turned into a tree, Drew tries to rescue him (by pulling away bark that has been crudely glued to his face) and Brent gets seduced by Creedence back at the RV when she appears in a more obviously sexy guise, their lovemaking causing the vehicle to fill with popcorn for some reason.

The Waits, plus Elliott, return to the farmhouse to find that the entire population of Nilbog has turned out to throw them a party, which basically involves everyone clapping along out of synch to the most irritating and bland repetitive ‘tune’ imaginable. Fortunately Josh and Grandpa Seth save the day using a combination of a molotov cocktail and a fire extinguisher which, if they had stopped to think about it, really cancel each other out. The pastor goes up in flames and is seen to be a goblin, and the family are then trapped in the house, though there is no explanation of why the goblins, who have all come outside, don’t simply go back in and attack them. Eventually they do this and Josh is somehow transported to Creedence’s house where she has a magical stone from Stonehenge(!) which looks about as convincing as the one that Spinal Tap used on stage.

Grandpa Seth has had to go for the final time - this is one of those films where lots of things ‘must’ happen but no explanation is given as to why - and leaves Josh a bag which he must only open when absolutely necessary. Surrounded by goblins (several of whom we have already seen die in the attack on the farmhouse), Josh successfully repels the vegetarian fiends with the contents of the bag - a double decker baloney sandwich! Then his family appear and destroy the evil little critters and their queen (Creedence, now a scary old hag) by touching the magic stone and concentrating, though nobody ever specifies what they should actually concentrate on.

In an extraordinary epilogue that is as unpleasant as it is nonsensical, the family return home, but Holly, Elliott and Michael head for work/school without setting foot in the house. Diana goes upstairs for a shower, and Josh subsequently discovers the shower cubicle full of green slime, then runs downstairs to find the goblins (yes, the dead ones) stuffing their faces with goop from his mother’s naked, eviscerated body. Eh?

Filmed by Italians in Utah with a largely amateur (by the look of it) cast, Troll 2 is a cinematic car-crash - so horrible that you just can’t look away. With the exception of Deborah Reed (Creedence) and Mike Hamill (pastor), nobody on screen can act - and those two only get away with it by playing the whole thing like a Christmas panto. Among all these people who never made another film, probably the most successful performer in the movie is the girl who plays the disguised goblin that tricks Peter in the fairy tale prologue. Michele Abrams - credited here as Michelle - was in the original Buffy movie as well as Cool World, Junior and episodes of Lois and Clark and Murder, She Wrote.

Writer/director ‘Drake Floyd’ seems to be Claudio Fragasso (though some sources credit old Joe D’Amato himself, Aristide Massaccesi) who is no stranger to fake sequels. He wrote Zombie 3 (which at least was partially directed by Lucio Fulci) and directed After Death, which was released in the States as Zombie 4 (those two are available on British DVD as Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 and 3!). He also wrote and directed House 5 (yeah right - also ‘starring’ Michael Stephenson) and in 1989 beat James Cameron to the punch with Terminator 2 (aka Shocking Dark aka Alienators)! Other notable writing credits include Zombie Creeping Flesh (released at least once as Zombie 5 - oh, now this is getting ridiculous), a couple of Italian fake Emanuelle pictures (Violence in a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre), Rats: Night of Terror, D’Amato’s 11 Days, 11 Nights and latter-day peplum The Seven Magnificent Gladiators. And he’s still directing.

But the most extraordinary credit on display here is ‘costume designer: Laura Gemser’. Surely, I thought, that must just be an invented name but no, it seems that Black Emanuelle herself (also in such creaky Italian epics as Ator the Fighting Eagle) worked behind the camera on this film. She and Fragasso share several other credits, though it’s hard to see what costumes here needed designing apart from Creedence’s dress and jewellery. All the other humans wear shirts and jeans, and the goblins all wear rough sacking smocks.

Who on Earth can this film have been aimed at? Children and adults alike will find it equally unpleasant, although for slightly different reasons. It’s unalloyed rubbish which might have been forgivable in the early 1980s when anything could be released on video, but this crap was filmed in 1990. And why go all the way to Utah to make it?

Troll and Troll 2 have recently been released on a double bill DVD which has unfortunately raised the profile of this justifiably forgotten rubbish. Contamination Point 7, directed by 'Martin Newlin' the same year, was released as Troll 3 but has no connection with either of the first two films. That one actually was made by a pseudonymous Joe D’Amato which may explain the confusion over the identity of Drake Floyd.

MJS rating: D

[Addendum: Since I first posted this review, several years ago, Troll 2 has acquired an unexpected degree of infamy, not least because of its position as one of the absolutely lowest rated films on the IMDB. Cast-attended screenings, an extensive website and in fact a whole cult of Troll 2 has sprung up. Who would have thought it? And in fact, there is now a feature-length documentary all about Troll 2, calledBest Worst Movie. And I'm in it!)

