Director: Richard Wenk as 'Danny Graves'
Writer: Larry Katz
Producer: Paul Brooks, Larry Katz, Jeanne Marie Van Cott
Cast: Michael Weston, Alexandra Holden, Austin Pendleton
Year of release: 2002
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK video (Metrodome)

Here’s a fun teen slasher movie with an interesting supporting cast. The local sheriff is Meat Loaf (using the name ‘Michael Aday’), the coroner is Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubinstein (her scenes with Meat Loaf are great), one of the boyfriends from Sex and the City is a teacher, and the main character’s mom was Miss DePesto in Moonlighting!

The principal cast is headed by Michael Weston (Cherry Falls) as High School nerd Brett and Alexandra Holden (In and Out) as Samantha, the head cheerleader for whom he carries a torch. The usual high school jolly interplay of ‘jocks’ and ‘losers’ is here interrupted by the anonymous delivery to Brett of a magical totem which will grant him three wishes. Like any red-blooded teenager, he wishes for a girl; specifically for Samantha to go to the prom with him. His second wish is for Samantha to fall in love with him. Both come true, much to the amazement of Brett and his dorky friend.

But at the same time, a series of very gruesome, apparently supernatural murders start striking down their fellow high school students. Something incredibly strong - and frankly quite imaginative - is on the prowl. Just what has this got to do with the magical totem, and can Brett use his last remaining wish to put everything right?

To take the second question first: what do you think? This is a teen slasher film, it’s light years away from the monochrome nihilism of Night of the Living Dead. Some sort of happy ending is pretty much guaranteed. As for the first question: that’s a big ‘don’t know.’ The Scooby-Doo resolution to the killer subplot has very little connection with Brett and Samantha’s situation.

Wishcraft is a fun 98 minutes of unpretentious, competently made teen horror, with some likable leads and some nicely underplayed comic relief from Meat Loaf and Rubinstein. The story doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense, but loose ends are tied up - in a fashion - and good triumphs over evil.

MJS rating: B

In August 2006, a few months after our chat about Darklands, my mate Julian Richards invited me down to South Wales to hang out on the set of his fourth featureSummer Scars. I grabbed a few words with Julian over lunch in the pub.

How far into your shoot are you?
“Just past midway. It’s a three-week shot and we’re on day ten now. We’re a little bit behind schedule because this particular film is all exterior daytime. We have no weather cover at all so we’re in the hands of the gods and they haven’t been too favourable on us the last two days. Our main location was flooded yesterday so we lost half a day there and because of some other weather issues we lost one and half days in the first week and a half. So we’re probably going to have to stick two days on the end of the schedule, which means we spend our contingency. So we’re still within budget but slightly behind schedule.”

Are you starting to wish you’d maybe written a couple of indoor scenes?
“It wouldn’t have worked for this type of film. The beauty of it is that it was something that we could shoot with available light, more or less in one location that wasn’t a set that we had to build. It was something that pre-exists. Also we’re only using a handheld camera. So we have no lighting, it could even be said to have taken on some of the Dogme rules, which works for our budget.”

How are you finding working with the kids?
“They always say ‘never work with children’ but the thing about these kids is they come from a pretty good drama workshop in Cardiff. They’ve done a lot of TV, they do Casualty and The Bill, so they know about acting, they know about not crossing the line, they know about their eyelines and their discipline offset is pretty good.

“So the challenge for me this time round, it’s the first time I’ve done a film which has so many characters all within one scene. It’s scene after scene after scene of between seven and nine different characters. It’s much, much more complicated than shooting a scene with just two, especially when you’re on a tight schedule because if you need close-ups, suddenly you’ve got to get nine of them instead of just two of them! It can be incredibly time-consuming. There’s a sort of cinema verite quality to this which makes it quite difficult to work out beforehand how things are going to be. You sketch it out in your mind, turn up on the day, go through it with them and then work out how you’re going to shoot it, as you’re shooting it. I can do that - but it’s a bit hairy at times!"

website: www.jingafilms.com

Directors: Mark Harriott, Mike Matthews
Writers: Mark Harriott, Mike Matthews
Producers: Mark Harriott, Mike Matthews, Nic Speranza
Cast: David Paisley, Jonathan Keane, Christina De Vallee, Jill Riddiford
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener (Peccadillo Pictures)
Watch niow - see end of review for Distrify link

Unhappy Birthday comes to us billed as ‘the gay Wicker Man’ and that’s not an unreasonable concept if one had to sum the film up in four words. It’s not a Darklands-style quasi-remake but it is set among an isolated, heavily religious island community.

