Cult films and the people who make them

In 1994, Justin Whalin took over the role of Jimmy Olsen in the second season of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. In February 1996 I interviewed him, together with several other Lois and Clark personnel, for a big feature in SFX.

What was it like stepping into a character that was already established?
"It was difficult. The fans of the show were really strong fans, and that's great. And when you have fans like that, they support the cast that's on the show. They want the characters that they're used to. I'd known Michael Landes for a really long time, who played Jimmy before, and he's a really good actor. Him leaving, it wasn't anything personal or anything like that, but I decided I couldn't do the same thing he was doing. I didn't come on the show and try to be him or try to do the character in the same way he did it in any way. So I came on and just did what I do.

"I totally put the character a different way. I tried to base him more on the comic book: kind of an orphaned kid who has raised himself and lived on the streets and all that stuff. I just went in the opposite direction and it was a little tough for the audience at first to get used to. You've got to remember: nobody asked them if they wanted Jimmy changed, nobody asked them if it was okay with them. I think at first they were like: 'That's not okay with me.' So that's hard. I've never done anything else where I've replaced anybody. I've come into shows where they've already been on a while, but I haven't replaced anybody. You've got to give the audience a little while to get used to you, and thankfully the audience got used to me. They're real happy, I guess, with me now, but when I started they weren't so happy!"

Were the rest of the cast okay with you coming on board?
"Again, I don't think they were asked, and Michael was their friend. But they were so great to me when I first got here, all of them. They were so good about it. They welcomed me, they made me feel comfortable. Dean and I are very good friends now, really really good friends. They just really made me feel comfortable with coming into the situation. They didn't put any more stress on me. You work with these people all the time, 12 to 15 hours a day, and after a year of doing that you develop some relationships with people. Sometimes it's hard to come into a show because relationships have already been developed. These people know each other so well, and you're like this new thing all of a sudden. It's like somebody being brought into your family. They were really welcoming and very cool."

Were you watching the series during Season One?
"I'd seen two episodes of the first season. I'm hardly ever home and I don't get to watch a whole lot of TV. But I'd seen it and I knew the show well, and I'd seen what Michael had done with the show as Jimmy."

Did you have to audition for the role?
"I did have to audition. The first year that Lois and Clark was on, I did a series for Warner Brothers called It Had to Be You with Faye Dunaway. So the people at Warner Brothers knew who I was and knew my work, so I only had to meet with Bob Singer and Randy Zisk. That was one audition. Then the next day I went again and that day I had it. So I had to audition but it wasn't a very stressful auditioning process. It was very quick, it took two days, because the people at Warner Brothers were familiar with my work."

Were you a fan of Superman in the comic books?
"I think every kid growing up is a fan of Superman. I never read comic books; the only comic book I ever read is Richy Rich. But I watched the Superman movies, I watched the old, old TV show. Superman is such an icon. I did an interview for CNN about three months ago; they asked me if, when I was a kid, I ever dreamed about being Jimmy Olsen. Nobody ever dreams about being Jimmy Olsen! Everybody wants to be Superman! How many people do you see running around with a camera going, 'I'm Jimmy Olsen!'? No, as a kid I wanted to be Superman. I tied a pillowcase to the back of my neck and ran around."

You got closer than most of us, though. You're on a TV show with Superman.
"That's right. He's my buddy."

Would you like to see more episodes with Jimmy as a more central character?
"As Season Three progresses, you're going to see more and more of Jimmy. In the comic books and the TV show Jimmy was getting in trouble almost as much as Lois. This show is Lois and Clark. It's not the regular Superman story, it's a little different. It's more about their relationship. The marriage comes closer and they start really getting together and having a relationship. This brings me into the picture more because you need another character who doesn't know about Superman. So I think you're going to see more of Jimmy getting into trouble."

How closely is the Daily Planet office designed to look like a real newspaper?
"You're asking the wrong person. I've no idea how much research was done. To me it's just a set. I go there, and I've got my script and I show up."

You've not been following real photographers round?
"Not personally. I never get to leave the office anyway, I'm still getting coffee for Lane Smith. I'm a coffee boy. This is a fantasy show. It's fantasy, it's an adventure, it's romantic. It appeals to a real broad audience. It's not trying to be a show about a newspaper. That's not the purpose of the show. The show wants to be about Lois and Clark's relationship. It wants to be about Superman and his exploits. I don't think the newspaper is a major thrust of what we do."

Are you getting much fan mail?
"Yeah, I'm getting some fan mail. I'm getting more than I've ever got, and I've done four or five other series. This is the longest consistent job where people see me all the time. So yeah, I'm getting more and more fan mail, and it's nice. It's nice to be appreciated. Especially as, after the first couple of episodes aired, everybody was like: 'Kill him! Somebody string him up! Thumbscrews, somebody!' That was difficult because that was the first time that I did anything where anybody said anything bad. I didn't get bad reviews from Lois and Clark, but I got bad reviews from the audience, off the internet or whatever. I was like: 'Wow! They want me dead! Oh my God! Mid-life crisis time!' But after about five episodes they settled down, they started to get used to me and they started to like me. Now, they're wonderful and they say really nice things. The fan mail that I'm getting is really wonderful, and it's really nice to get it."

You started acting very young.
"I was eleven. I got into acting because I had a crush on a girl; I took an acting class to be close. The teacher said I had some natural ability and asked me if I wanted to represent the school in an open call for a big play that had come to town. It was called The Little Prince. I got that part and I did that play for two years, playing the little prince. Then I started doing some commercials. I met a casting director from General Hospital; he asked me to come down and audition for a part and I got that part. From there I just kept working and working and working, so I've just been really, really lucky."

What other things have you done that we might have heard of?
"I'm sure you've heard of Charles in Charge, I'm sure you've heard of General Hospital. Child's Play 3, Serial Mom."

What's John Waters like to work with?
"He's a nut. He's crazy but he's so funny. I'm one of the first people John Waters has ever hired without meeting first. Because I was working here, I couldn't go to Baltimore to meet him. So he only saw me on tape. So I hadn't met him, and he hadn't met me. I fly out to Baltimore to do this film, and all I've heard is stories about John Waters, how zany he is and crazy, and he lived up to every single one of them! Talk about a guy who's definitely doing his own thing, but he does it so well. I've done a whole lot of stuff. I've done twelve TV movies, I've done four or five features and I've done five series. But when you do a John Waters movie; I don't care who you are, you listen to John Waters, because it's his genre. He created this whole look and feel and genre. So there's never any doubt about what he's saying. If he tells you to stand on your head while you deliver that line: 'Okay! Sounds interesting!' It's not really reality acting and it's not comedy acting. It's this weird, different kind of... I don't know. But it's definitely his thing. So you go in there with a lot of: 'I've got to trust you. Please don't mess me up.' You just go with him, and you just have to trust him. He's hysterical, he is so funny to hang out with."

The other title that's infamous over here is Child's Play 3. Was the controversy over that reported in the States?
"No."

Basically, it was blamed by the media for causing two young boys to murder a two-year-old, although there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that either boy had ever seen that particular film.
"Oh my God! I heard something about this but I thought that was here. I didn't know that was in England. So I'm infamous there now. I can show up and be banned."

Child's Play 3 has gone from being an inconsequential little horror film about a possessed doll to the most evil film ever made.
"That's wild."

How long do you see Lois and Clark going on for?
"I don't think it can go on indefinitely. I think it can go on as long as the relationships are honest, the stories are good, and - to be honest - the writers don't ever make the audience feel like they're cheating them. There has to be no fear of doing something that's never been done. The marriage stuff is cool. I don't know if they're going to be married or not be married or what. Like last year in 'Tempus Fugitive', she learns that he's Superman, then she forgets. As good an episode as that was, that really pissed off a lot of people. You can only do that so many times before an audience starts getting disillusioned. If something's going to happen, they want it to honestly happen. If it's not going to happen, fine. They'll sit there and wait and hope that it happens, but if you tease them with it they start to get upset, and I think the show has to be careful with that.

"I think it has to keep growing. The thing about shows that's different from life, is that life is always changing. You never really know what the hell's gonna happen. Shows are manipulated. Their stories are manipulated; what's going to happen is manipulated. In life you can't do that. Life will throw some really weird stuff at you, and sometimes TV shows are afraid to throw that kind of stuff at you. If this ever becomes a show where Superman has a bad guy to defeat every week, and you know that this villain's going to be tough, it's going to be hard for Superman but eventually he's going to win, that'll work for a while. But that'll only work for so long. Part of the reason the show's been successful is the romantic relationship between Lois and Clark. I think that keeps people coming back; they like those two characters and they want to see them together, they want to see them happy. It could never just be about Superman beating up people."

Have you got anything lined up for the hiatus?
"There's some talking about a lot of stuff. I may do another John Waters film, there's a Wes Craven film I may do, a Linkletter film I may do. We've got two and a half months still. I'm not at the point where I'm just being thrown every movie I want to do yet. I'm still knocking on the doors, and it's still too early to have been cast because I'm not going to be available for two and a half months."

I interviewed director David Winning by e-mail in September 2000 about his work on what was then a brand new, unaired show - Andromeda. David has also directed a stack of other TV shows, including Earth: Final Conflict, Friday the 13th, Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark? plus the second Power Rangers movie.

How well are the cast and crew of Andromeda gelling at this stage in the production?
"This is the same production team that I worked with in Vancouver on three episodes of the NightMan series in 1998. Headed by executive producer Allan Eastman, it was as much fun then as it is now. This is certainly a bit different though; the stakes are higher and we're all aware of the legacy and the tradition - not to mention the fanbase that no one wants to let down. Director of Photography Gordon Verhuel is giving the series an amazing visual look. My second episode (‘The Pearls That Were His Eyes’ with John de Lancie) brought them to the halfway mark of the first season. This is a group that works very well together and is very talented and respectful of the material."

What problems are presented in working on a series which hasn't aired yet and so has no audience feedback?
"At last count there are already 94 websites in existence for Andromeda. How's that for pressure? Robert Hewitt Wolfe (DS9) who developed the series from Roddenberry's notes has an excellent feel for the genre and has created a very exciting group of characters and storylines for the first season. I think fans will be pleasantly surprised. It is tough with a new series but it's a whole new universe!"

To what extent is the legacy of Gene Roddenberry felt on the show?
"Star Trek (the original series) had an indelible impact on me as a teenager. And I didn't discover it until reruns started in the early seventies - on a black-and-white TV no less! I've said many times that it taught me how to make films. Even in the days of corny melodrama, Roddenberry certainly tapped into something special in 1966. The entire production team has an enormous amount of respect for the Creator - and hope we created something equally special with Andromeda. And yes, he's there on the bridge of the Andromeda Ascendant even today."

On the basis of what you've seen, which character, device or other aspect of Andromeda is likely to be the one that everyone latches onto and identifies with the show?
"Too many to name. Seven exciting and vibrantly different main characters to start - and some incredible new alien visitors that should keep fans tuning in. I really think there will be something for everyone. Stories filled with action, drama, humour and intelligence."

How well is Kevin Sorbo exorcising the ghost of Hercules and establishing his new character?
"Kevin is an incredible actor and person. He's bringing a real warmth and humanity to Dylan Hunt that I think audiences will respond to. He did seven seasons of Hercules and wasn't ready to jump back into television this soon. I don't think he could resist this part when it came along. To start with, Kevin is a huge Roddenberry fan. He's a very powerful presence on that bridge."

How does John de Lancie's character Uncle Sid compare with Q, and is he likely to return in future episodes?
"First of all - does he return? Well, that would be giving away the plotline of ‘Pearls’ - due to air in January 2001. John is kind of a hypnotic performer. He brought so much likability to the character of Uncle Sid in a portrayal that I'm hoping will entertain many fans when it airs next year. On a personal level, he's a quiet, soft-spoken, very intelligent man who is extremely busy juggling many projects at once. It was a fun experience."

website: www.davidwinning.com

William Winckler is the writer, director, producer and star of the snappily titled William Winckler's Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove. He kindly agreed to answer some e-mail questions in July 2005. My thanks to Jeff Berkwits of Perplex PR for arranging and co-ordinating this interview.

What was the initial inspiration to make this film?
“I absolutely love classic monster movies and creature features. I grew up watching the old Universal films, the Hammer horror productions, the wonderful AIP drive-in movies, and classic Japanese monsters like Godzilla and Gamera. I love pure, entertaining, escapist horror, sci-fi and fantasy. These classic films are what inspired me to make William Winckler's Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove, and of course served as the inspiration for me to originally form my own production company, William Winckler Productions, in 2001.

“I also have to be honest: having worked in ‘mainstream Hollywood’ for the past two decades or so, I just can't stand most of the genre films cranked out each year. I strongly feel the Golden Age of horror and sci-fi films was back in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early to mid-1970s. I love the classics because they were intelligently written and often produced with love and low budgets, forcing film-makers to focus on characters, not $100 million CGI effects. The horror genre used to be about many different subjects - vampires, mummies, werewolves, mad scientists, ghosts etc - but then in the 1980s the slasher films took over, essentially hijacking the entire horror genre. Horror films haven't been the same since. It's a tragedy, because for nearly 60 years the horror film was something totally different - it was a wide, wonderful world of different styles of monsters and creature features.

“I should note that I do like some slasher films, like John Carpenter's Halloween and of course Hitchcock's Psycho, but most horror films today are just absolute, bloody garbage and ‘paint-by-numbers’ gorefests. Some are good, most are not. What these film-makers (and I use the term loosely) don't understand is that human emotion - the physiological emotion of ‘fear’ - is totally the opposite of ‘disgust’. ‘Fear’ and ‘I'm going to throw up’ are two different emotions. I believe horror films should entertain, frighten and keep audiences on the edges of their seats - they shouldn't make you want to run out of the theatre feeling like you want to barf your guts out.

“So, taken together, all of these elements inspired the type of work I do. I'm interested in recapturing the magic and classic-style storytelling of the ‘good old days’ of horror. In fact, my idea of a perfect afternoon is relaxing on a comfortable sofa with my wife, drinking a nice cup of British PG Tips tea and watching an old Vincent Price movie (The House on Haunted Hill being a favourite). What more could anyone want in life?”

What sort of budgetary and time constraints did you work under?
“For William Winckler's Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove, I actually had a nice-sized budget (for an independent film). It was comparatively large, which enabled us to shoot the underwater footage, shoot at the many marvelous locations, have numerous monsters appear in the film, build a full-body latex creature suit and hire a cast and crew of over 60 people. So I actually had good money to make this film, and that's why I think the quality of the movie turned out so damn great. Fans, industry professionals, movie critics and others have just been blown away by our production values, which are incredibly high for an independent horror film.

“As for time constraints, we shot the movie in 21 days but we were in pre-production for months, so we really didn't have too many time constraints as far as schedule was concerned. We did have a limited number of days to shoot at the laboratory set location - which, incidentally, was a real working lab - but we got all of our footage shot in time. The only minor problem during the production was the long time it took for the various monster make-ups. It took about three hours to get our actor Lawrence Furbish into the Frankenstein monster makeup. The monster designs are incredible, and they look even better on screen, but they did take forever and a day to get made up and onto the set each day. That was the one constant worry that haunted me throughout the picture.”

Of all the classic monster films, to which this is an obvious homage, which is your favourite and why?
“It's hard for me to pick a favourite - I love them all for different reasons. Still, some of my favourite films are the classics like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The House on Haunted Hill, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the classic Mummy sequels, the early Hammer films featuring Dracula and Frankenstein, the early Godzilla movies (like Godzilla vs the Thing), War of the Gargantuas, Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Monster on Campus, the Amicus films like The House That Dripped Blood, and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On television, I loved Darren McGavin's Kolchak: The Night Stalker films and TV series, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery, among others.”

I was very impressed with the black and white cinematography. Can you give me some technical details about how the film's look was achieved?
“We shot Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove using state-of-the-art digital equipment, not unlike George Lucas' most recent Star Wars pictures. However, my cinematographer, Matthias Schubert, did a few tricks during filmmaking and post-production to give the finished movie the look of a full-fledged 35mm Panavision, widescreen, black-and-white film. And, as I've said before, audiences and critics have seemed thoroughly impressed by the high production values. Most can't believe it's not film!”