In October 1995 a bunch of Star Wars cast were flown over to the UK for a press junket. Must have been yet another VHS re-release I suppose. I was given Billy Dee Williams to interview, who didn’t really want to talk about the Star Wars films. This is what I did manage to get out of him.

You came into the Star Wars sequence with The Empire Strikes Back. What do you remember of Star Wars when you went to see it?
"I thought it was a very good movie. The first movie I ever saw that George did was THX-1138. I realised then that there was something going on."

When did you first hear there was going to be a major part going in the sequel to Star Wars?
"Well, all the people who work for me, like agents and managers, tell me these things. At that time I was under contract to Berry Gordy who owned Motown. I was under a seven-year contract to them and they were always looking for projects for me to do, so they came up with this one. I was asked to participate, so I had a meeting with Irving Kirshner. There was a real sympatico there, a real good connection between the two of us. He came to my house and sat and talked about a lot of things: what he was aiming for, what he was trying to do, what he was interested in."

Did you have to audition for the role?
"No. I never audition for roles. I gave that up a long, long time ago."

How did you start in acting?
"I started when I was about six, seven years old in Broadway musicals by Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. My mother got me into this ridiculous business, but I didn't really pursue it until after I left high school. I was studying painting; I spent two years on a scholarship to a school called the National Academy for Design for the Fine Arts, and won a Gugenheim at the age of 19. While I was there, I was looking for little jobs to buy canvases and paints, and started doing extra work on television. I was studying acting and doing plays."

What was your break into films?
"The first film I ever did was with a great actor called Paul Muni. I was about 20 years old. That was for Columbia Pictures, it was called The Last Angry Man."

When you were making The Empire Strikes Back, was there a lot of pressure to make sure it was as good as Star Wars?
"There's always pressure to make a better movie than you did prior. I guess George's aim was to introduce a lot of interesting new technologies to create a greater impact for this kind of a movie."

Was there a confidence on the set that this one's going to be better?
"I guess. I don't know. I was just an actor. I was hired just to be an actor, so I didn't really think about all those things. However, when I saw what was going on I was pretty amazed at what they had put together. I spent many moments when I wasn't working for the cameras, talking to a lot of the young people who were employed to come up with all of these incredible ideas, and I found that to be a really interesting experience."

Were the main cast from the first film already established as a unit?
"Well, if you're a new person it's like entering a family that's been established, but if you're a fairly civil human being, I guess you're accepted."

What sort of difficulties, if any, were there in acting with the non-human characters?
"No drawbacks, you just make the adjustment. If you're an actor that's what you're employed to do. It's the responsibility of the actor and if you're trained to do those things, you do it."

Did you see Empire and Jedi as just a couple more jobs?
"Yes, I was pretty much established through other films I had been doing. And this was just one more job; a job I really wanted to do because it was science fiction, and I always saw myself doing a science fiction movie. So I got lucky and did this particular thing which was really a goldmine and was a fore-runner of all the other things which happened in science fiction. as far as the technology's concerned."

The character of Lando is a very vague character in terms of relationships. Was it tricky playing a character that complex?
"No. If you're a professional then you do it. You do the job. Very exciting, it was all very interesting. You try to do the best job you can possibly do. Not only the best job, but you try to bring something unique to it that's your own, and I think I succeeded with Lando."

Return of the Jedi was made under heavy security, with fake titles and things.
"Yes, it was called Blue Harvest, but it was not really a secret. Those who follow all that kind of stuff knew a lot more than I even realised they would know about what was going on. In fact I was pretty amazed because there was so much secrecy going on, but the fans were all out there. They were even flying around in airplanes, watching the filming. It was pretty amusing."

How have you found the reaction of the fans? Is it difficult to cope with people who think of you as Lando?
"No, because they think of the other characters I've done, like in Lady Sings the Blues. That character created a big impact. People when they see me, they always want me to quote lines from that particular movie - same thing with this - which means that obviously I did my job well. I was successful in what I set out to do. But that's true of most of the characters I do, so I guess I must be pretty good."

What are your favourite characters?
"Well, Lando's one of them. The Lady Sings the Blues character. I was nominated for an Emmy for one character I did for television. A lot of movies: The Bingo Long-Travelling All-Stars and Movie Kings, about baseball, I played a good character in that. A lot of stuff I've done has had interesting characters."

Do you prefer film or TV acting?
"Everything. I prefer everything."

What were you doing for Motown?
"Berry Gordy produced Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany. Berry Gordy was very closely involved; he wanted to be a film person. He signed me to a contract."

Do you remember at what stage Revenge of the Jedi was renamed Return of the Jedi?
"I remember it. I don't know specifically when it happened, but I remember it happening because I had some collectables - Revenge of the Jedi T-shirts and posters - and then they changed it."