And instead of one devoutly Christian copper we have a trio of thirty-somethings on a weekend away: Sadie (Christina De Vallee, from off that marmite advert!) wears bright-coloured leggings and large, plastic ear-rings; her boyfriend Rick (David Paisley: Casualty/Holby City) is a little more conservative; and their gay friend Jonny (Jonathan Keane, former senior programmer of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) is a bit more boisterous. What is noticeable is that all three are reasonably intelligent, considerate people - the sort of folk you would be happy to meet and talk with. This means we care about them and what happens to them. You don’t need me to tell you that far too many horror films make their protagonists dumb, vain, arrogant 21-year-olds whom we are happy to see killed off. Bravo to Unhappy Birthday for presenting us with rounded, likeable, believable characters.

The tiny island of Amen lies just off the Northeast coast of England and is briefly accessible once a day via a causeway that appears at low tide. Rick is taking Sadie there for her birthday weekend with Jonny along in tow but they arrive too late to make the crossing and spend the night at a nearby B&B.

While Sadie, who has recurrent nightmares about drowning, tries to sleep, the two boys are downstairs, unable to resist each other. It’s not clear (at this point in the story) whether Sadie is aware that her bisexual boyfriend is fucking their pal and doesn’t mind, or is aware but choosing not to say anything, or isn’t aware. Anyway, the point is that if a tastefully shot but fairly explicit (frankly quite erotic) scene of two men shagging each other puts you off your breakfast, then you’ll have to miss out on a really good horror film. Come on, it’s 2011. It’s a modern world. Ask yourself: if it was exactly the same scene with a man and a woman, or two women, would you be bothered?

Well then.

One secret that Rick has kept from Sadie up until they cross the next morning is that he hasn’t chosen this spot at random. Sadie was abandoned as a child and Rick believes he has found her family. He has been in communication with a lady called Corinne who is, all indications suggest, Sadie’s long-lost sister.

Amen turns out to be a creepy, curious community where most people wear identical anoraks and live in fear of contamination from the mainland. Nevertheless, the islanders obviously have some limited contact with the mainland because, although self-sufficient in food, they must get their fuel (and indeed their cars and tractors) from somewhere. Life on Amen is simple; rural but not primitive. The place looks like it hasn’t changed since before the war. But there’s no animosity. Quite the reverse. Everyone waves in a friendly but vacant manner at the three bemused visitors.

Corinne (Jill Riddiford: Book of Blood) lives alone, welcoming the trio into her house. She seems simplistic, not simple. Sadie on the other hand is a wreck and goes through a whole range of emotions, De Vallee giving an excellent performance of a character dealing with an overload of complex and conflicting experiences in quick succession. At times Sadie wants to leave, at others she is more accepting. Gradually she learns about the childhood she can’t remember in this insular community, while the muddy boys strip off in the barn and wash each other.

At the same time, Corinne learns something about her little sister: the as-yet unannounced news that Sadie and Rick are expecting a baby. Or at least, Sadie is.

Gradually, Sadie comes under Corinne’s spell as their hostess keeps her separate where possible from the fellas who are sent down the pub. There they discover that the local tipple is mead, that money is not used on the island, that the locals aren’t necessarily as friendly as they had come to believe - and that the landlord is 1970s horror screenwriter David McGillivray!

To go into too much detail would be to spoil what is, frankly, one of the best British horror films I have seen this year. Writer-directors Mark Harriott and Mike Matthews do a wonderful job of slowly turning Sadie from a vivacious polka-dot towngirl into a restrained, calm village woman who finds herself warming to the simple Amen life and coming round to Corinne’s view that the island would be a wonderful place to raise a child. At the same time, Rick and Jonny are coming to the very opposite conclusion.

There’s a wonderful ambiguity about Corinne (helped by Riddiford’s superbly creepy performance). Is she scheming and manipulative, or is she really as plain and simple as she seems? What does she want? What does she know? What is she not telling? Is her power over Sadie some sort of magic, or simple persuasion, or carefully manipulative psychology, or just a warmth and openness missing from so much of today’s society?

