Mark Withers, director of Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice, kindly answered one of my six-question mini-interviews in October 2007.

How autobiographical is Hardcore?
“69 per cent! They say the easiest subjects to write about are those you have first hand experience of. Now my experience with the adult film industry goes as far as writing some scripts for that market, but soon feeling like I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel, just as Jack does in the film.

“So that feeling became the springboard for me writing Hardcore. At the time I had fifteen years’ worth of filmmaking experience to draw upon – therefore quite a bit of the script became somewhat autobiographical, even if it was an exaggerated truth of past events.

“I hope I’m a better filmmaker than Jack, but we both started off making dodgy horrors and films with friends at a young age, even if I wasn’t privileged enough to gain access to a video camera until quite a bit older than my fictionalised alter ego! When his Mum reveals that as a boy Jack had a VCR he made out of an old cardboard box – that was me. Some of the crew members are based upon people I’ve worked with and met, especially the egotistical cinematographers. Reg and Ron are based upon two ‘scrap dealers’ I vaguely knew years ago, one of whom was gay despite being a man you really wouldn’t want to cross – so they aren’t, as many people think, influenced by the Kray twins. Plus there are other little bits and pieces that are an extension of me. I’m not as sexually naïve as Jack I must point out though! Honest.”

What are the practical differences between shooting a regular film and a mockumentary?
“Time! With the exception of two or three scenes, they’re all shot in one unbroken take – as a real documentary would be captured, even if sometimes multiple cameras are used and cuts made. Therefore rather than a lot of set-ups, an entire scene can be shot in one go. The first week on location, which was all the footage in the mansion where they’re shooting Assanova, we had six days to film 46 scenes! And we did it. Because really there were 46 set ups, well more like 60 because certainly two scenes at least were shot broken up as if the documentary crew had two cameras running, although we only had one.

“The choice of camera also swayed the decision to make a faux documentary. We had a high definition Sony Z1; initially I’d wanted to use 16mm (the original documentary gauge) but couldn’t raise enough money to afford it. I hadn’t particularly liked video before, but the high def footage I’m very pleased with, although I was under no illusion that it was celluloid, so the video medium was utilised accordingly to film it as a documentary, as so many docs are now shot on tape as opposed to film.

“Our crew was kept small as a ‘real’ documentary would be. I think there were seven or eight of us, sometimes just four covering the bare bone basics of filmmaking.

“None of this was done as an ‘easy option’ though. We knew our budget was tight, as was time (a four week shoot) so I approached it slightly differently from prior films I’d made and also I was directing it ‘in character’ playing the fictional documentarian Linda Boreman, who is also a woman, whereas I am not! So technically it was harder as these long takes, especially where there are a dozen or so people in the scene, were very carefully choreographed whilst trying to make it all look natural without any pre-design, just happening spontaneously then and there for the first time.

“Our week’s worth of rehearsal time before shooting was vital to pull this off on location and not waste precious time. We had a day-by-day shooting schedule and even if we got off to a late start we always finished on or before the scheduled wrap time. It was the best shoot I’ve ever had, despite certain problems arising from two dozen relative strangers cooped up in a mansion in the middle of nowhere for six days.”

How did you assemble your cast and crew?
“We, I keep referring to ‘we’ - that’s myself and co-producer Mike King - put out a casting call on several actor websites. We had a huge response and whittled down our favourites to attend an audition at the Three Mills Studio in London, then a second bout and call-backs two months later.

“Casting had to be ‘spot on’, it was the most important element to me as we were making what on the surface was supposed to be a genuine documentary, so anyone that couldn’t act natural was no use because the game was over as soon as someone looked to be ‘acting’.

“Jack Innov had to be a character we believed in and liked as he really would carry the film and if an audience didn’t warm to him I don’t think they’d care too much about his endeavour. There were four serious options for Jack, then it became between two – Al Constantine, who we eventually went with, and Tom Clutterbuck, who ended up playing ‘Tinto’. Tom had a different kind of take on Jack which was much more academic and he intellectualised him almost to a point of pretension, which is how so many filmmakers come across as anyway, and they’re usually the ones making the worst films! He also had that film student look, long hair, big beard and I didn’t want Jack to be the cliché we see time after time.

“Al however had a playfulness about him and a real ‘puppy dog’ look that I knew would make audiences sympathetic toward him. He did a really great job – in fact everyone did, I can’t say there’s one performance I’m unhappy with, which is unusual. There were times when I thought we’d miscast, but then it just sort of came right, sometimes at the eleventh hour!

“Also to maintain that ‘air of authenticity’ I wanted to only cast good but mostly unknown actors. This definitely works for the film, but has backfired as far as gaining faith from distributors to release it, as there’s no ‘name’ to sell it on.

“I also mostly cast against type. If I saw a showreel where the actor seemed to be playing a certain type again and again, such as an action star, I’d cast him or her in a role that was either a lot closer to their real personality or someone vastly different. By doing that I can tell that Hardcore is the best work many of them have done to date. Helped of course by such a great script!”

How did the cast and crew cope with all the nudity?
“Very well. We were all adults and it was no big deal, they knew what they were getting themselves into. I am surprised I never had to get naked myself, you know just to ‘encourage’ them. But I didn’t.

“I was marginally concerned on the first day that one of the actresses might ‘bottle out’ as she seemed quite shy, so I made sure we shot her scenes first; a clothed interview and then a nude scene to get her comfortable with it and be sure she would do what she’d promised to do! Because after day one she had another two nude scenes to complete. But she did it with no problem, and as it turns out that actress ended up with the most amount of screen nudity and a little over two years later married me!

“The men wore socks on their cocks, which actually looked funnier than if they were naked and ‘cold’. But as we’d stressed early on that this would be a boobs and bums film with all genitalia ‘fuzzed out’, the sock issue wasn’t a problem.

“At the end of the day, let’s just say the nudity made for a nicer day at the office but still just another day at the office. The trick is, keep looking the actors in the eye! And for me at least I’m so focussed on other things that whether an actor is standing before me naked or not is one of the last things I’m concerned with. Although I do make sure the actors are comfortable and as unembarrassed as possible, otherwise their discomfort will just show through in the end film.”

What has the response to the film been like so far?
“Really good. As a comedy you’re never too sure what works or not after a while because what was once funny has been seen so many times it becomes diluted, so it’s then up to an audience seeing it with fresh eyes to laugh (or not) and remind you that what you did was funny.

“It’s played at several worldwide festivals, the film does translate comedically - even with subtitles. It plays to packed out audiences, mostly males, until word gets around that it isn’t that ‘rude’ and then we get a much more even mix of both sexes turning up.

“At the Cannes market screening we sold out the cinema and despite maybe eight or ten buyers leaving within the first ten minutes (they know that soon if it’s suitable for their company or not) we had other viewers still queuing to get in who were then allocated those vacant seats, so the whole screening remained full to capacity! Which is quite something considering the day before I’d witnessed a much more prolific film producer’s latest offering have some of its audience walk out and stay out within the first half hour!

“Ultimately I made Hardcore for audiences and they really like it. I remember at a screening in Switzerland looking up at the 150 strong crowd whilst the film was playing and I could not see a single non-smiling face. I just wish a reputable distributor would have as much faith in the project and forget all this selling it on a ‘name’ business.”

What are your plans for the future?
“As far as Hardcore is concerned I’m now trying to raise additional funds to do a few things with it. First, get a ‘name’ actress to give a ‘to camera’ opening introduction in the role of fictionalised documentarian Linda Boreman – as she’s never seen in the film, only heard. Then we have our ‘name’ distributors so dearly need! That said, the other thing I want to do is release it on DVD with myself (Big Brush Films) as the distributor.

“Possibly I’d like to get a 35mm print made as that opens up the doors to more independent cinemas taking an interest in screening it, as currently there’s only a digital master. I may also marginally cut a few scenes down, only by two or three minutes at most (we do have 30 minutes’ worth of ‘Circumcised Scenes’ to go on the DVD version, some of which are great) and possibly rename it Blue Movie with the subheading ‘Linda Boreman’s Poke into the Adult Film Orifice’.

“Away from Hardcore I’m struggling along as a freelance filmmaker; I’ve just directed a commercial for Manchester United and am developing my fourth feature length film Baby Swipes, to hopefully shoot in 2009. I’m also making a follow-up to the short My Mum the Wrestler next week, entitled My Dad Made a Seagull - as that little film’s done far better than anything else I ever directed and it only cost me £40 and one day to produce!”

website: bigbrushfilms.moonfruit.com

I met Tom Wu on the set of Mutant Chronicles in June 2006. We just had a short chat so I didn’t ask him about his role inIntergalactic Combat...

Tell me about your character.
"My character is called Juba and he’s from the Machina army. He’s been selected to do this mission, to go and die for the world. He’s a trained killer, he’s a soldier and all he does in this life is kill, he’s trained to kill. He enjoys it, he enjoys how he kills and he likes to perfect his techniques all the time. The perfect way to kill."

Is there a lot of action involved?
"Yes, I will be having a big fight scene with the mutants at the end before I die in a grand kind of way. So there’s a big fight for me and it will be fun to do. Interesting how it will be choreographed because the mutant has himself sort of long, bone arms. In the scene we do he’ll be swinging these at me but it’s such a small space so we’ll just have to work that one out. And also how I’m going to fight with this big gun I have. My background is martial arts so I’ll try to use some of my stuff in close combat. I’ve done Wing Chun before, which is a style where you fight very close so it’s very useful and maybe I can show off that."

Were you a martial artist before you became an actor?
"I competed for Britain a long, long time ago. In 1988 I went to China and competed and won a few medals, using the style Wu-Shu which is what they use a lot nowadays in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger. It’s quite pretty but it’s not really for fighting, it’s more like a gymnastic routine. It looks nice and it’s good for film."

How did you get from that into acting?
"Through a martial arts instructor: ‘You want to do some acting work?’ ‘Sure.’ From there I got into it, I went to drama school for three years, Guildhall Music and Drama."

What other films have you been in?
"Let’s see. I’ve done Revolver with Guy Ritchie which was okay. Belly of the Beast with Steven Seagal - so a lot of action movies. I worked with Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights. Bits and pieces in Tomb Raider and Batman but nothing too big in those films."

How does all the green-screen and stuff not being there affect you as an actor?
"It’s difficult. As an actor we really do have to ask the director: what’s in front of us? What’s behind us? We have to keep remembering what’s around us and know how loud we need to speak, for example, so it makes sense. We really need to focus and remember what’s around us."

How is Simon Hunter as a director?
"Great. He’s very quick. He likes to get on with things which is very good. Straight down the line, just get on with it and make sure we know where we’re at with the green-screen and everything."

What’s next for you?
"Actually I’m not doing a film. My next project is Tintin. It’s a Christmas show which I’ve done at the Barbican last year. It’s going to the West End and then an international tour and that will take me about seven months.”

When I e-mailed actor Joel D Wynkoop (star of such notorious low-budget indies as Creep and Dirty Cop No Donut) half a dozen questions in April 2008 I was expecting a few short replies. But Joel went to town with some massively detailed answers, as you can see.

At what point in your career did you realise/discover that your name on a video sleeve might have some value to a film-maker?
“When I did Creep in 1995. Tim Ritter, my partner, got a call from a young movie maker named Marcus Koch who had seen Creep and asked Tim if he could get me in his movie Rot. Tim got a hold of me and told me. I called Marcus and we talked for a couple hours about the part I would play. It sounded like fun and the money was good so I said yes.  While I was in Tampa making Rot, another movie maker heard I was in town and contacted Marcus to see if he could get me in his movie Brain Robbers from Outer Space. I worked out a deal with Garland Hewlett the director of the movie and ended up doing his movie while I was in town doing Rot.

“Right after this, Kevin Lindenmuth called Tim and asked him if he could get myself to appear in his movie Alien Agenda: Out of the Darkness. I accepted; it was a bit part but it got me the front cover of Alternative Cinema. Out of the Darkness led Kevin to ask Tim again, could you get Joel in another movie of mine entitled Alien Agenda: Endangered Species? This was a bigger role and a lot of fun to play. Shortly after this Kevin again asked Tim, can you get Joel to do a part for me in Addicted to Murder 2: Tainted Blood? Again I accepted, I think that was in 1996.

“Tim and I kept doing movies together but soon I started getting calls from movie makers all over the country wanting me to be in their movies. I even had distributors tell me the only reason they picked up the movie was because I was in it and my name meant something in the low budget movie arena. Other parts I got were from Ryan Cavalline of 4th Floor Productions and Mike Hoffman of Wet Floor Productions, all because of my previous track record with the movies Tim and I were cranking out. So it was and is pretty cool to have other directors and producers seek me out because of my past work and offer me rolls in their flicks.”

Realistically, how happy are you, making films for a few hundred bucks? Do you have (or did you ever have) any serious ambitions or dreams to take things to the next level?
“Realistically I am very happy doing low budget movies. I ask $300 a day now but I'll work within the movie maker’s means. Besides just being paid for your performance there are other attributes like a place to stay, your meals covered and airfare or gas depending how far away the shoot is. I have always had the dream to take it to the next level. That's every actor’s dream. If this is what it takes to get to that level then so be it. When I finally make it I can look back and say, 'Man, I really worked hard to get to where I am now.'

“A lot of actors just make indie movies, a lot of actors just do what their agent gets them. I do both, plus I am invited to conventions as well and I do voice-over work also, so it balances everything out pretty even. When I do make it to that next level I would still like to do the indies because I love acting, whether it's the big time or not.”

At this low, low level of film-making, there must be plenty of BS-merchants: how can you spot them and avoid them?
“My partner Tim Ritter and I have heard it all, trust me. Every time I hear, ‘I'm making this little independent movie and I might even have Tom Cruise in it,’ - while everyone else is going, ‘Wow, did you hear that? He's getting Tom Cruise in his movie,’ I'm the first one to say, ‘Oh really, well bring him by when you get him so I can say hi.’

“I've always said when I hear, ‘I'm waiting for a million dollars to do my movie,’ I always say, ‘You keep waiting for that million dollars and I'll have knocked out 20 B-movies in that time.’ Now there are the times where the money does come through but most of the time it's just talk. Another is: ‘Give me your movie and I'll make you a million dollars. Just sign on the dotted line that I get all the rights and I'll take care of you.’

“Tim and I really got burned on our movie Creep. The distributor's cheques all bounced and they were impossible to track down because they would keep packing up and moving their offices to avoid us and our lawyers. I've seen so many movie makers make deals with distributors and they all got burned - the distributor never pays or if they do it's so very little. Okay, I take that back, most of the deals I've seen the movie maker has gotten burned. There are of course the exceptions; with us it is Ron Bonk of Sub Rosa Studios. Ron has always given us a fair shake. He has gotten our flicks out into the market and we have seen return on our movies.

“As far as spotting a distributor I would say just look over what they have to offer and ask other movie makers if they have dealt with them and see what their experiences were. I'm not downing all distributors, I'm just pointing out the ones we have dealt with. Other ways to look at it are: some will take your flick and get it out there all over the place and you get nothing or very little so it's up to the movie maker to make his or her choice. Honestly I don't think anybody becomes a millionaire off indie flicks, even the Blair Witch and Open Water deals are few and far between.”

How has the production and distribution of low-budget indies changed over the 20-odd years that you've been making them?
“Tim Ritter and I started back in 1984 with a little video called Twisted Illusions. At this time there wasn't any indie production at our level or others going on then. Tim and I were one of the first to really start this low budget, video-released industry. Yeah, there were the big boys like Herschell Gordon Lewis and George Romero but they were still studio-released stuff, I'm talking like it is today where everyone and his brother has a camcorder and is flooding the market with indies. When Tim and I started there wasn't any. I mean Blood Cult I think came out the same time we released Truth or Dare and Peter Jackson's Bad Taste came out right after Truth or Dare. Peerless Films had put out a line of shot-on-video features called Video to Video but with very limited release.

“Truth or Dare was really the first big deal in the low budget arena (low budget meaning one million dollars). Killing Spree was next and still fairly new to the low budget movie arena. By the time we got Creep out everybody was shooting low budget indie movies. Nowadays the market is flooded, it seems everyone is shooting a movie. It is hard to get something released when there's so much product these distributors have to go through.

“Of course the more money you spent the harder it was to get back. Truth or Dare made all its money back and then some almost right away. A lot of Truth or Dare though was Tim going to Chicago to secure financing and do all the red tape stuff to get the ball rolling so it's not like we shot it in our backyard, a lot of time went into getting that movie going. Nowadays I think it is a lot harder. Well, there's two ways to look at it: then it was hard because no one was giving money to do it, we really had to be persistent or it never would have happened. Nowadays there's so much but no one really wants to give you anything for your work, or very little.

“Like I said, no one says, ‘Wow, cool movie you made, here's a million dollars for it." Also CGI, you didn't have that in the ‘80s, not like today where you can make the whole damn movie on your computer. (Well, I can't but people that know computers can. I can't even turn mine on.)

“Distribution I think is the same. Truth or Dare got out all over the country and overseas but that is the same with most distributors as well today, I don't think that is any different. All our movies are released all over the world. I think production just relies on the amount of money you have to spend on the movie. In Truth or Dare we were blowing things up right and left, we had Bob Shelley from Ghostbusters and Invasion USA and Jere Berry from Prom Night and Sharkey’s Machine. On Killing Spree the budget was a lot less but you make the best out of what you got. When I did Lost Faith there was no budget, actors worked because they wanted to be in a movie and all my catering was donated by local establishments. Money never stopped Tim and I from making a movie, I mean we wouldn't wait on a certain budget we'd just start shooting. Don't let the money stop you. Today there's just a lot more going on with indie movies then when Tim and I started in the ‘80s.”

What can you tell me about your role in Phil Herman's Into the Woods?
“Uh oh, another in-depth answer coming here. Phil has been a friend of mine for over 13 years. I read an article on him and Falcon Video (his company) in Independent Video, a now defunct independent movie magazine. I called Phil and we became immediate friends, we talked about Burglar from Hell and Creep. We started a crossover friendship right off the bat. He started appearing in my movies and I started appearing in his. Phil was supposed to play the detective in Screaming for Sanity but a scheduling problem occurred and we had to use someone else at the last second. In Screaming for Sanity we changed one of the lines Kathy Kay Kurtz was saying to: ‘And Mr Herman thinks he's the Jacker.’

“Another movie I was acting in had a board in the background with people's names on it who were to be ‘reaped’ (I played a Reaper, sickle and all) in this particular movie and I wrote Phil's name on it. That was Jason Liquori's All Wrapped Up segment called 'Bogged Down'. Phil had me do scenes in Jacker 2: Descent to Hell, Tales for the Midnight Hour, Tales Till the End and most recently we collaborated on Always Midnight which was the wrap-up to the Midnight series: Around Midnight and After Midnight. Cathy my wife and I shot three segments for this: The Bronze Princess (which everyone hates), Andrea’s Revenge and Kill Her, Arnold and we did the wraparound.

“Originally I was doing The Bite for Phil's Midnight series but I took too long to finish and he had to release it without The Bite. Now I had a short with nowhere to put it so I made lemonade out of lemons and turned The Bite into an 80-minute feature. I still owed Phil a segment so we shot a short called Kill Her, Arnold and Phil used it in the next Midnight movie, Always Midnight.

“Finally when Always Midnight was finished (that's another story in itself), Phil told me he was going to make another feature. I told him, ‘Cool - otherwise people tend to forget we can do full features.’ Tim had told me the same thing before I started The Bite. ’Man,’ he said, 'you need to do another feature otherwise people forget what you've done in the past and they just see you doing shorts and say: is that all he can do?’

“Anyway, Phil asked me right away if I and Cathy would do a cameo in the movie, my answer was yes. As said above, Phil and I have always helped each other, appearing in each other’s movies as well as whatever else we do for other movie makers. Phil had told me he needed a scene where two guards were watching a monitor in the Mental Institution. Like I said it's just a cameo and if you sneeze you will miss it but it was a lot of fun doing it and it is always fun working with Phil. I still say his best performance is in Tales Till the End when Phil (Parker) recounts the making of Burglar from Hell in The Distributor segment.

“In Into the Woods, the patient we are watching is Phil's crazed character, so it was a fun scene to do knowing we were looking at Phil. To give you an idea of the conversation, one of the guards (played by my wife) is asking all these questions about the crazed psycho we're watching on the monitor. She asks all these questions about his life and what drove him to the murders, she goes on and on (like this interview) with the questions about his life and rehabilitation and I simply say, ‘He's a crazy, fucked up son of a bitch! If you ask me, give 'em the chair!’"

It's clear from the trailers and reviews that many of the films you have appeared in are not what one might call 'morally uplifting'. Is there any conflict between your work and your faith? Have you had any criticism from other Christians about appearing in sexy, violent movies?
“Well, I am a Christian. I argue with myself sometimes about this. I'm a Christian so am I bad to do this? No, good vs evil has been around forever: look at The Bible. Sometimes to tell a cool, uplifting story you have to battle evil and you have to show the evil because it makes the story so much better when the evil is destroyed. How could you make The Exorcist without showing the evil? What, the priest just shows up to exorcise the girl but you don't show why? The hero takes down the vampire with a cross but you don't show why? If you skip the evil parts no one will know why your hero is killing the bad guy or bringing him to justice.

“Great example: there was an episode of The Brady Bunch where Bobby makes Jesse James his hero. His teachers are upset and show his parents so they let Bobby stay up and watch Jesse James to show how evil Jesse James was and how he killed many people... except they cut out all the killing and Bobby said at the end of the scene: ‘Wow, Jesse James is great - he didn't even kill anybody.’ Point made: the evil has to be shown as well as the good to tell a good story.

“I've done slasher movies, sci-fi, comedies, dramatic pieces, martial arts and Christian sci-fi. I don't think an actor that just does Christian movies would get anywhere very far, just like I don't think an actor that just did slasher movies would get very far. I think you have to take on all roles and decide what you think you can get away with. What I mean is, for example, on Rot the director Marcus Koch wanted me, in the script, to call the toilet ‘God’ (purely for shock value). I told him no I would not do that. He asked if I was a Christian and I said, ‘Yes, I'm a Christian and I'm not going to call the toilet ‘God’. I'll talk to it but I'm not going to call it ‘God’." (Also this was not in the script that I had received so it's not like I backed out of doing the scene, it was added later.)

“I am not judging the writing or Marcus, it was just me personally that I did not want to do this. Marcus is very cool and very talented and I have very much respect for him as a person and FX man and movie maker. In fact I'll be working again with Marcus in June on a movie called Body in a Dumpster for Kristian Day. I guess using that as an example I'm trying to say there are some things I will not do in a flick that question my Christianity. However if I never did Twisted Illusions, Truth or Dare, Killing Spree (pretty much all horror related) I never would have done anything, and therefore probably never would have had the track record I do today.

“Another thing is that when we started I wasn't thinking in that vein, I was a kid that loved Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street and Chuck Norris and I just wanted to make a movie. I guess I never thought about it like: ‘Oh, this is blood and gore’, I just thought this is my chance to make a movie or be in a movie. I will always say - and have said - ‘It's just entertainment.’ Others will argue: ‘Well then, so is a snuff film.’ What I mean is if you can walk away saying this was just entertainment and no one got hurt and it wasn't too far over the edge, it's just another part.

“I think it's funny though that a lot of people will question me about my actions in a movie but if it's a big star like Michael Keaton who does a questionable flick, it's okay. Point being Batman and Pacific Heights. Even with Batman you have the people saying, ‘It's too violent.’ Well let me tell you something: that's the real world. If there were a DC world with the criminally insane Joker killing people we'd want a Batman to kick the crap out of him. Forget the DC world, look at our own world. Every time you turn on the TV you see that someone killed somebody, Hell, we need a Batman. Sorry, in Batman Micheal Keaton plays a good guy and cult icon that stands for truth and justice; in Pacific Heights he's an out-of-his-freaking-mind psycho. He had a role where he had to play a sick, twisted character. If he really looked at the moral implications of it he would have turned it down and probably every movie he has ever done. Even Nightshift: someone out there would say, ‘That's terrible - they are promoting prostitution.’