What sort of instructions did you give Rich Knight in terms of designing and creating the monsters?
“Tons of instructions! First off, unlike many other indie pictures, for Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove the special effects team had over a year to prepare. Not only was the budget high for an independent film, but much of that money went to visual and editing effects, not necessarily make-up. I also called out specifically what we needed in the script. For example, I carefully detailed what all the monster characters looked like. Frankenstein's monster is based on Mary Shelley's description: long black hair, yellowish skin and a corpse-like face. As we hashed out the designs I had multiple meetings and phone calls and e-mails with Rich. He drew up designs based on my instructions - like any process, some were good, some were less-than-good - and we kept improving upon the good ones. For legal reasons I wanted to be certain that all the monsters in our film were totally original in design so that we would not infringe on the rights held by any other studio. For example, our Frankenstein monster does not resemble the Universal/Karloff character nor does it resemble the Hammer character, nor any other horror character. The same goes for our Creature from Blood Cove amphibious beast. It does not resemble The Creature from the Black Lagoon or The Monster of Piedras Blancas or any of the fishmen Paul Zastupnevich (who was a friend of mine) designed for Lost in Space or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

“The Creature costume was especially difficult. It was a full body suit, rubber mask, gloves and feet. Poor Corey J Marshall, the actor who portrayed the Creature, had to be squeezed into this costume each day, and he not only had to fight on land, but also in the ocean! So the costume had to be strong and durable enough to withstand all the underwater photography, with the Creature swimming and fighting under the waves. It's very tough to make a rubber suit that can endure that much punishment, and the costume was continually being stitched and glued for repairs (none of which are visible on camera).

“Both Frankenstein's monster and the Creature also had special dentures made. Rufus Hearn made these for Corey and Lawrence, casting moulds of their mouths and teeth, and then later the monster teeth were cast. The final result looked great, but imagine having to act in an unwieldy monster suit with uncomfortable dentures in your mouth. Then, as director, I tell you to battle, both on sand and underwater! Yes, the dentures fell out some times (it's pretty funny, and fans will be able to see it on the extras when the DVD comes out).

“Frankenstein's boots were a real pain for Lawrence, too. They gave him more height, but were difficult to walk around in on the sandy beach. We finally got special socks and protective cushions for Lawrence's feet. All in all, it's just not easy being a monster!”

What did you learn from making your previous film, The Double-D Avenger, that helped you when making WWFVTCFBC?
“Though I pretty much applied the same working methods to both films, the thing I learned from The Double-D Avenger that surprised me was that you really don't need ‘star names’ in genre films today. Without naming any names, I worked with some big cult film stars who turned out to be royal pains-in-the-ass and very difficult to deal with. As a result, it was harder to shoot The Double-D Avenger than it should have been. Then, when I discovered that 90 per cent of the customers who purchased the movie had never heard of our stars - that they were actually buying the film based primarily on the unique subject matter - I realised that the time had come, at least for small, independent films, where you just don't need ‘stars’ anymore.

“Now, for William Winckler's Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove, we do have many celebrity cameos and some cult film stars playing leading roles, like the wonderful Larry Butler (who also starred as the villain in The Double-D Avenger). But nowadays, it's clear that you don't need temperamental movie stars in your film for it to succeed and make money. This was the biggest lesson I learned. At the same time, star or no star, I should point out that of course the biggest name in our movie is really Frankenstein's monster.”

Far be it from me to complain about young ladies taking their clothes off, but I felt the T&A sequences interrupted the story and weren't necessary. Why did you include them?
“One major problem with the old classic horror pictures is that, more often than not, they didn't have enough sex appeal. In the Hammer horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s, the brief nudity added so much to the films, especially the vampire pictures. At the same time, the classic Italian horror movies of Mario Bava included nudity. So I felt that brief, tasteful, Playboy-style nudity would be important and nothing but a plus for the picture.

“From a story viewpoint, our heroes were a small group working for a cheesecake magazine, and it just wouldn't make logical sense story-wise for us not to show the models posing in the nude. The public today simply knows that men's magazines feature nudity.

“We also have a climatic scene in the story that takes place at a seaside bar/strip club. Now, what on Earth is the stripper going to do? Dance in a bikini? Everyone knows that strippers strip! To me, it's always ridiculous in cop shows on TV when the policeman or detective investigates a strip club and all the girls on stage are wearing bikinis!

“So, for logical story-related reasons, as well as being influenced by Hammer and Italian classics, I went ahead and incorporated a bit of T&A in the picture. I auditioned hundreds of women, and finally cast Playboy model Carla Harvey (who also starred on Playboy TV), real-life glamour model Tera Cooley and rising adult-film queen Selena Silver. Of course, if you don't like the nudity you can easily fast forward your DVD. There is only about two minutes of T&A scattered throughout the entire picture, which runs 90 minutes. But I think most viewers will find it fun.”

To what extent are your films fanboy wish-fulfillment and to what extent are they intended as commercial feature films?
“What I was trying to do with Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove was to make a new retro-classic. However, I'm a businessman too, and I've been in the business for over 20 years. I am making profits on my movies, and making a living doing what I love to do. Yet I also love and respect vintage horror films, and not many producers at the major Hollywood studios have that same love and respect. In fact, some of the studio producers I know have nothing but contempt for both classic horror films and genre audiences! Well, I love the fans, in large part because I am one! So I'm a balance of fan and professional, and it's the businessman in me that keeps me in business.”

I understand that the late Michael Billington was approached about playing the monster: how did that come about and why did it not happen in the end?
“Years ago I worked for a company called Galaxy Online. It was a website designed to be like the Sci-Fi Channel on the internet, devoted to science fiction, fantasy and horror. I was an executive there, and we were supposed to produce movies for DVD and webcast featuring various stars from famous science fiction films and TV shows. As part of the job, I visited Pinewood Studios and met with Sylvia Anderson (UFO, Thunderbirds, Space: 1999), Mike Billington (star of UFO), Elizabeth Sladen (Doctor Who) and many other English actors. Mike and I hit it off, and he was paid by Galaxy Online to help promote the company in England. Well, when the dotcom bubble burst, Galaxy burst too. However, Mike and I remained friends and kept in contact.

“As a person, he was fantastic: a down-to-Earth guy, friendly, nice and willing to work with me on my independent films. He loved The Double-D Avenger and was anxious to star in my next horror film. He didn't care that he'd have to be under lots of make-up, and was looking forward to the opportunity. Well, we were all set to go around November/December 2004, but there was a work visa problem. Mike told me that because he'd overstayed on his most recent trip to America (he and his son had visited Florida), there was a ‘mark’ against his visa. He was afraid there would be problems on his visit, and as a result he suggested I recast the Frankenstein monster role because he didn't want to screw up our schedule. So, reluctantly, I did recast the role. I told Mike he could be in my next film, playing a Christopher Lee-type vampire, and he was thrilled about that, because he loved the Hammer vampire films.

“Well, after that, there was a long silence from him. I had sent him a couple e-mails, and never heard back, but I simply thought he might have gone to Italy or something for a UFO convention. Then I found out he had died. I can't tell you how saddened and shocked I was ... it totally blew me away. A real tragedy, because he was not only a great actor, but also a helluva nice guy.”

What has been the reception to WWFVTCFBC so far and what are your plans for distributing the film?
“William Winckler's Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove will be distributed all over the world, through different distributors, some in different dubbed languages (such as Japanese) in the coming months. The US DVD release should be out later this year, likely by November or December. Here in America, we also have various theatrical screenings planned, and some of the cast and crew will be making personal appearances at these events.

“Among those who have seen it, the reception has been absolutely incredible! All of the reviews thus far have basically been positive, and the fan response has been fantastic. In fact, recently the editor of Cult Movies magazine (a well-known genre publication in Hollywood) and his staff had a screening of the film, and they absolutely flipped over the picture. The editor, Michael Copner, told me it was like a trip back in time for him, like watching a long-lost AIP classic, which is exactly what I set out to do - to make a true, honest, dramatic, loving homage to the classics ... an homage done out of respect, not ridicule.”

This second interview with Kevin Howarth, in April 2004, was probably done for Fangoria I suspect.

What has happened since we spoke last year?
"It’s a weird time because there’s been so much about The Last Horror Movie on the web and it’s been talked about on the IMDB and among people at festivals. I went to Fantasporto and had a really good time. All the organisers and people involved really looked after us - really friendly people. We got some press coverage down there, Julian and I, we did really well out of it - and then we picked up the Critics’ Award for best film. So that was good news. Coming on the back of winning Best UK feature at Raindance, that was great stuff."

Last time we spoke you were shooting Cold and Dark. How did that go?
"That was great. It was a very intense schedule. Timewise, it was a very short shooting schedule for a big, 35mm feature like that. It was a pretty low budget compared to American standards, but by British standards not bad. I haven’t seen too much of it apart from what I’ve seen when I went to do my ADR work. Andrew Goth is the guy who directed. He’s lovely, he did a film called Busted - that was the title in America - which I believe in England was called Everybody Loves Sunshine. A film with David Bowie and Goldie and people like that; that was his first feature and Cold and Dark’s his second feature.

"Luke Goss is the lead; the two of us have these roles that are parallel in many ways through the film. The character I play, Mortimer Shade, is Chief Inspector of the Vice Squad but he’s just so abnormal with regards to what a cop would normally be like. There’s something very quirky about him. I had this extraordinary wardrobe. You’ve got this cop who normally, if he was played on British TV, would be a hard-nosed vice cop - you can imagine who would be playing those kind of roles. But this guy is completely different and very peculiar so nobody knows too much about him. Matt Lucas is in the movie too and he’s great. Unfortunately we don’t have any scenes together but he’s a really lovely guy, very talented, and an extraordinary fellow."

Do we know when Cold and Dark might be seen?
"I heard from Andrew that it’s going to be in Toronto. I don’t know how to describe it. I know that most people who read Fangoria are real horror buffs. But it’s very strange because I love horror and I love horror films but I don’t particularly think of myself as a horror genre actor. It’s just that I seem to get these roles in these projects. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t particularly look at The Last Horror Movie as a horror movie. It’s a very quirky piece and you have to see it to understand what I mean by that. There are horrific scenes in it, really brutal, and I play this character who at times is chilling. Chillingly calm yet at the same time with this homespun philosophy on life that is just bizarre.

"But it’s very intellectual, it’s a very narrative script, there was a lot for me to say from the point of view of the narrative. That’s very unusual for a film. Most film scripts you get, there’s hardly anything being said because film on the whole is normally looked at as a visual art form, which is what it is. So it’s not often that you get a narrative-based film - and that’s exactly what The Last Horror Movie was. I was thrilled to be able to do that role and also I was really excited by the prospect, initially when I got it, of breaking the fourth wall and interacting with the audience. Which was, obviously, breaking a lot of rules of film-making and makes it very different. Like the first time anyone saw Michael Caine in Alfie. I do it but in a more horrific context."

Has anybody recognised you in the street?
"Not yet. They do when I go to festivals, after they’ve actually seen the film and when I’ve been in newspapers. As of yet, until we get released here in London, which is I gather at the end of June, but as soon as Tartan release the film and if enough people go and we get great word of mouth and they start putting it on more screens, I dare say people will start to recognise me. I dare say that will happen because I’m never off the screen! But going back to Cold and Dark, we’ve got a really good sales agent on there called Beyond, an Australian outfit. Hilary Davis - she’s been in the business a long time. They’re pushing that really hard and I’ve heard great news about the trailer that went very well at the AFM. It’s sold seven territories so far and thirteen were gagging for it. So it’s just a matter of the film coming together now. It’s still in post but very, very close to being finished, about another week to go and then it’s all done and wrapped up. They’re taking the trailer to Cannes again with some extended scenes. The first time it will be screened, apart from a cast and crew screening if they can get one inbetween, will be at the London Screenings at the end of June."

Cold and Dark features effects by Paul Hyett.
"I must say, I think Paul Hyett is an absolutely brilliant special effects make-up artist. It will be great one day to see him get an absolutely massive budget to work with so that he can do what he wants. I love to see people who are really dedicated at what they do and I can see the passion in him. An extraordinary guy. And the guys who worked with him on Cold and Dark were great guys. I’ve worked with Paul Hyett three or four times now. He did the special effects stuff on Whacked, in fact I think that’s where I met him. Then he was on The Last Horror Movie and he was on Cold and Dark. He’s always in demand but rightly so. He is fantastic, really dedicated and he works so hard. I have personally a lot to thank Paul for."

Let’s go through a few of your other films. What did you play in Razor Blade Smile?
"I played this character called Platinum who is this supercool ex-hitman who had dropped out of it all for some reason. Something had happened to him. It was never really mentioned in the script but I made up a personal history for him where possibly on a hit he had killed a kid who just got in the way. He has become slightly jaded with the whole thing but of course Eileen Daly, who played Lilith Silver, he’s been having a big affair with her, unbeknownst to him that she’s this vampire and he doesn’t know that. I’m one of the few people in the film that’s human! For what he had at his disposal, Jake West did a fantastic job."

You did another film with Jake.
"Yes, I did a film called Whacked which was a short film that Jake was hired to do. It was actually a monologue from a play that had been performed at the Edinburgh Festival. This girl called Sarah McGinnis who produced it and starred in it alongside me, it was her monologue, which had gone down quite well in a theatrical context. She decided, along with a writer and a few other people, to do it as a short film. The character that I played in it, called Karl Ryan, he doesn’t appear in the theatrical version. But in the film he’s there because he has to be this other protagonist that she bounces off. That was fun to do and Jake did a fantastic job with that. It was a quite punchy short film that definitely had a good look to it and definitely had a lot of Jake’s hallmark little things in it.

"Because Jake’s an extraordinarily good editor, that’s what he’s really good at. And when he directs, he directs like an editor. You’d be halfway through a scene and he’ll just stop you: “Okay, fine, got that, because I’m going to come out there and I’m going to movie in there…” He’s one of those directors that’s already got it all sorted out visually in his head before he starts, then he just goes for it. He has all these visual effects and cutaways and tracking shots and slo-mo and so on. All these little tricks of the trade that he uses; he knows exactly when he's going to do it and how he’s going to use it. I’ve known Jake for a while now and we really get on."

Where did you train?
"I got a distinction from the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Minnie Driver was there, just a term above me. Emily Joyce from My Hero was there."

You were also in a much more gentle film called The Ghost of Greville Lodge.
"George Cole, Prunella Scales. Now this is really weird. Of all the films I’ve done, that is the one that most people come up to me and say, ‘You were in Ghost of Greville Lodge, weren’t you?’ Because it’s been running on Sky a lot. Every time I turn the TV on, it’s on. It runs through the daytime and they just keep playing it over and over again. I know for a fact that I ‘ve walked into Tesco and I’ve had checkout
women say, ‘I saw you on TV the other day’! That’s really bizarre. We made that quite a while ago. That was a very good director friend of mine, Niall Johnson, who I did The Big Swap with, which was actually my very first feature film. He wrote me that part specifically."

What was your role?
"I played this ghost called Billy Boy. I made him Scottish and he was this mysterious character who worked at the church a a grave-digger. In actual fact I was the catalyst for making the young lad in it see what was going to happen and guiding him in the right direction. He was actually a gentle ghost, a good guy not a bad guy, and it was nice to play that sort of role, to play something not so intense. It was still sort of intense in a mysterious way but it wasn’t violent or full-on nastiness."

Your first film was The Big Swap.
"The first feature film I did, which was made ages ago. We shot it in 1996, so eight years ago now. It was a film about all these thirtysomething couples that end up swapping partners and thinking they can get away with it, but in actual fact what happens is all the bad side of that: the jealousies and the way it changes people’s perceptions of their relationships with their partners. So that was a very interesting thirtysomething drama with a lot of sexual edge in it. Niall Johnson did that. Then the next film I did was Razor Blade Smile. And at the same time virtually, or just when I finished Razor Blade Smile, I went off to do this film called Cash in Hand. It was originally called The Find then the title changed to Cash in Hand. Charley Boorman was in it and Richard E Grant in a very tiny role. This guy called Justin Baldwin directed it. I play this IRA killer in it and did my usual thing, I was really Irish looking. It was good fun what I was doing, but the film as a whole I believe was just in a state.

"After Cash in Hand, that’s when Niall called me back for The Ghost of Greville Lodge. Then I did a film with Nick Sherard called Don’t Look Back!. That’s more of a mysterious horror film. It’s all set in an American off-road diner. The amazing thing was that it actually started as a short film and was then developed into a feature film. It was a project that went on for years. I was originally in the short film; I played a character called ‘The Stranger’ who was this guy who just turns up at this off-road diner in the Southern United States of America. It’s never mentioned where this place is. There’s no mention of any particular state but you do know you’re in the Southern States.