The growing unease of the second act lets loose a third act of genuine horror, not as a sudden switch but rather as a steady, inexorably increasing intensity and paranoia which eventually tips over a line. The three mainlanders start to realise that something is up, but they are clearer about the need to get away than what precisely they are getting away from. And of course they are hampered by the fact that the causeway won’t be accessible for several hours yet.

The film's climax is a juddering sequence of horrific revelations and resolutions that combines imagination with careful construction. After sitting through the disappointing, overhyped Kill List a few days earlier, it was such a pleasure to be reminded what a well-crafted horror story is really like. Not that everything is wrapped up neatly, but the questions raised - such as ‘Is Corinne really Sadie’s sister?’ and ‘How much contact does Amen really have with the mainland?’ - are ones that merit discussion and contemplation, not just random WTF inconsistencies.

Worthy of particular praise is the sexual angle. It would have been very easy for the islanders to have seen the openly gay Jonny as a demon. Let’s not forget, one of Britain’s own island communities, the Isle of Man, only legalised homosexuality in 1992. These are simple, God-fearing, Christian folk (we never see a church on the island but we must assume there is one) who believe that sex outside marriage is an evil sin and there is certainly no room in their world for filthy sodomites.

But that’s not the tack that Matthews and Harriott’s script takes. Corinne is shocked by profanity and snack foods more than by Jonny’s attitude and behaviour (which possibly she doesn’t even really recognise or understand). Another possibility would have been for this film to be one where the characters’ sexuality is entirely incidental to the plot, and while that is a laudable principle it’s also an easy way out. As is a simple gender switch, of the sort that says instead of topless chicks let’s have some shirtless beefcake and drool over that instead (what might be termed the DeCoteau technique).

But no, what is impressive is that the sex and sexuality of each of our three protagonists is intrinsic to the plot. Not so much directly but more in the way that the three relate to each other: characters are defined by relationships, as I believe I may have observed in the past.

There is Sadie’s relationship with Rick, plus a secret between her and Jonny, and of course the boys’ own dark passion. This is a three-sided triangle (rarer than you might think in cinema!) and each side, each angle changes over time as each individual discovers more about themself, their friends and the situation in which they all find themselves. The character development here is masterful. I’ve praised the girls already so let me add that Paisley and Keane are also superb in their respective roles.

While Unhappy Birthday sits proudly within the subsubgenre of the queer British horror film (cf. The Wolves of Kromer and, arguably, Vampire Diary) the horror itself arises not from the sex or the sexuality (or indeed, the sexiness) but from that more traditional penetration angst of the townie thrust into the rural world. Rick, Jonny and Sadie are out of their depth, unable to rationalise the Amen community. Should they mock? Should they pity? Should they be afraid? Or should they learn to embrace the simple life and free themselves from the shackles of modern city living?

In this respect, Unhappy Birthday is a fine example of a British Horror Revival film that manages to be current and contemporary while harking back to an older tradition of homegrown horror pictures. These are modern people with modern lives facing horrors outside their understanding.

Incredibly, the film was shot in just a single week (in early 2010), making use of Harriott’s sister’s guest-house when the location suddenly became available. The causeway is genuine - it’s the one at Lindisfarne - and time-lapse photography really brings home how quickly the land can become sea. At least, I hope it’s time-lapse!

Cinematographer Mark Hammond has previously worked on Top Gear and Bang Goes the Theory (and was one of at least four DPs on Martin Gooch’s absolutely-cannot-wait-to-see-it feature Death). Editor Tony Graynoth also has extensive television experience while composer Lin Sangster was a member of popular beat combos Kit, Send No Flowers and Bad Anorak 404 as well as scoring a FilmFour jingle and a Warburton’s bread ad! Between them, these three create an image and a soundtrack which totally belie the film’s undoubtedly paltry budget. There’s no credit for production designer but Kerry Platts (the scarf designer?) was art director.

A gem waiting to be discovered, Unhappy Birthday is a marvelous little film that knows precisely what it wants to do and achieves it with real skill. Original where it needs to be, yet fully aware of its heritage, defiantly indie and all the better for it. When you start to wonder why you sit through all these movies of varying quality, along comes a picture like this which makes it all worthwhile.