“Okay, let me get off this soapbox. There, that's better.

“Also an actor does what the script calls for. Like I said, you wouldn't be a working actor if you kept turning everything down because you found something you didn't like in the script - because that could go on through your entire career (like this answer). I guess to sum that up, I don't look back and say, ‘I'm evil because of the movies I've been in (Wicked Games, Creep, Truth or Dare, Screaming for Sanity, Rot...). They’re entertainment, they’re just roles an actor plays. When the role goes too far I'll decide if I'm going to do it or not. I think my friend Joe Davison sums it up the best: ‘It's just acting.’ The actor must decide how far he wants to go with the role.

“Now on the other side of the coin. have you seen Lost Faith? Lost Faith is about a man who has lost his faith in God and what he goes through to get it back. It's a lot of martial arts, which I enjoy bringing to life in characters I play. It's a story about Steve Nekoda and his wife being kidnapped; the law is crooked and Nekoda goes after his wife to save her and has to fight all the bad guys to get her back. In the end, the Master beats Nekoda and Steve calls on God to help him in this situation, to regain his faith and beat his enemy and save his wife and other captives. His faith is restored and he is able to vanquish his enemy and get God back in his life.

“Ya see, it's much easier to bash somebody than it is to pay a compliment. If someone says, ‘You swear too much and kill people in your movies. You're evil.’ and I say, ‘But look at these movies where I do good and witness to many people through the movie,’ they answer, ‘Yeah but in that other movie you kill people.’ I can't win. Of course no one will bring that up (the good I might portray in a movie.) because they just want to knock the horror part of me.

“As a writer and actor you have to be flexible I think and cover all avenues (and I don't mean pornos, there's someone out there right now going, ‘What about pornos man?’). Also Lost Faith and The Bite are two movies I wrote on my own so I was able to control what goes into the story. A lot of people think too that you should not raise your fist to another man, however if you are threatened or you have to defend yourself you may just have to fight. I knew a guy once and he is a Christian and it came up about defending yourself and he said, ‘I would let the guy beat me to a pulp before I tried to fight back." Wrong! I can guarantee you God does not want you to get beat up.

“The Bite it was a vampire/martial arts movie which pitted my character Nick Hazzard against vampires and evil in general. A lot of times I feel like God is tapping me on the back as I write and saying, ‘Where's my part?’ This happened on The Bite. As I was writing the characters of good and evil came out which created conflict for Nick and then he met Madame Ora who questioned his faith and gave examples of the evil on Earth and it was up to Nick to destroy it. Simply saying, ‘Hey, all you vampires are doing bad things, you guys go away now and be good,’ wasn't going to cut it.

“To destroy evil sometimes you got to get a little medieval yourself in your story writing, not to mention it makes a better movie. Did anyone ever question The Bible and say go back and take out all the evil and mean stuff in it? I don't think so. That's life! Even though The Bite was martial arts and vampires I still worked God into the story because I wanted to. I thought in Fright Night it was so cool when the vampire said, ‘You have to have faith in that for it to work on me!’ and when he knocks down Peter Vincent because he didn't have any faith Charlie grabs the cross and puts it right in the vampire’s face who then cowers away. I thought that was great! Charlie had faith but Vincent did not.

“If I can work God into one of my stories I will, that's my way of witnessing for the Lord. My dad did it on a pulpit, I'll do it in the movies. I don't force it down someone's throat, I just make it part of the story. But like I said, no one mentions that like, ‘Oh, that was cool how you mentioned God in that story," they just go for: "Ya, but you ripped that guy’s head off in Wicked Games, man." How 'bout a story about a guy who goes against all these others that are trying to force their ways on other people (and are killing them) and this hero stands up against them with just a jaw bone of an animal and kills them all... violently? Those people would say, ‘That’s terrible - you can't show that! All those people being killed by that man, what an awful story.’ Really? It's in The Bible, it was Samson. See what I mean?

“On another note, I was asked by John Martin to do a short called The Survivors of Rimec for his anthology movie called Not of This Earth. It is a sci-fi about a starship crew going to the planet of Rimec to search for survivors. Upon finding them, the crew have found that they have lost their faith in God and have forgotten all what was taught to them in the past, but in the end it is clear they had never lost faith. You know what I'll get for this? ‘That was boring, it needed more action, you should have hit somebody.’ See, I can't win.

“Rimec is a cool little ‘uplifting’ story but I'll still get those same people saying, ‘Well, it's not a true Christian story because there's a spaceship in it.’ But I wanted to do this kind of story, the script really spoke to me as well as many of the cast members; also it was the first time I got to play a ‘Captain Kirk’ role, and what actor hasn't wanted to play Kirk?

“Summed up? I guess to the Christians that say, ‘Those are violent and have too much sex in them," ... actually I can't even say ‘just Christians’ - there are plenty of people that are not Christians that don't like violence or nudity, it depends on the person. So to the people that don't like it: I'm sorry but that's what happens in real life. There's sex and there's violence and it's just a movie when you come right down to it. I had a guy tear me apart on our Twisted Illusions site saying, ‘Wynkoop needs to find God and get his mouth washed out with soap.’ This was because of my performance in Dirty Cop No Donut. My character Gus used the F-bomb like a million times. Well that's the way Gus spoke, not me. Do you think that guy ever wrote me and said, ‘I saw Lost Faith and it was a fun karate movie and the message it carried about God was great to see in a movie and it really spoke to me and changed my life...’? No, that guy will say, ‘You hit too many people and that was not nice of you. You are a meany, Mr Wynkoop.’ Okay I'm being funny now but you get the point.

“I try to change every character I play so they don't all come off the same. Some swear, some don't, some swear a lot and some swear a real lot, like Gus Kimble and Angus Lynch. It's just part of the character. If I said the same about Pacino where he uses the F-bomb, that same complaining guy would say, ‘Well, he's a genius the way he uses it,’ so I can't win either way. It's just a movie. From a family standpoint? My sisters do not like my movies, nor my Mom or my brothers but they know I have a passion for it, they don't condemn me for it (at least not that I know of.) My sister loves me and wishes I would just stick with TV commercials. Oh, one thing I did learn long ago: you can't please everybody.”

Director: Bobby A Suarez
Writers: Ken Metcalfe, Joe Zucchero
Producer: Bobby A Suarez
Cast: Marrie Lee, Master Johnson Yap, Joe Zucchero
Country: Philippines
Year of release: 1978
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Herewith a short history of bionics. The word was invented by Jack E Steel, a medical doctor and former US Air Force Colonel in 1958. It was given literary credibility by Martin Caidin in his 1972 novel Cyborg which was adapted the following year into a TV movie - The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as US Air Force Colonel Steve Austin.

The telemovie was a big hit, pushed the term ‘bionic’ into the public consciousness and was followed (I didn’t know this - thanks Wikipedia!) by two more Movies of the Week about Steve Austin: Wine, Women and War and Solid Gold Kidnapping.

A weekly TV series of The Six Million Dollar Man started in January 1974 and ran for four years, totalling 100 episodes. The show was a massive hit, in those pre- and post-Star Wars days and it was inevitable that a distaff spin-off would be produced. The character of tennis player Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) was introduced in the second season of The Six Million Dollar Man in March 1975, returned at the start of season three and then The Bionic Woman ran simultaneously for three seasons, including a couple of two-part stories which stretched across both shows. This series, like its progenitor, was produced by Kenneth Johnson. Three reunion TV-movies followed in 1987, 1989 and as recently as 1994.

In November 1976, a possible third series was considered, aimed at a younger audience, and was trialled as a double-length episode of The Six Million Dollar Man called ‘The Bionic Boy’. But 15-year-old athlete Andy Sheffield (Vincent Van Patten) wasn’t as popular as Jaime Sommers and his spin-off never materialised. Fortunately neither was there any stand-alone televisual future for The Bionic Dog. No, honestly, they introduced a bionic dog.

Until Star Wars appeared, the two Bionic series were the biggest sci-fi hit around, hugely popular across the globe. Everywhere you looked, kids in playgrounds and comedians on TV were running in slow motion or punching each other slowly while making “Pow-ow-ow-ow...!” noises.

This came to the attention of the Philippines' greatest purveyor of popular cinema, Bobbie A Suarez. The first title from BAS Film Productions Inc, set up to produce exploitable action movies dubbed into English for international sale, was therefore The Bionic Boy, starring a nine-year-old (some sources say eight) tae kwon do prodigy named Master Johnson Yap who had been prominently featured in the Singapore press.

In The Bionic Boy, Yap played the son of an Interpol agent who took on a bunch of international gangsters in revenge for the death of his parents. The film was the last known work of director Leody M Diaz, who passed away after wrapping production but before the movie was released. Diaz also helmed the semi-mythical Filipino epic Batman Fights Dracula and worked as action director on several of the popular Darna series of superheroine pictures. The screenplay was written by Romeo N Galang from a story by Suarez; Galang also wrote and directed an even more mythical film, 1973’s Fight Batman Fight! To the best of my knowledge no-one has ever actually seen either Batman movie although vintage newspaper ads confirm their existence. If a copy of either ever surfaced, it would be a major find. Until then, we must content ourselves with that old VHS of James Batman.



Combining the fad for bionic stuff with the 1970s vogue for chop-socky pictures was a smart move by Suarez and the film sold well. It was released in Pakistan (“He is more than a warrior... more than a super hero... he is the fighting fury of World War III.”) and Mexico (“Despues de El HOMBRE NUCLEAR y LA MUJER BIONICA, una nueva dimesion de aventuras y accion con un poderoso e indestructible personaje que le hara estremecer!!!”) and probably a bunch of other places. But not, so far as I can tell, the United States.

Suarez and Galang than reteamed for They Call Her... Cleopatra Wong starring the one and only Miss Marrie Lee. And when that was also a success, the obvious next step was to combine the two franchises. The result was Dynamite Johnson - and that’s the film we’re discussing here.


...ballyhooed the poster, which reused part of the artwork from the first film and subtitled the movie, in very small print ‘Bionic Boy (Part II)’. And that small print is what I find odd about all this because there is no other attempt in the publicity to link this to either of BAS Film Productions’ previous movies. Marrie Lee (‘Singapore’s handgun and martial arts expert’) is prominently featured but there is no mention of ‘Cleopatra Wong’ on the poster. And she is definitely playing the same character - a sexy, powerful chick composed in equal parts of legs, eye-shadow and attitude. Yap’s character calls her ‘Auntie Cleo’ and other characters refer to her specifically as ‘Cleopatra Wong’.

So why was the word ‘bionic’ so prominent in publicity for the first film but so hidden in the second? It could be that Suarez had got wind of legal arguments in the USA where some enterprising soul had decided to release the three-year-old Japanese monster flick Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla as Godzilla vs the Bionic Monster. Universal Studios, which made The Six Million Dollar Man, made loud, threatening noises and the posters were quickly amended to read Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster.

Which makes it all the more bizarre that, while one film was losing the word ‘bionic’ from its title, this one was adding it in. Dynamite Johnson became The Return of the Bionic Boy, with the title rather obviously added as a still frame, interrupting the credit sequence of Master Johnson Yap doing his tae kwon do schtick.

Before the credits is a sequence of American mercenaries attacking some sort of industrial establishment who are interrupted by a robotic dragon. It’s a vehicle, togged up like a silver dragon, with a flame-thrower in its mouth and a machine gun in its tail. It’s goofy as all get-off but it’s an impressive, full-size, fully-functioning prop and the only thing that really lets the side down is that we have all seen Dr No at least seven times.

Master Johnson Yap plays a boy named ‘Sunny’ - presumably his surname is ‘Johnson’ - who arrives, in a wheelchair, in the Philippines from Singapore for surgery on his broken legs. For some reason, this surgery not only restores his ability to walk, it also greatly enhances his ability to do flying leaps and spin-kicks. And it raises his sight and hearing to superhuman levels too.

That’s surgery on his legs, folks.

Furthermore, no-one ever comments - not the good guys, not the bad guys - on Sunny’s amazing fighting ability.

Not having seen The Bionic Boy, I can’t say whether this film ties in to that at all but it seems unlikely that there is any narrative connection because Sunny isn’t actually bionic at the start of the film in which he ‘returns’. While recovering in hospital, his bionic ears overhear some bad guys talking in another room so he goes to investigate but when he tells the doctor and Auntie Cleo, no-one believes that he could have heard anything.

So he discharges himself from hospital (or sneaks out - I’m not sure) and tracks down some bad guys exchanging stuff at the docks. “Hey, what’s that kid doing here? Beat it!” says one, whereupon Sunny proceeds to defeat a whole bunch of chop-socky goons from both criminal gangs.

This sequence also introduces us to the least subtle, most stereotyped homosexual film character in cinematic history. Introduced here as the bad guy’s driver but later apparently some sort of second-in-command, this dark-skinned, skinny fellow wears an outfit that looks like one of Liberace’s cast-offs wrapped round a broomstick. He doesn’t just camp it up, he flounces, he pouts, he squeals like a little girl. In fact, he behaves in general like a little girl. It’s like the actor’s idea of homosexuality is ‘grown men who act like four-year-old girls’. On uppers.

He’s actually pretty funny - one of the film’s highlights - because he is so massively over-the-top he’s round the bend and back underneath. Comic relief that is, in its own way, actually comic, just not in any way that was intended. Honestly, next time you see an old clip of Are You Being Served you’ll think, ‘My word, that John Inman is essaying a sensitive and considered portrayal of a gay man.’ By comparison, at least.

Truth be told, after this it all gets a bit less interesting and, remarkably, Dynamite Johnson aka the Bionic Boy disappears from his own film for most of the running time as Cleopatra Wong takes centre stage. It’s some sort of smuggling operation of course, plutonium or something, I think. One thing is for sure: unlike the last Bobby Suarez/Marrie Lee film I saw, there’s no strawberry jam involved here.

Master Johnson Yap does get a sequence where he plays basketball with some kids, amazing them with his bionic b-ball skills before kicking the arses of some more chop-socky goons. There’s no doubt that the lad knows his moves and while he’s not outstandingly impressive, he’s not embarrassingly bad either. The last half-hour or so is, once again, a massive extended fight sequence, with our main characters joined by a couple of young blokes in black pullovers - don’t know who they are. The robot dragon reappears briefly. Finally, all the bad guys are beaten and our heroes fly off in an unexplained helicopter which comes to collect them.

One of the film’s problems is that it’s never sure whether it’s the Bionic Boy or Cleopatra Wong who is doing the returning. Although they do have some character scenes together, the movie seems to flip between the two for extended periods. But there is plenty of fighting, a reasonably coherent (if somewhat skimpy) plot, a great robot-dragon-machine and the campest fruit west of the Pacific.

The Return of the Bionic Boy finally made it to the UK in November 1986 courtesy of Cable 2 Video with a sleeve which assured any potential renters that this was ‘The First Bionic Boy’ and Marrie Lee’s name spelled wrong. The back of the sleeve, which features a staggeringly bad drawing of Master Johnson Yap, credits the director as ‘Bobby A Stuart’ although Suarez receives the correct credit on screen. It’s also worth reproducing the marvellous sleeve blurb from the UK release:


Which is stretching things a bit because really it’s an hour and a half of a little lad and a hot chick kicking the arses of production line martial arts goons. An interesting aspect is that Johnson’s ‘bionics’ are never commented upon (and certainly never shown). It’s really just an excuse to have the youngster beat grown-ups at kung fu. In that sense, it’s no different from the 1990s movies that would cast Billy Blanks or Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson or whoever as a cyborg just so that the hero could justify being so much better than the anonymous stuntmen who queue up to jump away from him.

In fact, now I come to think of it., the hero of this film is actually a cyborg. It’s easy to miss that because cinematically, in a post-Terminator world, ‘cyborg’ is usually taken as a synonym for ‘robot’ or ‘android’, cheapjack film-makers failing to notice that Arnie had a layer of human skin and flesh covering his metal skeleton, rendering him a cybernetic organism. But Dynamite Johnson really is half-human, half-robot, yer actual cyborg (as indeed was Steve Austin of course).

All of which means that, unless someone can demonstrate evidence to the contrary, The Return of the Bionic Boy is officially the first ever KCM.

The screenplay is credited to Ken Metcalfe and Joe Zucchero who also play two of the lead roles, though I’m not sure who. Apart from master Yap and Miss Lee, I can’t actually identify any of the actors with their characters. No matter. The UK sleeve calls Metcalfe ‘Ken’ as writer but ‘Ron’ as actor. The two also wrote Bamboo Gods and Iron Men together. Metcalfe contributed to the script of the Roger Corman-produced TNT Jackson, a Cirio Santiago blaxploitationer which clearly inspired the title Dynamite Johnson - and which was allegedly released as Dynamite Wong and TNT Jackson in the Philippines. It’s easy to see how audiences might confuse that film’s Jeannie Bell with Pam Grier, both being about seven feet tall with a giant afro. In Dynamite Johnson, Marrie Lee also sports a Foxy Brown style wig and costume for one sequence but she would be harder to confuse with Grier, what with not actually being black and everything.

Ken ‘Ron’ Metcalfe’s other writing credits include Firecracker and Hell Hole for Santiago and American Commandoes and Warriors of the Apocalypse for Suarez. As an actor, he appeared in about 50 films between the late 1960s and the late 1990s including The Beast of the Yellow Night and Enter the Ninja. A sideline in casting local talent as extras got him credits on Hamburger Hill and Born on the Fourth of July!

Joe Zucchero wrote Final Mission, The Devastator and Eye of the Eagle for Ciro and Devil’s Angels for Bobby. As an actor he has about 30 credits, mostly (like Metcalfe) for the prolific Santiago. His sideline was in editing including both versions of Ciro Santiago’s boy-and-his-pteranodon classic, Vulcan and Anak ng Bulkan. (The Inaccurate Movie Database credits the script to Suarez and Romeo N Galang which is nonsense, although Suarez does take story credit.)

The cinematographer was Eduardo ‘Baby’ Cabrales whose CV includes Cleopatra Wong and the sixth entry in the long-running Shake Rattle and Roll Filipino horror anthology series. ‘Associate director’(?) Pepito Diaz worked on Delta Force 2, American Ninja and William Mesa’s enjoyable late-1990s monster flick DNA. Gene S Suarez was executive producer. The cast has some big-name (or at least, prolific) Filipino actors including Chito Guerrera (Fight Batman Fight, 7 Crazy Dragons), Joe Sison and Manny Tibayan.

Special effects are credited to Benny Macabale (One-Armed Executioner) with Margie Catro handling make-up and Nita Bayed as ‘costume caretaker’. Other credited crew include Isabelo Tatos (setting in-charge), Rolly Banta (special props), David Cheung (film editor), Bonnie Esquerra (production supervisor) and Willie Henson and Rolly Mercado (schedule masters). Alex Pecate is credited as both actor and stunt co-ordinator but the highlight of the credits, indeed of the opening titles, must surely be ‘P.I.S.S.’. This probably stands for Philippines International Stunt Squad or something but, dudes, it doesn’t matter what that stands for. Change your name!

Now comes the sad part. I had owned this VHS tape for quite a few years and planned to rewatch it (one of the few tapes I still own) in order to put a review on this site to complement my review of They Call Her Cleopatra Wong (which you will find under its UK video title of Female Big Boss). In December 2007, after I had posted that Cleopatra Wong review, Bobby Suarez himself became aware of it and sent me a very nice e-mail, telling me about all his plans to return to film-making.

Even though I don't do many interviews any more, I really wanted to interview Bobby Suarez. But not until I had rewatched The Return of the Bionic Boy. And that wasn’t going to happen until after I moved house because everything - DVDs, CDs, magazine, books and my handful of remaining video tapes - was packed up.

Well, we moved in December 2009 and in June 2010 I finally got round to putting The Return of the Bionic Boy into my surviving VHS machine. Both tape and player still worked fine and the movie was as gloriously bonkers as I remembered it. I set to writing this review.

And that was when I discovered that Bobby Suarez had died on 8th February 2010, aged 67. And that depressed me, not just because he joined Cirio Santiago on the list of Filipino directors I really wish I had interviewed, not just because the handful of e-mails I had exchanged with him showed Bobby to be an intelligent, friendly man, but also because nobody seemed to have noticed his death. It was listed on Wikipedia and the IMDB but I certainly didn’t see any discussion on any of the film boards where I occasionally chat or lurk.

So Bobby will never see this review. But his work lives on and maybe somebody will give his films a really good DVD release. In the meantime, I’ve posted, in lieu of the interview that I'll never get, that original e-mail which so delighted me when it appeared out of the blue on Boxing Day three years ago.

Rest in peace, Bobby.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Mark Baker
Writer: Mark Baker
Producer: Mark Baker
Country: UK
Year of release: 1982
Reviewed from: theatrical screening

Any thought that this might be a simple cartoon for little kids is rapidly despatched when the heroic trio of the title ride to the rescue of a young woman being burned at the stake as a witch. First, she is actually being burned at the stake, with flames dancing around her, and second, the two unidentified inidividuals performing the witch-burning are swiftly decapitated and their heads stuck on sharpened wooden sticks.

A terrific piece of cel animation running just shy of a quarter of an hour, The Three Knights is a wordless medieval romp following the adventures of a tall, skinny knight (on a tall skinny horse), a fat knight (on a fat horse) and a little knight (on a little horse). After rescuing the young woman, they ride off and so miss seeing her transmogrify into a green-faced old hag in a black pointy hat.

Over the course of the next ten minutes or so they slay a giant, meet Rapunzel and, in a hilarious sight gag, re-stand a leaning building. Each time, as they ride off, they are oblivious to the consequences and they are unaware of the gradually expanding group of disgruntled folk pursuing them in a manner reminiscent of old Benny Hill Shows (but not speeded up). In the climax, the witch turns herself into a three-headed dragon - not overly dissimilar to Ghidorah - to battle the knights.

Clean of line and perfect of timing, The Three Knights is a mini-masterpiece. It was produced as a student project at the West Surrey College of Art and Design (which also brought us two-thirds of the Nightmares quasi-anthology) and a print is currently available from the BFI. Animation legend Bob Godfrey is generally credited as co-writer but in fact he only receives a non-specific ‘thank you’ credit.

Any opportunity to see this film should be grasped by all fans of British animation.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Steve Lawson
Writer: Steve Lawson
Producer: Steve Lawson
Cast: Helen Crevel, Andrew Coughlan, Jay Sutherland
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: cast and crew screening
Website: www.rites-movie.co.uk

Rites of Passage is the first feature for some time from Steve Lawson, previously known for directing micro-budget actioners like The Silencer and Insiders(and not for directing stuff like Dead Cert andJust for the Record– that’s a different Steve Lawson). After some years in the corporate-video wilderness, Steve is back in narrative feature land with his first entry in the British Horror Revival. And it’s a real pleasure to announce that the wait was worth it. This is not only Steve’s best film by a significant margin, it’s also one of the best low-budget British horrors I’ve seen for some time.

At its heart, Rites of Passage is yet another film about a psycho with a hunting rifle chasing a pretty girl in a dress through deciduous woodland. It’s a prevalent subgenre, as we all know. But Steve manages to wring something new out of the set-up through the twin barrels of plot and character.

Andrew Coughlan is hard man Weaver, ex-con, keen hunter, keen to pass on his skills to son Rex (Sam Smith), a quiet lad torn between not wanting to take an animal’s life and his natural fear-induced obedience towards his father. Elsewhere, Helen Crevel is Stacey, on her way to a friend’s wedding in the Peak District where she is due to provide musical accompaniment on her valuable violin. And Jay Sutherland is Thom, giving Stacey a lift and carrying a torch for her but stuck in the friend-zone.