"Interestingly enough this whole film was shot just outside Farnham. A place called Alice Holt Forest. There’s a guy called Colin who runs this place down there, he’s a fantastic bloke. Loads of massive movies have been shot down there. Ridley Scott shot the whole Germanic tribe bit of Gladiator there. When you see the beginning of Gladiator and that big battle scene, that was all shot in Farnham. It’s a huge forestry area and because of the vegetation it can double for Germany, France, anywhere. They’ve got these really long roads and lanes there and there was this shack that the set decorators on Don’t Look Back! turned into this diner. And it really does look like you’re in the Southern USA, you really wouldn’t know. Shot on 35mm. But I just think the story got mixed a bit when it got turned into a feature film. It lost its way a little bit and you’re not quite sure whose story it is. Is it my story? Is it the waitress’ story? But it has some great moments in it,some really good moments that are almost verging on film noir, some brilliant stuff."

What’s lined up nest?
"Nothing concrete at the moment. Julian’s got a couple of projects on the boil. One is called Love Bites which is a sort of dark romantic comedy! But he’s also got another film which is a really good thriller called The Long Dark Hours and that’s a possibility too. He would like me in both of them, I think. Long Dark Hours is a little bit like The Hitcher but the other way round; instead of the hitchhiker, it’s the driver who’s this crazed one. The script’s not bad. It needs a bit of work but I think it will be a really hard, fast, punchy British thriller. Get a good cast, it’ll be great.

"Then there’s a guy called Rod Woodruff who’s not only a brilliant stunt guy that I’ve worked with about three time snow but also a brilliant writer. Do you remember, many years ago, a film called Clockwork Mice, set in a school with kids from broken homes? Well, Rod actually wrote that. He has written a project that he’s very keen for me to be in because he worked closely with me on Cold and Dark. He wants me to play the cop in this thriller about child abduction - which is unusual because I normally get the child abductor! Again, very early days."

website: www.kevinhowarth.com

I interviewed composer Richard Wells about his work with Jake West in October 2005. He subsequently also composed the score for Mutant Chronicles..

How did you first get to work with Jake?
“I first worked with Jake on the Bitmap Brother’s cult computer game Z. We didn’t meet but Jake did the storyboards for all the animations and myself and Dave Punshon wrote the music.

“We next worked together on a game called MIA (Missing in Action). Jake wrote and directed all the cut scenes using real actors and real sets - something quite unusual for a game at that time (c.1996) - and Dave and I scored the music for them. They were all rather melodramatic as I remember. On the strength of this Jake asked me if I would score his up and coming debut feature Razor Blade Smile. We met, had a beer and discussed styles of music and Jake played me a few tracks he liked and then I went away and ignored most of his suggestions and did my own thing. Anything Jake did not like we changed but as far as I remember we changed very little and just modified a few cues.”

When he approached you about doing Evil Aliens, what sort of brief were you given for the music?
“As far as I remember there was very little briefing for Evil Aliens. Jake showed me a rough cut with some temp music on it, some of it my own demo for Evil Aliens. The only scene where he was specific was the farmer’s stand off with the aliens which was shot as a classic Sergio Leone western stand-off and we both decided we would score the farmers as Leone gunslingers. Otherwise I was pretty much left to do my own thing again.”

From your point of view as composer, what are the biggest differences between Razor Blade Smile and Evil Aliens?
“We couldn’t afford a live orchestra on either film so the decision was taken in both cases to write a hybrid score with orchestral elements, synth elements and guitars. Despite this I think the end result is quite different in both cases. Most of the RBS score revolves around two melodic themes for the main characters Lilith and Sethane. Lilith’s theme is used far more than any of the themes in Evil Aliens, mainly because Evil Aliens is more of an ensemble piece. Therefore there are more themes or motifs for the different characters. Razor Blade was a very melodic score whereas Evil Aliens is based around different clusters of notes for the aliens and humans.

“Jake had promised to come around whenever I needed him but due to the tight post production schedule he only made it over twice and we only changed two cues. Everything else came out right first time which was fortunate as we only had five weeks to do it in. I remember saying it would be impossible for me to write, play and mix the soundtrack in this time but in the end I was the only one of the post production team who finished on time, after many late nights. The project was great fun to work on as Jake is a very decisive character; when he says the picture is locked it really is! Also he is very encouraging and trusting and allows people lots of space to be creative which brings the best out the people he chooses to work with.”

What sort of balance were you aiming for between 'horror music' and 'comedy music'?
“I don’t really do comedy music, although there are a couple of moments which I suppose you could describe as comedic: the puddle scene and Gorman’s tantrum in the field. Because there is so much comedy in the film there wasn’t really any need to write comedy music as such. So most of the time we were writing horror/action or emotional music, some of which was a bit melodramatic and may have got a laugh because of this. Obvious example: Gorman running into the crop circle. More a case of absurdly inappropriate music than comedy music which works because it goes completely against the grain. Gorman thinks this is his big moment, he has found the aliens and as he loves aliens I thought it would be funny to give him a hugely romantic/heroic theme, quite inappropriate as he is a complete geek. It turned out to be one of my favourite musical moments.”

What are you thoughts on the inclusion of the Wurzels on the film’s soundtrack?
“I think the Wurzels were an inspired choice for the combine harvester scene. Who other than Jake could have dreamed that one up? Funnily enough the guy who helped me mix some of Razor Blade Smile also mixed the original Wurzels track! So there is a connection there, even if he won’t admit it! He shall remain nameless or his career may be in jeopardy!”

website: www.richardwellsmusic.com

I met David Warbeck a couple of time in the 1990s, when he became a regular face at conventions and in low-budget British films. He was always a delightful chap and had a feast of stories, some of them even printable. This interview was done at the Fanderson Gold convention in August 1996. The event celebrated Gerry Anderson’s fiftieth year in showbusiness and there were many guests including David, who had appeared in a couple of episodes of UFO alongside Ed Bishop. David passed away the following year at the ridiculously young age of 55.

David, you did two episodes of UFO.
"Did I? Okay. The people who interview me know more about me than I know about myself. It's absolutely true: I've been very, very lucky with having done so many films over 30 years. About 400 film sequences, can you believe? Which is about easily 300 commercials all around the world, plus about a hundred movies. So I get totally lost as to what I've done half the time. So you guys tell me what I've been doing."

Does everything blur into one another after a bit?
"Oh no. When we sit down like we're doing now, and when you get specific and remind me about specific things, the memory bank can still sort things out, but now and then I'm really genuinely surprised at things I'd completely forgotten about. As you may have read in this book that you've got here that Jason Slater put together, he bullied me into digging up files and newspapers and all that lot. And I was genuinely shocked at how much I'd done. Because I've always looked upon this as just a huge pleasure, and people mad enough to throw money at me and have a good time. I've never got over my luck! He wanted to make it the definitive one, and now that it's published I've realised there's about another half-dozen things that I'd totally forgotten about. [Jason Slater's booklet, David Warbeck: The Man and His Movies was published by FAB Press but is long out of print - MJS]

“Like I was in opera! I did Tosca, sang away in that. I'd totally forgotten that. And also some other little films I'd forgotten about. I don't mean to be blase or to be stupid, it's just that I'm very fortunate with so much work. At the moment I've got about another six films lining up. And I've written either almost fully, or certainly skeletons, about eight other scripts. I write. Three of them are theatre plays I want to get going, and one of them is about Joan Crawford. And I've got at least another three film scripts, because we're very enthusiastic to recreate Hammer horror in my house, which you've seen a picture of in that book, and call it Hell House Horror Productions or something. I've got three scripts that I've got set up on that one, and the boys that I've just been working with on a film called Pervirella, which is turning out to be a big surprise!"

I saw some of the rushes of Pervirella recently.
"Isn't it amazing? You know, I love to support and encourage, I always love doing that. It's just part of me and that's all there is to it - there's no money in the stuff. But I always find that supporting ideas, they always snowball, and it all ends up being very incestuous and everyone's got their finger up everyone's bum anyway, if I can say that!"

I was speaking with the guys from Pervirella, Josh Collins and Alex Chandon. It’s just a shame that there’s no support from official sources for independent film-makers like them.
"Do you want an exclusive? Here you go. I totally agree with what you've just said: there's no support, and blah blah blah. I was invited to Bradford by the boys two years ago when it first started, because Bradford wants to put itself on the map. And the enthusiasm up there among the Northerners is really generous and great. So off I went. And so many of my so-called professional friends in the business who I can't stand said, 'Oh, why are you doing Bradford? It's a bit out of the way.' I said 'Listen, when I was there two years ago, I met Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and so on.' And what I call the English young blood. There was no sponsorship for it etc.

“Well then, tying up with mad Trevor Barley and Paul Brown to do some film marts and some of the little film festivals, I spoke to the management of the Everyman Cinema, it was their idea. Because the Everyman, as you know, is a sort of an arthouse, and it's shocking that the Scala's gone, Electric's gone, that there is no place in bloody England to have a centre for either genre or new blood films or whatever. So I spoke to the Everyman and the short story there is we've done about 15 festivals there, the Italian and so on. And so, having just worked on Pervirella with Alex, and I'm doing another film at the moment down in Southampton, Sudden Fury, with a boy called Darren Ward. He's halfway through making his film. And another boy who was on Pervirella called Mike Hurst.

"Well, this youngster was on Pervirella. And in Pervirella I'm sort of James Bond in retirement, and a part of my team are the ninja boys who go around beating up all the baddies, and he's one of the ninjas. Wonderfully athletic, great shape, good face and all that lot. He just in quick conversation said that he'd made this film and he's got in his car and driven down to the Cannes Festival and flogged it off to... I don't know who all these people are.”

Mike Hurst’s film Project Assassin has been picked up for German distribution by Roland Emmerich, the guy who made Independence Day.
"Oh, you're kidding! Oh God, shoot me in the head! Bloody hell, you see this is where I'm a dingbat. I just stand in front of a camera and they say action; I'm clueless on all the mechanics and the politics. Anyway. So I was delighted for him, so I'd put him as a new blood, and this other boy Darren. So I thought fuck it, I haven't got time this year because I'm very tied up with so many projects at the moment. I involve myself in a lot of things privately that people don't know about. Like I support a lot of medical things. I was a founder member of the Motor Neurone Society, before David Niven died of it. We set that up in my house in London. I won't go on about all the other things. So that's the whole background that I never discuss basically. That and building projects and court cases.

“I'm under a huge court case. I'm under house arrest - for running a brothel! We all thought it was a joke as well in the beginning. But my palace - which you've seen the photograph of in this book, because it's the set of the interview - that I've been restoring for twenty years. I love building, and we're always rebuilding. Because I wanted to be a set-builder actually, that was always my ambition. Or shop windows. Because they change them every few weeks. That's why studios are great, especially Italian ones. So I'm always building and I've put this wonderful house together. It's an extraordinary house and if you come and interview me you'll see it. With its own private theatre. And the reason it's so famous, this house - I didn't know all this when I got it. I bought this burnt-out, derelict hovel and when we ripped all the rubbish off we found we had this private theatre in it. Franz Liszt used to play there. Gilbert and Sullivan regularly used to go up there and try out some of their new operas. We just got the startling news that Sir Henry Irving's read there and we think that - you know Sir Henry Irving's friend for thirty years was Bram Stoker? - we think Dracula was first read in my theatre."

Yes, there was a one-off read-through of the novel as a play.
"Well, wouldn't it be wonderful if it was in my house? That would be beyond... oh, there's so much to say. I haven't got to the exclusive part yet. I've just had an amazing writer from New York, Professor Paul Oppenheimer, who does Medieval Literature at New York University and London University, he's staying at my house. I'd not met him before. Through our daughters we got in contact. He's publishing a huge book - it's taken years to write, came out two weeks ago - called Evil, and it's about demonic influence. What makes serial killers serial killers, and then we go back through Hitler and back into the ancient world. The whole panorama of the world's cruelty and mass slaughter and Caligulas and all that lot.

“An amazingly strange book. But he's done it through the eyes of film. He's done it with literary references throughout history - obviously it only goes back a hundred years - but he's referred a lot of demonic behaviours, slaughter, mass murder through film, using examples like Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal or Kubrick's Clockwork Orange or the Hitler rallies. And the old classic horrors. It's a brilliant, amazing book, got very good reviews. Well, he was very enthusiastic about Bram Stoker probably having read in my theatre. So he's coming back next year to do research for us, because that would be quite an honour. So through him and through all the interest in the revival of all the old Hammer horror.

“And I rang my best mate, Herman Cohen in Hollywood, who created I was a Teenage Werewolf and ...Frankenstein, and Trog and Craze. Freddie Francis I worked with twice through all that. He told me, 'Dave, I can't believe it,' - because Herman's heading for eighty now - 'They want me to redo Teenage Frankenstein.' And my mate Roger Corman has just signed up a seven-picture deal to redo all that lot. And my Italian and my Spanish people, they're all redoing the Spanish/Italian remakes of old horror stuff. So I thought, 'Fuck it, I'll use my house, if Bram Stoker did read there' - can you imagine that as a credential thing? - ‘and call my house Hell House Horror Productions or something like that. It's a sort of a junior version of Hammer."

Next year is the centenary of the publication of Dracula.
"Oh god. This is what I mean by I've got no time for something. Anyway, the exclusive I wanted to come to was: with all the young bloods - I duck and dive and talk like Dickens: subplots, blah blah blah - is that I've got to put a festival together - I thought well, Hampstead Everyman - of the young bloods. So that for a week, tied up with the London Festival which is October/November, and have that running either twenty-minute acorns of their idea or a whole film like Mike Hurst’s or whatever.

“I went to see my agent and was chatting about other things just last Friday. I'm so blessed that my agent is Dennis Salinger of ICM. The boss of everything in the world basically, and what a sweetheart. I just rabbited on, did all the superspeech chat to him about the young blood festival. He said, 'Hold it there, boy!' He calls everyone 'boy' because he can't remember Michael Caine's name: 'Hello, boy. Got any jokes, boy?' Then he said, 'Look at that' and he held up a piece of paper he had on his desk, and it's only Puttnam, Ridley Scott, Nick Roeg: the committee to do exactly this. To do a Young Blood Festival that's going to be after the Cannes Festival, in June I think it is. Dennis, like myself - magic guy, he's not up himself like so many frigging agents are. God, they're wankers, most agents! But Dennis is just a joy and a sweetheart. He's a multi-billion-trillionaire and all that lot. But he also has got the same thing about young bloods.

“So I've got to call Mike Hurst tonight and say, 'Listen, Michael. Dennis would love to meet you, just to talk about it.' And I've got Darren and I've got the boys from Pervirella, and a couple of others. But it's to encourage the young bloods. Because as you know, there is a ton of talent in this country, a ton of it. Creative talent, performing talent, technical talent. Look at the big boys: Star Wars and the Bonds and all that lot. But I think it needs a little promotioning. And so here I am gabbling away, but I'm a great enthusiast for this sort of thing. You guys, what you do is absolutely imperative and it's not a bloody penny in the bank to you guys. But it's what they call the snowball effect. You put your stuff with enthusiasm and affection. And it's a bit like to do with my background, which is New Zealand, where you do it for the love of the thing. The love and the fun of it.

“One of the things that I detest about the so-called professional world is that there's no fun. You get that: 'Blah blah blah, would you care to stand over there?' I say, 'Well, where are the jokes? Who's got the dirty stories?' And now and again, like Pervirella. That was a joyous set to be on. They were great kids; the energy was wonderful. It was like UFO; Sylvia and Gerry when they got going. Here we are, thirty years on or something. Not only them, we've got all the Hammer revival. Barbican last Friday. We've got all the other stuff I've just mentioned. So I just find it terribly exciting."

Working on UFO, did you meet Gerry Anderson at all?
"Yes, of course. I was a total junior, out of drama school, very young. He was run off his feet in organising, so we didn't remotely become friendly or mates or anything like that. There was this period of Sylvia rushing around finding frocks and things in the back room, and Gerry rushing around making sure of this director, that director. As you must know, with filming you've got to have a troubleshooter, and that was Gerry's job, really. It was his baby, his creation, and he had to make sure that the scheduling was getting through. So we had no time really to sit down and have a chit-chat.”

When I interviewed Anna Walton on the set of Mutant Chronicles in June 2006 she was an unknown actress getting her big break. By the time that the film opened in October 2008, she had starred in Hellboy 2 and was filming the big-budget TV series Crusoe (created by my pal Steve Gallagher) as well as making a rather good little vampire film.

Tell me about your character.
"I play Severian. She is Samuel’s protector. She’s grown up in the Monastery with Samuel. She’s never left the monastery, she has been brought up knowing that her perfect duty in life is to be ready for this moment that has arrived in this film, that the Chronicles have predicted. So her job is to go along with Samuel on the mission and protect him, basically. But he’s also a sort of father figure to her. He’s brought her up and taken her under his wing."

How did you get this role?
"I auditioned for it."

What attracted you to this film?

"Firstly the role. I was very interested in the role and the fact that she’s also taken a vow of silence. I was very intrigued to investigate that."