And finally, what of the two main creative forces behind this film? Mike Matthews is also a telly man. He has been shooting stuff for the Beeb and Channel 4 for 13 years now, amassing over 100 hours of credits. Once you know that he has directed both Nigella and Gok Wan, what more need be said? On the other hand, much of Mark Harriott’s output is definitely not suitable for family viewing, certainly not something called Life in Bras for which he recently won a SHAFTA award! After art directing oddball Anglo-Austrian sci-fi thing Dandy Dust, Harriott became Amory Peart, pornographer, and ejaculated a succession of quite extraordinary indie films, both straight and queer, featuring everything from men with no hair (the skinhead sex of Straight Acting) to men with far too much (the hirsute cuddle-cushions of Lick Daddy Suck Bear). Some of his stuff is 'TV' work but definitely not in the sense that you might find it listed in Radio Times...

In 2008 Harriott/Peart even ventured into the fringes of the horror genre with Secret Diary of a She Male. Although you won’t find this listed in most Jack the Ripper reference works, it does feature a sequence in which the ghosts of the Ripper’s victims get together to discover and enjoy a mutual asset which, curiously, the Victorian police reports glossed over and failed to mention!

(And coming soon: hardcore sci-fi action with... The Bionic Milf!)

Following a limited theatrical run in Edinburgh and Greenwich, Unhappy Birthday was released on UK DVD by Peccadillo Pictures, the specialist gay label which also brought us Vampire Diary, Krabat and the Legend of the Satanic Mill and (premiering in Cardiff the same week I reviewed this) British bloodsucker feature Vampires: Brighter in Darkness.

MJS rating: A-

In May 2014, to tie in with the 10th anniversary DVD re-release of The Last Horror Movie, I posted all my old interviews with Julian Richards and Kevin Howarth to this site and also did a catch-up interview with Julian.

With the benefit of ten years’ hindsight and experience, how do you personally view The Last Horror Movie now?
"The Last Horror Movie benefited greatly from a unique collaboration of talented individuals. To begin with, and this doesn't apply to most films, the idea was very good and James Handel's screenplay not only delivered on that idea but also pushed it further with the moral ambiguity of the killer and his attempts to justify his crimes, not to mention the meta-horror angle. James is not only a doctor of philosophy but he's also quite a comedian with a jet black sense of humor, so the character of Max Parry is not too dissimilar . Then there was Kevin Howarth, the actor who brought Max Parry to life, he realized early on that James and Max were one in the same and spent a lot of time with the writer perfecting an impersonation.

"The production was managed by Zorana Piggott, who despite the micro budget, kept her eye on production value, insisting that the ball was never dropped even if it meant forking out £1,000 on wedding flowers. Paul Hyett's special effects, particularly the burning man, are also noteworthy, specially when you consider that each scene was directed real time in one long developing shot, without being able to use edits to conceal or cut around an effect. It's easy to take all this for granted and to think that each film-making experience will be the same, however of the six feature films I have directed only Summer Scarsgets close to the perfect recipe I had with The Last Horror Movie."

How pleased were you with Shiver and how well did it do commercially?
"By the time I joined Shiver as director, most of the creative decisions had already been made, so my function was to get it in the can on time and on budget, despite having very limited resources. Of course , I was able to address some of my creative concerns but not all of them, and it was very frustrating for me not to have final cut, or any say in post production sound, music and visual effects. Despite these frustrations I had a great time with the cast including Danielle Harris, Casper Van Dein, John Jarratt and Ray Dawn Chong. They were all wonderful to work with and I hope that in the not too distant future I will be able to work with them again."

The biggest mistake I made in Urban Terrors was not including Summer Scars. I personally don’t consider it a horror movie, but it has been marketed that way so by my criteria should have been included. Where do you think that film stands in terms of genre?
"Mitch Davis of Fantasia calls Summer Scars a 'youth apocalypse movie', a description that I like. It's a dark coming-of-age thriller about a gang of hoodies held hostage in the woods by a psychopath and is actually based on a real life experience that I had growing up in Wales. In terms of horror semantics, I would put it in the same sub-genre as Taxi Driver, Assault on Precinct 13, Eden Lake and Dead Man's Shoes. As a kid, I remember collecting books on horror films and would make sure that I got to watch every film listed in the index. I was a bit flummoxed when it came to watching Mary Poppins and Taxi Driver, but as they were both listed in the index, I figured that they must have some horror or fantasy ingredients. I see Summer Scars the same way."