The set-up is that Thom’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and a terrible accident leads to a situation where Weaver needs to make sure that Stacey tells no-one about what she has seen. As a game of cat and mouse develops, Weaver becomes more and more obsessed, determined to track down and eliminate the troublesome girl.

It’s in the first act that Rites of Passage marks itself out as well above the common level of this sort of film. It’s easy to have a random girl spending random time in the woods where she crosses the path of a random psycho. Indeed, that pretty much sums up Steve Lawson's previous toe-in-the-water of the horror genre, his 1998 shot-on-VHS short Dead Lane, which has a similar initial set-up to Rites. The violin was a folder of confidential business documents, the 'pretty girl in a dress' was Steve himself in a slightly too big suit, and the psycho in that instance was a completely random serial killer guy.

But there’s nothing random here. Everything that Weaver does, he does for a reason. Admittedly, if he had just buggered off quickly there would have been no problem, but there would also have been no film, and the bloke had to make some pretty fast, on-the-spot decisions about what to do in an unexpected crisis, so we’ll give him that. With the above caveat, every action of Weaver’s – and Stacy’s – has clear, identifiable motivation. I’ve sat through so many films where characters do utterly stupid, illogical or inconsistent things for reasons which serve the plot but destroy the story. Not here. We can utterly believe these characters.

Stacy herself is no damsel in distress nor (thank God) some pot-smoking idiot teenager. She’s an intelligent and resourceful young woman, but without ever tuning into some sort of rural Ellen Ripley. There’s a fantastic moment when she looks like she might be turning the tables on Weaver but we, because as an audience we have a privileged view of proceedings, are nowhere near as confident as she is.

The film uses its locations well: the lonely country lane, the trees, the stream and its ancient bridge, an old garage and – in the third act – an unstaffed rural industrial estate which ably takes the cat and mouse game indoors. Throughout all this, Stacy keeps a hold on her (very valuable) instrument.

Crevel is simply awesome in the lead role, capturing the confusion, realisation, horror, hope and determination of an ordinary person suddenly facing an extraordinary, potentially lethal situation. This is her first feature though she has a lot of stage credits, including the lead role in the Nottingham Playhouse production of The Worst Witch. On the other face of the coin, Coughlan plays Weaver with just enough humanity (mostly around concern for his son) to make him something more than just a cardboard cut-out bastard.

Sutherland has less to do (for reasons which I don’t want to spoil here) but is thoroughly believable in the role. Cited by many as One To Watch, Sutherland’s feature credits include a brace of Jonathan Sothcott pictures: Simon Phillips’ Riot and Stephen Reynolds’ Danny Dyer thriller Vendetta. He was in acclaimed Arthurian fantasy short Arthur’s Lore and also made something called Zombie Defence for the same guys. More recently he has made upcoming British war/horror feature The Fourth Reich. And mention must also be made of Sam Smith’s vital supporting role, delivered with very little dialogue but a lot of facial expressions (for reference this is not the Sam Smith who is in Wondrous Oblivion, nor is it the one who was in Bane and The Witches Hammer). Glenn Salvage (Left for Dead, Underground, The Silencer) provides a telephone voice in one scene while Isabella Nash is the bride-to-be.

Simon Wyndham, who co-directed Insiders and The Silencer with Steve, provided some Steadicam assistance on his film. Kelly Webster handled the make-up effects, including a rather nasty foot injury. Leicester’s own Alex Young, who has previously scored various video games, was responsible for the brilliantly effective music which adds greatly to the tension.

And that’s the key word here: tension. This is a teeth-grindingly scary horror-thriller, frightening its audience through the fear of what might happen and the terror of the implications of such a thing coming to pass. I was absolutely delighted to be invited to the cast and crew screening at Leicester Phoenix in April 2014 and I have no doubt that Rites of Passage will do well at festivals and find itself a distributor.

MJS rating: A

Director: Curt McDowell
Writer: George Kuchar
Producer: John Thomas, Charles Thomas
Cast: Marion Eaton, Ken Scudder, Melinda McDowell, Mookie Blodgett
Year of release: 1975
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (Far Out 2002)

This riotously funny, black and white, ‘old dark house’, hardcore sex comedy used to play regularly at the Scala in London. It has never been given a BBFC certificate but occasionally local councils are broadminded enough to allow a screening - so kudos to Leicester CC for giving Phoenix Arts permission to show a 16mm print imported from Denmark.

On a terrible, stormy night, three men and three women seek shelter at the isolated home of batty Mrs Gert Hammond, a faded Southern belle with too much make-up and a dead husband buried in the wine cellar. They change out of their soaking clothes and indulge in various sexual activities with each other or alone, while discussing where they’re going and how they might get there. Then a fourth man (writer Kuchar, who scripted only one other film but directed more than 60 from 1957 to 1986) arrives, who was transporting a horny female gorilla for a local zoo - the beast has escaped and is very dangerous unless placated with bananas.

A simple synopsis like that doesn’t begin to do justice to this unique film. It is a hardcore porn flick, yet would be just as entertaining without the hardcore shots (well, almost!). Extraordinarily, it includes not only straight sex and lesbianism, but man-on-man buggery as well, along with both male and female masturbation. One chap uses an odd-looking device which, in a post-Austin Powers world can only be described as a Swedish-made penis enlarger, and another shags a blow-up doll while sticking a dildo up his arse. What sort of audience was this aimed at?

Throughout it all there is the clearly demented Mrs Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton - also in Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat), a sort of Miss Faversham of the Southern States who clearly hasn’t spoken with another soul for years, and who constantly stresses that her husband is dead but her son “no longer exists.” She gets off on watching both men and women undress, spying on them through peepholes in a portrait of George Washington. One of the men (it’s difficult to tell which one as all display the obligatory 1970s porno hairstyle and moustache) is going to burn down his father-in-law’s corset factory; his wife died when her rubber foundation garment caught fire at a party, and he has turned to men ever since.

When Medusa the gorilla appears, it is (understandably) a man in a hairy suit, and an elephant is represented by a silhouette at the kitchen window. This is not a big budget production, something evidenced by the opening titles’ ability to spell ‘Original score’ with three ‘i’s. Several other names in the credits raise amusement among modern audiences, notably producer ‘John Thomas’, which probably means nothing to American (or Danish) audiences!

The storm and the gorilla-as-monster keep this just on the border of the horror genre - but the eventual unlocking of a mysterious door and the revelation of who/what is inside (a brief but unforgettable shot) tips it over into real Edgar Allan Poe territory. It also has some remarkable monochrome cinematography, some accomplished editing (especially of the flashbacks, some of which are shown split-screen) - both credited to director McDowell - and a fantastic ‘originial score’ which really adds to the comedy. The version shown at Far Out ran two hours; there are also 110 minute and 152 minute versions, apparently.

I can certainly see why this has such a reputation and cult following - there really is no other film even remotely like it (though comparisons can be made to Walters, Warhol and Wood). See this if you ever get the chance - but do be prepared for close-up shots of men and women enjoying themselves...

MJS rating: B+

Director: Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray
Writer: Harmoni McGlothlin
Producer: Robyn Ray
Cast: Josh Williams, Tony Williams
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: DVD

Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray? Could he be any relation to Sir Frederick Olen Ray, the auteur behind Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Evil Toons, The Phantom Empire etc? Yes indeed, this is Fred’s eldest who has been shadowing his father for most of his twenty eight years, working as Second AD, Production Assistant and other crew roles, sometimes in front of the camera too, on FOR movies such as Cyclone, Terminal Force, Hybrid and Biohazard. Let’s face it, what better education could there be?

Well now young Christopher is itching to make his own first feature but rather than simply doing the B-movie equivalent of asking Dad to borrow the car, or assuming that he knows it all now and charging ahead. he has very sensibly started with a simple but effective short film, which functions as both practice for him and a calling card for the rest of us to watch.

Four actors, one set. Tony Williams is Gator, a Florida fisherman who supplements his income by running drugs for gangland boss Thomas (Josh Williams). Thomas’ goons Bob (Bill Lambert) and Jackson (David Ramirez) have trussed up Gator in a warehouse where his screams won’t be heard so that Thomas can politely enquire what has happened to the quarter-million dollars’ worth of dope that the fisherman was supposed to deliver.

It’s not a new set-up: how many short films are there which consist primarily of a sharp-suited gangster interrogating some poor sod? Lots. In the years immediately following the release of Reservoir Dogs, it was practically the only story that any aspiring film-maker seemed to know. But Ray makes his film work by keeping things simple. Crisp black and white photography by Lance Mitchell (who was assistant camera operator on titles like Gary Graver’s Veronica 2030 and Jim Wynorski’s Lost Treasure) gives the film style and hence gravitas and the director frames his shots with a sharp eye. The opening shot of the gangsters walking in is terrific: everything in the sunlight is bleached into non-existence, making it seem as if the men are strolling from a great cosmic emptiness into the monochrome claustrophobia of the lock-up. There’s another memorable two-shot in which drifting cigar smoke makes a point that would probably have been done with complex CGI in an equivalent scene in a Hollywood blockbuster.

Anyway, the gist of the plot is that Gator is knocked about until he explains where the dope has gone. But Thomas doesn’t believe his series of stories and counters them with brutal twist-tales of his own, illustrated with cut-aways, also in black and white. Eventually Gator turns the tables, to some extent, by admitting where the drugs have really gone.

It’s a smart little script, telling us just as much as we need to know about these two characters - neither of them exactly sympathetic - so that we care what happens to them in the end. Time of My Life is exactly what a short film should be: a concisely told, adroitly constructed snippet of someone’s life, a moment in time that illuminates, for a moment, a larger, unseen story somewhere.

The director also handled the editing (as Chris Ray). Writer Harmoni McGlothlin is not, as I first assumed, a pseudonym but a real person. Producer Robyn Ray (Chris’ missus) is, I believe, not the casting director of that name. Brian Bellamy, who has worked with Lance Mitchell since they were Best Boy and Best Boy Electric on Femalien II nine years ago, is credited as First Assistant Camera.

The special effects make-up is by Ron Karoska (Wishmaster III and IV,Dead and Rotting, 2001 Maniacs, Candy Stripers) and the special effects props by Carl Soto, who worked with Mr Ray Senior on Hybrid. Former pro wrestler Ric Draisin was stunt co-ordinator.

You need two things to make any film - skill and talent - and this little gem ably demonstrates both. Copies of Time of My Life are available from the director for ten bucks plus shipping, with whatever funds this raises being put towards his first feature. It’s good to see a young filmmaker showing such entrepreneurship (especially when he could surely rely simply on the goodwill that his family name brings) so I recommend chancing a tenner on this film to support the next generation of independent Hollywood talent.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Franco Prosperi
Writer: Nino Marino
Producer: Ettore Spagnuolo
Cast: Sabrina Siani, ‘Peter McCoy’ (Pietro Torrisi), Harrison Muller
Year of release: 1983
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Mr Video)

More tedious early 1980s Italian sword and sorcery crap. How many of these bloody films did they make?

A witch called Azeera gets raped by Belial (Harrison Muller from Avi Nesher’s She) who is ‘the Devil’s messenger’ and wants a son to rule the world. She gives birth on a stormy night to a hideous mutant thing which grows up to be handsome but cruel Morak (Muller again). Born at the same time is Siegfried who grows up to be Pietro Torrisi from Werewolf Woman and Django the Bastard.

The land is ruled by King Agon the Wise who sits on the titular throne of fire, which was forged by Odin (apparently). If Morak can kill Agon and marry his daughter Princess Valkari (Sabrina Siani: Black Cobra, Ator the Fighting Eagle, Mondo Cannibale) he can sit on the throne and rule to his evil heart’s content. But he must do this before sundown on ‘the day of the night in the day.’

Well, killing Agon proves no problem. Morak has a whole army of black-garbed bad guys and we eventually see a flashback to the king’s demise. But Valkari escapes. Eventually captured, she is rescued by Siegfried. And when he is captured, she rescues him. There‘s a lot of very ho-hum to-ing and fro-ing and much running around a castle which, in the manner of these things, has iron handrails on the steps and modern guttering.

At one point, Morak shows how villainous he is by offering to free the villagers he captured along with Valkari, letting them run one by one towards the door only to be shot in the back with his arrows. Later, Siegfried is thrown into the Well of Madness which proves to be an underground cave system where he faces hallucinations including a panther, a floating head and a python which he drapes round his neck and pretends to wrestle with. It seems to be real and live but drugged up to the eyeballs. From the Well of Madness he breaks into a cell where he finds his father Antar (as you do) who turns out to be a magician and grants him a one-time spell of invisibility while also making him invulnerable to everything except fire.

But that rotten old Morak overhears this and fires a flaming arrow at Siegfried when he tries to escape with Valkari. Morak’s problem, you see, is that only legitimate rulers can safely sit on the throne, and he will only be legitimate if he marries the late king’s daughter. He demonstrates what will happen otherwise by asking a doubting courtier to sit on the throne. Up come the flames and the guy burns to a nasty death.

Eventually it all comes down to a fight in the throne room between Morak (who is still a mutant-demon-thing at heart) and Siegfried... just as a total eclipse is happening. At the moment of full eclipse - ‘the day of the night in the day’ - Siegfried pushes Morak onto the throne where he roasts, on account of not being married to Valkari presumably. It all ends happily with Siegfried and Queen Valkari cheered by a small group of villagers, all of whom were murdered by Morak about fifty minutes earlier.

Even by the low standards of this dodgy subgenre, Throne of Fire (Il Trono di Fuoco) is rubbish. There’s not even a mad narrator with giant shoulder pads to relieve the tedium of the threadbare plot. Plentiful shots of Morak’s hordes attacking villages (well, the same village from different angles) are scattered throughout the film for no good reason. Some shots were overcranked so they can play in slow motion but one has been accidentally speeded up so that villagers skitter around like extras in a Benny Hill sketch for a couple of seconds.

Among the cast are Benny Cardoso (not ‘Beny’ as some sources claim, though her real name is apparently Beni Cardosi) from Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy and Sumuru; Isarco Ravaioli, finishing off a career that began in 1953 and included The Vampire and the Ballerina, Wild Wild Planet, Three Graves for a Winchester, Danger Diabolik and Achtung! The Desert Tigers; and Roberto Lattanzio - now an assistant editor in Hollywood!

Franco Prosperi directed Hercules in the Haunted World back in 1961 and a bunch of other great-sounding flicks of which the one I most want to see is a 1967 low-rent Bond spoof called Dick Smart 2007. Producer Spagnuolo’s most notable credit was Fulci’s Aenigma in 1987.

Interestingly, the artwork on the British video sleeve is identical to that used for the Spanish poster for another Spagnuolo production, Sword of the Barbarians - as La Espada Salvaje de Krotar - even though it is clearly more relevant to this film (it features a throne of fire, for one thing). Sword and Throne both starred Sabrina Siani and ‘Peter McCoy’ but ironically the bloke in the painting looks less like Pietro Torrisi than I do!

There are a few brief shots of quite nasty, bloody wounds, courtesy of make-up man Giuseppe Ferranti (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat o’Nine Tails, Cannibal Ferox, Monster Shark, Rats: Night of Terror). Special effects (such as they are) are credited to Paolo Ricci (The Sexorcist, Mountain of the Cannibal God, Eaten Alive, The Atlantis Interceptors, 2019: After the Fall of New York). Silvio Laurenzo (The Case of the Bloody Iris) designed the costumes, which must have taken all morning, and the art director was Franco Cuppini who was set decorator on Argento’s Inferno and assistant set decorator on Juliet of the Spirits!

The only watchable thing in the film is Siani (real name Sabrina Seggiani, also variously credited as Sabrina Sellers and Diana Roy) who was nineteen when she shot this and not only looks good in her suede bikini but can actually wield a sword. She puts far more effort into her performance than this shoddy film deserves.

This was one of several sword’n’spaghetti flicks made/released by Cannon in 1983-85, the others being Thor the Conqueror, Hercules, She, Sword of the Barbarians, The Adventures of Hercules and The Seven Magnificent Gladiators.

MJS rating: D

Director: Daljinder Singh
Writer: Daljinder Singh
Producer: Daljinder Singh
Cast: Sibylle Bernardin, Bradley Carpenter, Kathryn Walker
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: Distrify
Website: Facebook page
Watch now - see end of review for Distrify link

The Library is an admirable - and reasonably successful - attempt at a traditional British ghost story. Though it suffers from limited production values (of course) and a script that could have maybe borne one more trip through the rewrite mill, a combination of a good cast, some fine photography and a sincere, non-jokey approach creates a worthwhile movie and one that shows promise for the future work of Daljinder Singh.

The library in question is a small public library in a Victorian building, represented by the 1869 library at Hall Cross Academy in Doncaster. Scottish actor Sibylle Bernardin, affecting a somewhat transient transatlantic accent, is Lucy, a postgraduate fine arts student who takes a part-time job at the library to make ends meet. What she didn’t realise, because she had been out of the country for several months, is that the library was the scene of a brutal murder and in fact she has taken on the job of the victim.

There are two other staff: stern Mary (Kathryn Walker) and slightly creepy Gregory (Bradley Carpenter). The former is an efficient schoolmarm with no time for shilly-shallying, the latter may just be socially awkward around women of his own age. Either or both may know more than they’re saying.

Over the course of a (slightly too long) 90 minutes, Singh introduces a series of bizarre and disturbing events into Lucy’s life but clever combines these with real life problems and stress (not least that she is this close to failing her degree). A sequence in the toilets of a deserted late-night bus station is particularly effective, with taps and hand-dryers all coming on and then, as Lucy exits the room, a simultaneous closing of all the stall doors. There is also a spooky scene later on when Lucy sees a mysterious and creepy small girl in the library (Madisson-Ann O’hara, presumably daughter, niece or sister of make-up/hair artist Julie Ann O’hara). This has both a rational explanation and a supernatural extension, simultaneously leaving us both sure that something unearthly is at play and certain that this is all happening in Lucy’s head.

And there, I realised after musing over the film which at first pass I found a little dull, lies the strength of The Library. Many of the best ghost stories leave the viewer/reader in doubt as to whether the events therein are genuinely supernatural or have a psychological explanation (or both or neither…). It is possible to watch this film as a slice of fantastique, a genuine haunting. But it is equally possible to read the movie as the descent into madness of a disturbed young woman, her overactive imagination tripped over the edge by finding herself stepping into the professional shoes of a murder victim.

On the one hand, sure, those taps really came on, those toilet doors really closed (and Lucy wasn’t even in the room then). That’s solid evidence of a ghostly manifestation, right there. But if we approach the film narrative as an unreliable narrator, then perhaps those taps only turned on in Lucy’s head, maybe she only imagined that the doors closed after she left the room. There are some definite clues in the later part of the film that Lucy is suffering from psychological issues which all point to a rational explanation for what she sees and experiences, without taking away from the supernatural possibility. Such ambiguity is the mark of a fine ghost story.

In particular (and this only occurred to me after the event), a scene towards the end implies that Lucy might be in the deserted, locked library when an intercut scene shows her working on a painting in the local art gallery. When she leaves the gallery (which has no other visitors) she simply leaves her easel and paints where they are, which seems odd. Perhaps she’s in the library and only imagining that she’s in the art gallery then running through the night to the library? (This would also provide a get-out for day-night continuity problems in this scene!)

Less successful than the visions and physical manifestations is the recurring use of ‘something’s watching’ handheld POV shots of Lucy, tweaked into negative imagery and accompanied by indeterminate, breathy whispering. Lucy later confesses to feeling she’s being watched but for the most part she shows no reaction to this and it doesn’t really add anything to the film. Maybe one or two of these might add to the overall creepy frisson but the effect is overused.

Along the way there are all sorts of clues, red herrings, non sequiturs and distractions which add greatly to the overall sense of unease. Was the previous victim, Claire, actually found “disembowelled and drained of blood”? (Incidentally, I know it’s a common phrase in vampire stories, but I’m not convinced it’s actually possible to drain the blood from a body.) An old local newspaper headline questions whether Claire’s death was some sort of ritual killing, but if she was found as described, then obviously it was. There are also passing mentions of cults, of ouija boards, of dark arts. But are these real, or just jokes, or even just things that Lucy thinks she hears people mention in her increasingly fractured reality?

There’s also an antique charm which Claire found and fastened to her library keys, now in the possession of Lucy. Does this have significance, or even an occult power? Or does Lucy merely think it does? And - I really think this is significant - at one stage Gregory says that Claire "went mad" which Lucy picks him up on: "She didn't go mad, she was murdered."

The Library definitely improves as it goes along and could benefit from some tighter editing in the first act. For example, we don’t need to watch Lucy pick out art materials, take them to the check-out and have her credit card declined in order to know she needs money. Just the credit card moment would suffice: two or three seconds instead of the best part of a minute that doesn’t really progress the plot. There is also an introductory voice-over which is presumably supposed to be a local radio report on Claire’s murder which should definitely be snipped. It’s not written like a radio report (far too dry and descriptive), plus the actress reading it is completely wooden. First impressions count and this makes the film look like it will be both badly written and badly acted, neither of which is true. More saliently, we simply don’t need to be told about the murder at this point. The story works much better if we find out later at the same time that Lucy does.

But by the second half of the film, things are progressing well with both plot and characters and indeed the final 10-15 minutes is genuinely scary and horrific, whether it’s happening inside or outside Lucy’s head. These scenes are helped greatly by the work of ace DP Matthew Thomas who uses a low blue light to achieve what many bigger productions singularly fail to do, which is show us clearly what is happening while convincing us that it’s actually almost pitch black. The sound design is also commendable, with clear dialogue and effective use of Samuel Allen’s music.

Truth be told, the film doesn’t really have an ending. I was initially disappointed by the lack of resolution and the pat epilogue but on reassessment, like much else in the film, this non-ending raises questions which actually benefit the story as a horror tale, feeding the ambiguity about what precisely is going on and how real any of it is.

My other slight area of disappointment was that the building itself never comes across as anywhere near the level of spookiness which is ascribed to it. And this is a real shame because Hall Cross Academy Library is a fine piece of gothic revival architecture designed in 1869 by Sir Gilbert Scott, the man who also gave us the St Pancras Hotel and the Albert Memorial. It has wooden beams, stained glass windows and a good number of memorial plaques, making it more like a church than a library, not to mention the assorted old antique volumes on some shelves. But hardly any of this is seen except briefly in establishing shots. A few insert shots of some of the gothic detailings would have added greatly to the film’s atmosphere.

The above notwithstanding, I enjoyed Daljinder Singh’s debut feature and, crucially, have enjoyed it more the more I thought about it as I mulled this review over in my head (and indeed, sitting here typing the thing). The solid lead cast is ably supported by Leann O’Kasi (who was in an episode of Rab C Nesbit, credited here as Leann O Kasi) as Claire in flashbacks and a voice-over of a blog. Mention must also be made of Aimee-Louise McKee (credited as Aimee McKee) who makes a great role of Jenna, Lucy’s bubbly, extrovert friend, a part which in other hands could simply have been incidental and forgettable.

Faridah Rimmer (Four Lions, episodes of Emmerdale) and Stephen Bellamy (who played Nick Clegg on stage!) are college lecturers. Jay Martin (episodes of Silent Witness and Corrie) gives a suitably cold, calculating performance as a reporter for the local paper, helped by a location shoot in the actual Doncaster Free Press offices. Louella Chesterman is an old lady who may have clues for Lucy or may just be senile, and Jade Hamilton is the student in the epilogue.

JennyAnn Spencer-Parry (possibly JennyAnne or Jenny-Anne) designed the hair and make-up including some particularly icky injuries in the final sequence. Jessica Reed handled the costumes; I’m assuming she’s not the Philadelphia-based costume designer Jessica Reed only because The Library was entirely shot in Darlington. Phil Johnson and Joe Dawe are credited with VFX. Lincoln-based band The Lounge Crusade provide a song over the end credits.

After a slightly shaky start, The Library proves to be a well-handled, eminently watchable, thought-provoking and spooky ghost story in the great English tradition. Worth seeking out – in fact, why not watch it here right now?