They're very collectable nowadays.
"Oh I've got a lot of stuff from the films. I even have an Ewok."

Do you try and collect stuff from your various roles?
"Certain movies I do."

The careers of the leading players of the Star Wars trilogy seem to have gone in wildly differing directions. Do you think these films have been a help or a hindrance to your career?
"Oh, it's been a help. I've done a lot of movies - some successful, some not - but certainly these were good box office movies so that helped me."

Do you watch your own films when they come up on TV?
"Not really."

Was there a feeling on the set that after Jedi you would quickly roll over into the next Star Wars movie?
"I was signed to do Empire and Jedi, so I knew that those two were going to be done. What he was going to do after that I was not really privy to. Although I think he had decided that Jedi would be the last one of this particular trilogy. And what he was going to do after that I think was a question of what else he wanted to do before he continued to pursue this Star Wars thing. But certainly he had so much success with it, it's like a goldmine. I'm sure that whenever he decides he wants to do something with it, he'll do it. But I think he had other things he wanted to do."

If you were offered the role of Mr Calrissian Snr, would you take it?
"I don't know. We'll have to find out. I have no idea. I don't know how pertinent the character is to the whole story. He comes into the situation, not really being an integral part of the whole saga, so I can't see any reason why you would have his father. It was really the relationship between Han Solo and Lando that brought Lando into the situation."

The other role that our readers most associate you with is Harvey Dent in Batman.
"I really wanted to do Two-Face, that's the reason I took the role, but as things turned out, it didn't work out. There was a couple of times a change of hands, so things changed. I was not signed to do more than that one movie, but I was hoping that I would."

Are you a Batman fan?
"Yes, as a kid growing up I used to read the comic books. But I don't pay much attention to a lot of this stuff. I'm too busy doing other things."

What did you think of Tommy Lee Jones' performance?
"I have not seen it, but he's a very fine actor, so I would imagine that he brought something interesting to it."

What was Tim Burton like to work with?
"He was nice to work with, a very nice man. He's unique in his approach. He seems to like the dark side of things and seems to be very good at it."

What are you up to at the moment?
"As soon as I leave here I've got to go back and do a small, independent movie called The Prince, based on Machiavelli's The Prince. My character is the Prince character. The guy who is writing and directing it, he made a movie some years ago called Gabby, a very interesting little film. He's had this around for a long time, he's been asking me to do it for a long time, so finally he raised some money and I agreed to do it."

Any significance to the Lone Ranger badge you’re wearing?
"No, I like all these characters, I grew up with all these characters. Mickey Mouse is my favourite. But also I paint. I have an exhibition of my paintings in Washington DC. I also work with the Thelonious Monk Jazz Festival. It's an international competition that they have every year."

Do you play jazz?
"No, but I've spent all my life listening to jazz. I'm not an aficionado but I know it pretty well. I played a jazz musician once in a movie, a movie in Canada called Giant Steps that nobody will ever see. It just didn't work as a feature, but I think it's on video."

Would you have been happy to go into music or painting if you hadn't gone into acting?
“Well yeah. Painting is something I've been doing all my life. It's been a very important part of my life. But I never look at things that way, I never say if I didn't do this would I have done that. I just do everything I think I want to do. I have no problems with it. I have no hobbies. People say, 'Is painting your hobby?' No, I never bother about having a hobby, it's just what I do with my life I try to make the most of it, to see where it takes me."

Do you have any ambitions?
"Well, I'm going to be an author. A book of my paintings is being published. That was going to come out for the holiday season, but now it's been postponed to next Spring."

What sort of paintings do you do?
"I call it 'abstract reality'. In other words, there's realist things in there and abstracts. It gives me a lot of opportunities to play with various levels. I work in oils and acrylic. A lot of different themes, a lot that have to do with what I call my journey themes which depicts my experiences as I've gone through my life at various levels, various situations. Having to do with romance, having to do with music, having to do with politics, having to do with social statements."

Star Wars was a long time in the past, and you're still being called on to do these festivals and so on.
"Well, I never do them. But I was asked to take a trip to England, and I said why not? I'll go to England. I have a little time before I go to work. Earlier on, before the movies were released, I used to do a few conventions with everybody. I just narrated for the Sci-Fi Channel in the States the promotion of this new technology."

Have you seen the new versions?
"No, but I know that George spends a great deal of his time working with this stuff, enhancing it, making it better. He seems pretty much preoccupied with that, so I'm curious to see it myself."

The trilogy is going to be re-released. Do you think that will help?
"Yeah, I hope it helps. It's going to be good for everybody I guess, if it has the success."

Are you surprised at the longevity of the films?
"I'm not surprised about anything. I think it certainly has all the honours for longevity.”