So you don’t have any dialogue?
"No, she breaks it! Samuel dies about three quarters of the way through the film and then she breaks it. I was very interested in that, in playing someone who has taken on that massive thing and what it does to your other senses and all that kind of thing. Also just because of the script, which I was really interested in because it is a sci-fi action movie but it resonated with me quite deeply. It felt quite a special film about genre because it has such a strong message underneath all the action. It’s very contemporary, it’s about war, it’s about how we’re ruining our planet. I think that’s something very important at the moment."

Are you doing any stunts?
"Yes, I do lots and lots! She’s a highly skilled swordswoman so I’m training hard for that. There’s some sort of rope work; I climb anyway so that I think will help. Lots of climbing and lots of jumping around."

How do you cope with the fact that so much of the set just isn’t there?
"I’ve never done that before and I was very intrigued by that. I’ve done a lot of theatre, my training is in theatre, and I liken it to that really because theatre imagines everything. You don’t have anything in theatre. So I think of it like that. You still get more than you would in theatre on a set like this and actually they have made as much of the set as they can for each scene."

Have you done many other films?
"I’ve done one other film called Vampire Diary which is going to be released this year. It’s an independent, produced by Margaret Matheson and Mike Riley and Bard Entertainment. It’s a horror movie and I get to play a vampire in that."

With the teeth?
"No. It’s a long story but she’s had them taken out. But this is my first big film. It’s a bit of a break for me and it’s a really exciting thing to start my film career off with. I’ve done some short films and I’ve done theatre and some bits for television. I graduated two years ago from Upton School of Drama."

How is Simon Hunter as a director?
"He’s wonderful. He’s great to work with and he’s so generous with his time. Very willing to listen to your questions and your input which is really nice."

You’ve got some big names and some very experienced actors in the cast.
"For me, as a very inexperienced actor, I feel very lucky to be working with all the cast because they are experienced. Every day, just watching and learning. Everyone’s very kind and I can ask them questions. It’s really nice, being able to watch them work.”

Emmett 'Babe' Wallace was born in Brooklyn in 1909. Starting as a singer in a Harlem nightclub he went on to become a very successful musical performer - including a period fronting Ella Fitzgerald's band - as well as an actor on stage and screen, a poet and novelist and a prolific songwriter. Now well into his 90s, Mr Wallace lives in the Actors Fund Retirement Home in New Jersey. My interest in him was sparked by seeing him in the 1939 voodoo pictureThe Devil's Daughterand discovering that his grandson, musician Jimy Bleu, maintains a website about him. Jimy very kindly agreed to ask his grandfather some questions on my behalf and relay the answers back to me. I am enormously indebted to both Jimy Bleu and Emmett Wallace for this wonderful interview.

What do you recall of making The Devil’s Daughter?
“I recall it being very hot! The film was not shot in Haiti... I forgot which island it was actually shot on. Practicing our lines on the boat ride to the island is really the only thing I remember. Ohhh... they gave me more lines in the film at the last minute than I expected or was ready for.”

What are your memories of your beautiful co-star, Nina Mae McKinney?
“Lovely young lady indeed! ... Quite innocent and she always smelled like a morning walk in a garden.”

Was this film made before or after you worked with her in Black Network?
“I can't remember... At that time frame, we were involved in a few other projects in film and in theatre simultaneously. We worked together with the highest respect on the sets, but our off-screen relationship was a bit ‘torrid’. I admit I took advantage of her naiveté. She was a genuinely good and honest woman. She definitely didn't deserve the likes of me... Ella too!” [Jimy Bleu notes: “He and I laughed uncontrollably loud at this!"]

Where would a film like this have been shown and what sort of audiences would have seen it?
“From my knowledge, these films were shown in the many theatres, especially in the black neighbourhoods. Back then, in those theatres, you would usually get the main film (Bogart, Cagney etc), then live entertainment (musical group/band, comedy, vaudeville, dancers etc), then cartoon shorts, then the black films. It sure felt good walking down the Brooklyn neighbourhoods and folks coming up to me saying they loved my films. I remember I kept thinking to myself then: ‘Good! Now if only Hollywood would recognise me!’”

At that time, the late 1930s, how much integration (if any) was there between the black film industry and mainstream Hollywood?
“Very little if I recall correctly. The only parts integration offered to blacks were menial roles (maids, mammies, cooks, butlers, valets etc). Myself, Ralph Cooper and maybe a few others were the ones that adamantly refused to take those roles when we were called for them. We held out for better roles which never came to us from mainstream Hollywood. I understand that today it is a little better, but back then, forget it man! ...This is why Oscar Micheaux and other black companies flourished for a while then. We had no choice but to produce our own product, or at least hook up with the few sympathetic white producers who produced black films. It was not a good time back then for race.”

How important was film work to an all-round entertainer like yourself in the 1930s?
“I wanted to be the next Cagney, Barrymore etc... Everything I was involved in was supposed to lead me to that final place. I thought the playing field was leveled enough for me to actually have a shot at this goal. With the right film roles, I could reach many folks, thereby displaying my talents. Big screen film was the new thing back then. There is nothing like sitting in a theatre, seeing yourself in a film that the folks in the theatre are diggin' and seeing how they react positively to your performance.”

What do you think of the fact that The Devil’s Daughter is being watched and enjoyed by people in their own homes, all over the world, more than 60 years later?
“Ahh! ... That's a gas! I just hope folks will recognise the effort of us actors and actresses back then to really get ourselves out there among the Hollywood elite and the many obstacles that were in our way at that time... Wow ... 60 years ago? ... Jeemaneti! ... I must be gettin' old, huh?”

This interview was originally posted on 4th February 2006. Emmett 'Babe' Wallace passed away aged 97, just a few months later on 3rd December 2006. I think, of all the hundreds of interviews I have posted on this site and published in magazines, this is the one of which I am most proud.

Jimy Bleu, shown here with Emmett, was working at the time on a documentary about his grandfather (to include contributions from Nina Mae McKinney's niece).

You can find out more about Emmett on Corey Jarrell's blog.

Director: Andrew Weild
Writers: Andrew Weild, Fraser Barsby
Producer: Fraser Barsby
Cast: Ross Maxwell, Liam Browne, Layla Anna-Lee
Country: UK
Year: 2004
Reviewed from: DVD

Well, here it is at last. One of the rarest and most obscure British horror films of the naughties. A movie so poorly documented that I didn’t even find out it had had a release until after Urban Terrors was published: Andrew Weild’s 2004 teen slasher Hacked Off. I finally tracked down a copy on eBay and got the chance to watch it.

It’s not great, certainly, but it’s not quite as terrible as the handful of contemporary reviews suggest. And its problems are not those which contemporary reviewers identified (apart from the poor sound, which is really bad).

2004 was a good year for British horror. In that year we got Shaun of the Dead, The Last Horror Movie, Dead Man’s Shoes and London Voodoo. Mind you, we also got The Porcelain Man, Nine Lives, Dust and LD50. While Hacked Off doesn’t approach the quality of the former group, I’d still watch it before sitting through any of the latter quartet (to be fair, I’ve still not tracked down a copy of Dust, but its reputation precedes it).

Hacked Off starts with a caption – ‘Northern France, Autumn 1992’ – and then launches straight into a seven-minute prologue which consists of subtitled conversations between someone on the ground and someone in a light aircraft, searching for a patient who has escaped from an asylum. I say subtitled but what we don’t actually get is the original French dialogue, probably because that would have involved actually finding someone French to translate it and speak it.

Now on the one hand, kudos to the production for finding and using an actual aeroplane. No stock footage this. A gent named Barry Colvin, credited as ‘police pilot’, provided and flew the plane. There is footage of the plane shot from the ground and there is aerial footage shot from the plane, which adds enormously to the perceived production value. Only two things trouble me, well three. If this patient is, as we learn, massively dangerous, shouldn’t there be a more widespread search with, you know, dogs and stuff? Also, in the final conversation between ground and air, the pilot says there’s no sign of the escapee in the area he’s looking at and it’s now too dark to see anything. Well hold on, monsieur le pilot, but if it’s too dark to see, how do you know the guy’s not right underneath you?

But the most troublesome thing is the darkness. This prologue, like much of the rest of the film, is shot day-for-night with a blue filter and it’s simply way, way, too dark. Often, all we can see are dark blue shapes moving about among even darker blue shapes. One of these shapes is a telecoms engineer (played by producer Fraser Barsby) who is killed – in some manner that is too dark to see – by our escaped lunatic.

Now we launch into our title sequence, which plays over a load of stuff about some students meeting up, driving a minibus onto a ferry, having fun on the boat, then driving through France, stopping off at a market, eventually arriving at the 17th century farmhouse, converted into a luxury holiday home, which is their destination. While on the ferry they meet a Dutch guy and invite him along. This sequence is presumably supposed to introduce us to our main characters but it singularly fails to do that because by the end of it we don’t know any of their names or any of their relationships. The only good thing is that by counting how many people got out of the minibus, I discovered there were eight of them (including the Dutch guy). By the end of the film, we still won’t know all their names or their relationships, although a couple of them are lesbians apparently.

The above, like the prologue, lasts for a full seven minutes. Given that the entire feature only runs 70 minutes, that means we are fully 20% of the way into the film before eventually getting past the ‘Directed by Andrew Weild’ caption.

Apart from the hot lezzas and the Dutch guy who turns out to be a skilled chef, the only distinguishable character is the ostensible leader of the group, a tall, foul-mouthed, bullying, deeply unpleasant Scouser called… no, even after watching this all the way through I have no idea what the character’s name is. Farsby and Weild’s script is not only short on characterisation, it doesn’t even bother identifying the various characters. Why do people do this? Do they genuinely not realise that, in presenting us with a whole bunch of people, all of similar age and dressed similarly, the one thing that might be useful is to at least know people’s names?

So, people unpack and the Dutch guy cooks and people eat and people drink and people play Twister and my God it’s dull. Eventually there’s a knock at the door and it’s a gendarme, puzzled to see them there as the property’s owners had assured him the place would be empty (a pointless thread of a plot strand which is never mentioned again). He warns them that a crazy psycho named Jacques Sykes has escaped from the local asylum so they should stay inside and keep the doors locked. Fortunately, one of the students recognises the name of the psycho and proceeds to regale his pals at length and in detail about a series of crimes which happened near here ten years ago. Because why shouldn’t he just happen to be an expert on something which happened in a different country when he was nine?

So hang on, this all must mean that the prologue is actually taking place on the same night that the gang arrive at the farmhouse. So all the stuff on the ferry was effectively a flashback of sorts because it happened in daylight, before Sykes escaped from le nuthouse. This is all confusing because the natural assumption, when viewing a film shot in 2002, having seen a prologue captioned ‘1992’, is that the main story brings us up to the present day, especially when characters talk about something which happened ten years before. But that would mean the entire film is set in 1992 for absolutely no reason - certainly none of the clothes or hairstyles look particularly ‘90s. In fact the lad who makes the obligatory discovery that there’s no mobile coverage says he wants to check his Lottery numbers. But the National Lottery didn’t launch until 1994, and anyway in 1992 mobile phones were still rare and well out of the financial reach of students.

Here’s what I think must have happened. Weild and Farsby perhaps originally planned that the prologue with the aeroplane would be the original search for Sykes after he butchered an entire village, so they created the caption that set it ten years earlier. But they then rewrote the dialogue for the pilot and his colleague on the ground, making it a search for Sykes after he escapes. But then they forgot to remove the caption! I can see no other possible explanation. It’s quite the dumbest, crassest error I’ve seen in a film for quite some time.
Sykes, who is now togged up in the telecoms engineer’s gear, proceeds to butcher the assembled, unlikeable characters one by one. Unfortunately, the deep, dark day-for-night filming means that everything outside (and everything inside after the lights go out) is unfathomable, Added to constant poor sound recording (by Barsby) this means we can often neither see nor hear what is actually going on.

One thing we do get to see is two lesbians in bikinis making out in a swimming pool. When Dutch chef guy turns up, they invite him in for a threesome. He scurries back to his room to get changed but, in a quite amusing sequence, spends so long posing in front of the mirror as he tries to decide whether to go for, as Kevin Bacon famously put it, “shorts or budgie smugglers”, that by the time he arrives back at the pool both girls have gone into the sauna and there been savagely butchered.

Dutch guy runs back to the main house to tell people but the Scouse twat accuses him and ties him to a chair. The girls’ bodies have, it seems, swiftly disappeared from the sauna so the rest of the gang go outside looking for them, thinking they have just wandered off, which seems a bit daft given the copious quantities of blood still in the sauna.

After that, it all becomes a bit vague and it’s impossible to tell who gets killed in what order by the steadily walking, implacable, shades-wearing psycho. There was talk in the publicity of the killer assembling a “makeshift morgue” but that doesn’t come across at all through the Stygian photography. Eventually the final girl – whoever she is - runs down the killer with the minibus but a radio news report, delivered in the traditional flat monotone, tells us that the guy’s body was never found.

A brief epilogue “three months later” sees the killer still togged up as an engineer, stalking the final girl in her large, opulent flat. Needless to say, absolutely no motive is ever given.

Now here’s the thing, while Hacked Off is thoroughly generic, it’s also early enough in the history of the British Horror Revival to actually be quite innovative. Think about it: what precedents are there for British slashers? Sure there were a few movies about psychos in the mid-1970s from the likes of Pete Walker, but the modern teen slasher was invented by John Carpenter in 1978. Can you – can anyone – name me a British film before Hacked Off which used the standard slasher tropes that were established in the late 1970s. The closest I can get is Simon Hunter’s Lighthouse but the setting and characters there are more original and distinctive. This is just a bunch of obnoxious teenagers, going off somewhere away from it all, and then being stalked and brutally killed for no reason whatsoever by a dispassionate but relentless nutjob with a variety of tools.

Nowadays that sort of thing is a ten-a-penny but back in the early naughties, as the BHR was getting into its stride, it was still quite a radical idea to make one of these things in Britain (or in this case, mostly France – the top/tail UK scenes were shot in King’s Lynn). So, just as it was nearly 30 years from Night of the Living Dead to the first modern British zombie film, so we can see it took the best part of a quarter of a century for the influence of Halloween and Friday the 13th to be felt over here. Of course, a couple of years later along came Bryn Hammond with The Summer of the Massacre to show us all how it should really be done…

The movie was a co-production between Elig Films and Chipboard Productions, one of which was Andrew Weild and one was Fraser Barsby. The two gents pretty much comprised the entire crew; apart from music credits, the only other names are Alexis Park (gaffer and stills) and Emma Blickem (production assistant and catering) whom I would venture to suggest were their girlfriends at the time. Weild is credited as both DP and camera operator; Barsby as production designer, sound recordist and special make-up; the two share editing, costume, sound effects and (with Blickem) casting. That’s your lot.

Neither fellow made another feature. Fraser Barsby still lives in Norfolk where he has a company that sells and customises ex-Army Land-Rovers. Andew Weild (assuming it’s the same guy) is now a portrait photographer based in the Scottish Borders.

Among the cast, only Ross Maxwell and Liam Browne seem to have pursued a subsequent acting career. The former is in Ouija Board and Sawney: Flesh of Man and a sub-feature psychological horror called Sessions of the Mind; the latter has made some non-horror indie features and starred in a couple of Stereophonics videos. Ben Tyreman, who plays the psycho, now seems to be active in Welsh theatre. But Maria Conciarro, Sarah Pavey, Adam Stride, Tori Wheatman, Mark Wright (not the TOWIE guy) Patrick Owen (who plays the gendarme) and body doubles Karl Irons and Emma Sands have simply vanished. Or have they? An actor named Emerson Peters lists this film on his agent’s website and, you know, you wouldn’t admit to that unless it’s true. I guess he must be either Stride or Wright under a new Equity stage name. The acting, by the way, is no great shakes but also not awful, except the scenes on the P&O ferry which seem to have been improvised.

All of which leaves one name in the cast list who has made something of herself and might well prefer her venture into violent horror cinema to be swept under the carpet (or maybe she’s proud of it) – credited here as Layla Stewart but now known professionally as Layla Anna-Lee. If the name doesn’t ring bells with you (thank you, Wikipedia), she is a TV presenter, mainly covering sport, particularly rugby, football and cycling in its various forms. Even if you’ve not heard of her, you’re almost certainly heard her voice because she was one of two announcers at the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. She also does awards coverage for OK! Magazine’s website and presents a children’s cooking show on ITV. Plus lots of modelling over the years, apparently.

Most of the £8,000 budget came from Fraser Barsby’s credit cards with some sort of contribution from King’s Lynn-based financial consultant Martin Crannis and Norwich advertising agency Freshly Squeezed who both receive ‘executive producer’ credit. Local indie band Vanilla Pod, who had been gigging and released albums since the mid-1990s, provide some songs for the soundtrack, which also credits Allan Kirk, Shane Reeve, Todd Scott, Bill Cocker and Messrs. Barsby and Weild.