MJS rating: B

Director: Cameron K McEwan
Producer: Elisar Cabrera
Cast: Lots of folks
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Website: www.whoschanging.co.uk
Watch now - see end of review for Distrify link

I wouldn’t normally watch a feature-length documentary about Doctor Who fans but this one was produced by my old mate Elisar Cabrera so I gave it a punt. Elisar, those of you with long memories may recall, was there right at the start of the British Horror Revival (or arguably just before it) directing Demonsoul and Witchcraft X and producing Virtual Terror (under the pseudonym ‘Elisar C Kennedy’). We shan’t hold that evidence against him.

Before commencing the review, it’s probably best if I explain my own thoughts and position vis-à-vis Doctor Who, so you know from whence I am coming in my praise/criticism. I started watching Who at the commencement of the Jon Pertwee era. In fact my earliest memory of anything is seeing Patrick Troughton’s final episode when I must have been about 18 months old. Interestingly, this documentary starts with some folk recalling their first memories of the show, with several saying that it’s their earliest memory of anything and pretty much everyone picking the final episode of a particular Doctor.

I then watched the series continually until the Bonnie Langford era when even I couldn’t stomach it any more, though I did return for Sophie Aldred. What I never did was become an actual Doctor Who Fan. Never joined the fan club, never bought a fanzine, never attended a convention. My slice of fandom was Hitch-hiker’s Guide and it was through the Hitchhiker’s fan club that I was introduced to wider SF fandom, including a range of conventions from 1984 onwards. But these were general sci-fi cons, catering for Who, Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica etc etc. And they were small, intimate cons of maybe 100-200 fans, in a hotel, getting very drunk indeed with a couple of guest actors/writers/whatever hanging out in the bar. Later I ran my own cons, edited the HHGG newsletter and rose to the dizzying heights of HHGG fan club president. So I know of fandom, but not specifically of Doctor Who fandom. And in any case, it has very much All Changed Since I Were A Lad.

Cameron K McEwan’s film is a good overview of Who fandom in its current state with some interesting stuff about the past which personally I found more interesting, though that may just be my status as an old fart. Considering that it’s basically 80 minutes of talking heads and people walking around cons, Who’s Changing is strangely compelling and curiously watchable. It’s not self-indulgent and seems aimed more at the ‘lay Whovian’ like me rather than the hardcore fan who actually attends these things (though they will presumably want to watch it as well). It’s certainly a lot, lot better – more sympathetic, more informed, more observant – than a similar thing would be if it was made for TV broadcast.

Unsurprisingly, none of the Doctors themselves are on show here except in still photos (although one interview was cheekily filmed in front of Tom Baker’s autograph queue). However, it does have Leela and Ace from the old series and, from the new one, Madame Vastra, Jenny, Strax, the little girl who played young Amy and the fat blue bloke who was in a couple of episodes. And while show-runners RTD and the Moff are also absent, there are a number of people who have written spin-off books, comics, audio adventures or even actual episodes, including Eric Saward, James Moran, Gary Russell and Jeremy Bentham. Plus lots and lots of fans.

What the documentary addresses, its main theme, is the revival of Who in the 21st century, including the salient point that those who brought it back were active fans of the original series and the way that Who fandom has now massively broadened, both geographically and socially. While the fans are, by their nature, enthusiastic and positive, there’s a refreshing lack of bland “David Tennant is so dishy!” fangirl squealiness. Although one thing I took away from watching this, unremarked in the film itself, is that contemporary fans of the new series seem largely uncritical, whereas ‘old school’ fans recall that part of the joy of fandom was complaining about the rubbish episodes,

I started rewatching Who when it came back in 2005 (I also recall seeing the McGann movie, actually at one of the sci-fi cons I helped to run). I came to the new show with absolutely no expectations; in fact I had made such a good job of avoiding spoilers that I didn’t even know they had abandoned the awful old multi-episode format so was genuinely surprised when ‘Rose’ wrapped up after 45 minutes. In my critical opinion, the new version is vastly better than the old, not just in the obvious effects but in the stories, the writing, the direction and the acting. I have no interest at all, not even a nostalgic one, in rewatching any episodes from the 20th century. As for all that Missing/New Adventures tat they published during the wilderness years, I tried to read one once and it was just dreadful. (A witty writer once observed of the Missing Adventures: “From where exactly are they missing? What’s that you say? From the shelves of discerning readers? That’s a bit unkind.”)

However, the above notwithstanding, the show seriously lost its edge when the Moff took over from RTD. I can say with hand on heart that I absolutely loved virtually all of the Eccleston/Tennant episodes and have been massively disappointed with virtually all of the Matt Smith episodes (through no fault of the actor), to the extent that I probably wouldn’t bother still watching if it wasn’t for TF Simpson. (TF was about 18 months old when we sat him down to watch ‘Rose’.  A year or two later he cornered me with a quizzical expression and asked, in all seriousness, “Daddy, Doctor Who’s not real, is he?” And a year or two after that he developed an increasingly obsessive attitude to the show to the extent that my living room is nowadays a sea of Doctors, companions, Daleks, Cyberman, Sontarans, Silurians, Weeping Angels, sonic screwdrivers and at least three different Tardis playsets. Good grief.)

Anyway, the point of all the above is that modern fans of NuWho seem uncritical of the show and thus miss out on one of the great joys of fandom, which is complaining about the thing you love. They also don’t seem to drink very much, possibly because their cons are in hangar-like convention centres rather than hotels, possibly because they’re not actually old enough, or possibly because they’re just too boring. Alcohol and crushing disappointment – that’s what makes a true sci-fi fan.

A lot of the fans interviewed are in costume, and I have absolutely nothing against costumes at sci-fi cons. Forry Ackerman invented the idea before the war and I’ve probably worn a few in my time, although nothing like the level of handiwork on show nowadays and usually only for the costume contest and/or the Saturday night disco. However, I refuse to use the ghastly American term ‘cosplay’. It’s fancy dress, plain and simple. Fancy dress is great fun and some people put enormous time and effort into creating costumes which are either exact replicas or wildly imaginative, for which they are to be commended. But it is just fancy dress, folks.

There’s even talk of ‘crossplay’ which is fancy dress drag. There’s some toot about how women can dress up as male characters but men can’t dress up as female ones, and that this reflects society and it’s something which empowers women when they drag up but which emasculates men yada yada yada. That was one of the few points when I wanted to give the documentary a good slap because the simple, unstated truth is that a woman in male clothing is hot, while a man in female clothing is funny. It’s not impossible, but very, very difficult, for a bloke in drag to actually look sexy. But then again, it’s also very, very difficult for a woman in drag to get big laughs. Vive la difference, say I. Far too politically correct, these young Who fans.

Which brings us on to the subject of, well, not sex but sexiness. There’s lots of discussion, mostly by women, of how the modern show has sexy doctors. Interestingly, one female fan praises NuWho for adding romance to the show while another complains about it. There’s no doubt that Tennant attracted legions of girls and women to the show, as has Smith and (retrospectively) Eccleston as well. And I have no doubt that female Who fans will similarly swoon over Peter Capaldi (whose casting is mentioned here, marking the film as bang up to date but of course swiftly dating it come October). But let us not forget the wise words of Paul Merton who once pointed out that all you have to do to be considered ‘sexy’ is be on television and have a pulse.

Certainly there’s no denying that the show has large numbers of female fans now who were noticeably absent during the original run. A number of people recall the first ever Who convention in 1977 (from which there are several fascinating photos shown) as being almost entirely male, as were most of the subsequent Who cons. The only women in evidence, apparently, were girlfriends who had been dragged along, a condemnation subsequently downgraded still further by another interviewee who says it was in fact fans’ long-suffering mothers who provided the only oestrogen in the otherwise all-male environment. (This was not endemic to SF fandom in general, incidentally. Multimedia cons of the sort I attended and organised were generally about 60/40 in the M/F split. Most of the big names in Star Trek fandom have tended to be female (Bjo Trumble, to name one obvious example). And frankly if a single bloke couldn’t pull at the almost all-female conventions for shows like Quantum Leap or Beauty and the Beast then he might as well become a monk.)

One of the writers here, can’t recall who, opines at length (albeit eruditely and with some justification) that the 21st century Doctors are ‘sexy’ but not ‘sexual’, strengthening his argument by reminding us that McGann’s Doctor actually was sexual, enjoying a lingering snog with his female associate whereas his successors have largely gone no further than a peck on the cheek. And this brings me to my main point: the elephant in the room, the lacuna, the empty space at the heart of this (nevertheless highly commendable) documentary. And I realise that much of this review has described what this film is not, rather than what it is, for which I apologise. But then, what it is is a succession of well-shot and well-edited talking heads of actors, writers and fans discussing Doctor Who. There – that’s not much of a review is it?

So what is missing? Well, it seems very curious to me that among all this talk of sexy men, of cross-dressing, of old school Doctor Who fandom, there is no mention at all anywhere of sexuality. And that’s actually really rather relevant to the topic under discussion. One of the reasons why those early Who cons in the 1970s and 1980s were so massively male-dominated was that, for some reason, the show – or rather its fandom – attracted a disproportionate number of gay men. I mean, seriously. Sci-fi fandom has always been a very tolerant environment – infinite diversity in infinite combination, as the Trekkies put it – and other fandoms had their share of folk of different sexualities. But it was a standing joke for many years that the loneliest sci-fi fan in the world was a straight man at a Doctor Who convention.

Russell T Davies and Mark Gatiss are two of the most obvious names when thinking of gay Who fans who went on to be involved in the show’s successful  return but there are many others. Now please don’t get me wrong; I am not for one moment suggesting that Who has been recreated by some sort of ‘gay mafia’. But the fact remains that many of the leading figures of Who fandom in the 1980s and 1990s who have worked on the show subsequently have been gay men. And I think this is significant if only because NuWho has made tremendous strides in making homosexuality more acceptable and dispelling prejudice. Remember that scene where Captain Jack said goodbye to Rose and the Doctor? He gave Rose a kiss and, by God, you could hear a significant proportion of the viewing audience simultaneously shouting, as a joke, now kiss the Doctor. And he did!

That was a breakthrough moment in British TV. In a tea-time family show, a flamboyant, openly bi character (played by a flamboyant, openly gay actor) kissing another man. And the reason it was such a breakthrough was because, despite the millions who saw it, no-one made a fuss. Not too many years ago, that would have been front page news on the tabloids. The ‘80s and ‘90s were full of stories about gay characters on TV, not opprobrium but salacious nevertheless. There was that lesbian on Brookside, and for SF fans there was Ivanova in Babylon 5 who was hailed as being some sort of breakthrough gay character when she was actually just a rapacious dyke in a military uniform, feeding straight men’s fantasies.

But now we have Madame Vastra and Jenny, an openly gay married couple – “Good evening. I am a lizard woman from the dawn of time and this is my wife.” - and nothing is made of it. And that’s wonderful. That shows how far we’ve come. And it’s an example for the next generation. I certainly know that when TF becomes aware of variant sexualities, I can hold up Captain Jack and Madame Vastra as examples when I explain things to him.

There are plenty of other gay gags in RTD-era Who (“The Master, eh? Has he still got a beard?” “No. Well, a wife.”) and in terms of fandom there was a memorable comedy sketch on BBC2 in 1999, written by Mark Gatiss, in which Gatiss and David Walliams played Who fans who kidnap Peter Davison, ending with a shot of Davison’s eyes going wide in horror as Gatiss asks, “Would it be okay to… kiss Peter Davison?”

Now I’m not here to write a thesis on representations of homosexuality in Doctor Who, or to speculate on why the asexual Doctor should have held this fascination for homosexual men. And I fully realise that Cameron and Elisar could only fit so much into their documentary. But it just seems to be this massively relevant aspect of Who, NuWho and Who fandom which the film keeps approaching – male/female ratios, sex appeal of leading men, cross-dressing fans – and never quite reaches. (And there is a thesis to be written here. Why would a show largely created by gay men create such an appeal for women: is the Doctor really a sex object or just a gay best friend? And while we’re at it, why has it gone so massively downhill since control passed into the hands of a ‘breeder’?)

But I guess if you know about that side of things, you don’t need to be told it in a documentary, and folk who don’t know probably don’t care and won't spot the gap. So to return to the subject in hand, let’s briefly consider the technical aspects of Who's Changing which are very good. Camera-work and sound recording are excellent; the latter in particular can be a real problem in an open convention environment but there are no problems here. The film looks and sounds thoroughly professional yet has a fan-made aesthetic at the same time, somehow. The editing is smart and snappy too, skirting around the lack of any actual BBC stills or footage (apart from two or three very, very brief clips right at the start). Archive home video of previous events is incorporated into the main film, some of it no doubt supplied by my old mate Kevin Jon Davies whose name can be spotted in the credits. Behind-the-scenes and convention photos of Tennant, RTD and others give them an on-screen presence without troubling copyright lawyers.

The film is available to stream via Distrify for just £3.49 – link below – or if you prefer physical media you can buy the DVD (which includes extended interviews) for a kibblesworth under 13 quid from the website or selected high street geek stores. Full details at www.whoschanging.co.uk The film willenta haven* its theatrical premiere at Sc-Fi London on 3rd May 2014 (*one for the Dr Dan Streetmentioner fans there) and is also scheduled to screen at various festivals and conventions on both sides of the Atlantic. The whole thing was crowdfunded via Indiegogo in 2013.

The world of Doctor Who fandom has, over the years, often been incredibly insular and self-obsessed and it’s good to be able to view the passionate fans through the dispassionate lens of Cameron McEwan and see what that world is like now. Lots of people having fun, clearly, many of them wearing cute outfits, But I can’t say it appeals to me. Too much yacking, too many young people, not enough drinking, not enough complaining.

It were all electromagnetic fields around here when I were a lad…

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ryan Kift
Writers: Ryan Kift, Sian Davies
Producers: Ryan Kift, Sian Davies
Cast: Lots and lots of zombies plus some blokes from Big Brother
Country: UK
Year: 2013
Website: www.facebook.com/ZombiesFromIreland
Reviewed from: YouTube
Watch now – YouTube link at end of reviews

Here’s a fun little zero-budget feature which is far from being the worst zombie film that you or I have ever seen. Though thoroughly generic and cut-price for most of its 80 minutes, nevertheless there are several imaginative, original or memorable sequences which repay a watch – especially as the whole thing is free to view on YouTube anyway. In addition, Zombies from Ireland breaks new ground by being, I believe, the first feature-length British horror film shot dual-language with some scenes in English and some in Welsh (with English subtitles) and the first (partially) Welsh language zombie film.

There was a Welsh language horror film shot in 1974, Gwaed Ar Y Ser: Why Is This Man Green!?, which was rediscovered a few years ago, had a screening in New York in 2011 and possibly a broadcast on S4C in November 2013. About 30 seconds of this is online. There is also a 2009 short on YouTube called Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers), probably a few others too. But none of them have zombies.

The set-up of Zombies from Ireland is that prisoners in a Dublin gaol are being used as the subjects in unethical experiments to find a cure for swine flu. The British Government takes an interest and arranges for half a dozen of the test subjects to be brought to London, but to maintain secrecy they are shipped across the Irish Sea to Anglesey in a small private boat. But one or more of them turns into a zombie, the boat crashes on rocks (unseen of course) and one or more of the surviving zombies make it ashore where they set off a gradual chain reaction of gut-munching and infection.

All the above takes up the first 20 minutes, with scenes shot in laboratories and a real gaol cell (apparently). Added production value was provided by a quick trip to That London for establishing shots of things like a Tube station and the headquarters of the British Medical Association. There is no evidence of footage actually shot in Dublin but a large part of that ‘first act’ was shot at sea on a (very small) boat (provided by Go Angling My Way Sea Fishing Trips, who have several pages of photos from the shoot on their website).

More production value comes from the use of the Tank School in Usk, Monmouthshire which is here renamed the Marcus Akin Tank School Fuck Yeah. Akin, who has wannabe-Wolverine sideburns, was apparently a housemate on Big Brother in 2009, thereby giving the film some token D-list name value, a value which is doubled by the additional presence of Big Brother contestant turned local radio presenter Glyn Wise who was on the show in 2006. Frankly, there may well be other reality TV ‘celebrities’ in the cast but I wouldn’t know them. I wouldn’t have known either of these two except that so much play is made over their names that it seemed worthwhile googling them.

Disappointingly, despite various shots of tanks and other military vehicles in sheds and driving around fields, that’s all we get. There is no zombie interaction during these scenes. No zombies attack a tank, no tank attacks any zombies. A real missed opportunity which sadly knocks this generally enjoyable little movie a notch or to down on the scale of ‘how well do they achieve what they set out to do with what they had available.’ Dude, you had a freaking tank. In a zombie film.

Instead, all we get is five minutes of comedy swearing (in English) from Mr Akin before he sets off up a country lane, encounters a shuffling zombie and lays it out with a couple of punches, albeit sustaining a bite in the process. For added comedy value, this fight features some Batman-style kerpow-captions. (Glyn Wise subsequently fares better, casually swatting away an attempted zombie attack outside the gym with a handy badminton racket.)

Another highlight is a televised wrestling match where two hulking zombies clamber into the ring and lay about the wrestlers and referee while the hapless TV commentator attempts to describe what is happening. Amusing and silly (and satisfying for Santo fans) though this sequence is, it nevertheless suffers by being inexplicably shown entirely by filming a TV screen rather than using the actual TV footage itself.

Although most of the film is played for laughs, the actual zombie attacks are generally played for horror. These include an old lady sitting reading her magazine in the middle of the woods (as you do), a young couple dragged from their car and (later) a stoner played by director Ryan Kift. The closest thing to a central character is a blonde woman who was on the boat and somehow made it ashore, played by co-writer (and tattoo model) Sian Davies, who features n the one stand-out scene of real drama. Struggling through the woods, she eventually finds the couple’s abandoned car. In a single take, she throws herself inside, lock the doors, collapses into tears and then, seeing her face in the rear-view mirror (as do we – it’s filmed from the back seat), she spots a gaping wound on her cheek, which she pulls apart, sobbing and yelling in terror and confusion. Eventually she summons up the strength to start the car and drives off up the lane before being brought to a halt by a locked gate, by which time the zombie infection is starting to take hold.

This is a terrific sequence, the sort of thing that we watch these movies for. It’s followed by a flashback showing us her previous life as a lesbian pole-dancer/whore who bites a client’s dick off while noshing on him. A similar life-passing-before-her-eyes sequence occurs when the old lady is killed, except that her memories are all of charity shops. That could have played up brilliantly if the pole dancer had died first, but the old lady is the first victim so we don’t really appreciate the contrast the way we could have done.

The film’s climax is its most impressive – even iconic – scene as a hundred or so zombie extras lurch across the traffic-less Menai Bridge, spreading the infection to the mainland. Shot at dawn, this is a terrific sequence, ably intercut with footage of two comedy policemen who see the zombies on CCTV but assume they’re protesters demonstrating against plans for a second bridge (one of the coppers is watching a TV ad for ‘Beb-Stesion’ featuring Sian Davies). A post-credits gag harks back to the swine flu experiments which we have all forgotten about by then.

Shot over a period of months from summer 2010 to spring 2011, Zombies from Ireland premiered at Blaenau-Ffestiniog on Halloween 2012 and subsequently screened at Bangor University in February 2013 and at Caernarfon in July. I’m listing it as a 2013 release because in August that year it was made generally available via the Tube that is You. Apart from Rift and Davies, the massive cast and the bands on the soundtrack, the only credit is for make-up artist Anwen Peters who clearly did a terrific job on both undead and victims on what was, I imagine, a non-existent budget. If nothing else, Zombies from Ireland is a great show-reel for her.

Got 80 minutes to spare? Enjoy zombies, wrestlers, Big Brother, military vehicles, tattooed blondes or some combination of the above? Got a high tolerance for low budget horror? This could be the perfect movie for you.

MJS rating: B

This was the first of several interviews that I did with Julian Richards, on this occasion for the theatrical release of Darklands in 1997. Little did either of us know then that this film was to become one of the three cornerstones on which the 21st century British Horror Revival would be founded (along with Andrew Parkinson's I, Zombie and Urban Ghost Story from Genevieve Bujold and Chris Jones). A small extract from this was published at the time in SFX.

Darklands has been in development for seven years. What was the crucial thing that made it happen now?
"It was really a combination of things, I suppose. Essentially, the Lottery came about. It was the first time that funding came available in Wales through the Lottery for production finance. So when you get a producer like Paul Brooks who has his own private sources of investment, he makes low-budget films and he seeks to make a budget through pursuing 'soft money'. Soft money is anything from an Arts Council grant to a tax break. So he would be looking at tax breaks in Canada through Telecom Canada or Section 35 in Ireland. He'd been looking at subsidies in Germany, but when the Lottery came about, suddenly he could go for a purely British-financed project. Plus by playing the Welsh card, we were a bigger fish in a smaller pond. It was far less competition. In fact, when we applied for the Lottery I think we were the only application at that time for a production in Wales. So it just so happened that Paul put in £250,000, the Lottery put in £250,000, and that's how we got to make the film.

"I'd spent six or seven years in a vacuum beforehand, talking to people who could talk the talk but they couldn't deliver the money in the end. They had their hands tied because it was money from television or from the BFI or from British Screen. They have a certain agenda, certain criteria, and Darklands didn't really fit. I suppose the other thing that attracted Paul to the project was that Craig Fairbrass wanted to do the film. He wanted to do it because it provided an opportunity for him to prove that he is more than an action man, that he can act and that he can show a more vulnerable side to himself. To put himself forward as a Harrison Ford as opposed to a Schwarzenegger. So that's what his angle was. He had a three-picture deal with Paul. He'd already done Beyond Bedlam and Proteus, so he chose Darklands as the third project."

How much has the script changed over those seven years?
"I originally conceived the idea in my final year at Bournemouth Film School, probably '88/'89. It was the story of a guy who works in a one-hour photo-developing shop. I had a friend who worked in one of those shops and it was amazing some of the photographs that would come through. He had his own private collection stashed away at the back of some of the more extreme photographs. I just thought of the idea, almost like Antonioni's blow-up, that this guy comes across a load of photographs which maybe depict some kind of murder or a religious sacrifice or something. He dupes the photographs and he starts investigating what's going on and what's behind them.

"There was a girl in the photographs and he recognises her as somebody who walks past the photograph shop every day. He gets involved with her and she leads him into the cult.. That's how it started off, but I eventually changed it to a newspaper reporter. It was only about two or three drafts in that I began to realise the potential that the story had for dealing with some of the issues that it deals with in the subtext. Being a film set in Wales, to do with the cultural issues, social issues and political issues. So I changed it to a newspaper reporter because I figured it would be more useful."

Was there a chance of the story slipping into the supernatural and actually raising a demon or something?
"Aha! Well, there was a thought of doing that. I know Paul at one stage did suggest bringing in something that suggested that what these guys believed in actually existed. But I wanted to avoid that because I don't believe in all that stuff myself. I believe it exists in people's minds. What interests me about a religious cult is not that they can invoke demons but that they believe that they can. I think that was more interesting. It's more psychological than fantastic."

Tell me about your early short films that won various awards.
"When I started film-making I was 13. My father had a super-8 camera and he used to film holiday footage of us. I watched the whole process of the super-8 films coming back from Kodak in the post and him projecting them and then editing them. Because I was a big film buff at the time, I thought, 'I've got everything that I need here to make my own film'. So I got my school friends together and on weekends we shot my first film. It was called The Curse of Cormack. I'd never written a screenplay before, so what I did was: I used to collect House of Hammer magazine and there was a comic story in that called The Curse of Cormack, so I basically made that."

Was that one of Van Helsing's Terror Tales?
"Yes it was! So it took me three years to make that. From then on I probably made a horror film in super-8 every year, until I was about 18 and it was time to apply for film school."