As a director, a producer and a distributor, what do you think have been the biggest changes in horror movies in the last ten years?
"The digital revolution allowed me to make The Last Horror Movie and Summer Scars and I suppose the market has now become saturated with found footage films. Many of them have nothing new to offer, but every once in a while you will come across a film like Rec or Conspiracy, which really do get the best out of this sub-genre. The amount that films sell for has halved in the last ten years, so film-makers have to get the best out of very limited resources, hence we are seeing many single location films such as Buried and also anthologies, such as VHS and Theatre Bizarre.

"As DVD continues its demise, TV is becoming an increasingly important way to monetise a film, but the problem with TV is that it doesn't like violence, hence we are seeing more supernatural horrors such as Insidious and The Conjuring. Personally, I think the best recipe for a successful horror film right now is to combine horror with action a la The Raid and Dog Soldiers."

What news of the mooted Last Horror Movie sequel?
"It's still very much a work in progress but if it does get produced it will be very different from what I originally intended. I don't want to give anything away, but I don't think any of the original characters will be returning for The Last Horror Movie 2."

What else do you currently have in the works?
"I am scheduled to direct Suicide Solution towards the end of 2014, but it might shift into early 2015. It's a very dark psychological horror about a young woman held captive by her stepfather whilst he embarks on a murder spree. I have also revived The Monkey Farm which is about a gang of inmates who take over the asylum."

website: www.jingafilms.com

See also:
Julian Richards interview (1997) - Darklands
Julian Richards interview (2003) - The Last Horror Movie, early shorts
Julian Richards interview (Apr 2006) - Darklands director's cut
Julian Richards interview (Aug 2006) - Summer Scars

Producers: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Clark Balderson, Karen Black
Country: USA
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.dikenga.com

The Making Of documentary is a relatively recent invention. It started out as the occasional TV special on a big summer blockbuster and gradually became fused with the electronic press kit or EPK. Although there were Making Ofs during the VHS era it was really the advent of DVD in the late 1990s that brought this specific type of film to the fore. It rapidly became the norm to make a 20-30 minute ‘featurette’ for any movie in production, mixing behind-the-scenes footage with cast and crew interviews.

The first feature-length Making Of which was capable of distribution on its own was probably Burden of Dreams in 1982, Les Blank’s documentary on Werner Herzog’s epic drama Fitzcarraldo. But that was a one-off and it was only with The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys fifteen years later that the in-depth Making Of documentary became established as a cinematic subgenre in its own right.

Nowadays it’s rare indeed to find a film that doesn’t have a Making Of and in the field of independent cinema it is almost a given that some aspiring or student film-maker will be allowed to hang around the set with a camcorder and assemble something for the DVD. The problem is: the more of these things one watches, the more one realises that all films are basically made the same way. It takes something really special like Lost in La Mancha (which, uniquely, is the Making Of a film that was never made) to stand out from the crowd. For the most part, every Making Of is pretty much like every other Making Of and only the details differ.

Imagine if you watched a documentary film about someone building a house. All very interesting and you could learn a lot about the construction industry. Now watch another documentary about someone else building a different house. And another and another. After a while the only thing that will distinguish one film from another is the colour of the front door. And so it is with Making Of documentaries.

All of which is interesting but to some extent irrelevant because Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere is not a typical Making Of.

Wamego is the name of the town where the Balderson family live. It is in the North East corner of Kansas which is an almost entirely rectangular state. It’s called a ‘city’ but has a population of just over 4,000 which makes it about two thirds the size of the the village of East Leake where I went to school. I find it fascinating that the USA, a huge country where everything seems to be several times larger than it is in the rest of the world, nevertheless has cities that are smaller than English villages. Anyway...

Wamego is real small-town America, a place where everyone knows everyone else - in fact, as producer Clark Balderson points out, most people are related to everyone else in some way. According to online man-in-a-pub Wikipedia, the town’s two main claims to fame, apart from the Baldersons, are a museum devoted to The Wizard of Oz and (allegedly, at one time) the largest LSD factory in the United States. It is not the sort of place where you would expect a feature film to be made - and that is the point of this documentary.

There was a six-year gap between Steve Balderson’s first feature, the sublime black comedy Pep Squad, and his second, the achingly beautiful murder mystery Firecracker. Wamego goes some way to explaining why, despite widespread critical acclaim and a bunch of awards, a follow-up to Pep Squad was so long in coming.