Filmed over five days in November 2002, the movie carries a 2003 copyright date. I can’t find any evidence of festival play but it was actually submitted to the BBFC, receiving a 15 certificate, which must have set the boys back a few quid. Copies were sold through the now defunct hacked-off.com website with offers of a free T-shirt or poster for the first thousand discs sold. Which seems an enormously optimistic sales projection for a no-name indie slasher only available from its own website or the undiscriminating shelves of The Cinema Store.

Screeners were sent out and the film was soundly trashed by reviewers on three websites: Eat My Brains!, The Late Doctor Lady Show and Slasherpool, a now-defunct, English language horror site based in Sweden. “Terrible low-budget slasher effort from the country that just doesn't seem to want to produce good slashers,” was the opinion of Slasherpool which seems odd because it was the people behind that site which actually released the Hacked Off DVD! (Their only other release was Swedish feature Death Academy.)

Long since consigned to history, and not even the well-documented bits of history, copies of Hacked Off now surface very occasionally on eBay.

MJS rating: C-

I interviewed Julian Richards years ago for SFX when Darklands was released and again for Fangoria when he made The Last Horror Movie. This e-mail mini-interview was done in April 2006 when it was revealed that a 'Director's Cut' of Darklands was in the works.

How have you been able to get the rights to recut Darklands?
“UK rights originally belonged to Metrodome Films, but when Paul Brooks left for the US, he sold the production company (and its assets) to new owners who quickly shifted its focus from production to distribution. Hence Metrodome Distribution. International rights were controlled by a seperates sales company, Victor Films, who sold Darklands for DVD distribution in Asia and Europe. Victor liquidated in 2002 and international rights reverted to the production company - Metrodome. I met Metrodome last week and negotiated a contract to represent world sales through my new sales company Jinga Films.

“This ended a very frustrating period (2002-2006) when many distributors of The Last Horror Movie were also interested in Darklands, but nobody knew who controlled the rights. I was approached by several North American distributors, but was unable to close any deals because of this rights issue.

"You might also like to know that Jinga Films is also representing Wild Country and we are close to signing a North American distribution deal. Wild Country will have two screenings in Cannes and we will be looking to close this deal at the market."

What are the differences between the two versions?
“Darklands - The Director’s Cut is probably a first, in that it is several minutes shorter than the original version which was often criticised for being slow to start. Benefit of hindsight is always a good thing, so I took the film back into the editing room and pruned and juxtaposed several scenes in the first 45 minutes. Overall, the changes make for a much more entertaining watch. I like to think that it's a genuine director's cut rather than some contrived marketing ploy. It's a director revisiting and improving his work as opposed to including deleted scenes on the basis that there has been some pseudo dispute between director and producer.”

How much is this based on what you originally wanted the film to be like and how much is influenced by what you know now as a more experienced director?
“It's all about the latter. When you make a film you become extremely close to it and there is often little time in post production schedules to distance yourself from the material. It's now ten years later and I have directed another two feature films, so it's great to able to revisit my early work and bring to it what I know now.”

Will we see this new version on DVD?
“Definitely. Metrodome Distribution are already planning a UK DVD release. And today I have begun negotiations with a very established North American distributor for a US DVD release. After the success of The Last Horror Movie the timing couldn't be better. American genre fans are eager to discover my previous work and the forthcoming release of Neil La Bute’s Wicker Man remake as well as the Omen remake will clearly add interest to Darklands and its subject matter. Some people might go as far to say that Darklands was the first Wicker Man remake!”

Any other news on other projects?
“Dewi Griffith, producer of High Stakes, who was also the location manager on Darklands, will be line producing my next feature Summer Scars which will star Kevin Howarth and shoot in Wales this Summer... A gang of school truants come of age after being held hostage in the woods by a schizophrenic. It's a very dark thriller in the mode of Larry Clark’s Bully and Shane Meadows’ A Room for Romeo Brass. Kevin plays the schizophrenic.”

website: www.jingafilms.com

Matthew Jason Walsh wrote and directed the short film I’ve Killed Before and a feature-length version of the same story,Bloodletting. He also co-wrote Witchouse I and III, Deep Freeze, The Brotherhood (and Parts II, IIIand IV) and Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy, as well as doing sound work on various movies. Although Bloodletting is his only feature credit as director, he shot second unit footage for two of JR Bookwalter’s movies, Ozone and Polymorph. Matthew kindly answered one of my six-question e-mail interviews in May 2005.

Why did you decide to remake I've Killed Before as a feature? Were you unhappy with the short or was it planned as a step towards a feature-length production?
“The whole thing got started while JR Bookwalter was doing post-production on The Sandman and a bunch of us who'd worked on the movie were kind of camped out in Mogadore, Ohio, where JR lived at the time. And I'd just written a bunch of scripts for David DeCoteau the previous winter, so I wanted to do something that was as far away from the ‘work-for-hire’ material I'd been doing as I could get, so I whipped up this short script around props and locations I knew we could get our hands on. So I always kind of viewed I've Killed Before as either an experiment or just a way to pass the time. We kind of joked around while we were making the short that we should just ‘keep going’ and make it a feature-length project. I think I figured the worst that could happen was, it would end up collecting dust in a closet somewhere. No such luck!

“A year later, I returned to Ohio to do the visual effects and the score for Bookwalter's Polymorph, which was one of the first features ever to be shot on the mini-DV format, and decided to approach him about directing a feature. I had a script I'd wanted to shoot, but since Ariauna Albright was going to be financing the movie on her credit cards, she had a lot of influence on what would get made, and I think it was her idea to remake I've Killed Before and expand it to feature-length.”

What were you most pleased about when the film was completed, and how do you view the movie eight years on?
“It's tough to say. I look at the movie and see a bunch of mistakes on my part all the way across the board, so I don't think I've ever watched it the way people who seem to enjoy the film do. If I could do it again, I'd definitely have done it with an actual crew and an FX guy and anybody but me producing it. For what it is - a ten thousand dollar shot-on-video movie - I think it turned out okay.”

Are you happier as a writer, a director or a producer?
“I've spent most of my career as a writer, and I like directing, under the right circumstances. I think I'd rather have a limb cut off than produce a movie again, though!”

What was your involvement with Deep Freeze/Ice Crawlers and how close is the finished film to what you wanted?
“I was brought in to rewrite Deep Freeze and make it more realistic to do for a moderate budget. The original script was easily a fifty-million dollar movie, and just for the record, the script that was handed to me was a pretty great screenplay, one of those projects that I really felt bad about changing anything on. At the time, Regent Entertainment wanted Dave DeCoteau to direct it, so I was also brought in to alter it to Dave's sensibilities and to make the characters more young and ‘hip’ - so, somehow, I had to figure out how to get a bunch of late-teens/early twenties' characters to Antarctica!

“I think it went through a few more hands before Dave finally passed on it and John Buechler took his place as the director, then it spent a while in Writer's Guild arbitration (since I'm not a member of the Writer's Guild, it was unclear whether or not I would even get a credit on the final movie). I was excited because I was a fan of Buechler's work, especially his ‘Jason’ design from Friday the 13th: The New Blood.

“The first and only time I got to see the film, I was visiting my parents and my mother was watching it with me, and while I don't remember having a reaction to the movie one way or another, every time that trilobite creature scurried by on the screen, my mother would just crack up laughing. So it was probably worth it just for that.”

You are credited as a writer on both Witchouse and Witchouse III: what was different between those two productions, from your point of view?
“Well, Dave DeCoteau was hired to direct a screenplay for a title Charles Band had called Witchouse, written by Neal Marshall Stevens (who wrote for Charles Band under the pseudonym ‘Benjamin Carr’), and that project wound up becoming Stitches a few years later. Dave was unhappy with that project and brought me on to develop something more along the lines of a Night of the Demons. At the time, they were going to shoot it in Romania, so I came up with this elaborate opening set in 17th century colonial America, where we see the witch originally get killed by a mob of witch hunters on horseback, and the first act took place on a college campus, which I think better introduced all the characters. Then, I was told they'd be shooting it on a soundstage in LA, so I had to gut the script and cram the whole thing into the house, get rid of the elaborate prologue, etc. Then, they took that script and shot it in Romania... which I never really understood. I think the original storyline would have opened the movie up more. JR wound up going that route with the second one.

“When JR set up the deal for Witchouse III (whose story I notice has already been detailed in your Witchouse III review!), he approached me to crank out a script on short notice. At the time, I was busy finished up The Frightening screenplay and a screenplay for a kids' movie for Regent Entertainment, and I had about three or four days where I could work on Witchouse III and hand it in to JR. Fortunately, JR had an idea of what he wanted to do: three women in a beach house, they somehow summon the ‘Lilith’ character and to make it as atmospheric as possible. So, where I think the first one is a poke at Night of the Demons, the third one was more of a throwback to the original The Haunting, or an old Hammer film.”

What can you tell me about the project you're developing with John Ellis, who did FX on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?
“I can't really give away too much about it right now, other than its title, Fade Out, and the basic premise that a group of stereotypical teenage horror movie characters face off against an unstoppable masked killer and then, wind up in a situation that I can safely guarantee has never been done in a horror movie before (I know, I know, like that claim hasn't been made twenty thousand times this week!).

“I've had a treatment for a movie I've wanted to do for a few years, something that would really push the boundaries of what could and couldn't be done on this level of film-making, especially in regard to visual effects, and I'd given a copy to John, because of his visual effects expertise. John wound up showing the treatment to a friend of his who'd helped finance his directorial debut, Twilight of the Dogs, and she immediately wanted to get onboard. So, at that point, I decided I'd gracefully back off and stay in a writer/co-producer capacity and let John direct the film. Right now, we're locking in the script and then, hopefully, it'll get produced later this year!”

Director: JR Bookwalter
Writer: Matthew Jason Walsh, JR Bookwalter
Producer: Tammi Sutton, JR Bookwalter
Cast: Tanya Dempsey, Tina Krause, Debbie Rochon, Brinke Stevens
Year of release: 2001
Country: USA
Reviewed from: R1 DVD (Full Moon/Tempe)

There’s something ironic in the fact that this film - shot in nine days on digital video for $26,000 - has been acclaimed as one of JR Bookwalter’s best. But it’s precisely because he has learnt his craft so well over the years that he’s able to pull off something like this.

As explained on an informative insert, Charles Band had bought a small indie film and planned to upgrade sound and picture then release it as a third Witchouse movie. JR argued that for the same money they could make their own and it would be better. And by god, it is.

In a nutshell, three young women stage a fake demon-summoning and accidentally raise Lilith, the vampire-demoness-thing from the previous two films. Stevie (the deservedly ubiquitous Debbie Rochon) is making a documentary about witchcraft, assisted by the less confident Rose (the ever-reliable Tina Krause), and they are joined by their old friend Annie (a quite superb performance from Tanya Dempsey) who has run away from her abusive boyfriend (Paul Darrigo).

But have they really summoned Lilith? Why has she come? And are all three girls telling the truth? Despite the rather extreme Lilith make-up hiding the gorgeous Brinke Stevens (The Naked Monster and a zillion other B-movies), there are some lovely subtle horror images here, especially the initial summoning and a scene where Lilith is reflected in a computer monitor screen. And the small cast of characters nevertheless bring a complexity to what, in lesser hands, would have been a one-note story, as trust disappears and allegiances shift.

The movie looks great, thanks to an experienced crew led by cinematographer Danny Draven and producer/production designer Tammi Sutton, and JR gets sterling performances out of all five of his experienced cast. But a special mention must be made for Ms Dempsey who really stands out in a role that takes her from vulnerable victim to defiant bitch and all points in between. A relative newcomer, though still with a good few films on her resume, Dempsey looks set to become the next big thing in B-movies - and possibly beyond. Co-writer Matthew Jason Walsh also wrote Deep Freeze and wrote and directed Bloodletting.

As usual, Tempe Video have packed the DVD with goodies. In fact, there’s so much one is left wondering whether the disc is actually top-heavy. Not one but three commentaries (Bookwalter and Rochon; Dempsey, Stevens and Darrigo; Sutton and Draven) mean that this 77-minute film would take more than five hours to watch in full! And on top of that there’s 19 minutes of out-takes, 34 minutes of behind the scenes, 33 minutes of interviews, a two-minute 1979 8mm film Burning of the Salem Witches shot by 13-year-old Bookwalter, plus filmographies, stills, trailers, etc. That’s nigh on seven hours in total! (There is a completely vanilla UK disc which is just called Demon Fire.)

MJS rating: A-

Director: Jesse Baget
Writer: Jesse Baget
Producers: Chris Moore, Jake Schmidt
Cast: Jeremy Radin, Adam Huss, Leyla Milani
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

Filmed as The Mexican Porn Massacre, retitled El Mascarado Massacre and eventually released as Wrestlemaniac (possibly an attempt to dupe unwary WWE fans used to buying Wrestlemania DVDs), this is yet another of those unkillable-Mexican-wrestler-tears-faces-off-amateur-pornographers-in-ghost-town movies.

For Heaven’s sake, when will these people think up something original?

Whatever you want to call it, this is actually really good fun and makes a nice change from yet another masked psycho hunting ‘teenagers’. Even though the guy does wear a mask. There are some lapses and leaps in the logic - and the make-up, truth be told, isn’t great - but the central conceit is enjoyable, the location is adroitly used and the characters are likeable.

Moustachioed, stetson-wearing, loud slimeball Alphonse (Adam Huss: Demon Slayer) and tubby, camera-toting, enthusiastic Steve (Jeremy Radin) - who is of Mexican descent but born and raised in Seattle - are on their way into Mexico to shoot some amateur porn, starring two blonde ‘actresses’. The girls’ names - in a wonderful gag that passed me by until the end credits - are Debbie and Dallas (Margaret Scarborough and WWE ‘diva’ Leyla Milani, who is a regular on the US version of Deal or No Deal). Also along for the ride are Jimbo (Zack Bennett) and his sister Daisy (Catherine Wreford: Dead Boyz Don’t Scream), stoner siblings whose presence is explained as being solely because Jimbo owns the camper van they’re using.

Characterisation is this movie’s strong point. Alphonse, Steve, Debbie and Dallas could have come across as simply ‘greasy git, fat kid and two bimbos’ but all four are rounded characters for whom we feel both empathy if not necessarily sympathy. So it’s ironic and a real shame that Jimbo and Daisy neither do nor say anything at all of any consequence and are, in narrative terms, simply there to be killed. The story requires us to understand the danger that our quartet are in before any of them actually die and since they’re in a deserted ghost town this has been achieved by bringing along two extra bodies as psycho-fodder.

The entire film only runs 73 minutes (including five minutes of end credits) so there was plenty of scope for giving the stoners something to do or at least letting us get to know them better.

The idea of Americans travelling to Mexico to shoot what they themselves call ‘amateur porn’ is not one I can claim to understand but I’m prepared to cut this film some slack. Actually, the more I think about the basic set-up, the dafter and less believable it seems, but I can forgive almost any film which features masked Mexican wrestlers - and this one starts with a title sequence full of genuine, vintage, black and white lucha libre footage.

Stopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, the gang encounter a creepy old guy who seems to have stepped straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode (he’s played by Irwin Keyes, whose many credits include The Exterminator and its sequel, Oblivion and its sequel, Death Wish 4, the Flintstones movie, David Lynch’s weird sitcom On the Air, House of 1,000 Corpses and the monster in Frankenstein General Hospital). He tells them that they are close to La Sangre de Dios (which Steve translates as ‘the blood of Christ’), a long-deserted ghost town. This is where Steve’s Mexican heritage comes into play because he knows the legend of El Mascarado; in fact he’s such a lucha fan that he carries a mask of his own in his back pocket.

El Mascarado’s back story is a bit confusing because we are told that he appeared on the Mexican wrestling scene from nowhere (at the same time that several top wrestlers disappeared) and also that he was the scientific creation of the Mexican government. He seems to have been some sort of Frankenstein-ian creation given life in the hope that Mexico would win the wrestling gold in the 1984 Olympics. (Of course, this is slightly ludicrous because Olympic wrestling is Greco-Roman wrestling, a genuine grappling contest between athletes, not the violent-but-fake, costume-clad showbiz spectacle that Mexican and other audiences enjoy.) Apparently El Mascarado was a very successful wrestler but was in the habit of killing his opponents so he was spirited away to an old ghost town many years ago. And he has apparently been there ever since.