They were all horror films?
"They were all horror films. Evil Inspirations, The Girl Who Cried Wolf: they were all horror films! Then I went to Bournemouth Film School. I found film school wasn't horror-friendly. In fact, to quote the head of Bournemouth Film School: he said (a) he hates students, and (b) nobody in the film school is going to make a horror film or a film with a car chase. The emphasis was on other things. Film school is an incredibly competitive place and not everybody gets to direct their film, so you have to play the game a little bit in order to get your film made there. I had another tutor there, Derek Warbank, who said, 'Well, I can see what your influences are, but they're all about other films. How about yourself? Who are you? What have you got that's unique to say?' I decided to take him up on that and I thought what I need to do is put the camera a bit on myself and my own experiences.

"I suppose at that time my only experience in life, predominantly, was school. I made a film called Pirates that was about three stereotypical characters that I'd come across during school: a body-builder 'jock' kind of character; a punk, rebel kind of character; and a college boy, A-stream character. In their summer holidays, they all get a job in a DIY warehouse. They're being exploited by their boss for cheap labour. They're all very different to each other, there's a lot of acrimony, but they find a common enemy to unite against, which is this boss that's exploiting them for cheap labour. He's involved with the import and export of pirate videos. They uncover that and decide to sell the videos themselves, in order to make up for the lack of money that they're earning. It's a kind of action-comedy-drama, but essentially focusing on three characters.

"For the first time I was dealing with human issues in a film as opposed to just pyrotechnics. I was dealing with what Derek Warbank at Bournemouth Film School called 'cinema of the heart'. The film was quite successful - it won the Celtic Film Festival - but it was kind of comic-book still though. It still wasn't in the social realist tradition that I think I was heading at that time. I began to discover Ken Loach; films like Kes which is one of my favourite films. And Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Mean Streets. I began also to discover the French New Wave. It's funny that everybody discovers the American New Wave before they discover the French New Wave when it worked the other way round. And some brilliant Italian films, Vittorio de Sica's films: Bicycle Thieves, A Miracle in Milan.

"All that stuff broadened my horizons. So my next film, Queen's Sacrifice, was even more autobiographical. It was still kind of a comedy. It was the story of a young chess player from the Rhonda valley, who is taken up by his history teacher, who was a chess player in his heyday but never quite made it to win the British Chess Championships. But he believes that he can achieve his ambition now through his young protege.. It's a mentor/protege story. He takes his young charge to Bournemouth for the British Chess Championships, but the kid's about 14 and he's just discovering girls. He falls in love with this girl and he's more interested in her than winning the competition. So it becomes almost this dramatic and comic conflict between the traumas of first love and bringing the trophy back to the moribund coal-mining town which he comes from.

"I used to play chess and chess was a big turning point in my life. At school, to begin with, I was quite slow, I was almost remedial. I was quite good at art and painting, I used to get a lot of attention for that, but in terms of maths and English I was way behind. But I was a good chess player, and I ended up winning the Newport Chess Championships and the Welsh Chess Championships, and I played in the British Chess Championships. I played Nigel Short and lost! But it was a turning point for me because suddenly I was doing something considered to be academic, and shining at it. That gave me the confidence to turn my schooldays around into something a bit more positive than they at that time were. So I wanted to make a film about that, and I also wanted to make a film about the conflict of choosing between a love interest and your career, which also interested me strongly at that time. So that's Queen's Sacrifice and that won the British Short Film Festival.

"When I went to the National Film School, I made the last in that trilogy. It was called Bad Company. Again, it's a portrait of my home town, Newport in South Wales. It's about a guy who at school was very good at art but not that academic. He didn't have much parental support and rather than continue in education after school, he left early and got married early. Basically he's frustrated and getting sucked into a life of crime through his association with a couple of dodgy characters. He ends up beating his wife and he's never recovered from the experience of that marriage breaking down. Until he meets an old friend from school; a girl who is now in art college. She rekindles his talent for art and pushes him in the right direction. At the same time, his flatmate is pushing him towards robbing the DIY store that he works in. There's a final denouement at the end where he decides to leave crime behind and apply to art school, and he gets in. Essentially, I was wanting to say with that film that education is a way out for somebody trapped within a small town existence."

Then Darklands?
"And then Darklands, because I always knew that I would come back to the genre. It was the genre that got me into film-making and I suppose I had a long-term plan. And the long-term plan was: I knew that most of the horror films I'd seen were weak in characterisation and plot. I wanted to go on a big learning curve, then bring all I'd learnt back to the genre and uplift it."

Is Darklands a melding between the earlier horror stuff and the later realistic stuff?
"Very much so, yes."

What about your script for Celtic Warriors?
"Celtic Warriors was how I met Craig Fairbrass, because originally I didn't go to him with Darklands, I went to him with another script. What happened was that I'd given up on Darklands, I'd put it in the bottom drawer, because it was quite an ambitious project: lots of locations, lots of characters. I needed about 1.5 million to make it. So I thought, 'What I need to do is write something that can be done cheaply - maybe for about 200,000 - and do it the same way that they did Leon the Pig Farmer: get tax incentives and money and just do it.

"One of my favourite genres is the siege film: Assault on Precinct 13, Zulu, The Thing. I just love characters that are caught in a claustrophobic location and they're being attacked by something from the outside: Night of the Living Dead, Maniac. So I came up with a little twist on that. It's set on an island off the west coast of Ireland, and this island is famous historically because it was the last stand of the Celts against the Romans, where a famous Irish warlord was killed. There was also a massacre of the Druids there by the Romans. During the First and Second World Wars, the island was used as a place for experimenting with biological weapons. And there's a crop of magic mushrooms that grow on the island, the fly agaric mushrooms that the Celtic warriors used to take before going into battle so that they would become berserkers.

"So the whole thing was based around that. What we have is an illegal archaeological dig on the island, and we also have drug manufacturers on the island who are using the mushrooms to create a new smart drug. A SWAT team is sent in to arrest the drug dealers. Meanwhile, the archaeological dig unleashes the curse of the warlord, the wrath of warlord, which basically means you get reincarnated Celtic warriors; berserkers covered in tattoos who go on the rampage. Eventually the SWAT team, the drug manufacturers and he archaeologists find themselves in the derelict farmhouse that the guys are using to manufacture the drugs in, being attacked by a reincarnated Celtic warrior army. It's kind of like Assault on Precinct 13 meets The Evil Dead. So maybe I'll still make that somewhere along the line.

"When Craig read it, he liked some of the themes I was dealing with, but he said, 'It's too horror, it's too B-movie. But there's themes in here that could be a lot bigger, and Paul's looking for a $20 million/$30 million action movie. Maybe you could set it in LA and maybe you could make it more like Highlander.' I took it to Paul and Paul said, 'Yes, I'm looking to make something like Highlander. I like some of the Celtic themes that you're dealing with. Is there anything you can do to provide me with something as a big action vehicle for Craig in LA?' So I though,t 'What are my two favourite films in that genre? It's got to be Terminator and Highlander.' So I thought I'd combine the two and came up with Warlord, which I'm writing now for Metrodome.

"That's about reincarnation and time travel. It's about a Celtic prince and a Viking princess who want to marry, but when they try and marry the wedding is interrupted by the king, the princess' father, who is against the marriage. He challenges the prince to a duel and kills him. The princess decides to enlist the support of a wizard to create a poison that she can drink with her dying fiancee, whereby they both die but they're reincarnated 2,000 years later. So the story's told from the point of view of this young couple in LA who don't realise what their heritage is, what their past is. They only realise it when a Viking warrior appears in downtown Los Angeles with a quest to prevent them from getting married the second time."

What were your feeling about teaming up with Metrodome, given their record of Proteus and so on? Any worries that you might end up with another rubber monster?
"Not really. Paul, I found, was useful in many ways because he was very realistic as a producer. He knows what the problem is with the industry here, especially as far as making low-budget, independent genre films goes. And he just says, 'Well look, get on with it.' Sometimes you'll go into a situation where you know you're not ready, but the thing is that you never will be ready. You have to make compromises and you have to learn to make compromises work, and that's one thing I learned from Paul. You've just got to get the job done. At the same time, he would come along with some quite creative contributions to the movies, too. Some ideas he came up with were really terrible and I'd tell him so and he'd say fine. He wasn't dictatorial in any way; it was very much a creative and collaborative process.

"I'd heard things about Paul, I'd heard things about Metrodome, but in the end I have to say: for me it was a very good experience. Apart from the fact that sometimes we had to compromise too much. because they didn't have that much money, we didn't have that much money to make the film. So things like: we needed to do some pick-ups at the end of the film, and Paul didn't have the money to fund it, so I had to fund it myself. But I was determined to make the best film that I possibly could. It wasn't a jobbing film for me. I know, for instance, with Beyond Bedlam, Vadim Jean was brought on four weeks before they started shooting. For him it was a jobbing film. The script was a mess; it didn't really tell its story well. Proteus: well, I suppose that's another story, I don't know much about Proteus. But I'd been with this project for seven years, the script was good, and I think that if you've got a good script, then that's all that matters. A good script and a good cast are 70% of the job done. I think the problem with Proteus and Beyond Bedlam is that the scripts weren't that good, and sometimes the cast weren't that good either. So that's 70% of the job not done."

What's the distribution deal like?
"I'm about to find out this afternoon how many cinemas it's going to go out in. But the release is October 24th. I know there's already a couple of cinemas in Wales that have called me up, that want me to go and introduce the first night. The NFT in London, there will probably be another two or three cinemas there. I imagine about 20 prints are going to go out on the UK theatrical circuit. The film's sold to every country in the world, bar the US. We've had some offers from some US distributors. but they've not been good enough yet for us to go with them. So the film, financially has done well. At this stage, a year after completion, it's returned its investment. And so the next five years or so will be profitable."

Will overseas versions be dubbed or subtitled?
"Probably a mixture of both."

Do you have any control over translations? It could end up as a Carry On film in Korea...
"I saw The Black Mask recently in Germany. That's been dubbed into English and the actress they've chosen just seems... I think when you go and watch a dubbed film, you know that it's dubbed and you try and take that into consideration."

Are you finding that people from whatever relating country are relating to the film's themes?
"I think the themes that the films deals with are global in the sense that nationalism is beginning to re-emerge as a problem - if it's a problem at all. But iy is beginning to re-emerge and we've seen what happened in Yugoslavia, and we're seeing what's happening in Russia. I suppose in Korea they have the North and South divide, so at some point it's going to happen there. I think it definitely does translate. I'm quite surprised sometimes how aware people are about what's going on in the film. For instance, two French critics came up to me in Valenciers and said, 'If they're trying to preserve their race, how come they choose a black prostitute to conceive the child? And why does the girl who eventually conceives Fraser's child have a Jewish name?' I had to say, 'Well, yes, I never thought of that.' Essentially my answer to that is that there are black people and Jewish people in contemporary Wales, and it's a contemporary story. It's not about fascism as such; it's about racism, it's about nationalism."

It's about being Welsh as opposed to Celtic.
"Yes, I suppose so. But the flipside of that is: one of the first werewolf films was set in Cardiff, with Lon Chaney Jr - The Wolf Man. I suppose at that stage Universal were picking places on the map that people knew nothing about: 'Oh well, nobody knows about Cardiff. We can just reinvent the place.' And that's what I like about people's ignorance, internationally, of Wales. Often I've met people  who'll say, 'Where's Wales? We've never heard of it before.' I quite like that because it's a mystery. I can reinvent it and I can deal with mythology in a way that is far more open. That's essentially what America has done with its film culture. I was talking to a guy from American Cinematographer, Dave Williams, a few months back. He was saying that he's never seen anybody pull a gun - and he lives in Los Angeles. We watch American films, then we go over there and expect them to be dodging bullets. We don't have a tradition in this country for creating myths out of the world that we live in. We're not that imaginative, we're too affected by realism and documentary."

How did you choose your cast and crew? The cinematographer in particular seems to be getting a lot of credit - and rightly so.
"It was a funny story with the cinematographer because originally we were going to shoot the film on 35mm and I approached Bernard Leyton, who shot Young Americans, to shoot Darklands, and he was very interested in doing it. When we dropped to 16mm for budget reasons, he was no longer interested because it was too much of a compromise for him. So that meant that I couldn't waste any more time seeking a really well-grounded cameraman. I had to go with somebody for whom this was going to be their first feature. So I went for Zoran Djordjevic because I knew him, I'd been at film school with him. But since film school he'd done a lot of second unit work for Andre Seculas - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction - and I just figured that he must be well aware of the process now and eager to get in there and do it himself. So I gave him the first break. But it was really difficult for Zoran because he had to come up with a look for the film that would translate in blow-up from 16mm to 35mm. It involves putting up a lot of lights, and that takes time, it takes money, which we didn't have. So often myself and the cameraman were at war during the making of the film, because we both needed time which we didn't have. Zoran would often steal my time, and sometimes I would try and steal his. It was difficult and very fraught, but sometimes it takes that to get a result."

The visuals, especially the steel works and industrial architecture, are very nice.
"What I did with those is: we didn't have much time to shoot those during the making of the film. I had a friend who lived in Bristol who had his own super-16mm camera, a documentary film-maker. So I said while we're shooting, can you just go out and get as many shots of the steelworks as you can. We ended up with about 30 or 40 compositions of the steelworks at various times during the day, and we just staggered them throughout the film. It's amazing how they embellish the film, creating the atmosphere and the world that it takes place in. Otherwise it would all have been anonymous interiors."

What problems did you have with Welsh nationalists and so on?
"One of the reasons, I suspect, why I didn't get anywhere with the film in the first six years of trying in Wales is because people were aware of some of the issues I was dealing with, and they didn't particularly go for it. In the end, when the Lottery made their decision, there was no Head of Film in the Welsh Arts Council, so they sent it up to Scotland, and Eddie Dake in Scotland made a decision. Which is kind of nice because sometimes I think that the whole system in Wales can get so anal - dealing with issues that are so small and parochial and taking them so seriously - that they'll just make films that will only work in Wales. If that at all. So it was good to get objective support for the film.

"The film screened in the Aberystwyth Film Festival and I had a couple of people outside the cinema came up to me and said, 'That's the worst film I've ever seen. How dare the Welsh Lottery support such a venture. It's racist. It's full of primeval fear.' - which it is. Primeval fear: that's one of the essential fear factors I was dealing with. In terms of the racism, I've experienced racism from Welsh language people, being a non-Welsh language speaker, and this is me biting back. But at the same time, I would say the film's a fantasy. We're dealing with extremism and it's not meant to be a true representation of what goes on in Wales. Even more, the Head of Aberystwyth Film Festival, who is now the Head of the Arts Council in Wales and who's a nationalist himself, said, 'It's a sign of confidence in your culture when you can make a film that's dealing with things negative and derogatory but in a fantastical or comical way.' I agree with him."

What did Channel Four say when you tried to get funding?
"Channel Four said it was too down-the-line horror, too genre. What they meant by that was that they couldn't believe 100% in the world that it was based in. It wasn't realistic enough for them, basically."

Who was it who said it had 'no contemporary resonance'?
"BBC Wales said it had 'no contemporary resonance'. They completely missed the point. I sometimes wonder who these people are that get employed in film companies and TV companies to read scripts and decide what gets made and what doesn't. Because they're not film-makers; I don't know what they are. I think that things should be more driven by film-makers. Rather than me having an anonymous relationship with these people in Channel Four and the BBC... I don't know them, they don't know me. I send a script in, and they pass. They don't know my work, and if they did then they would understand the whole thing a bit more. It's kind of quango-ish in the end. I think they make films with who they know."

Will the tax thing announced in this year's budget affect films like this?
"Um, I don't know the full ramifications of that, actually. I don't know whether that's a tax break for investing in films, or whether you don't have to pay tax on your production. Which I suppose is a saving of 17.5% on every budget. I don't know."

Do you have a lot of contemporaries. Did you just luck out in getting this made?
"There are a lot of people. At the same time, a lot of people I went to film school with who wanted to make feature films, they find themselves ten years on making corporate videos, maybe pop videos, maybe commercials, but not features. Because there isn't really an industry that exists. It's very hard to make a living out of being a feature film director in the UK, it's almost impossible. I'm still not doing it. I don't have the cash-flow at the moment to take me from one day to the next, because with Darklands all my wages went into the film, I didn't get paid. If it wasn't for the social security system and me keeping my overheads to a minimum, I wouldn't have been able to afford to do it. They've decided to get themselves into a situation where they have much bigger overheads than I have which they have to pay for, so therefore they need to work to live. It's unfortunate because they're trapped. They don't have the time to sit down for two years writing a script and not earning a penny."

How did your stint on Brookside come about?
"When I finished film school, I sent out my showreel. A year later I got a phone call from Mersey TV. They called me up and said, 'Come along for an interview'; I went for the interview and got the job. So I was there for six months doing twelve episodes. That was an invaluable experience, because at film school I made these three short films. We shot for half an hour; maybe two or three weeks. That's two and a half minutes a day. At Brookside, suddenly we had to do a half-hour episode in two and a half days: 15 minutes a day. So it was a huge learning curve for me to make that work. I think without it I probably wouldn't have been able to get through the Darklands schedule. So it was invaluable."

Is there much room for creativity in directing a soap opera?
"Every now and then you can be a little creative, but on the whole no. It's a situation where you've got so little time that anybody who goes in there to do the job will come up with the same answer to the problems. So there's nothing to distinguish you from the next guy; there's only one answer to how to shoot this scene, and you've only got half an hour to shoot it. So yes, it is dissatisfactory and six months was certainly enough for me. I think I would have got pretty depressed if I'd have carried on."

Why did it take you six months to shoot twelve episodes?
"It's a six-week cycle. What you do is you get the script, which you prepare for two weeks; on the third week you shoot; then on the fourth and the fifth week you edit and put the sound on; and it goes out in the sixth week. You've got other directors doing other episodes, so it's a continuous cycle. There are about three or four directors working on it at the same time."

Are you going to do more of that?
"I need to earn some money right now, so if somebody came to me with an offer to work in TV, I'd take it up. I particularly like This Life. That's revolutionised soaps, it's left all the others behind. I think it would be very difficult for me to work on anything other than something in the vein of This Life. Because for me the rest is history now."

What about the corporate/pop video side of it?
"Pop videos and commercials I'd like to do, actually. One or two a year, just as a little side thing. But I haven't had the reel to get me that kind of work. Now I've done Darklands, the Pagan sequences and action scenes will help me get commercial and pop video work. That's how a lot of feature film directors survive. People like the Scott brothers; they essentially do two, three or four commercials a year. And commercials pay big money. You can get two grand for a week's work at least, and that's enough to tide you over while you're focussing on the features. Again, it's a danger. There's so much money in commercials.

"I have a very talented producer friend who I was at college with, who went to LA and is living the life of Riley. He's got a big Beverly Hills house and the whole lot. He still hasn't done his first feature; he's doing commercials. He's enjoying himself, but I still got the sense when I was there talking to him in April that he was a bit jealous that I'd done my first feature. He's got ideas in the pipeline, but his whole lifestyle now is dictated by commercials. As soon as he stops doing them he's in trouble, I suppose, because he's living a bit of a hire-purchase life as well."

In researching Darklands, what sort of research did you do into Pagan rituals?
"The Paganism that exists in Darklands is a bit of a fusion. When Keller appears at the end in his red robe, that's really more of a Satanic image than it is a Pagan image. But the Green Man and the Red Man are all based around a real life Pagan ceremony that takes place in Edinburgh on April 30th called the Beltane Fire. It's an annual event. Four thousand spectators turn up and watch these guys go through their performance. I went along and witnessed it and I was so impressed by it that I basically lifted it and put it in Darklands. I wanted to get the original guys involved, and they were helping me out to begin with, but when they read the script and realised that it was a horror film, they pulled out."

What about the influence of things like Arkaos?
"It was the evolution of the idea, actually. Because I'd lived with it for seven years, it was always in the back of my mind and I found that every year would pass and I'd see something or I'd come across something that worked in the world I was trying to create. I remember going to see a performance of Arkaos in Battersea Power Station, where they had the metal sounds and the whole post-industrial side of things mixed with Brazilian tribal dances. What I loved was this mix of the tribal and the ancient with the contemporary post-industrial. I thought, 'That's what I'm trying to get at with Darklands.' So it worked for me. I wanted to avoid some of the stereotypical images that you have of religious cults and of people walking round in robes chanting and stuff. I thought, 'Maybe this is a good way to do it. Maybe this is how these people live. They'd probably be a circus act or a bunch of performers.'

"I remember going to see Arkaos with a friend who knew somebody who was in the show, so at the end of the show we went back to the caravans that they live in and spent the evening there. It was like being in Tod Browning's Freaks. It was intimidating, but a lot of fun at the same time. It was such an unusual world. So I just felt that it worked. Also, a friend of mine had made a documentary about Test Dept called Notes from the Underground. I'd seen that, and I saw images in it of guys banging bits of metal and stuff. I thought, 'Well yes, instead of chanting, maybe this is what they're doing because of the steelworks thing.' I thought that really works too. And I listened to an album that Test Dept did with a Welsh performance group. I listened to it, and it was a mixture of Celtic folk singing with hardcore industrial percussion - an extraordinary mix of the old and the new, and it had a religious feel to it too. Then Test Dept did a brilliant show up in Glasgow called The Second Coming. It seemed that whatever angles Test Dept were coming up with, I was linking with because I was thinking the same way, just thinking, 'Yes, I can use all of that.' So the Beltane Fire, Test Dept, Arkaos and others were really inspirational to how I was going to depict the Pagans."

Where di the music for the Pagan scenes come from?
"The track at the end of the film, over the credits, of that Celtic singing: when you hear that singing you immediately think of Ireland and Irish singing, and people don't associate Wales with the same kind of singing. But that kind of singing exists in Wales. The Welsh language, when it's sung, is very beautiful. So that was good for me. It think it's one of the unique parts of the film. We basically took that sort of music and we said, 'Okay, we'll run it along the same lines as this, and then we'll mix it a bit with Terminator.' We wanted that hero music for Craig, especially towards the end when he's going to fight his way out. That sound from Terminator is very metallic sounding, so we took a little bit from that.

"The only sequence that doesn't quite fit that palette is the Halloween homage, if you like, of Rachel being chased around the house by Carver. The guys who composed the music came up with an industrial score for that which just didn't work because that sequence is about suspense. The music, although it was dramatic, wasn't suspenseful. I said, 'Look, we've got to come up with something a little more Bernard Herrmann for this. It's got to be violins and chase music.' So they went for that. But I think if they'd have had more time, they'd have liked to have made that more industrial as well. I feel it's a bit of a pastiche."

When she backs towards the window, it's obvious what's going to happen, but it still makes you jump.
"There are two ways to do a jump scene - it's the old Hitchcock thing. Do you show the bomb underneath the table, and wait for the audience to go, 'My God! It's going to go off! Do something!' so that they know it's going to happen but the problem is when is it going to happen? Or do you just have two people talking at the table and suddenly: Bang! There are two jump scenes in Darklands. One is the one that you mention which is where I've shown the bomb underneath the table. You know what's going to happen. The fact that you know it's going to happen creates suspense. The other jump scene is in the train, when he look out the window and he backs away and the guy jumps him from behind. That's a big surprise, that's a bomb going off without any warning."

Was the train an old BR carriage?
"It was too expensive to get any Railtrack line. The way they've gone with privatisation, it's impossible to get any sense out of them in terms of having to get a carriage on a certain track. So we found a private line in Lidney. It was a bit of risk because they only had steam trains, and they only had a mile-long track, so we had to run a train back and forth all night. But in the end, they were very supportive. They gave us three days' use of the whole station that they had.