Strictly speaking, this is not a film about making a movie, it’s a film about getting a movie made. Clark Balderson, Steve’s father and producer, sums it up in one concise quote: “The average guy, sitting in a movie theatre, watching a movie, cannot begin to comprehend the amount of detail, the degree of complexity, that is present in a motion picture.”

Unlike a standard Making Of, Wamego does not show us how particular shots were filmed and it doesn’t interview all the cast and crew. There are some talking heads but the level of luvviness usually seen in these things - “Oh, he was just wonderful to work with. He’s a delight. We just had so much fun together...”: give me a flipping break - is much lower than normal. There are a few comments about how wonderful Karen Black is but also some carefully veiled intimation that she is also, shall we say, somewhat demanding.

What Steve, Clark and their cast and crew demonstrate and recount is the amount of work - administrative, technical and sheer manual labour - required to produce a piece of quality cinema like Firecracker. But at the same time, they are at pains to point out that by operating outside the Hollywood system they were able to make the decisions they wanted rather than kowtowing to received wisdom about how things must be done. This made their lives easier and ultimately made Firecracker possible.

Not that Steve Balderson is some sort of dangerous maverick. He has to negotiate with stars’ agents, he has to pay wages commensurate with SAG agreements, he has to abide by the rules.

The written rules.

Film-making as an industry is hidebound by unwritten rules so hooray for Balderson and son who don’t give a tinker’s cuss about ‘how it should be done’. What they care about is efficiency, cost effectiveness, practicality and artistic vision. If any one thing comes through when watching the hundred minutes or so of Wamego it’s that at no point was Steve ever prepared to compromise his vision of what Firecracker should be like. And if that meant turning down big stars who actually wanted to do the film (Debbie Harry was very nearly Sheriff Ed, a role eventually played by Susan Traylor) then so be it.

Wamego is more than a document, more than a documentary, it’s a masterclass in how to pursue your dreams. There are two lessons here: (1) You don’t have to do things the way everybody else does if you can find a way that’s better for you, and (2) you had better be prepared to work bloody hard. I was amazed to find, for example, that Steve, Clark and a few friends actually built all the ‘gypsy wagons’ seen in the carnival scenes from scratch. Just building those wagons must have taken more time, effort and money than some people put into a whole movie. At the same time, scenes of cast and crew painting colourful side-show banners have a tremendous sense of esprit de corps that says, ‘Hey kids, let’s do the show right here!’

No director is credited on Wamego although the IMDB lists Steve, Joe Martin and Ed Leboeuf. The credits simply say that the film was compiled by Imagemakers, which is a graphic design and advertising agency that Steve runs when he’s not shooting movies.

Wamego is a fascinating, intriguing, uplifting movie packed with conflict resolved, obstacles overcome and ambitions achieved, just like any good, well-told story. And just like any great movie, three years later Wamego spawned a sequel.

MJS Rating: A-

Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Clark Balderson, Eric Sherman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.dikenga.com

Wamego Strikes Back starts with the Star Wars theme music (not the original version, obviously) and a text crawl that spoofs the opening of each of the Star Wars films. It’s a little affectation which we can allow Steve Balderson before he plunges headlong into the sequel to his earlier Making Of feature on Firecracker, his second feature film proper.

And just think for a moment how odd this is: a sequel to a documentary. Who has ever heard of a documentary having a sequel? Who has ever heard of a movie having two feature length documentaries made about it, each of which is released on a separate DVD? But then, young Mr Balderson is not someone who does things ‘the normal way’. Tucked away in a corner of Kansas, he is about as independent as independent film-makers get.

Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere told the story of how Firecracker was conceived, cast and produced. Wamego Strikes Back picks up the story with the film’s world premiere at Raindance in London and tells of how it was distributed - or not, as the case may be. Making movies, as anyone who dips a toe into this ridiculous industry rapidly discovers, is only half the battle. Once you’ve made a film, you’ve got to find a way for people to see it. Sure, you can send it to film festivals, but only a very small percentage of the movie-going population ever attend a film festival and to some extent every festival acts primarily as a shop window for (a) distributors and (b) other film festivals.

So for eighty minutes we watch Steve and his producer/father Clark struggle with distributors, seeing the film that they slaved over turned down again and again for increasingly ridiculous reasons which all basically translate as: “Though we like to think we’re edgy and independent, in actual fact we are as conservative as the Townswomen’s Guild’s cake-and-jam stall at a village fete and we dare not touch anything that doesn’t look like everything else that we and our sheeplike competitors are buying at the moment.”