Anyway, the van makes it to just a few yards outside La Sangre de Dios before the slightly-stoned Alphonse drives over a rock and wrecks the transmission. Exploring the town, they find an old bar and the three ladies get down to some very tame lesbian antics before Daisy - whose cotton camisole does little to disguise her generally un-porn-star-like figure - rushes off to be sick. And so the separations and deaths begin.

Steve apparently stands the best chance of survival because of his knowledge of all things lucha. He surmises from some reel-to-reel audio tapes(!) which he listens to on a functioning tape machine(!!) that El Mascarado survived several attempts to kill him and that his only weakness is that he must obey the rules of wrestling (it has rules?) - so he celebrates any success by ripping his opponent’s mask off, but he can be defeated if his own mask is removed. And if an opponent isn’t wearing a mask, El Mascarado simply rips his or her face off instead.

This is where the film’s make-up lets the side down, I’m afraid. The people we see with ‘face ripped off’ simply look like their faces are covered in blood. When we do see someone whose face actually is covered in blood they look just the same. Special effects make-up artists JP Pettersen (Crazy Animal, Risen) and Brandon Reininger (who worked on The Passion of the Christ and Day of the Dead 2: Contagium) have attempted to create faces of muscle and fat but they just don’t work. The actual face-ripping shots are great, but the skinless faces, on-screen, just resemble an accident in a ketchup factory.

What Wrestlemaniac does have going for it is a terrific villain/monster. El Mascarado is a heavy, hulking, non-speaking, mindlessly violent killer and frankly I think there’s a lot of mileage in him. If Wrestlemaniac is enough of a hit to justify a sequel, I think we could have a whole franchise here. He’s not going to trouble Freddy or Jason, but in a world where there are six Leprechaun films, I think there’s definitely room for another one or two El Mascarado pictures. Rey Misterio Sr, a genuine Mexican wrestling champ, is the man in the mask and boots.

Wrestlemaniac is the debut feature from writer/director/editor/co-producer Jesse Baget. Production designer Dan Adams (Parasomnia) does a grand job with the ghost town location - which was actually in California - and cinematographer Tabbert Filler does good work in both bright sunlight and night scenes. Jim Lang (Body Bags, In the Mouth of Madness) provides the original score, supplemented with plenty of traditional Mexican stuff.

The Wrestlemaniac script manages to be well-crafted in terms of believable dialogue while nevertheless having a core story that makes no blooming sense whatsoever. But I’m prepared to forgive much of the silliness, and even to let the director have fun with gratuitously extended shots of the lead actresses’ shapely arses, because Wrestlemaniac is simple, unpretentious, cleverly original horror fun. That’s what matters.

MJS rating: B

My third interview with Kevin Howarth, and the first one actually done face-to-face, was in August 2006 on the set ofSummer Scars.

How did Julian Richards first approach you about this?
"He had spoken about it some time back. He’d mentioned the title to me and what it was vaguely about. But there was actually talk before about another film called The Long, Dark Hours and that seemed to be more prevalent. Then suddenly, it almost seemed to come out of the blue, this one, Summer Scars. When he sent me the script and I read it, I thought it was very, very interesting and very topical, very current. I just think it had the feelings of a story that doesn’t often get made, stories about things like this, that would touch a nerve a bit. I really liked the character and I really liked the interaction with the kids and I thought it had potential. I really liked that. And actually it came together extremely rapidly. It seemed to steamroller into happening. It was very, very quick when it all came about."

How would you sum up the character of Peter?
"Interesting question actually, because the first time I read the script, when Julian and I were talking, and the word paedophile kept being mentioned an awful lot. I read it and I could see where there were certain elements in the script where people could look at that and think, ‘Yes, there’s definitely something there.’ Because it’s a guy with these kids you can see where that connotation comes in and where the connection is made. But the more I read it, there was one particular scene in the film and I thought, ‘My God, this guy has got a split personality.’ Then I started talking about schizophrenia. Then it kept flipping backwards and forwards. And it was really just a case of me with the homework again, as usual. I dug deep into this guy and started to dig deep into the script. You’re always looking in the script for those little beacons of light: ‘Ah, yes, now I get it - he’s blah blah blah blah.'

"So after a little while the paedophile thing started to drift away a little bit. I just felt he was less of that really and really, at the end of the day, this guy’s a schizophrenic. I looked at certain elements of it where I initially thought, ‘Oh, split personality’ but I did a lot of homework on the schizophrenia side and in actual fact schizophrenics are extremely common. I then found out that one in a hundred people is schizophrenic and in fact even more people than that genuinely hear voices but just don’t act on them. Split personality? Very, very, very rare. And I really didn’t think that was the way this was going to go. I’m looking at this guy and Peter is a schizophrenic definitely. But the more you look into the background of schizophrenics and where it all comes from, the big thing, the trigger in a lot of their lives is the trauma and that sort of thing, to do with things like poverty, homelessness, not having a job.

"All of these things affect but crucially from an early age, definitely physical, mental, racial harassment and abuse. There are different poles of schizophrenia; there are positive and negative poles. It’s quite a deep sort of thing really and an interesting subject. They can be very, very within themselves and severely quiet and introverted and don’t fit in, to the point of quietness beyond that. Or they can be very, very edgy and moving around a lot and speaking incoherently and jumbling words. Fascinating stuff and frightening to believe that there are so many people who suffer from this sort of thing."

The interesting thing is that we’re not told any of this in the script. There’s just the odd line of dialogue.
"No, it doesn’t come out. That’s all you can go on as an actor, you’ve just got to go through the script and look at the dialogue that this man has with himself, with the children, and you get to understand the growth of him through the story. You think yes, I can see this and pinpoint certain things. Altering dialogue - there’s been an awful lot of dialogue that’s been altered in this film to suit the parameters of where we’re at and what we’re doing with it.

"Alan Wilson, the writer, lovely Welsh guy, he was here the other day. He’d based it all on a guy that he knew when he was a kid; it actually really happened. That guy was slightly middle class and fairly well groomed and had this military bearing. But he kept them hostage in this particular area at one point with this air rifle or whatever it was. And Julian himself had had a similar sort of event happen to him. It’s funny because if you go back in a lot of people’s lives, a lot of young boys I think have had experiences to some degree of something like that, even if it’s only briefly. I remember when I was a young man, there was a guy lived round the corner from us - working class, council estate areas - who used to be in the Navy. He was probably only in his mid-twenties, late twenties at that time but to us he was a big adult.

"He used to love this whole idea of fighting with us on the green, having punch-ups with us. Playful to start with but then they would end up really quiet serious. In this film there is a scene - I couldn’t believe it when I read it - this fight he has with the kids and it really brought back those images and reminiscences of that whole thing with that guy. Because it would turn quite serious at times. You’d get a clout and you’d think, wait a minute. Though whether he was like that or not, I don’t know, you just have to go with all these different pictures and images in your mind that you remember. I’ve experienced and met people like that. Funnily enough, since we’ve been on the set there have been two lads who walk around here and both of them are schizophrenics. It’s really bizarre."

How are you finding coping with a very young cast?
"Luckily I’m not too bad with kids because I come from a very big family and I think I’ve got about 18, 19 nieces and nephews. I think I’m lagging in the child department myself because my eldest niece has now got children of her own. I’m now a great uncle, it’s just ridiculous! So I’m quite good with kids and coming from a big family I think you just get used to that kind of thing. So I’m good at being around them and handling them. But they are raw, these kids. When they’re not filming, they’ve got some energy. But we were all 14, 15 once, I understand that.

"So it’s just about keeping them focussed because it is a serious topic we’re dealing with here. There are serious scenes. The build-up towards the end, there are some very serious scenes there with the kids and they have to understand that. And I think they do, and they’re good kids. They’re a really good bunch of kids, they really are, and they’re doing a cracking job because their energy’s in for it. It’s just those inbetween moments when we’re not filming. It’s just keeping them focussed, keeping them entertained, they’ve got things to do. They are all six completely different individuals, and that’s nice, that suits a gang I suppose."

What have you been up to since last we spoke in 2004?
"Well, funnily enough, not a great amount. I did some stuff for the BBC and I’ve been in touch with certain directors, obviously very closely with directors I’ve worked with, about other projects. There are a couple of much bigger things in the pipeline coming up which I’d better not say anything about them right now. Because it either puts the kibosh on them or you just end up looking stupid if it doesn’t happen. In fact I’ve had a couple of phone calls since being on this set."

Did The Last Horror Movie have an effect on your career? Do people know who you are now?
"It’s a weird one, that one. Sort of yes and no. The funny thing about The Last Horror Movie, as you said Mike, I know you can put a label of ‘cult’ on any movie but it was a particular kind of movie and we all know that. It was aimed at a certain market. Or rather, the film could only be aimed at a certain market. People either took to it or they didn’t. It's interesting to see that on all the votings that the film got that I heard about, you know when they vote for films on the video stores or IMDB or any of these kinds of places, there seemed to be this fifty-fifty split which I would say is pretty fair because it is a film that you either love or you hate. But I would rather be in a movie like that than something that people just come out of and think, ‘That was all right.’ What I would call a car park movie: by the time you’ve got to the car park you’ve forgotten about it.

"Certain people have seen it. I don’t know, it’s a funny one. Like anything else, I just think that if it had had a really big release - not knocking Tartan because they did what they did with the film that they had and they did a great job. But obviously certain distributors would have handled it differently. If it had had a really big distributor and posters and things had been plastered everywhere then obviously that has an effect on you as an actor and on your career because so many more people go and see it. What I was pleased about was that there were so many more people who saw the film who I wouldn’t have thought would have gone to see it, or who I personally would have thought wouldn’t have even liked it. So I was quite surprised by certain corners of response where there were people who went to see it and I thought, ‘You went to see that? I wouldn’t have thought that would be up your street.’ But they did.

"And an awful lot of people who I thought wouldn’t like it, really loved it, and that really surprised me. Why it surprised me, I don’t know. I guess because I always had that thing of: it’s quite brutal and it has a certain kind of unique energy about it. The Last Horror Movie, there’s a very unique energy about that film. It certainly has no formula whatever. It’s off on its own somewhere. What it did for my career though: there’s a little bit of a leap up the ladder and a lot more people notice you and they come up to you. People have come up to me and said, ‘I saw you in a film called The Last Horror Movie.’

"I’ve had an awful lot of people tell me that they’d seen the trailer because the trailer was on the front of DVDs of things like The Assassination of Richard Nixon with Sean Penn and films like that. Much bigger, starrier projects. So when that was happening I got phone calls from France, Spain, all over the Goddamn place, saying, ‘We’ve just seen your trailer! We’ve just seen your trailer!’ So never knock a trailer. I think a trailer is certainly a fantastic advertising tool for a film. If you can get a great trailer and you can get it on the right films, my God, people will queue up to see your film then, because they just suddenly see it and go, ‘Wow, let's get that!’

"But I was thrilled when Julian phoned me up one day and said, ‘Have you seen the charts?’ I said, ‘What charts?’ It was Blockbuster and we were second. For about a month we were the second most popular rented movie in the country which I thought was brilliant. And hats off to Julian because he was the one who lived with that movie from beginning to end. He trawled it through all the festival circuit and the awards we picked up. The awards I picked up and the awards he picked up. It was just fantastic. It went a lot further than we both ever even expected at all, so it did great for us. And Fangoria, hats off to them because I know Fangoria have got a huge audience in the States and that really helped as well. They did an awful lot of advertising for it."

website: www.kevinhowarth.com

Director: Melanie Ainsley
Writers: Melanie Ainsley, Sam Voutas
Producer: Sam Voutas
Cast: Frances Marrington, Sam Voutas, Katrina J Kiely
Country: Australia
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc

It would be pretty cool if a DVD turned up in the post with nothing to indicate what it was except that somebody had written on it ‘watch me’. As it happens, I had already been contacted by producer Sam Voutas and checked out the movie’s website so I had some idea what I was in for.

Voutas and director Melanie Ainsley are both Australians who were raised in China (although Ainsley was actually born in Canada) but the biggest influence on this movie isn’t Aussie or Chinese cinema, it’s the post-Ring vogue for Japanese horror. The film-makers cite Dario Argento as an influence too, although that’s less apparent.

Instead of a cursed video tape, Watch Me concerns an e-mail attachment, a video file depicting sickeningly horrific sexual violence which spreads from computer to computer like a virus, albeit a lot slower. Anyone who opens and views the file receives a fatal visit from a spooky young woman with red hair and a yellow dress, who walks backwards for some reason.

Jill (Katrina J Kiely, also in the bonkers sci-fi spoof Atomic Spitballs) and Tess (Frances Marrington: Purge, A Nocturne) are taking a film studies course at some unspecified Aussie university. Their thesis on the role of the voyeur requires Jill to rent three films from Taku, a fellow student nicknamed Freakboy who finances his studies through a library of hardcore porn amassed over many years. Played by producer Voutas, Taku is a connoisseur of filth, inured to its effects yet still enthusiastic about it as a genre. So when Jill mysteriously dies as a result of watching an e-mail attachment, Tess seeks Taku’s help to solve the mystery.

Along the way more people die including fellow students and two cops investigating Jill’s death. Eventually Tess and Taku - who have both watched the video clip and survived - manage to track down a recipient before he watches it (the e-mail only travels to one computer at a time) and confront the ghost.

Watch Me is an enthusiastic and commendable indie horror feature with some good set pieces but which suffers from the curse of low budget film-making - over-ambition. The story isn’t cohesive enough to fully satisfy the viewer and the impression given is that Ainsley and Voutas were more concerned with the parts of the film than the whole. As I have observed before, a ghost story needs to be constructed as a mystery and we need to find out at the end what has been happening and why, the pieces falling into place for the audience and whichever characters we are empathising with.

In Ring, this film’s most obvious antecedent, we eventually found out who the spooky girl was, why she was on a video tape and why she crawled out of people’s TVs. The explanation may have been enigmatic and debatable, but it was there. The ghost story in Watch Me doesn’t have an explanation per se, only the realisation by Taku and Tess as to why they both - and they alone - survived viewing the clip. This ties in to Taku’s extensive experience of hardcore porn and a traumatic event in Tess’ past but to be honest the explanation doesn’t really hold water; it makes a kind of sense but it’s not satisfying.

There are certainly some great scenes in Watch Me but their strength comes from characterisation more than plot, the most notable being Taku’s experiment on Tess, forcing her to watch the clip and videoing the process in the hope of finding out what kills her - except it doesn’t. But these scenes are strung together in a story which meanders somewhat. For example, it takes quite some time before we realise that Tess is our main protagonist, in fact before we even meet her. Before that the film concentrates on Jill and introduces us to Taku. It’s an imbalanced plot structure which a more carefully worked out script might have solved.

That’s the problem. This script has been filmed before it was ready. It needed a few more drafts to iron out the narrative structure and better establish the backstory behind the spookiness which otherwise comes across as somewhat arbitrary in places. The red-haired ghost girl is undeniably frightening, both in her conception and her execution, but we never find out her motives and her methods seems inconsistent. Some victims are found dead with their eyes sewn shut, others simply disappear. Some die while watching the clip, others succumb shortly afterwards.

That said, these criticisms should not detract from the film’s successes. We really care about these characters (once we know which ones we’re meant to care about) and the threat, the danger is keenly felt. I don’t mind ghosts being slightly derivative when they’re as spooky as this one. The acting is good and the production values throughout are highly commendable. The direction is snappy when it needs to be, languorous when languor is required. In technical terms, the two things that let the film down slightly are the flat video quality and the use of what look like genuine, unaltered homes as sets. I would never recommend making your lead characters film students simply because it makes the film inevitably look like a student production (which this is not).

So in a sense the film is overambitious in terms of story but sells itself short in terms of mise-en-scene, using found locations that don’t tell us about the characters because the characters haven’t created those homes. But I’m sounding unduly critical here. I really enjoyed Watch Me and I was genuinely scared by parts of it - and you can’t ask for too much more than that.

Ainsley and Voutas have previously collaborated on the sci-fi feature film Crash Test - about an escaped crash test dummy - adapted from Voutas’ short student project, and on the Beijing-set documentary The Last Breadbox. Ainsley’s previous film was the horror short Butcher which, like Crash Test, also featured Katrina J Kiely.

Also in the cast are Tanya McHenry (as the ghost), Steve Van Spall (who played the lead role in Crash Test), Glen Hancox (who was the Dean of a film school in Neighbours!), Celeste Barry and Dave Peterson (both also in Crash Test), Thomas Lim (Marco Polo, Son of the Dragon), Sharn Treloar (Magnificent Deed) and George Ivanoff who provided a voice for I, Rocket (a short animated film by Russell Devlin who also made Seventh Victim - everyone in Australia is ultimately connected to my mate Russell, it seems).