"That train sequence is actually based on a real life experience that I had - although not quite that bad. I can remember whilst I was at Bournemouth Film School, having to catch the train from Bournemouth to Newport. At that time, they were really old, dusty, beaten trains. I got onto a carriage that had no lights. I sat there and just thought, 'Maybe the bulb's gone.' The train departed and went through all these tunnels. What amazed me was that when there are no lights in the carriage, the lights in the tunnel produce all these danse macabre shadows and images all around the train. I just found it so frightening, I thought, 'Wow! I've got to put this into a film some time.' Then finally when the train pulled into the station at Newport I tried to get off and I couldn't because all the doors were locked. I realised that I'd actually got into a closed carriage, so I had to call for an attendant to come and open a door for me. I was determined to find a way to put that into the film."

What about the pig and the goat. Presumably 'no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.'
"That's right. We had three pigs. One was real and alive and is now called Darklands, living happily ever after on Cardiff City Farm. Another one was a dead pig that we got from a slaughterhouse. And the third one was a rubber pig that we used for the throat-cutting scene. It was quite distressing filming the pig being hauled out of the carriage. The farmers that brought the pig along - that's how they move pigs. They grab them by the ears and they just haul them. And when you do that to a pig it squeals. The whole crew were really uncomfortable. I was loving it because I knew that what they were experiencing, the audience would experience and that's part of the whole thing. It's really quite distressing.

"The goat we got from a taxidermist. I think the idea, for me, is something that's not Paganism. It's a Satanic image, the goat with the horns; it's Dennis Wheatley. I wanted that shot in Silence of the Lambs where the cops are running through the room after Lecter's escaped from his cage, and there's an almost cruficied guard, transfigured by light. I was going for that, really. Obviously I couldn't have a metal wicker man, a big statue of a wicker man, so I just thought: 'What can I come up with? Well, with the crucifixion there were two criminals either side of Jesus, so maybe I can have the pig and the goat either side of Craig.' Hang them upside-down, which is Satanic, which is a fusion of all these things."

What about the scene in the church? Was that tricky?
"It was, yes: 'We'd just like to put a dead pig in your church, please.' We used a real church for the shots of the vicar arriving and coming in. But for the reverses, his point of view, we used a deconsecrated church that we found. But even so, it took weeks to get that church and go through all the wrangling. It was in a tiny Welsh valley town, and all the houses were built around the church. We had to sneak the pig inside because we really didn't want to let people know what we were doing in there. Even though it was closed and deconsecrated, it still did feel like it was sacrilegious.

"I can remember the line producer saying to me, 'Are you sure that you want to go ahead with this? Are you sure that there isn't a God? Are you sure that you won't get punished for what you're doing?' I said, 'I'm an agnostic. I don't believe in that kind of stuff. It doesn't worry me.' He said, 'Well, it worries me!' We were in the church, the pig was hoisted up over the altar, it was bleeding down onto the altar. I was watching all the blood seeping into the carvings on the altar and I just suddenly got a really bad feeling. It was about four or five o'clock in the morning when I was driving home and I drove through a roundabout without realising. the roundabout had left and right but no straight ahead, so I went straight through a fence into a field, wrote off my car and was concussed for a day."

website: www.jingafilms.com

In April 2014, after I had reviewedThe Library, the film's writer-director Daljinder Singh kindly answered a few questions by email.

What was the inspiration for The Library?
"Years ago before I went to university I had a summer job in a local library. It was very quiet most of the time and you were often left to your own devices. Libraries are naturally quiet places so when you're on your own it's easy for your mind to play tricks. You think you've seen something when really it's nothing. Or you hear 'strange noises' when it's probably nothing more than noisy old drain pipes. Your imagination runs wild and you start believing it's something more sinister! You have to go down lots of stairs into basement storage sections alone, you start to get a sense of isolation and tension. It's more or less psychological and I wanted to play with this aspect in The Library.

"As a child I remember hearing that the older kids in the area would go to the village library, take out a book on black magic and play the Ouija board at the back! Of course with time these rumours would take on a life of their own and started to involve the poor librarians who worked there. The rumour or local urban legend aspect was quite interesting - and I wanted to incorporate that into the narrative. Isolation combined with imagination and rumour can be quite dangerous.

"I love books and have always been a huge fan of libraries. For some reason any ideas I had for my first film always took place in a library. Because they're seen as being passive places, you can come up with interesting things to happen inside them. I always thought a library would be a great place for a ghost story. I started to think of the kind of library it would be - typical quiet small town library that has a bad reputation. The kind of people that would work there and a basic plot premise. The story started to come together quite quickly after that."

What is your background/experience in film-making?
"My background is mainly in theatre. My work had largely been visual and I was always more comfortable with visual forms of story telling. I had wanted to move into film-making for a while and then finally the opportunity arose. The Library is my first feature film. I managed to partner up with a number of local organisations so that I could get in-kind support for a limited period of time. Everything came together surprisingly fast and within a few short months, we were ready to roll."

How did you assemble you cast and crew?
"I had known Sibylle Bernardin (Lucy) before and had previously directed her in a theatre show. She believed in the project and took on the challenge of playing the main character. I needed a strong actor in the role of Lucy as she is seen in almost every scene. It's very challenging in that sense and I knew Sibylle would bring a sympathetic and intelligent edge to it. Leann O'Kasi who plays the deceased character of Claire is an experienced actor and director herself. She also happens to be a close friend of mine. Like Sibylle she liked the project and wanted to be involved. Kathryn Walker is also someone I had known before through theatre. I had originally wanted an older actress to play the role of Mary, but Kathryn was able to bring out the ambiguous and sinister edge to the character which was needed.

"I wanted to make sure that we involved local talent as well. This can be difficult sometimes but I was lucky. The local council, newspaper and other organisations helped us by putting out the cast call. Auditions were held over a number of days and I managed to find some real gems in Jay Martin, Aimee McKee, Stephen Bellamy and Faridah Rimmer. Bradley Carpenter (Gregory) had come along at the last minute on the final day. His audition was fantastic and I was taken aback when he told me he was still in sixth form. I was very lucky to find the cast I did. The film has a small cluster of characters so it was important that each person fitted the character and was able to establish a good chemistry with their co actors. We had some additions to the cast during the shooting schedule. Louella Chesterman came in as Mrs Clusker at the last moment when our original actress had to back out. Madisson O'hara who plays the little girl was the young daughter of our Make Up artist. Her mother put her forward for the role and she was perfect.

"The crew was made up of a number of individuals from the area. We had recent graduates such as Matthew Thomas and Jessica Reed as well as others who had experience and wanted to be involved. As was the case with the casting, crew calls were put out and I managed to get the technical team together. After the filming was over the same method was employed for the post production team too. I was lucky that I managed to come across some fantastic young and committed talent such as Adam Clayton and Samuel Allen. Vista Films agreed to come on board and take on the mammoth task of sound and other post production elements. The crew worked exceptionally hard and as was the case with the casting, the right people took up roles that they were able to do justice too.

"The Library is not just my first feature film but also the first feature of the majority of the cast and crew too. It would be an understatement to say that we were all swimming in the deep end."

What aspect of the finished film are you most pleased with?
"As a director it would be very difficult to pinpoint just one thing. I think the performances are very strong. The sound and overall framing of the story is also solid. On a whole the film had no budget whatsoever, everything was done with in-kind support alone. With that in mind the film in itself is quite an achievement. I wanted to tell a simple story in a simple but compelling way and I think that's been achieved."

What has the response to the film been like so far?
"People who have watched the film have liked it. I think it has a traditional horror streak running through it which people have found refreshing. Word of mouth will be very important and we hope the film will go on to find it's audience."

What are your plans for the future?
"I hope to continue making more films. I'm noting down ideas at the moment. Hopefully a strong idea will bubble to the surface and become my second feature."

My first interview with Kevin Howarth was this phoner, cnoducted in November 2003 for a Fangoria article.

I saw The Last Horror Movie in Manchester where it won an award.
"Yes, I heard. I was away at the time. I heard all the news and Julian phoned me and said, ‘We’ve just had this screening up in Manchester.’ Because we’d had a couple before that seemed to go down very, very well. It is thrilling."

How did you get the role of Max?
"I just went up for it like any other actor. I had a phone call from my agent saying there’s this guy, Julian Richards, he’s done a couple of feature films before and he’s doing this horror film called The Last Horror Movie. The usual route: he gave me a time and I went up to Julian’s flat to meet him. I have to say, you get so used to sometimes traipsing across to some part of London and meeting some director and thinking, ‘Oh, here we go...’ It’s just got ‘low budget’ written all over it and it’s the first thing you think of. But I have to say, the minute I walked in there it was just Julian and myself and we sat in the room and he told me all about the film. Then we actually got to talking before he did any filming of me or anything.

"We just chatted about films we liked, directors we liked, the sort of things that we liked, and I could see that he knew what he was talking about, and I think he could see that I knew what I was talking about. We actually got a little bit carried away: ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘I’d better film you. Can you do these bits and bobs?’ I’d had some of the script faxed to me and that was the thing that really made me interested in going to meet him. The piece that I had sent to me was really good, the writing was excellent."

Was this a monologue?
"Most of the film is like that so it’s difficult to say whether it was one of the monologues itself. I think in actual fact it was the scene right at the beginning of the film where I go into the lift and I’m explaining where I did my first killing right at the top of that tower block. I think it was that piece, if I remember rightly, that I was doing, and then he asked me to do a little bit of one of the monologues to camera. And that was it. We shook hands and Julian said, ‘Great meeting you.' But we’d got so carried away with each other, just chatting like a couple of mates in a bar, that I knew I got on well with him and he got on well with me. Then I heard, later on, that literally within 24 hours he’d called James the writer, he’d called the producer and a number of other people and said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this screen test that I’ve just seen because I think I’ve found my Max.’"

However good you are in person, it’s how you come across on camera that’s crucial.
"Absolutely, that is everything. We’re in the business of making films. I’m an actor, it’s my arse up there on the screen whenever I do a role in any movie. You get hired because of the qualities that you bring that make the role that you’re up for come to life. You can meet lots of people in life, but it’s like I’ve always said, so much of the film industry - especially in Hollywood - is all based around what people look like: are they good-looking? When in actual fact if you really look at most of the great actors and actresses in the world, none of them are gorgeous, none of them are those kind of people at all. Everybody’s got a little bit of something individual about them but it’s that one thing you can’t put a finger on, which is charisma or something. People never seem to be able to say what it is, they just know there’s something that makes you want to watch them.

"I think that is the key to film-acting. Because it’s so immediate. It’s not like stage, it’s so immediate, it’s in your face. When you’re on a cinema screen your head is fifty feet high and thirty feet across so everything you do is being noticed. But I’d done a lot of film work before and had got a lot of experience, and he also knew that. I was also the only one, he told me, that left a showreel. I took a showreel with me as well. He watched my performance that I’d done for him on camera, which he was thrilled with, then he put my tape on and he said that was the final convincing moment. Because there was such a diverse range of characters that I’d played on my showreel and he could see the intensity and all the other things that were there.

"I’m very prepared when I go to audition for a role and I’ve got a very close idea to what they’re about. Because I love language and because I love words, to have a narrative piece like that, which is what Max is all about. If you think about it, that is a lot of dialogue in a movie. It’s very unusual to have that much to say in a film these days. You know what it’s like: in most films there is very little dialogue and that’s because it is a very visual artform. In this film particularly, it was a very narrative piece and a lot of it to camera which is breaking all the rules of film-making because you’re looking right down the lens and you’re having to engage the audience. So there were big elements in this film which were against the grain of normal film-making."

Long, unbroken takes direct to camera must be very different from what you’re used to.
"Yes, but that’s the wonderful thing about making a movie like The Last Horror Movie - you know that it’s unique before you even start. You know that the script is unique and you know that the format it’s going to be filmed in is unique so what you do is you think: this is great because this throws all the books in the air again and we’re playing with some other kind of way of doing it. And I love that. I love directors and writers and people working on film like that who are willing to go out on a limb and try something new. And that’s what Julian is about. His whole ethos is about creating something a little bit different, a little bit on the edge. He’d had this idea for a while and I’m so thankful that I got the role and together we all brought it to fruition. Everybody was fantastic. I actually had some of the best times ever on a film on that film. It was great fun, even though it was very intense and we had a short filming period. It was just brilliant, we had an absolutely brilliant time. Everybody’s passion was there, everybody was involved. There were no weak links. We all worked very hard to get that right and I think we did a really good job."

Did Julian show you either of his other films?
"No, to be honest with you, when I work with a director, in some ways I’d rather not see anything that they’ve done. Sometimes I do if I’m a but curious but there are other times when I just think: you’ve got to give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s a new project and whatever they’ve done before is just their work. Everybody learns as they go along. It’s a process of learning; there’s a learning curve that you go through. And from every movie, whether you’re an actor or a director, you learn something new. You take that knowledge into the next project and into the next project and into the next one. I just felt that I didn’t really need to.

"What Julian did say to me was: ‘Have you seen Man Bites Dog? Have you seen The Blair Witch Project?’ and I was going, ‘Well, actually, no. I’ve never seen either of those.’ It wasn’t because I wasn’t aware of them - I was very aware of both of those films of course - but again, I just thought no, I don’t need to see them and I don’t want to see them. Because I think actors who go off and do that start getting influenced by other films and that’s not the way to do it. The Last Horror Movie is a unique project in its own right; we ought to go from scratch and just do it. I’m not one for copying other actors or anything like that. I was very aware of what Max was all about.

"Actually the one person I worked very, very closely with on it was the writer, James Handel. Because I also felt that there was a lot of him in there really. It was his words and his writing. He is a philosopher and you could see where some of this eloquent dialogue was coming from,. But what I also did was I watched him very acutely and I changed my own speaking patterns into the way he spoke. I wanted to get that into Max. There was a certain pattern, there was a kind of rhythm to his speech and the way he delivered his words. I wanted to get that and I also wanted to make sure we got the great balance between the humour and that very chilling stuff that Max does, those horrible, horrible murders. I really wanted to strike the balance there really well because otherwise what you end up with if you’re not careful is a film that’s either too, too grim and there’s no lightenment in it at all, or it’s too funny and it’s not shocking enough. I think in the end what I did and then what Julian and Klaus and Mark and people like that, editing it and putting the film together, did was really strike that right balance.

"I think it was really put together well, I was really surprised. Actually we had a first-run edit, a really rough edit, at one point and I was really, ‘Oh my God!’ It was very short and Julian had cut a lot out; he was just trying to make it pacy. It was just a trial effort - nobody was saying ‘This is the final product.’ It was Julian just testing the waters, just to see what he’d got, for his own mind as well as everyone else’s. But when I saw that I thought, ‘Oh, blimey. There’s not a lot of Max left there now. There has to be more of Max there.’ We talked about it and we discussed it, and James sat down; we all got together and we conflabbed it out and had lots of chats about it all, what we thought and what we didn't think. There was a longer version as well. We weighed the two versions up, then Julian just went off with Klaus with all those comments ringing in his ears and - well, he came up with the goods. Just extraordinary. But it’s all down to him, the way the film looked at the end, it really was. He did a great job on it."

I understand you went to Cannes with Julian.
"We had a ball! I actually had three movies over there. I had another feature film that was there called Don’t Look Back!, that a guy called Nick Sherard directed, but that wasn’t doing very well because he was having problems with the sales agent and it was all getting a bit awkward, that one. I had a short film that was shown there as well, called Whacked, directed by Jake West. I’ve worked with Jake twice because I was in Razor Blade Smile and I did this film Whacked with him as well, so I know Jake very well. And then we were down there with The Last Horror Movie. Simply because Julian had come up with this really clever marketing idea.

"Instead of putting some generic film poster together and putting that all over the place, he flyposted the whole of Cannes, all down the Croisette and round the back streets and everything, with these murder posters. Like a genuine copy of a murder poster with my picture on it, saying I’m wanted for murder! My car had been found at Luton Airport and I was believed to be on the Cote d’Azure. When I got there he started to get phone calls saying that people had seen me in the Majestic bar and in the Carlton and wandering around the place. His girlfriend Rosanna was getting really pissed off because it was her phone number that he’d put on the posters! It was absolutely hilarious. We couldn’t believe the response."

Did anyone actually approach you?
"No-one approached me, but Julian called me immediately, as soon as I arrived at the bus station after the flight, and said we’ve got this meeting tomorrow morning with Hollywood Reporter magazine, the daily paper that comes out every day over there. The woman who is the editor of that saw these posters and picked up on this, and thought: ‘My God, this is a really great marketing ploy.’ She just loved that, so the next morning Julian and I went and did this interview and a little photo-shoot thing with them. The next day, there I am on the back-page of this magazine and this whole article about what a brilliant marketing campaign it was. Of course, that really struck a chord with everybody.

"So the first screening that we had in the Palais was absolutely packed out. Julian was turning people away. Then the next screening we had was absolutely packed out and we ended up turning 20th Century Fox and Miramax away because they turned up late! There was this old French woman on the door going, ‘Non, non, you cannot come in!’ They were getting pissed off and saying, ‘What do you mean it’s full? We’re Miramax.’ And Julian and I were just laughing in the corner, thinking this is getting out of hand, this is ridiculous. It was great for us.

"It got so much of a good response that we had Bill Gavin put an advert in the same paper saying that there’s going to be a third screening. They did a third screening in the British Pavilion and that was packed out as well. That was more a token screening but it went down really well and that was interesting because it was a more regular audience watching it rather than buyers. Because buyers are very funny. They walk in and watch a film for 15 or 20 minutes: ‘Okay, fine, that’s the sort of movie we want,’ or, ‘That’s not what we want.’ And they walk out. It’s weird. It’s crazy. But we had a real ball down there.

"Then Julian got a phone call one night when we were sitting in a restaurant from Matthew Freud of Freud Communications. There he was on his yacht, and he’s a marketing guy, so he said, ‘I’ve been seeing all this marketing thing. Absolutely fantastic! We love it! Is this for real? Is this guy really wanted? Come on down!’ And we all went down to his yacht and had a knees- up on his yacht. So we had a really good time and I think that really kicked it off. And then with Alan Jones and people from Frightfest and they got the buzz about it. It just went from strength to strength. I think a lot of it came down to Julian’s persistence and his hard work, and just me being around Julian when it was necessary helped as well I think.

"And then Bill Gavin of course who is just one of the best sales agents in the business without a doubt. Absolutely superb. He’s an older guy, he’s got 45 years in the business, knows exactly what he’s doing. He really went for it and he really knows how to deal with these people. So it just picked up such great interest there and it just went from strength to strength. What can I say? It has started to get picked up for all these other festivals. And the reviews. I’m sitting here because I’ve just printed off this press package that Julian’s put together. We haven’t had one bad review, it’s unbelievable. I’m thrilled and flattered and everything, but you just think: ‘Woh!’"

I think it’s going to be the indie hit of next year.
"I think it’s heading that way. I’ve got a strange feeling that if it’s handled in the right way by Metro Tartan and they really give it a big push, I think yes, it could turn out to be something really extraordinary. It could end up going through the roof. The only thing that seems to crop up now and again is you do get people going, ‘Hang on, it’s meant to be a video.’ But in all honesty, when you sit there in the cinema and you watch it, you forget all that. I think people look at it and just take it for what it is. If people just do that and take it for a film, and just get into it, I think that it really doesn’t make any difference. I sat there at Frightfest and I watched 460 people go absolutely ballistic about it. Now, if you can do that in one cinema, you can do it in any cinema."

I just was glad I didn’t rent it on video.
"I had a joke with Julian: maybe we could make some real money out of this on the side. We could set up parties for city boys because they’d want to frighten their girlfriends and then we turn up at the end! So we had a real laugh about that. We really have had some fun. But I was there at Frightfest and I saw the response, it was an extraordinary response. And I was there at Raindance and well, look, we won Best UK Feature Film. We couldn’t believe it! We just started thinking: this is really cooking."

It’s one thing to get awards at genre festivals, but Raindance is a mainstream festival.
"What was interesting about that is I went along to the awards: ‘You must be there, Kevin.’ I was so tired and I was almost falling asleep. I was so glad that they had the awards before the feature film that was going to be shown. I knew that we were in the running with three other movies for the Best UK Feature and I knew that we were possibly also up for the Audience Award. I think that was the one that we thought: well, maybe we’ll win that one. We really didn’t think that we’d win Best UK Feature simply because of the genre of the movie and the way it is. When we looked at the panel of judges that were judging the Best UK Feature at Raindance, you’d got Stephen Woolley, you’d got the Guardian’s film reviewer, Sadie Frost and Samantha Morton, Trudie Styler who’s a producer, the guy who wrote the script for East is East.

"I looked at these people and I thought: none of these people are going to go for this film, it’s just not their kind of thing. So then when we won it, I just looked down the row at Julian and at James the writer and we just looked at each other and thought, ‘Fucking hell! This is now turning into something that we really didn’t expect to happen at all...’ It was funny because Julian went up to get the award off Sadie Frost, and apparently she said to him, ‘Really great film but you scared the shit out of me.’ It’s got to the point where we just think: well, anything can happen now. There are no guidelines anymore, you can’t delegate for how any of this is going to go. Initially you think: okay, it’s a low budget feature. You just have to think that somewhere along the line it’s going to work.

"But I’ll tell you what, when I was working on it, there was one particular night. You know the monologues that I do to camera when I’m sitting in the room, I did all of those monologues in one night. That’s the way I work. If I get a script I get it so under my belt that I even know everybody else’s lines. Even more so on The Last Horror Movie, simply because I had to make sure as an actor that the words were coming out of my mouth as if they were just coming out of my mouth. I’m not trying to be egotistical here but there are a lot of actors that would probably have got that wrong, and they would have just fed it scripted. And the whole point of that is that it’s really happening there and then, and you have to believe that this guy is just talking to you, there and then. It’s just coming out of his mouth and he’s making it up as he goes along. I wanted to make sure that was a big, key element so knowing the lines and everything was crucial to the whole thing. And all the car monologues, even though they were at different points in the film, I did all of them in one night as well. So we worked very hard on it and we wanted to get it absolutely right.

"One night, when we were doing the monologues, it was about half past three in the morning and we were still working away and the First AD came in, this Australian girl, and she said, ‘Okay guys, we’ve got to go soon. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s getting a little late, Julian. Are you going to carry on going with this?’ And we all just totally ignored her! She realised that we were in this kind of zone and she just walked out of the room and left us to it. In the room were me, Julian, Chris St.John Smith who’s an absolutely brilliant cameraman. You have to give him a mention because he’s not just brilliant at what he does but such a lovely man. So calm, so generous, so ready to alter things if necessary in a really lovely way. We were all in this room, and the sound guys, and we just thought: let’s carry on with this, we’re just doing it and we’re in this zone and we’ve got to get this. Everybody has the same passion about it as I did. There was no one weak link, you didn’t have some sound guy whistling and scratching his arse. Everybody was really focused and really involved. And I can’t thank all of them enough. They were absolutely brilliant, everybody was brilliant on it."

What’s this you’re doing in Cornwall right now?
"I’m shooting Cold and Dark with Luke Goss, who I believe you know. I’m seeing him tomorrow; we’ve got a scene on Perranporth beach. I’m playing the co-lead with him. He’s playing an undercover cop and I’m playing an undercover cop but I’m playing his boss. I’m playing this character called Mortimer Shade and he plays this character called John Dark. But my character, Mortimer Shade, is really, really mysterious. He’s this guy that all the other cops look up to, almost in awe. He’s not married, he doesn’t have any children, and he has this extraordinary wardrobe. He loves clothes and there’s all these scenes in this tailor’s shop. He’s just got this extraordinary outward appearance with all these clothes and everything - and yet at the same time he’s this really cool vice cop.