It’s not like Firecracker doesn’t come with a seal of approval. Roger Ebert no less praised it to the skies in one of the best-written film reviews I’ve ever read. It picked up a truckload of nominations and awards at festivals around the world. But no, no-one wanted to distribute it. And you know, you can make your own movie in Kansas but if you want people to see it, you’ve got to work with the Hollywood system. They control the horizontal and the vertical. There is no alternative.

Bollocks to that said Steve (or would have done, had he been making films in Market Drasen instead of Wamego). Inspired by the travelling carnival in the movie, he took a 35mm print of Firecracker out on a roadshow tour of the USA, proving that there is a way to let people see your work. Suddenly, distributors came sniffing but as we see in a series of scenes featuring an increasingly exasperated Clark, Hollywood is just naturally structured to screw the little man. So huge corporations for whom anything under a million dollars is small change are months late in making payments of fifty or sixty thousand dollars.

While Clark struggles with the financial chicanery surrounding Firecracker, Steve tries to drum up investment for his putative third feature, Wilbert Brummett, a character ensemble piece loosely based on his own family. By the end of this movie, Wilbert Brummett is consigned to a shelf as Steve realises he can’t just make one film every six or seven years. Instead, he sits at his desk and makes his offbeat documentary/installation Phone Sex for pretty much nothing at all (as he points out, he didn’t even have to pay for long distance phone calls because people were calling him).

On this basis he decides that he can go completely outside ‘the system’, making the films that he wants, when and where he wants, rather than slaving for years to make one specific film. That doesn’t in any way take away from the extraordinary achievement that is Firecracker (or indeed Pep Squad) but Steve wants to move on and explore new avenues - and well he should.

Although similar in presentation to the first film, Wamego Strikes Back suffers slightly from having a less visually interesting topic. Making a film involves building things and painting things and cameras and actors and sets and extras and props and, you know, stuff that’s interesting to watch and look at. Distributing a movie involves endless meetings (where a video camera can’t go) and phone conversations or even e-mails. There is a head-bangingly bizarre moment when Clark reads out an e-mail exchange wherein both the sales rep trying to sell Firecracker and the person he thinks might buy it consistently refer to the film as Fireworks.

You might think: how can someone sell a product that they don’t even know what it’s called? But frankly, the title is the last thing that any distributor worries about. We saw that with Pep Squad which was released in the UK as I’ve Been Watching You 2, an ersatz ‘sequel’ to high school vampire thriller I’ve Been Watching You which was itself a retitling of David DeCoteau’s The Brotherhood!

Among the talking heads and other footage, Wamego Strikes Back repeatedly cuts to a fellow named Eric Sherman who, according to his website, is an ‘author and film industry consultant’ (and whose father Vincent directed The Return of Dr Rx!). I can see why Steve gets on with Sherman because he comes across as a no-bullshit guy and there aren’t many of them in Hollywood.

According to Sherman there are 500 people in the American film industry calling themselves sales reps or producer’s reps; in other words, their role is to connect film-makers with distributors. Sherman says he has met and spoken with every single one and that there are only fifteen who won’t charge an upfront fee. Like any reputable agent, those fifteen make their money by taking a percentage of the deals that they broker. The other 485 have to be paid in advance with absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that they will achieve anything - or even try to do anything. That’s like paying a builder a wad of cash just to come to your house and give you a quote on a new kitchen. It’s bizarre.

How can the market survive like that? Why doesn’t everyone use the fifteen honorable reps? I would imagine that, because of how they work, they can pick and choose the very best films to represent. After all, they can only have so many titles on their books at any one time. So every other film, even if it’s an award-winner, has to go through one of the 485 shysters. Okay, so why doesn’t any one of those shysters think: “If I took a percentage instead of charging an upfront fee, I too could have my pick of the best films”?

Because they don’t need to, that’s why. People bring them films and pay them money, people who have worked their guts out on a movie and are desperate to get it distributed, so there is no need for those 485 reps to adjust their business model. The whole thing is extraordinary.