Make-up and effects are credited to Louise Monnington (who worked on a Star Wars fan film) and Justin Dix (who directed a Star Wars fan film and then got to work on the real Star Wars prequels!). Xue Feng was the cinematographer while the DV cinematography is the work of Brett Anstey, director of Damned by Dawn.

Watch Me is a decent, well-crafted, scary slice of Down Under indie horror (filmed in both Oz and China) although it does make you want to see the same people make something more Australian. The thing about J-horror is that no-one does it as well as the Japanese. I would like to see Voutas and Ainsley make a thoroughly Australian (or even Sino-Australian) horror film, with a script that has been rewritten to within an inch of its life and deep, rich cinematography. That could be bloody great.

MJS rating: B

Director: Steve Balderson
Writers: Steve Balderson, Joseph Suglia
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Matt Riddlehoover
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

If you’ve read my review of Breathe Safely, the inarguable Worst British Film Ever Made, you may recall a phrase which I borrowed from a TV critic to describe director Paul Push - “a man who probably masturbates to videos of himself masturbating.” Little did I realise when I used that delightful turn of phrase that only a few months later I would be watching a film about a man who literally does masturbate to a video of himself masturbating.

Watch Out is a unique film. From Steve Balderson we would expect no less. Unlike Steve’s previous features, this one is adapted from a novel; author Joseph Suglia shares screen credit. I haven’t read the novel (never even heard of it, to tell the truth but I understand that it’s pretty famous) and I’ll wager that most of you haven’t either so I can only review this as a film in its own right.

Trying to explain what the movie is about... well, it’s easier to say who it’s about. Matt Riddlehoover gives an extraordinary, bravura performance as Jonathan Barrows: on-screen pretty much constantly and also providing a voice-over throughout much of the film. While narration is generally frowned upon in narrative cinema, it would be impossible to film this story without it because Barrows spends a considerable amount of time alone and it’s what he’s thinking as much as - possibly more than - what he’s doing which matters.

Because Jonathan Barrows is neither heterosexual nor homosexual, he is an autosexual: in love with, or at least physically attracted to, himself. In one of the movie’s most memorable scene - and frankly Watch Out is a movie consisting almost entirely of memorable scenes - Barrows has sex with a blow-up doll having first sellotaped a photo of himself over the doll’s face. Even when he shares a scene with other people, it’s Barrows’ internal monologue that drives the film although there are some excellent extended cameos along the way.

Plot-wise, very little happens. After black and white, 1920s-style opening titles the prologue see Mr and Mrs Barrows (Jon Niccum and Nancy Pujol) attempting to arrange their teenage son’s deflowerment, despite his very evident lack of interest in girls. Although the film as a whole is deliberately stilted and mannered, the mannerisms and, ah, stilting in this prologue are more over-the-top than throughout the rest of the picture. Watch Out as a whole reminded me of the work of John Waters, the differentiation being that most of it is like later John Waters stuff and this first sequence is more like his early work (though without the shit-eating or the overweight transvestites). Jonathan’s parents try to pair him off with the inbred girl next door and when that doesn’t work they hire a prostitute then sit and watch the attempted intercourse, armed with popcorn and palmcorder.

The bulk of the film sees Barrows, now grown-up but still a virgin (if one discounts blow-up dolls and his own right hand) on his way to a job interview at a small college in a small town in Michigan. He checks into a hotel staffed by a creepy, gay desk clerk who comes on to Barrows by assuring him that he’s not gay. At the college, the sassy receptionist has no knowledge of the interview and the professor who should be interviewing him only takes one class a week - so Barrows is forced to stay in the little town for a few days.

And that’s about it, plotwise. Barrows has a series of nonsexual, sex-related encounters with men, women and couples, most of whom come on to him and all of whom he rejects with a sneer. Eventually he manages to track down the elusive Dr Mendoza by - and I’m sure this is not coincidental - hiding in a closet.

Watch Out sits somewhere between intense character study and black comedy; there are some laugh-out-loud moments but really it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Barrows’ brooding, supercilious view of humanity as something which has reached its pinnacle in him reminded me in small parts of Fight Club (referenced on a character’s T-shirt). He really is a loathsome character - literally a pretentious wanker - and yet fascinating because everyone who has ever felt an outsider or imagined that no-one understands them can relate to his situation and think, there but for the grace of God...

Barrows is absolutely convinced that he is better than everyone else: smarter, socially superior and certainly better-looking. Rather than furtively having one off the wrist, he really does have sex with himself. Not literally (he’s not that talented or well-hung!) but as near as damn it. In one scene he rolls around on his bed taking Polaroid photos of his dick, in another he leaves his table in a restaurant to nip into the gents with a couple of little tubs of margarine for an exhilarating sherman.

While my non-British readers get to grips with phrases like “an exhilarating sherman”, it’s worth noting that Watch Out is devoid of euphemisms, slang or obscenities (apart from the ‘coming soon’ gag in the publicity). Barrows’ detached view of sexuality is emphasised by his unflinching use of the terms ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ (along with ‘labia’, ‘glans’ - it’s like a medical textbook in places). Visually the film is just as explicit. We never see a cum-shot and I think I’m right in saying that we never actually see Barrows/Riddlehoover with a full erection. But there is plenty of full-frontal nudity and Matt Riddlehoover’s devotion to duty is nothing short of exemplary. Many actors would have blanched at some of the things he has to do.

Then, after he has tracked down Dr Mendoza - and berated him for his polemic about the importance of marriage and community in a scene which never shows us any students, raising the question of whether Mendoza is talking to himself - suddenly everything changes and Watch Out becomes a different film. A horror film.

Twenty minutes from the end, a caption announces ‘Act Two’ which caught me by surprise because I had completely forgotten the ‘Act One’ caption seventy minutes earlier. In this much shorter second part we’re back in Barrows’ home town including a fairly lengthy sequence about his teenage babysitter and her boyfriend who become two of several victims of gory, sick violence at the hands of her thirteen-year-old charge. Most of the victims are known to Barrows personally but one is a mega-selling pop singer whom he kidnaps before chopping off her toes one by one. She is called Margaret but let’s face it, she’s Britney.

And then the film ends... and the reviewer is left to work out what it all means.

Watch Out is an easy film to like, if you’re not put off by things like vomit, masturbation and graphic, anatomical descriptions of sex acts. Or a man forced to eat his own severed penis. It’s fascinating, that’s what it is and that’s what all Steve Balderson features (with the exception of the work-for-hire documentary Underbelly) are. While it doesn’t have the opulence or grandeur of Steve’s masterpiece Firecracker, Watch Out is a step up (and a natural progression) from Pep Squad, sharing that film’s hyper-real dialogue, characterisation and cinematography.

But that’s what it’s like, not what it’s about. I’m prevaricating because I don’t know what Watch Out is about. It’s about Jonathan Barrows and his love affair with himself, that’s the best I can offer you. I suspect that the novel is one of those unique literary beasts like American Psycho or The Dice Man that digs deep into the disturbed yet strangely sane psyche of an individual who not only believes himself to be great but actually knows it. If it is, then there is no doubt that Steve has done a magnificent job of translating it to cinema.

Because this is indubitably and very recognisably a Steve Balderson film - which means that it is visually astounding and it takes chances that no other film-maker’s work would, not just for shock value but as part of a cohesive whole. Watching one of Steve’s films one always feels like a participant rather than an audience, as if the director is sitting in the next seat, occasionally whispering, “Ooh, there’s a good bit coming up here,” and sometimes as genuinely eager to find out what happens next as the rest of us. For example there is a scene in a restaurant where Barrows orders oysters and then waits for them to be served: an unblinking, locked-off shot of a man sitting at a table while muzak plays and other diners can be seen in the background. I didn’t time it but this seems to go on for three or four minutes - it’s probably less but with something like this it’s how long it feels, not how long it is.

Oo-er. Sorry

The point is that this is a very long, uncut shot of a man doing nothing except waiting and most directors would not have the balls to show this. Somehow the combination of Steve’s direction and Riddlehoover’s performance justifies this. It’s masterful film-making. It leaves you in awe.

What confuses me about Watch Out is its two-act structure and especially the imbalance of it. The impression I got - rightly or wrongly - was that this was two parallel timelines, showing us what would happen if Jonathan Barrows kept his psychosexual angst bottled up inside him (Act One) or released it through sadistic violence (Act Two). That may be completely wide of the mark but I can only report what I saw and speculate on its meaning. I’m not even entirely sure that everything we see is real and really happening, harking back to that Fight Club riff.

There is no doubt that Watch Out has the potential to be one of the great cult films of all time, probably more so than Firecracker because of its outré images and themes (and the existing fanbase for the source novel). I’m the first person to review this but already I can imagine the conflicting comments on the IMDB: some people will lambast this as a load of pretentious arthouse crap that just tries to shock. That’s because some people are very, very good at missing the point. Other folk will watch this then pick their jaws off the floor and rush to tell all their friends that they must watch it too. Steve considers this his best film to date and, ironically for such an obtuse story, it probably is his most direct and personal feature.

As usual, he has assembled an eclectic cast of remarkable performers including Peter Stickles from Fred Olen Ray-directed vampire TV series The Lair, prolific B-movie actor Jeff Dylan Graham (Cremains, Dead and Rotting, Dead Clowns, Dorm of the Dead), Starina Johnson (who was in Riddlehoover’s MySpace sensation film To a Tee) and BBW performance poet/burlesque dancer Lady Monster. Betti O, who played Miss Nelson in Pep Squad and Rosemary in Firecracker, is terrific as the sassy college receptionist and the very wonderful Amy Kelly, who was Susie in Firecracker and the unforgettable Terra in Pep Squad is superb as a forward woman in a bar who tries to pick up Barrows by drawing attention to her breasts. Why isn’t this woman a big star yet?

The crew was small, with Steve doing his own cinematography. Rob Kleiner, variously of such underground beat combos as Tub Ring, Mindless Self Indulgence, Super 8 Bit Brothers and The Baltimores, provides a masterful score that is almost worth the price of admission on its own. The film's website includes several 'video blogs' and the whole creative process is being chronicled in the third of Steve's feature-length documentaries, Wamego: Ultimatum. Also worth noting and praising is the way that Steve has made all the publicity shots for Watch Out look like proper old-fashioned 8x10 stills with captions. Nicely retro!

Do I understand Watch Out? Not completely. If you want straightforward narrative, Pep Squad remains Steve’s most accessible film. But Watch Out is not a film about storytelling, it’s a film about characterisation. It’s about sex, non-sex, psychology, society and a psychopathic sociopath. It’s extraordinary, a film which settles down into your consciousness and is still there days later, images and ideas flashing in and out of the viewer’s brain.

It is exactly the sort of film which those of us who have discovered American independent cinema’s best-kept secret expect from young Mr Balderson. Steve B has done it again.

MJS rating: A

Director: Mark Jeavons
Writer: Mark Jeavons
Producer: Mark Jeavons
Cast: Rob Leetham, Adam Rickitt, Gabrielle Amies
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.peteblaggit.com
Watch now - Distrify link at end of review

The title of this low-budget sci-fi comedy unfortunately brings to mind the notorious turkey Whatever Happened to Harold Smith. Touted as the great white hope of British cinema, that film flopped on its belly and killed the nascent cinematic career of Robert Lindsay stone dead. In its day, it was a byword for the hubris of the British film industry. I never actually saw it, but then neither did anybody. That’s the point. Years later, Lindsay is still doing penance for that mistake by starring in yet another joke-free series of My Family.

Anyway, that film has no connection with this one.

Peter Blaggit’s real name is Pete Blagmore and we’re told that he acquired the nickname ‘Blaggit’ because of his constant tendency to blag things, although this idea is slightly scuppered by the fact that not once in this movie do we see him ever attempt to blag anything. Blaggit (played by Rob Leetham, who was also in another low-budget British sci-fi, Waiting for Dawn) is a loser, a jobbing wedding video producer with unkempt hair who still wears the same hideous check suit he had in the 1980s.

Helping him is his brother Eugene (Andy Pandini: Harold’s Going Stiff) and their mate Clive (Corrie’s Adam Rickitt). Blaggit still lives with his ex-wife Tracey (Gabrielle Amies, who is both co-producer and executive producer) despite having been divorced for six years. A tragic secret from their married life explains some of what has happened since.

Pete Blaggit is an angry, unpleasant man; angry with everyone around him because he is angry with himself. He rants and yells and orders people about, including people getting married. Some of his venomous insults are quite imaginative but after a while this constant yelling and puerile abuse (he’s fond of calling people ‘faggots’ which seems an inappropriate americanism) becomes a bit tedious.

After an amusing fake archive advert for Blagmore Wedding Services, the film takes a long time to get going and, when it does, it’s never clear where it’s trying to get to. Weird things start happening to Pete Blaggit. His wife’s fridge seems to contain a dimensional portal. He sees an ugly, small blue thing which calls him ‘Daddy’. He gets abducted by aliens and deposited back on Earth naked, but fortunately with his clothes nearby.

Eugene also sees weird things happening while watching The Wizard of Oz but that may be due to the pot he’s smoking at the time.

Two white skinhead thugs (Anthony Baines and Russell Barnett) threaten him about some money he owes his ex-wife. And two black brothers (Carl Coleman and Christopher Tajah), who are somehow connected with the two white thugs, want revenge for ruining a wedding day.

Via a casino, Pete and Clive somehow get involved with a mysterious, moustachioed Russian, Uri Poppolochovechski. The film culminates with Pete being forced to help the white thugs and black brothers rob a warehouse, but then a load of stuff happens after that too.

If none of the above makes much sense then it’s a fair reflection of the film. Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit’s biggest problem is that not only do we never find out what happened to Pete Blaggit, we can’t even tell what’s happening to him while it’s happening. I’m sure writer-producer-director Mark Jeavons has the whole thing figured out in his head and here’s some reference near the end to an “alternate timeline” but honestly, the plot here is completely impenetrable.

The publicity talks about Blaggit having “a mind-blowing opportunity to put right his past wrongs, will Pete be able to turn his life around before it's too late?” so throughout the film the viewer is waiting for some sort of It’s a Wonderful Life-style revelation or perhaps a Groundhog Day second chance but nothing like that happens. There are just some weird, unexplained things, then the film ends. There’s no consistency to the weird things, no structure to them, they don’t even build in intensity or frequency.

Surely, thinks the viewer, at some point either Pete Blaggit will discover what is going on, or we will. But we don’t and neither, it seems, does he.

For some reason, Uri is also played (very obviously) by Rob Leetham. When he first appears to Clive, after Pete has nipped off to the gents, the thick accent and even thicker facial hair led me to assume that Uri was Blaggit in disguise, perhaps having travelled back from the future, trying to put things rights. Most of Uri’s scenes are on the phone and he also has an abusive turn of phrase but whether he is supposed to be Pete Blaggit, or just somebody who looks like Pete Blaggit, or the actor who was originally going to play Uri just didn’t turn up - who can say?

I have no idea what was going on with the robbery at the end. Clive seems shocked at a late-in-the-day revelation from Tracey about Pete’s compulsive gambling, despite having spent much of the film with him in casinos. And an early scene of Eugene smoking dope while watching Wizard of Oz and listening to Dark Side of the Moon in synch is completely at odds with his character throughout the rest of the film as ‘the sensible, responsible brother.’

The film is quite nicely directed and the actors all give good performances, especially Rickitt who is much better than one would expect from a former soap star in a low-budget indie. Unfortunately Leetham’s voice and mannerisms have a distinct touch of the Simon Pegg about them and this is likely to generate unhelpful comparisons with Shaun of the Dead. The effects vary from good (glowing fridge) to awful (blue thing). The music by Phil Mountford (who scored a Tomb Raider fanfilm) seems pretty good.

Honestly, I don’t know what else I can say. Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit just doesn’t make any sort of narrative sense. It’s not trying to be arty or pretentious or avant-garde, I think it’s trying to be clever and smart. But it raises lots of questions that it never answers. Not philosophical questions or moral ones but basic questions like ‘Who is he?’ and ‘Why is he doing that?’ and ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘How does this bit relate to anything else?’

This could have been a likeable little film. It starts out endearingly as a comedy about a wedding video producer who is monstrously unsuited to his chosen profession, but then it drags. A lo-o-o-ng sequence of Pete ruining the black guy’s wedding makes its point but then shows no sign of stopping. And when the promised weirdness appears, any hope of a coherent plot goes out the window. At the end of the film we have no idea what has happened or why.

I don’t think it’s just me. I rarely read other reviews before writing my own but on this occasion I had to see if anyone else had figured out what was going on. All I could find was negative reviews which thought the film made no sense and positive reviews which pretty much paraphrased the publicity about an opportunity to turn his life around. I can’t find any evidence that anyone, apart from Mark Jeavons, actually knows what’s supposed to happen in this film.