"Am I allowed to give the story away? He ends up with this kind of virus inside him called The Grail and of course all hell breaks loose. He becomes then a cop who can’t die. And Luke is this guy who’s trying to come to terms with this: ‘How do I deal with this? He’s my boss and I go along with him and I understand his theories and what he’s thinking and all the rest of it - but what do I do about this? He’s taking me into territory where I don’t want to go.’ In the end, his character betrays me and then I come after him. It’s looking fantastic. Andrew Goth is the director. He did a film called Busted, I believe, with David Bowie and Goldie. He’s absolutely fabulous because he’s one of these directors who, visually, knows exactly what he wants. He’s a great fan of Sergio Leone and David Fincher and he wants to shoot this movie almost like a sort of spaghetti western look about it. Big close-ups on eyes, and stuff like that.

"It’s got a decent budget, there’s a lot of people behind this one and it looks like this one’s going to go big time as well. They’ve made pre-sales already and we’re only a week into filming. And of course because Luke’s in it and he was in Blade II and Frankenstein and what have you, New Line Cinema are tracking the movie, keeping an eye on it. Luke is cooking at the moment. But it’s a great role to get, this Mortimer Shade, a totally different role from Max, a different kind of darkness about him, and this is very filmic: big 35mm stuff and looking beautiful."

What do you you think of Julian as a director?
"The thing about Julian is that I know he’s a director but he’s become now such a close friend that you don’t really divide the two sometimes. What I do love about Julian is he knows what he wants, and he knows what he wants visually as well, but he’s a wonderful actor’s director. From my personal experience with Julian, as an actor, he appreciates and understands my creativity and my input. He knows that I know what I’m doing and he allows me to do what I do. It’s just little things that he needs to tell me and I love that. Because I’m one of these actors who doesn’t like to be directed too much; I like to comes up with the goods and I like directors who allow me to give them anything they want. I can play around and give them lots of different versions of whatever they want, and I can come up with that without them having to tell me too much. The most I want a director to tell me is: faster, slower, louder, softer. That’s about all I want to know.

"Because I’ve done my homework as an actor when I turn up. I’m ready and I’m ready to go when they shout, as simple as that. That’s my job and that’s what I get paid for, and I’m ready to do it. What I love about Julian is he knows that about me now. I’d love to do another movie with Julian and I think he’s got things in mind to do with me again, which would be great, and some of them, funnily enough, aren’t horror films. He’s actually got a script of a sort of darkly romantic comedy; he wants me to play the lead in that and I’d love to because I’m an actor and I want to play different things. I don’t want to get tied into some sort of horror genre thing.

"One thing I will say, one last final thing about The Last Horror Movie: I realise Fangoria have jumped on it and I realise that’s a great banner to go under, but I do believe that this film is a crossover movie that mainstream movie-goers would love to go and see. I don’t think it’s just a film that horror people will want to go and see. I think it will cross genres and you’ll get all sorts of people going to see it. That’s what I really hope happens because then it will go to a much, much wider audience and that can only do the film good. At the end of the day, we make movies in the movie industry, we don’t make movies for two men in a barn with a dog. You make a movie because you want millions of people to see it. I just hope that this really crosses over and you start to get different kinds of people, a different audience, watching it, a mix of audiences watching this movie."

website: www.kevinhowarth.com

Director: Navin Dev
Writer: Navin Dev
Producer: Navin Dev
Cast: Emily Stride, David Caron, Silvana Maimone
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.redkingdomrising.com

The two dominant strands of British horror cinema - gothic and social realism - collide in Navin Dev’s extraordinary, fascinating Red Kingdom Rising. Our protagonist is Mary Ann (Emily Stride: The Worst Witch), a young woman with a troubled past who has a work placement at a nursery school. It’s curious how many films start out at schools before launching into the main, largely unrelated plot, from horrors like Eden Lake to comedies like Meet the Parents. A teacher (or in this case, nursery assistant) is a solid, responsible position that will instantly mark out our main character as ‘good’ and someone whom we can trust. School-set openers relax the audience, reassuring us that all is well before things start escalating, whether in a horrific or crazy way.

In Red Kingdom Rising, Mary Ann returns to her childhood home for the first time since her father died. It’s an imposing Victorian villa, all dado rails and unexpected steps up and down, often tactfully shot from low angles that emphasise the high ceilings. But Mary Ann’s evangelical Christian mother (Silvana Maimone, who was in a 2008 alien abduction short) barely acknowledges her presence, pausing briefly in her prayers when her daughter knocks on the bedroom door before restarting without a word of greeting.

Her late father (David Caron) was a horologist, forever tinkering with clock mechanisms in his cellar workshop, and Mary Ann remembers the pair of them seeking sanctuary down there from her strident mother. Sometimes her father would read to her from the works of Lewis Carroll. This is a very Carrollian film.

Writer-director-producer Navin Dev has previously made shorts which drew on, and explored the psychological aspects of, the stories of Little Red Riding Hood (Red Hood) and Pinocchio (Tree Man). Here his source text is the Alice novels. The Red King is an important character in Through the Looking Glass but often ignored by cinematic adaptations because he sleeps through the whole book (and, to be fair, there are a lot of characters to get into 90 minutes). But key to that book is the question asked repeatedly in Dev’s film: is the Red King dreaming Mary Ann/Alice, or is she dreaming him?

A slightly splash panel prologue is one of Mary Ann’s nightmares about being restrained by, then disembowelled by, an oleaginous, red-robed figure with claw-like hands - the Red King. Once ensconced back home, she has flashback memories of good times and bad in what she recalls as a matriarchal household. Somewhere along the line these blend into a dreamlike series of encounters with Alice herself (12-year-old Etalia Turnbull, who was in The Inbetweeners Movie!) - whom we may assume to be a younger version of Mary Ann - wearing a yellow pinafore dress and a Cheshire Cat mask. (Kudos to Dev for going with the original yellow dress rather than the now traditional, frankly clichéed, blue.)

Three objects are crucial to the story: the yellow dress itself, discovered buried in nearby woodland; her father’s original copy of Through the Looking Glass (with its Tenniel illustration of the sleeping Red King); and, most importantly, a small door. The back garden sweeps down sharply from the house and this half-size wooden door, small enough for a child but requiring an adult to crouch, is the sort of fairy-tale accessory that sometimes exists in real life. It leads into the cellar but has obvious connotations of Alice’s size-changing encounters with doors. Furthermore one can instantly see how magical this miniature doorway - betwixt the cluttered clockmaker’s workshop of the cellar and the vast, flower-bedecked playground of the garden - would appear to a child. In this film, the small door acts as a portal between reality and the dreamworld, or between different dreams (a melting clock pendulum clues Mary Ann in at one point to the fact that she is still dreaming, or at least in the dream world).

Any Carrollian film which explores the deeper, psychological aspects of the tales rather than just the enjoyable nonsense, will be unavoidably Freudian, and Red Kingdom Rising is no exception. The explanation of Mary Ann’s nightmares is pretty obvious from the start but Dev not only handles the revelation sensitively, he also wisely avoids saving it up for a climactic reveal. He surely knows that his audience will have worked out what is going on, at least at a basic level, well in advance of Mary Ann herself. So he saves this for about two-thirds of the way through the surprisingly short (73 minutes) feature, then elaborates on the situation as the heroine struggles to free herself from whosever’s dream she’s in, seeking a similar release for the younger Mary Ann, the id-Alice who has been her teasing guide into her subconscious.

Though the story itself is gothic, the opening is social realist (the subtext could be either, depending on how you approach it) and Mary Ann’s Ripley-esque vest and jeans identify her throughout as an intrusion of practical, bitter reality into the dreamworld. Wendy Battersbee has a crucial, but underused, role in the prologue as Esther, Mary Ann’s social worker and she recurs briefly as a phone voice shortly after Mary Ann arrives at the house. I would have liked more of that, to be honest (there’s certainly scope for more running time!) because the potential was there for Esther, a guiding voice on the phone in the real world, to balance the younger-self/Alice dream guide. But that’s the film I would have written, this is the one Navin Dev made.

And it’s a hugely impressive feature debut, a visual poem reminiscent of the masters of dreamlike cinema. It’s Gilliamesque (in a scary way, not a comic one), it’s, well, I suppose the adjective would be del Toroid. (Yes, I like that. I’ll use that again.) Full credit to production designer Anna Mould (who was art director on a short called Job Interview with a Vampire!), to ever-reliable special effects make-up designer Mike Peel (Zombie Diaries, Three’s a Shroud, The Zombie King) and to DP Jamie Havill, who between them create an amazing, immersive visual experience.

Any criticism must perforce be a quibble. A suggestion at one point that Mary Ann’s mother has twisted her Christianity into some form of Devil-worship is skipped over and unexplored. And, as mentioned, more could have been made of the social worker. That’s about all I can come up with.

Red Kingdom Rising is a fascinating film: narratively intriguing and visually amazing (pretty horrific in places too). This is the sort of movie that you come away from really glad that you’ve seen it because it has added something to your experience of the world.

MJS rating: A

Director: Mark J Howard
Writer: Mark J Howard
Producers: Mark J Howard, Stephen Greenhalgh
Cast: Jessica Cunningham, Roy Basnett, Stephen Greenhalgh
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.lockinthemovie.co.uk

The publicity for Lock In calls it a ‘psychological thriller’ which is about as far from accurate as it’s possible to get without calling it a musical. It’s a slasher, pure and simple. Not a great one, not a truly terrible one either. But a slasher nonetheless. It’s about a maniac in a clown outfit who stalks through an almost empty office building one night, offing late-staying staff and security guards in a variety of brutal and potentially amusing ways. So yes, it is about a psycho. But you could never accuse it of being a logical thriller.

Jessica Cunningham (model and proprietor of the Famous Frocks website) stars as Jenny, an account executive in an advertising agency run by unsympathetic, take-no-shit owner John (radio presenter Roy Basnett, match day host of Widnes Vikings RFC). There are about half a dozen other staff, some of whom have characters, some of whom are background. The company (the name of which is never mentioned so far as I can tell) is based in a building on some anonymous business estate. Presumably other companies share the same large building.

Six months earlier, as seen in a splash panel prologue, Jenny was raped in a pub toilet by a guy in fancy dress while attending what seems to have been a ‘zombies and clowns’ night. As the story proper starts, she is late into work after her neighbour vandalised her car (something which is mentioned briefly then forgotten about). She is also fending off the unwanted attentions of creepy cleaner Jenkinson (producer Stephen Greenhalgh, who was a stuntman in Zombie Diaries 2) whose acid-scarred face and one eye have earned him the nickname Cyclops. She’s also getting bawled out by John although not without some justification. Having turned up late, the first thing she does is go back outside for a fag break...

Jenny has to work late, getting a publicity pack ready for a press conference the next day relaunching a circus. Also staying after hours is the unnamed Building Supervisor (Simon Entwhistle), in an office presumably some distance from the ad agency office, who can’t leave until a replacement cleaner turns up after he fires Jenkinson. Two less-than-fit security guards, Colin (James Thompson) and George (Tim Paley: Tash Force) make a good double act and compensate for the generally unlikeable characters populating most of the rest of the cast.

Lock In’s most obvious problem is that it takes forever to get going. We are fully 35 minutes into the 80-minute picture before we actually get the first sight of the clown or indeed any other indication that there is something amiss. And while one gets the impression that we are supposed to think this is Jenkinson – whom we now know to be a violent ex-con – back for revenge, a swift count of the clown’s eyes easily eliminates him from the short list of suspects.

In fact it’s an incredibly short list, so short that the clown - assuming it is one of the other characters under that make-up - could only possibly be one person, making this the least mysterious mystery since we all had to guess who was the monster in Hammer’s The Gorgon.

Three other characters arrive at the building during the clown’s killing spree, increasing the number of potential victims, and I certainly won’t spoil the film by saying who lives or dies. The individual deaths are generally pretty good and will please the gore-hounds among you. Bizarrely, one scene takes place in a room where we see the various victims propped up, but this does not include all the victims so far and does include at least one person whom we never saw murdered and wasn’t even staying late (although, thinking about it, there is an earlier line of dialogue that ties in there, so I’ll give them that).

While the clown’s identity is obvious, his motivations are far from clear, even after the film wraps up. The basic premise is fine – clown-costumed psycho stalks late-night offices – and the individual bits are fine, if spaced somewhat too far apart. But the actual plot makes not a shred of sense and frankly doesn’t look like it’s even trying. A clichéd twist right at the end provides a get-out clause but creates its own problems – when you’ve seen it and thought about it, you’ll understand what I mean.

Low-budget slashers are not a genre renowned for good stories, rounded characters or coherent plots so for its target audience none of this should be a problem – although that target audience are apt to not even watch the film if it’s marketed as a psychological thriller! It’s no Halloween, that’s for sure, but this week I’ve also sat through Head Cheerleader Dead Cheerleader, a salient reminder of just how barrel-scraping these things can be and an experience which has helped me appreciate Lock In for its strengths, such as they are.

Those strengths are mostly technical – generally good photography, editing and sound, and good make-up effects too. The acting is decidedly variable but works best when the dialogue leans towards humorous, and let’s leave it at that. What’s most egregiously missing is any real sense of tension. The pre-clown scene-setting/character-building goes on far too long and even once the clown starts prowling the corridors, the pace never really shifts past ‘sedate’. The whole movie could stand to lose about ten minutes, not from any particular scene but lots of little shavings here and there to get to the meat quicker and then pick up the pace once the violence begins.

Also worth noting is that at no point is anyone ever ‘locked in’. And in fact one character gets access to the building, appearing out of nowhere without explanation, who definitely should not have a swipe card for the front door.

Jeff Downs turns in a good performance as the daytime security guard while Rachel Dargie (The 9th) and Holly Chadwick are Jenny’s principal co-workers. Craig Read, Jen Walker and David Mohammadi of Funstorm Industries supplied the make-up effects for the clown, Cyclops and the various victims. Manchester band Dead Kestrels provide some songs on the soundtrack.

Lock In is a valiant attempt at a first feature by Mark J Howard whose eclectic previous career has included a stint at Cosgrove Hall animation, freelance rock photographer and managing Peter Kay’s official website. It doesn’t quite succeed but it passes a reasonable 80 minutes (and would pass an even more reasonable 70). Its root problems, as so often with micro-budget first features, lie with the script which simply wasn’t ready to be filmed. Nevertheless, British slasher fans will want to seek this out. From my point of view, on the other hand, this is most interesting as another title in the burgeoning subgenre of British corporate horror alongside the likes of Stalled, Severance and Fired.

Premiering at Horror-on-Sea in January 2014, Lock In was made available on VOD two months later through VHX – see the website at www.lockinthemovie.co.uk for details.

MJS rating: B-

This interview with Julian Richards was conducted at a screening ofThe Last Horror Movieat the old Phoenix Arts in Leicester on Halloween 2003. The last couple of questions were added by email a few weeks later as I was crafting this into a feature for Fangoria.

Is The Last Horror Movie your third film?
"My third feature film, yes."

What did you do after Darklands?
"I did a film called Silent Cry which is a conspiracy thriller, which was made on a reasonable budget for a UK film, three million pounds. It had a nice cast as well: Douglas Henshall, Emily Woolf, Frank Finlay, Kevin Whately, Craig Kelly. We made it for a company called Little Wing Films and it was financed through a tax break scheme which existed at that time. At the moment it’s being sold by In Motion Pictures. It’s on DVD in Germany already but we’re still looking to get a UK release for it, though we’re not sure exactly how or where that’s going yet. But it should happen hopefully within the next six months."

What was the genesis of The Last Horror Movie?
"I wanted to make a low budget film. When I say ‘low budget’, I made it with my salary from Silent Cry. I wanted to control it completely, to produce it through my own company and therefore not only to benefit from the front end in terms of getting a director’s fee but also from the back end in terms of being a producer and a businessman within the film distributors."

Did this come from dissatisfaction on Darklands?
"Oh, I got screwed on Darklands big time! So yes, it did. The only way to survive in this business as an artist is to become businesswise and streetwise, to control. It’s not just a business thing, it’s an artistic thing too. Because you’re continually having to make compromises when you’re not in control, and walk around for five years making excuse about why the film isn’t as good as it could have been."

Isn’t there a flipside that having a separate producer gives you a useful, different point of view, stops you from becoming too self-indulgent?
"Yes, that’s true, but it depends on the structure in which you work. What I tend to do as a producer now is I’ll start the process going and then employ people - good producers, creative producers - to come on board and produce my film for me. They’ll tell me what I can and can’t do within a proper creative context. So the first thing I did with The Last Horror Movie was I got a pretty talented graduate from the National Film School, Zorana Piggott, to come on board and produce the film for me. She wasn’t just somebody who did the nuts and bolts of putting the production together, she also brought onto it an objective eye and a creative eye in terms of just keeping an eye on what I was doing. It was a good collaboration."

Where did The Idea come from?
"The idea came from a combination of sources. First of all, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer; the little video that Henry and Otis made. You combine that with Man Bites Dog and you also combine it with the current vogue there is for reality TV and reality cinema - and you combine that with Dogme. All of those were influences on me, post September 11th, disillusioned with fiction. I’m not affected by fiction now when I see it; reality is much more intense and effective, especially within the horror genre. You could put Blair Witch into that mix as well. So I thought: I can do something on a low budget that’s going to work within that context.

"A cousin of mine, four or five years ago, made a video diary for the BBC. It was actually a documentary that I was looking to do myself but we couldn’t get any support for it. So I presented it to the BBC video diaries; it was called Showboy: The Naked Truth, about a male stripper, which my cousin was at the time. Obviously I couldn’t be involved with that because it’s up to the subject to make the film himself, using a small, handheld camera. When I saw the results that he got, I thought, ‘Wow! Wouldn’t it be fantastic if a serial killer did the same thing?’ It’s kind of doing what Man Bites Dog did but taking it a step further. Because Man Bites Dog was essentially about a film crew that makes a documentary about a serial killer and finds themselves getting involved in the process. They cross the line and the audience cross it with them. With The Last Horror Movie, this is very much the serial killer one-on-one with the audience.

"Now, in terms of me being slightly disillusioned with the horror genre, one of the problems is the films just aren’t scary any more. I thought: well, how could I really scare the audience? Watching a horror film is a very safe experience because you’re in the comfort of your living room or the auditorium of the cinema and you know that you’re going to go through all these threatening experiences and then at the end the credits are going to roll and you’re going to feel pretty safe and you’re going to go home pretty unaffected. So I thought: what if what was happening on the screen spilled out into real life, and suddenly there was a question mark as to whether what you were watching was fiction or reality. Also if you tied it in with Ring. I actually thought up this idea before Ring and I can remember when I phoned up my manager in LA and told him about it he said, ‘Oh, they just finished shooting something like that in Japan.’ When he told me the story, I thought: well, it’s similar but its not the same."

It’s just the video cassette as horror item.
"That’s right. In Ring, it’s the characters in the story who get threatened by the horror cassette, in The Last Horror Movie it’s the audience themselves. So that for me was bursting out of the dimension where horror exists into a third dimension if you like, which is putting the audience in what could be a very threatening situation."

The film stands or falls on its lead actor. How did you cast Max?
"We were going for reality and we really did want to present our audience with something that they actually couldn’t see the cracks and the seams; what they see is very much real. So we couldn’t get a known actor. We couldn’t get a star, we couldn’t get somebody from TV, we couldn’t get somebody who had been in commercials because it would have blown our cover.

‘Crikey, I’m being stalked by that bloke off the lawnmower ad!’
"Exactly! So what I did was I used a great little organisation in the UK called PCR. It’s a little bit like The Stage newspaper, where you can advertise and you get sackloads of aspiring actors sending you their CVs. And I really mean sackloads. There was a special delivery to my flat in London every morning with about five hundred envelopes. So I waded my way through all these envelopes and shortlisted maybe about sixty or seventy actors to play Max. I auditioned about twenty of them, maybe thirty. When Kevin Howarth walked in I didn’t really notice him because I was videoing the interview and I was just snowblind with actors coming in and out of my flat. It wasn’t until I looked at the recordings I’d made, afterwards, and saw his presence on the screen and his charisma, that I realised that I’d found my man.

"This film lives or dies by its casting, which is something I’ve always believed in: a film is only as good as its worst performance. But this film in particular is only as good as its worst performance. The other thing which is interesting is that I decided not to write The Last Horror Movie. I came up with the idea but I thought: I know somebody who’s going to be better equipped to write this than I am. A friend of mine who hasn’t written a script before but he’s got a PhD in philosophy and he’s really quite an expert on serial killers. So I got him to write it. I gave him a ten-page outline. I knew what my beginning was, I knew what my end was and I knew the kind of character I wanted. We collaborated, and James Handel who wrote the script, brought a lot of really interesting ideas and intelligent ides to the whole process. But what he also brought was humour, satire, black comedy - which I didn’t expect.

"I think my original vision was to be as dark and as gritty as Henry. James brought to it a certain kind of levity which I think the film benefits from. Because obviously if you’re going to sit in a room for one and a half hours and watch something as intense as The Last Horror Movie, occasionally you need some light relief. That level of humour though, in James’ original script, went far beyond what I wanted and at times became farce, which again drew a parallel with Man Bites Dog. So one of the big aspects of how we collaborated and especially how the film was cut was we dropped quite a few scenes that I felt were a bit too comical, a bit too funny, ie. it’s not real, it’s contrived. I didn’t want to make people laugh for the sake of making them laugh. I wanted the humour in there to be real humour.

"There’s a tendency in films, especially horror films like this, to play the serial killer as a drab, lonely, working class guy - your typical Henry. If you have a look at Cassavetes films for example, some of his characters in Husbands or A Woman Under the Influence, are eccentric, slightly mad. they say things that are very funny. Human beings generally act in that eccentric way - that is reality. So I was trying to find the balance between what the writer was doing and what I wanted, and we eventually struck that balance in the cut. So when he says, ‘Is this a joke or is it real?’ - you don’t know. It’s kind of funny but pretty sick as well and very convincing."

Are you trying to make the audience feel any sympathy for Max? What he does is loathsome, but on a personal level, he’s quite pleasant.
"We knew that in order to keep our audience with the story, because Max is taking us through it in such personal way, that he would have to be likeable in some ways. I have had people in the audience, especially women, saying, ‘God, it’s a kind of weird film because we like Max. He;s attractive, he’s charismatic.’ And I thought about Count Dracula in that context, especially Terence Fisher’s film: that scene where Christopher Lee appears out of the shadows and you’re expecting this monster and instead you get this tall, dark, handsome stranger. So that’s what I was going for.

"Plus I think that there’s a certain side of dilettante, slightly anarchic side to Max. He’s carping from the sidelines where he always feels slightly disaffected from normal life that we can all relate to. He lives very much in a middle class world; the film is in many ways an attack on middle class suburban life. He’s not convinced by his sister’s marriage, he doesn’t like his brother-in-law. The jobs and careers that a lot of his victims have, he can’t relate to either. There’s a side to Max that represents the disaffection and disillusionment with everyday life that we can all relate to."

How closely scripted was the film, and how much was improvised?
"To be honest, the original script was very dialogue heavy and overstated some of the points and issues. So when I rehearsed with the actors, we script-edited and improvised it, reduced everything down to its core point. We did a couple of days of rehearsals, doing that, that’s where a lot of the improvisation took place. So that on the day we were shooting very much what was on the page. So yes, most of it is written, even though it gives the impression that it’s improvised. But that was very much to do with the way we filmed it as well. Because I wanted to set myself a bit of a directorial challenge.

"I was pretty bored with the conveyor belt, production line approach to film-making that I’d experienced on Silent Cry for example, where the director breaks down a scene into 25 shots and you go through a process from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, just doing one shot, then the next and the next. Leaving in to the editing room in order to see whether what you’ve got is any good. With The Last Horror Movie every scene is shot in one shot. Sometimes we had a six or seven minute scene, from beginning to end, where the choreography of events had to be such that the scene was never dull, never boring. So it really was an exercise in using the set, in direction really.