All credit to Jeavons and his cast and crew for the work they’ve put into this film, most of which was shot (on super-16mm) in 2006 and then sat on the shelf waiting for sufficient funds to be completed. Any feature-length film is an achievement but I would be lying if I said that watching this was in any way satisfying.

MJS rating: C+

Director: Bernard Carr
Writers: Dorothy Reid, Maurice Geraghty
Producer: Hal Roach Jr
Cast: George Zucco, some really irritating kids
Year of release: 1948
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (FFF 2002)

Those who complain about ‘racism’ in old movies are often interfering, know-nothing PC loons, and those who actually alter old movies to eliminate such ‘racism’ are even worse (the recent rewording of intertitles in a restoration of the 1925 Lost World is an example). That said, some films are jaw-droppingly racist in a way which cannot be excused in modern times - but their very nature means that they should very definitely not be tampered with. It’s important for people to see how casually racist even a minor kids’ film could be, reflecting the appalling state of American society only a couple of generations ago.

Who Killed Doc Robbin? is an Our Gang comedy in all but name, with five lovable (white) ragamuffins: the (male) leader, the (female) voice of reason, the boffin, the coward and the little one. Plus two black kids credited (both actors and characters) as ‘Dis and Dat’. It’s made abundantly clear that these two are not part of the gang per se.

The story starts with a doctor’s surgery exploding then cuts to a courtroom where a nurse stands accused of the doctor’s murder. The kids disrupt proceedings but under questioning (and via flashbacks) reveal that the explosion was probably caused by the trigger of a nuclear device(!) created by local repair-man/inventor ‘Fix-It’ Dan - who is promptly arrested.

Seeking to clear Dan’s name, the kids investigate the smoking remains of the surgery and find a tunnel into an ‘abandoned’ old house nearby, full of scientific equipment, caged animals (for experiments), secret doors - and ultimately a (man in a suit) gorilla. They find a dead lawyer in a cupboard who later turns out to be merely unconscious, they send their dog to the town jail to fetch Dan and the police, and in a plot far more complex than it needs to be, the ‘gorilla’ turns out to be the still-alive Doc Robbin (George Zucco: House of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Hand - though it’s actually the legendary Charles Gemora, uncredited, in the suit), who was up to no good. And Dan is exonerated of the explosion because his trigger was useless without the rest of the device.

Dis and Dat mostly run around looking scared - like Stepin Fetchit’s nephews. In a dark room they appear only as two pairs of animated eyes, and one of them turns white through an optical effect when he first encounters the gorilla. But the worst scene has the smaller one falling into a large washing machine. No, he doesn’t emerge ‘clean’ and white, though he is coated in white soapsuds. But his clothes somehow become detached, emerge separately and are put on by a chimpanzee who has broken loose. And as the chimp runs around the house everyone thinks it’s the little black kid! It’s astounding that this sort of stuff was considered perfectly fine for children even after the horrors of WW2 (when black GIs were formed into their own battalions and confined almost exclusively to non-military duties such as roadbuilding).

The casual use of a nuclear bomb as a McGuffin, three years after Hiroshima, is also astounding, and one of the kids recites a poem of his own devising in court about how “the Japs” must have “had a fit” when their city was destroyed! (It’s tastefully entitled ‘Bombs Away’ and all the grown-ups find it delightful.)

The film was reportedly retitled Sinister House in the UK and has been shown on US TV as Curly and His Gang in the Haunted Mansion (although the building in question is neither a mansion nor haunted). Director Bernard Carr had been an assistant director on Hal Roach's prehistoric epic One Million BC and had directed a previous film about the same group of kids, Curley, in 1947. There does not appear to have been a third film in the series.

This 50-minute film just about falls into the SF/horror genre by virtue of ‘Fix-It’ Dan’s atomic home technology, the gorilla-as-stock monster, and the spooky old house. It is a pain to sit through however: the cowardly white kid is particular annoying, being an even worse actor than his comrades - and that’s saying something - and having an almost ultrasonic scream. Nevertheless, anyone who thinks that America fought WW2 for democracy and freedom should be forced to watch this (or something like it) so they can see how little difference there was between Hitler’s views on race and those of Joe Q Average in post-war USA.

MJS rating: D

Director: Tetsuro Takeuchi
Writers: Tetsuro Takeuchi, Satoshi Takaki
Producers: Tetsuro Takeuchi, Kaichie Furata
Cast: Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, Drum Wolf, Masashi Endo
Year of release: 1999
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: advance UK DVD (Artsmagic)

This is mighty crazy rock’n’roll zombie jet movie super ace, yes? Yes, very much so indeed OK!

Wild Zero has no pretensions. It is not great art, not great cinema, it is simply unadulterated fun, filled with zombies, guns, motorbikes and constant cries of “Lock’n’loll!” It’s bonkers and it’s brilliant.

Guitar Wolf are a (real) three-piece Japanese band who play Ramones-esque punk rock. The three members are called Guitar Wolf (who rides a souped-up motorbike), Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf (who follow him in a car). All three are deeply cool - all quiffs and leather jackets - though there is a wonderfully understated subtext in this film that Bass and Drum both think Guitar is faintly embarrassing.

Anyway, we kick off with an enormous fleet of golden flying saucers heading for Earth, a fairly blatant crib from Mars Attacks!, and we see Guitar Wolf’s biggest fan, Ace (Masashi Endo, who does the voice of Scorpos in the original Japanese version of Beast Wars) grooving away at one of their gigs. Ace wanders into a tense, armed stand-off between Guitar and a crooked promoter named Captain (Makoto Inamiya: Zero Woman Returns) and in return for his help is given a whistle that will summon the band whenever he is in trouble.

Shortly afterwards, Ace stops his small motorbike at a service station where he accidentally foils a hamfisted hold-up and meets a cute girl named Tobyo (Kwancharu Shitichai). Further down the road he comes across a bunch of zombies attacking a yakuza boss and roars back to the service station to rescue Tobyo before she suffers the same fate. Ace summons Guitar Wolf, and also mixed up in the action are a geeky young couple who were two-thirds of the attempted hold-up team, and a sexy arms dealer who has the most extraordinary arsenal of automatic weaponry (the yakuza boss was on his way to meet her when the zombies attacked).

There is no real attempt at explaining the zombies. Presumably it is connected in some way with the golden UFOs which reappear briefly at the end before being defeated by a sword(!), but there is also talk of a crashing meteorite. In fact, there’s not much attempt to explain anything. What there is, is hordes of zombies in pretty good make-up and subjected to plenty of highly enjoyable digital head-exploding effects. And fast cars, motorbikes and the occasional Humvee. And leather jackets, quiffs and lock’n’loll!

To add to the chaos, the enraged (and injured) Captain tracks down the band - and Tobyo reveals a rather surprising secret. There is also a significant, if somewhat unexpected, plea for tolerance and love

Wild Zero is a hilarious, nonsensical ride through sci-fi and rock’n’roll cliches with its tongue not so much in its cheek as ripped out and waved around. It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s gory, it’s sexy, it’s crazy and somehow - don’t ask me how - it all works.

Grab yourself a slice of Wild Zero now, say goodbye to all your critical faculties, and wallow in an hour and a half of LOCK’N’LOLL ZOMBIE JETU MOVIE!!!! Yes!!!

MJS rating: A-

Director: Stephen W Parsons
Writer: Stephen W Parsons
Producer: Simon Sprackling
Cast: Tiana Benjamin, Doc Brown, Fenella Fielding
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Wishbaby is a powerful, original, mesmerising film which may, I suspect, be seen in retrospect as one of the core titles of the British Horror Revival. An initial viewing suggests that it could be important in defining the subgenre in the same way that The Last Horror Movie, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later are.

EastEnders’ Tiana Benjamin (also in Harry Potter IV) stars as Maxine, a 15-year-old black schoolgirl from a rough background. With no father and an absent mother, she lives with her older (half-?)brother Colin (rapper/comedian Doc Brown) in a squat in an empty office building. Men climbing the stairs to visit the Russian pimp on the floor above occasionally mistake her for a whore. Colin is a basically honest guy, holding down a job as a motorcycle courier and looking out for Max, although he’s hooked on meth.

Maxine inhabitants the world of today’s urban teens, the sort of environment where phones are routinely passed around to show happy-slapping videos. She doesn’t always attend school, sometimes bunking off to hang around the local ice rink, and she is resentful of the social workers who (as she sees it) interfere in things. But Max has a sense of moral values, so when she and her friend Jeanette (Leona Ekembe) see four boys attacking an old lady in a subway, she chases them away and the two girls help the old lady home.

Sometimes films stand or fall on the strength of one casting decision and in this case the film stands proud because casting Fenella Fielding in this role - Eve - was a stroke of genius. She is absolutely perfect. Now in her mid-seventies, she retains her slightly husky, breathy voice with its perfect diction and she emanates exactly the air of faded, genteel oddness that the part requires. Not eccentric as such, not batty, in fact slightly unnerving. She could have gone over-the-top, she could have been a descendent of Carry On Screaming’s Valeria Watt but rather she underplays the whole thing wonderfully and if this role can be related to any other in her career it’s actually (and bizarrely) Dougal and the Blue Cat that springs to mind.

In that once-seen-never-forgotten theatrical spin-off from The Magic Roundabout, an uncredited Fielding supplied the voice of an unseen being who goaded and coaxed the titular azure feline Buxton in his efforts to take over the garden by first flattery and then force. No-one who has ever seen Dougal and the Blue Cat can be left in any doubt that it’s an allegory for Naziism and Fielding’s cultured, coercing tones - serious, even sensual - are a major part of the adult subtext within that children’s film. When you realise or discover that she also provided the uncredited voice of the Village’s public address system in some episodes of The Prisoner, it adds even more layers to her role in Dougal and the Blue Cat. And hence, somewhat circuitously, to this one.

Her stand-out Carry On role may mark her in the cultural zeitgeist as a kooky vamp but in fact she can be creepy without being kooky (and mysterious without being ooky). She is simply magnificent in Wishbaby, a stand-out performance in a uniformly excellent cast.

The thing is this: the reason that the youths attacked Eve was because she was pushing an old-fashioned pram which they had spotted contained not a real baby but a doll. An ugly blue doll. Max at first sees this as a sure sign that Eve is batty but when the youths who attacked Eve are attacked in a mysterious way, the teenager starts to wonder whether the wishbaby may have some real power after all - and she lets Eve teach her how to make one of her own. (The youths are attacked, one by one, after breaking into a recording studio one night. Coincidentally, a late-night, empty recording studio - albeit a slightly classier one - was also the setting for Eitan Arrusi’s Reverb, released to theatres mere weeks before Wishbaby came to DVD. Even more coincidentally, both films had the same camera assistant, James Friend.)

The important point here is that the wishbaby itself does not do the killing. This is not really a killer doll movie. Although there are a few scenes of limited movement by the doll and a range of interchangeable heads with various expressions, this is not a ‘living toy’ film. No, the perpetrator of these acts is ‘The Governess’,a figure from Eve’s upper class childhood. (In flashbacks, young Eve is played by producer Simon Sprackling’s daughter Liberty.)

Played with beautiful understatement, perfect elegance and just a hint of sub-dom danger by Claire Cox (ex-RSC with a long list of TV credits), the Governess is the real threat here, a mysterious and deadly supernatural entity who can best be summed up as a very English version of Ring’s Sadako. It’s not clear what she does; that’s one of the reasons why she is so scary (and yet beguiling too). I mean, it’s not clear who she is but it’s even less clear what she does. People see her; she appears, just not to everyone. Her appearance in a stuck lift with the two social workers is especially frightening because of the claustrophobic containment in that scene and the impossibility of (non-supernatural) access. (The male social worker is played by Tony Marshall who was Nelson the barman in Life on Mars. His female colleague is Sakuntala Ramanee who was in a 1989 Doctor Who adventure and played a teacher in one season of Grange Hill.)

Clever editing and smart direction leave us in no doubt that something is happening without being as simplistic as showing us reality, any level of reality. There is some way in which people kill their friends because they perceive them to be doll-faced nightmares but it’s really not even as simplistic as that. Furthermore, the Governess is not just a vehicle for others’ wishes, she is a being with her own agenda, not just to serve but also to bewitch - specifically to bewitch Colin. That blue doll may give the film its title and its publicity image but it is the Governess that sticks in your imagination, raising questions of morality and reality with every slight turn of her perfectly sculpted head.

At its core, Wishbaby is a Faustian tale. At first Max uses the power of her own wishbaby to deal with the problems that make her life a misery: the social workers, the pimp upstairs. But while she may control the doll, she doesn’t control the Governess. And wishing for her mum to return may take things too far. Is that even her mum? Colin thinks not. First-time actress Ann Faulkner is particularly disturbing as Max and Colin’s mother: she looks scary even before she starts doing scary things.

It is the nature of Faustian tales that the Faust character loses control, and this story sees sympathetic characters die before climaxing in a savage and desperate battle between Colin and the being who may or may not be his own mother. This is a frightening tale yet also a beguiling, intriguing, fascinating one. And the whole thing is set against the background of inner-city, working class life, as defiantly British as Urban Ghost Story or Colin. This is the epitome of the British Horror Revival.

First-time director Stephen W Parsons does a fantastic job in creating both the realism of Max and Colin’s grim, urban world and the faded upper class shadows of Eve’s former life, while brilliantly mixing in the unnerving work of the wishbabies and the Governess. Previous to this he has worked as a composer for twenty-odd years, his notable credits including Food of the Gods II, Split Second, the Simon Sprackling-directed Funny Man, Luke Goss-starring gangster biopic Charlie, dodgy faux-sequel Another 9½ Weeks and the glorious Howling II: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch (aka Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf).

Sprackling has mostly been working on DVD-extra documentaries since he made Funny Man in 1994, some of them produced by Jonathan Sothcott, who takes executive producer credit here. Parsons’ wife Jacqueline was associate producer. Parsons shares credit for the score with Francis Haines, who composed the cemetery theme in Return of the Living Dead. Artists on the soundtrack include Essency, Dat Boy Aktiv, the Cabal, SLG, Undawurld, Klub Mundi and Doc Brown himself.

Neill Gorton is unfortunately misspelt ‘Neil’ on his credit as Special FX Co-ordinator. Sarah Lockwood, who has worked on Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, is credited with ‘SFX make-up’ while regular make-up and hair was handled by fashion stylist Jay Turnbull, whose work has graced the cover of Bizarre magazine. Cinematographer David G Griffiths also photographed Journal of a Contract Killer. Dennis Madden, who has lit videos for Dannii Minogue and Prince, gets an ‘additional cinematography’ credit as does Luke ‘not related to Jack’ Cardiff. Madden and Sprackling subsequently collaborated on The Reeds. The editor was video artist Anke Trojan.

While many independent British horror films have difficulty getting publicity, Wishbaby actually made it into the nationals twice in the month of its release, although not necessarily for the right reasons. Ann Faulkner was charged with the murder of her partner of 13 years, who was killed when she drove over him following an argument. But in April 2009 she was found not guilty and also acquitted of manslaughter. Then a couple of weeks later Parsons himself was in the papers, explaining how he had asked the BBFC to increase the certification of the film.

Originally passed as a 15, Parsons successfully argued that it should be an 18, saying, “I deliberately set out to make a horror film for an adult audience” and citing the happy-slapping camera-phone scene as something which could be copied by kids. Which was good publicity for Wishbaby but, in all honesty, the BBFC were doing the director a favour because there is no way that this is an 18. It’s creepy, scary, has some very brief drug use and a bit of violence but nothing that a 15-year-old kid shouldn’t see.

But don’t let that put you off. This is a powerful, impressive British horror movie and should be high on your list of movies-to-see if you have any interest at all in the current healthy state of British horror cinema.

The DVD from 4 Digital Media includes a trailer and two short films. Rough Magik is a 40-minute Lovecraft tale from 2000, written and produced by Parsons, directed by Jamie Payne and starring Paul ‘Avon’ Darrow. Karma Magnet is a 17-minute thriller from 2008, produced by Sothcott, directed by Martin Kemp and starring his brother Gary.

MJS rating: A-

interview: Justin Whalin

interview: David Winning

interview: William Winckler

interview: Kevin Howarth (2004)

interview: Richard Wells

interview: David Warbeck

interview: Anna Walton

interview: Emmett Wallace

Hacked Off

interview: Julian Richards (April 2006)

interview: Matthew Jason Walsh

Witchouse 3: Demon Fire

Wrestlemaniac

interview: Kevin Howarth (2006)

Watch Me

Watch Out

Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit

Who Killed Doc Robbin?

Wild Zero

Wishbaby