"Thinking about Orson Welles’ opening shot for Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Rope, directors tend to have this debate about montage and mis-en-scene and when it’s best used. This for me was a real exercise in developing the shot. And I found that by approaching film-making in that way, it freed the actors up to talk over the top of each other, which is much more naturalistic than having to cut halfway through a scene because one actor has spoken his lines over another one. To move about as they wish and it’s up to the cameraman to follow the action, so they don’t have to hit their right marks. It’s a much more actor-friendly process and therefore I think the performances in The Last Horror Movie are by far the best performances I’ve achieved, far better than Silent Cry and Darklands. Because the process worked in that way. It’s kind of a Dogme thing too, just saying that the way we’ve made films in the past is really not conducive to what’s important about film-making. What’s important about film-making is a good script and a good cast and giving the actors the freedom and the parameters to get the best out of them."

What about the technical set-up? Did you have lights and a boom mike?
"We literally shot the film out of the boot of my car on a little handheld Sony PD150 mini-DV camera with predominantly available light. If I was filming in a location like this cafe, I wouldn’t need any lights. That’s the wonder of digital video; you’re not surrounded by the circus that turns up with their generators and their heavy lights - which allowed us to film it in 18 days. Occasionally we would have to expand ourselves: the wedding in the countryside, there were no natural light sources that we could use. Then maybe we would have to splash out on some lights, but they were usually practical lights that existed within the shot. So the film is not lit, it’s practical light sources that are controlled and manipulated to suit the mood that we’re trying to set."

Was there much to do in post?
"The only thing that we did in post-production was very much an afterthought. There’s a scene where a guy is strapped to a chair and he gets beaten with a steak tenderiser - and he knocks the camera over. I can remember that on the day the cast and crew were saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to splatter the camera lens with some blood.’ We don’t see what’s going on, but if a bit of blood got on the lens it would help the suggestion. I thought: well, I’ve got so much to do on this day, to try and choreograph that and get it right - I’m not going to bother. It wasn’t until I saw the John Simpson news report from Iraq, the friendly fire incident when the BBC cameraman ended up bleeding all over the lens, that I thought: God, yes, that’s actually something that we can incorporate. So I blue-screened some blood splattering on the lens in that shot and it certainly does the job."

What about your special effects?
"Again, those were difficult to achieve because normally effects like that involve tubes with pumps and people just off-screen pressing the pumps to spray the blood. When we’ve got a three-minute developing shot, following somebody moving through a house before they eventually get killed, there’s no place for any of that. So we really had to be quite clever in terms of how we achieved that. The guy who did the effects on Andrew Parkinson’s film Dead Creatures was Paul Hyett. I saw Andrew Parkinson’s Dead Creatures at Fantasporto last year and was impressed with the effects, and I thought, ‘Paul Hyett’s my man.’"

I think he did Lighthouse as well.
"Yes, he did. So I met with Paul and we worked out how we were going to do it. One of the most effective and chilling scenes in the film is where a guy gets torched alive. The weird thing about that scene is that a lot of people have said, ‘How did you do that? Because it looks so real.’ That’s actually one of the few things where we had to use editing to switch the actor with the dummy. The dummy was actually pretty low-tech to be honest, it was like a Guy Fawkes , but it had springs on its joints and it had a full-head prosthetic - with real hair that was punched in - and hand prosthetics. So by the time the camera cuts back, you haven’t noticed that it’s been switched. Not only that; when it’s burning, it moves and the hair flicks around. It shakes and shudders and - apart from the edit - there’s no way you can tell that it’s not a human being who’s being burned there."

The only clue is that even the best stuntman isn’t going to sit there for that amount of time.
"We had two choices and we eventually went for the third, better choice. The two choices were to CGI the flames in afterwards but that’s never convincing, or the other choice was to have a stuntman in a big, asbestos, ‘Michelin Man’ costume but suddenly he’s doubled in size so I’m never convinced by that either. Plus, as you said, you can only burn for so long in asbestos suits anyway and in Last Horror you see him burning for a lot longer. In the end, this prosthetic switch that we did, I don’t think it’s been done before in film but it’s highly effective."

What was the reaction like at Cannes?
"We had a pretty interesting marketing campaign in Cannes where we put up murder posters all over Cannes, a police appeal for assistance: a serial killer’s been discovered in the UK, a body count of at least fifteen, he’s fled the UK and is now on the Cote d’Azure, and apparently all his murders were linked with people who had seen The Last Horror Movie. And The Last Horror Movie is this Hollywood slasher movie which has been released and has been withdrawn since the murders. And that really caught people’s attention. You had big Hollywood companies spending lots of money on huge posters and marketing campaigns, and there was myself and Kevin Howarth with this guerilla strategy that people stopped and read. We had two screenings - in fact we had three eventually because the first two sold out - and we actually got a UK theatrical and a US theatrical out of those screenings in Cannes. So highly successful."

When does Metro Tartan put the film out in the UK?
"That’s going to be February/March next year. And the US theatrical is through Bedford Entertainment in association with Fangoria at roughly the same time."

The film is always going to work best on video, so are you surprised at the success of your theatrical screenings and the interest from theatrical distributors?
"Yes. I was not convinced that the film had any theatrical legs at all. In fact I thought that it would do it a disservice theatrically because it would blow its cover. And there’s a part of me that still feels that way. But when we screened the film at Frightfest, I think we had an audience of four or five hundred and I saw the film ‘transgress itself’! It was extraordinary. To see Max that big on the screen, leaning right into the camera so he fills the screen. You could see the audience, when he did that, move back in their seats. So even though the twist at the end doesn’t have the immediate effect that it’s meant to have, people get the idea and have fun with the idea. I’m sure that after seeing it theatrically the first thing they’re going to want to do is go and rent it or buy it when it comes out so they can play jokes on their friends."

Watching it in Manchester, I felt the twist still works because I thought, ‘Thank Christ I’m not watching this on video’! It’s a shame you didn’t make this a few years ago when VHS rentals were at their peak, because a lot of people will see this on DVD.
"Chris Jones, who helped me in post production on this by letting me use his editing equipment, said, ‘If you’d made this ten years ago you’d be a millionaire.’ It’s probably true. I know that VHS is being phased out in many European countries now, so it’s probably the last video horror film. We thought, whilst we were shooting, that we should shoot different versions for the DVD but then how can you say ‘author’ instead of ‘record’? It just sounded a little bit too technical. And how would Max actually record over an existing DVD? You actually can’t do it. It just wouldn’t convince. At the end of the day, both theatrical and DVD have the same setback, but there’s enough going on in the film, there are enough ideas, for people to enjoy it for what it is."

Has there yet been any moral outrage?
"No, but I’m looking forward to that. We did have a couple of scenes where Max did things with copies of the Daily Mail but we cut those out because that was the humour and the farce that I decided the film could do without. The film has moral ambiguity but for me that’s just part of my interest in film-making, in being an artist in some way. It’s embracing the mutant. If I see something that is violent or sick or subversive or perverse in any way, I want to study it and analyse it and understand why, rather than brush it under the carpet and hope it doesn’t come and bite my behind. That’s just part of my agenda."

But are you prepared for ‘certain newspapers’ to say this encourages violence? ‘Ban this sick movie’?
"There’s often a reaction and people like that seek an easy answer or seek a scapegoat. I know there’s going to be that reaction and I don’t really care much about it, to be honest."

What’s next for you?
"Next is a difficult decision. There’s a possibility of an American remake. There’s a possibility of a follow-up with Max in America. I’ve got several scripts on the boil at the moment, including one I’ve written myself which is a romantic comedy, would you believe? There are others that other writers have written which are within the horror genre. To be honest, The Last Horror Movie’s a difficult film to follow because it sets expectations, it puts me into the Takashi Miike mode! How do I follow it up? So I think maybe a romantic comedy would be the best way to go!"

There is a British horror revival at the moment. As a  director working in the genre, do you think it has become easier to get horror films made in the UK in the past couple of years?
“I think it's more of a coincidence than a revival that the quota of UK horror production between 2001-2003 has increased. A few companies did emerge that professed to specialise in horror (The Dark, Ministry Of Fear and Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse) but so far The Dark/Shine Entertainment has folded without producing a single film. Ministry Of Fear/Little Bird Films are in post-production on Trauma (directed by Marc My Little Eye Evans) and Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse/Random Harvest have committed veritable Harikiri with two of the worst UK horror films to be produced in decades (Octane, LD50). There are rumours that Hammer Films will move back into production soon but I've yet to be convinced that the new owners intend to do anything more than profit off the back catalogue.

"What that leaves is a cottage industry with a few small independent film makers risking all to make a genuine contribution to the genre and whilst this is commendable, many of these films are mediocre and fail to return the sort of profit margin that will persuade the industry power brokers to invest in British horror.  On a more positive note, Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers struck an interesting chord and there are signs that the UK Film Council and Lottery funding bodies are waking up to the potential in the genre that Hammer realised in the '60s when they recieved the Queen's Award For Export. For example, Neil Marshall has development finance from the UK's Film Council to develop Outpost and Phil (Alone) Claydon has just received Welsh Lottery funding to develop Zombie Island.”

How thrilled are you that TLHM has been picked as the first theatrical Fangoria release?
“One of the contributing factors to me making a film like The Last Horror Movie is that I have been an avid Fangoria subscriber for over 25 years. Many of my thoughts and ideas have been informed and moulded by Fangoria and it is therefore most befitting that The Last Horror Movie should find a home in North American distribution under the Fangoria banner'.”

website: www.jingafilms.com

Director: James Eaves
Writer: James Eaves
Producers: James Eaves, Laura Tennant
Cast: Claudia Caulter, Jonathan Sidgwick, Stephanie Beacham
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Official website: www.amberpictures.co.uk

It’s always a thrill and an honour to be the first reviewer of a film but it’s also a worry. What if I’m completely out-of-step with everyone else? How honest should I be about stuff that I don’t like? How do I write a review which will be as relevant when it is first read - by people who, naturally, know nothing about the film - as it is when it is read later by people who have read other reviews or seen marketing material? It’s a responsibility, that’s for sure.

In the case of this thoroughly enjoyable British indie horror movie, my natural reaction is to pre-empt what other critics are going to say: Blah blah blah Blade blah blah blah Underworld blah blah blah low budget blah blah blah. The main character is a vampire who hunts other vampires, a sexy woman in a tight, leather costume who uses martial arts in an ongoing supernatural conflict. It’s impossible not to make such comparisons, however lazy they may be, so let’s get them out of the way now.

I should also get out of the way any concerns about the apparently ungrammatical title by directing you to my interview with writer/director/producer James Eaves (Sanitarium, Hellbreeder). And now, on with the review...

Claudia Caulter (who was in a sci-fi short called Frozen and also in an Oasis video) stars as Rebecca, a ‘genetically created vampire’ who is resurrected by the shady ‘Project 571’, injected with blue goop and then trained as an assassin. This early part of the movie is terrific, helped by suitably poker-faced performances from Andrew Cullem and Liza Keast as the project’s overseers and a powerful (and decidedly icky) scene where Rebecca, still unaware of what is happening, is forced to choose between a glass of water and a glass of blood.

Trained up by the project’s martial arts instructor (Adrian Johnson, who is female despite her name), Rebecca learns to use her increased strength and agility but she also learns that she cannot go back to her husband and young son. Eaves was also editor on the film and really uses the edit suite as a creative tool. There are lots of flash-cuts, especially in these early scenes, sometimes jumping around in time and space in a way that could be disorienting but isn’t. I found the sequence where Rebecca is told she can see her family briefly particularly moving because of the editing which only allows us to understand quite what is happening and what the words we hear really mean right at the end.

Having established Rebecca’s situation and prowess, partially through a hostage situation which goes awry, the story moves on when the staff of Project 571 are murdered and Rebecca finds herself ambushed by a bunch of vampires. The fights in this film were choreographed by Kris Tanaka (fifth degree black belt, who also appears as a vampire later on) and they’re very good. All the protagonists clearly know their stuff and, while the fights are naturally slightly stylised, they don’t come across as artificial or posed. The martial arts moves are complemented by appropriate direction and editing, something which many big budget films forget when it comes to action sequences.

Rebecca finds herself roped into Project 572, which seems to have even fewer staff than 571. To wit: Madeline (Stephanie Beacham) and Edward (Jonathan Sidgwick: Man Who Sold the World). Madeline is a high-ranking witch and Beacham (whose surprisingly long list of genre credits includes Dracula AD1972, The Nightcomers, Tam Lin, And Now the Screaming Starts, Schizo, House of Mortal Sin, Inseminoid, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, the first season of seaQuest DSV and episodes of UFO, Star Trek TNG and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense) plays her splendidly with a debonair superiority and a supercilious insouciance which puts one in mind at times of a supernatural Ann Robinson. Edward on the other hand is an occult scholar, played with an ambiguous mixture of nervousness and confidence.

We are introduced at this point to the movie’s McGuffin, an ancient book called Mallues Maleficarum or The Witches Hammer which contains the spells required to defeat the great vampire Hugo Renoir (Tom Dover), who is plotting world domination with the help of his chief assassin Victor (Miguel Ruz). (Hmmm... ‘Victor Hugo’? I don’t think it means anything.) Although the A-plot is Rebecca and Edward’s quest to defeat Hugo, the movie’s greatest strength lies, to be honest, in its subplot about two vampires who are on the trail of the book.

Jason Tompkins, who plays Oscar (and was apparently in a game show called Beat the Cyborgs), is not the first short actor to play a vampire but Sally Reeve (“a voluptuous comedy blonde” - Time Out), as Charlotte Apone, is certainly the fattest actress in the history of cinematic bloodsuckers. We meet the tiny man and the huge woman at a circus where we establish not only their sanguinary tastes but also their arch and mannered passion for each other. Every single line of dialogue between them ends with ‘sweetheart’ or ‘honeybun’ or ‘angel’ or some similar affectation of affection, even as they calmly discuss the violence and bloody gore which they leave in their wake.

These two are a terrific double act, Apone raising the interesting question of how do you kill a vampire so rotund that no stake could get anywhere near her heart? Actually, the film does take the trouble early on to explain to us - by explaining to Rebecca - the ground rules for the vampires in this film: severing the head kills them, puncturing the heart kills them, sunlight burns them (Rebecca keeps her motorcycle leathers on during the day and makes a lengthy train journey in a coffin).

Eaves has a penchant for flashbacks and we get four during the course of the film. Madeline explains how the Mallues Maleficarum came to be written by Kitanya (Magda Rodriguez: Castell de Ferro), a peasant girl in Medieval Russia who was ‘the first witch’ (and who is seen despatching the priest who wronged her using a bloody great hammer). Edward explains how he was recruited by Madeline, how arch assassin Victor became a vampire and how Apone was turned. This last flashback takes place in the late 19th century and is presented as a black and white, silent film with intertitles. Like all the Apone/Oscar scenes it’s laugh-out-loud funny, although The Witches Hammer, while it’s directed with a light touch, is certainly not a comedy. Rare indeed is the comic relief which manages to not only be genuinely comic but also provide effective relief from the main story without detracting or undermining it, but this film proves that it can be done.

The finale, which takes place in a suitably gothic castle (God knows where that is - this was filmed in Southampton!) has some plot twists, some revelations, the resurrection of Kitanya and some more fighting, including a casual beheading of a deliberately irritating character which should have audiences grinning and quite possibly cheering. The whole thing ties in somehow to three Grim Reaper-style ‘souls of the damned’ whom Hugo is attempting to control for his own ends.

Overall, The Witches Hammer is enormous fun. It doesn’t try to be any more than it is. By not being overly ambitious, the film works wonderfully on its own level and constantly impresses; anyone who loves independent horror movies will get a kick out of this one. The acting varies somewhat and there are some sequences which don’t really make complete sense but get away with it by being stylish and clever, notably a fight in a (swiftly emptied) pub between Rebecca and some sort of supernatural ninja. There’s not a whole lot of plot but there’s some nicely drawn characters, some kick-ass fights and some surprising laughs including a Carrie reference and an audaciously silly Citizen Kane gag. The film also looks great thanks to top-notch cinematography by John Raggett (Forest of the Damned, Nature Morte, Nightmares) using 35mm stock; I don’t care how good digital video gets, there’s still a sense of cinema that you get from 35mm footage which you just can’t get any other way.

Dark Raven Digital (Kingdom, Warrior Sisters) provided the visual effects, including vampire deaths which are surprisingly similar to those in Kaew Kon Lek. Nemesis CGI, React Films (With Evil Intent) and Poppy Effects are also credited for specific sequences. The Demon Within director Harold Gasnier, who gets a ‘special thanks’ credit rather than ‘executive producer’ as listed in some places, has several small roles, all of which end unpleasantly and one of which is a gag reference to his role in Hellbreeder. An all-girl band called the Lillettes play a number in the pub before it empties for the Rebecca-vs-ninja fight.

The Witches Hammer (which was retitled The Vampire Hunter for its German release and Dark Evolution in Japan) is a corking horror/action movie which oozes professionalism. Deftly directed and carefully paced to balance action sequences with slower, character-based scenes, this is a highly commendable addition to the continuing British horror boom of the early 21st century.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Keith Wright
Writer: Keith Wright
Producer: Keith Wright
Cast: Roger Bingham, Keith Wright’s dad, Keith Wright’s mum
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.frissonfilm.co.uk
Watch now - Distrify link at end of review

You know that film, Ed Wood? The Edward D Wood Jr biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp? Imagine if that was set not in 1950s Hollywood but in present day Yorkshire. With a script by Alan Bennett.

Take Me to Your Leader belongs, like Mark Withers’ Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice, in the subgenre of ‘recursive mockumentaries’: fictional, narrative films which pretend to be non-fictional documentaries about the making of an entirely imaginary fictional, narrative film. Hardcore was about the making of a porno flick, in Take Me to Your Leader the genre in question is science fiction.

The film follows the efforts of Corbin West (Roger Bingham, who was in episodes of The League of Gentlemen and The Last Train), a predominantly cheerful 55-year-old underachiever who decides to make a 1950s-style alien invasion epic on a shoe-string, starring himself as the alien leader Zortan. He ropes in a motley crew including American cinematographer Joe Palentino (Tristian Cooper with a completely convincing LA accent), stunt arranger Chet Harris (director Keith Wright’s father, who is also called Keith and is credited here as Keith S Wright) who claims to have worked on a Bond film, costume designer Margaret Fipps (Margaret Wright, mother of Keith and wife of Keith S) and elderly production designer Ray Pickles (retired roofing contractor Ray Ledger). The cast of this sci-fi movie includes aggressively self-confident leading man Simon Delgado (Grant Bridges) playing a character called ‘Wildboy’ and leading lady Jennifer Almon (Penelope Ellis).

Rounding out the family connection, Keith’s gran Margaret Collier plays Corbin’s estranged mother Betty who, in a continuation of the Ed Wood angle, wanted a girl so christened him Shirley and dressed him in skirts. Keith S Wright (as ‘Keith Wright Snr’) and Margaret Collier previously appeared in Keith Wright’s short film Long in the Tooth (available on the Frisson Film website) as a vampire scarecrow and his mum.

Over the course of 71 minutes we see these intrepid film-makers, armed with a surfeit of self-confidence but no discernible talent, attempt to make an SF feature called... Take Me to Your Leader. There is a mixture of fly-on-the-wall observation and to-camera interviews although the interviewer himself is only rarely heard. Other participants appear occasionally, notably a young special effects enthusiast with a slightly overdeveloped enthusiasm for explosives (whose appearances are, to be honest, too few and too brief to really register) and two double glazing salesmen persuaded to provide financial backing. Bubbling under this story is a subplot about the mother-son estrangement.

It’s slightly misleading to call this a mockumentary because it doesn’t mock anything. The characters are all massively sympathetic and portrayed with enormous affection, even the arrogant leading man and the loudmouthed Yank DP. There is a gentleness to Take Me to Your Leader which one doesn’t see in the likes of This is Spinal Tap (which Wright acknowledges as an inspiration) and this has the curious effect of making the film undeniably enjoyable without ever being laugh-out-loud funny. This is wry Northern character comedy; Keith Wright and co. may not thank me for saying this but it sometimes feels more Lancashire than Yorkshire in its humour - although I appreciate that to soft, shandy-drinking Southerners there may be no discernible difference.

What suffuses the entire film is pathos. The pathos of Corbin West’s confidence that he can make a film (not a great film, just a little one); the pathos of those who trust and follow him; and the pathos of his mother who, interviewed separately, has finally come to accept that her child is male not female and wishes to see him again.

If there is a fault it’s that the character conflict, which is indispensable to good films but especially to one like this, when it comes, comes too suddenly. Everyone is having a jolly time, buoyed up by West’s positive attitude, then about halfway through people start arguing and in some instances fighting. And this conflict comes solely from characters rather than from the situation of a semi-amateur film shoot; one gets the impression that the same characters, if thrown together in any situation, would have the same disputes.

Contrary to expectations (and the tropes of this particular subgenre) the film-making process itself does not throw external problems into the mix as one might expect. The fact that the cast can’t act, the script is clichéed and facile and the designs are ridiculous - none of this creates problems for West. And to be fair it’s not really a problem for the viewer either except insofar as it’s not what one expects when popping the disc into the player.

What can be said - indeed, what should be emphasised - is that despite many of the real cast being amateurs (including several who are not directly related to Keith Wright) the level of performance here is wonderful. Entirely naturalistic, there’s not a bad performance on screen, not even a bad moment in an otherwise good performance. These characters are so real that the line between Keith Wright’s cut-price feature film and Corbin West’s even more meagrely budgeted effort becomes blurred. We utterly, utterly believe that these are real people. There are a couple of moments in the accompanying 15-minute Making Of when it is very difficult to tell whether we are watching Roger Bingham talking about a spoof documentary called Take Me to Your Leader or an out-take of Corbin West talking about a sci-fi picture called Take Me to Your Leader.

Because, boy are there out-takes (albeit none on the actual disc). Keith Wright shot a massive eighty hours of footage, meaning there’s about 78 hours and fifty minutes sat on a hard drive somewhere (including some 16mm and super-8 clips of the ‘actual film’). The whole of Take Me to Your Leader was improvised, with the actors (both pro and am) developing their characters over the course of production. There was no script, just a basic list of scenes with starting points, key elements and approximate, hoped-for finishing points. Which, let’s face it, is also how they did Spinal Tap.

But the important thing about a film is not how it was made (despite the aforementioned Making Of and a Wright/Bingham commentary). To the viewer, it shouldn’t make any difference whether the actors are pros or the director’s parents, whether the film was improvised then distilled from nearly a week of raw footage or whether every word was carefully scripted beforehand. It’s what’s on screen that counts and, while we can all admire Keith Wright’s determination (especially a fortnight of self-imposed isolation in a caravan park to do the bulk of the edit), we must judge the film on the film alone.

In which respect I think I can declare Take Me To Your Leader a thorough success. It’s a wonderful slice of very British humour, about underdogs who fail to triumph (in America, everything would end happily - even Ed Wood culminated in a fictitious successful premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space). There is redemption and development here but above all there are characters: rounded, fully believable characters with hopes and dreams and lives beyond the 71 minutes that we see.

Making a film about film-making is considerably trickier than it sounds because one must balance what it’s really like against what people think it’s like. Most film sets are incredibly dull places but Corbin West’s location work looks like great fun. During the ‘zombie walk’ scene it’s entirely unclear whether the people being zombies think they’re making a real film for Corbin West or a fake film for Keith Wright. That surely is the sign of a good spoof documentary (I’m not going to call it a mockumentary again, I think it’s misleading).

Take Me to Your Leader is a warm, gentle, slice-of-life comedy that just happens to be about a man trying to make a science fiction film. Maybe it’s a little too short - and I don’t say that very often! - with room for another ten minutes or so in the middle to make the transition from calm to conflict less sudden. But that’s not a major problem by any means. Kudos to one-man-band Keith Wright (who did everything except the music, basically) for doing something different and making it work, despite the obvious odds stacked against him. And fictional kudos to Corbin West for exactly the same thing!

(The disc also includes Wright's award-winning short Where's Bingo Betty?)

MJS rating: A-