There are lots of Making Of documentaries but Wamego Strikes Back could very well be the world’s first Distributing Of documentary. It’s a story rarely told and a salutary lesson for all would-be film-makers. It features loud aunts, Kansans getting lost in London and cheekily appropriated YouTube clips of Lily Tomlin screaming obscenities on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Throughout it all is an overwhelming sense of ruthless honesty. Because Steve is ploughing his own furrow, determined not to battle through this nonsense again, he has no qualms about naming names; not individuals but the companies he is dealing with, the ones who pay his father sixty thousand dollars four months late.

There is nothing coy here, nothing diplomatic. Steve and Clark are dealing with people and companies who are either idiots or bastards or both and the men from Kansas call it like they see it. In that sense, this is an even more interesting, important and essential film than its predecessor.

So why is it curiously unsatisfying? What is it about Wamego Strikes Back that is just slightly off, that prevents it from coalescing into a robust and substantial whole?

About five minutes from the end of this film, a thought struck me, one of those moments of critical clarity that just comes along occasionally. I realised that Wamego Strikes Back doesn’t just ape the title and opening of The Empire Strikes Back, this film actually is The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t mean it has Taun-Tauns and Wompas and AT-ATs and the like. I mean that the big problem with this movie is exactly the same big problem that Empire has and since Empire is a magnificent cinematic achievement, its triumphs rendering its big problem irrelevant, we can likewise simply and safely ignore that problem when it arises in the North East corner of Kansas.

Let me explain. Most Star Wars fans will tell you that The Empire Strikes Back is the best film in the series, although I personally prefer the first one. True, Empire has terrific action sequences, wonderful special effects, breathtaking art direction, a thrilling, entertaining and literate script and more characterisation than the other two (in fact, five) Star Wars films put together. But it does not have a conventional cinematic structure.

Empire’s big problem is that, although it has three acts - a beginning, a middle and an end - they are not in the right order. Think about it: the movie starts with the battle for Hoth, pitching us right into a massive, climactic battle scene, full of action and heroics. That should be at the end of the film. The middle bit is people doing stuff - character and plot development - which is all well and good. And then the film ends when our various main characters split up to undertake their individual quests in the pursuit of a common goal. That should be at the start.

The Empire Strikes Back is a wonderful film but it is back-to-front, it’s arse-about-face, the hero’s journey is travelled in reverse gear. Whereas the original Star Wars has its beginning, middle and end in the correct order and so is - for me - more satisfying.

And so it is with the Wamego duology.

Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere tells a story from start to finish. It has a conventional beginning, middle and end in its reasonably linear documentation of development, pre-production and production. It starts with ambition and culminates in achievement. It goes forwards. But Wamego Strikes Back, which I at first found almost random and disjointed, actually plays in reverse. It opens with a triumphant world premiere, which one would expect to find at the climax of a film-making narrative. Then there’s a bunch of people doing stuff (or in the case of producer’s reps, getting paid for not doing stuff) and the film finishes with our hero Steve deciding on what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, which in a classical narrative would be our first act.

Just like its sci-fi namesake, Wamego Strikes Back has a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in the right order.

But you know what? That didn’t matter with Empire and it doesn’t matter here. I’m going to knock a grade off this film for its structural problems and then stick it right back on again because that’s not the point. The point is to watch, in sometimes painful detail, quite how hellish life can be for an independent film-maker.

However, as Clark points out, in a few years digital downloading will be the norm and film-makers will be able to distribute their wares in the same way that musicians can now. And then Hollywood had better watch out because their tentative hold on Steve Balderson and his kind will be lost forever.

(Oh, and one more thing. Does Steve Balderson only have one shirt? He wears the same blue check shirt in almost every scene throughout the combined three-hour running time of these two films, which together document nine years of his life. For God’s sake, buy the man’s DVDs so he can afford some new clothes.)

MJS rating: A-

[And two years later, Steve was back with... Wamego: Ultimatum - MJS]

Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Steve Balderson, Matt Riddlehoover, Joseph Suglia
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.dikenga.com

So let’s put this in context. Steve Balderson has so far made eight feature films. One was a dance documentary, one was effectively an avant-garde art installation, three were narrative features and three were behind-the-scenes documentaries about his second and third narrative features.

It’s an unusual and oddly self-reflexive filmography which in another film-maker might suggest desperation or confusion or even a massive ego. But for Steve a filmography like this is entirely appropriate. Steve is a unique film-maker, so far outside ‘the system’ that one cannot help but feel maybe it’s the system that is outside him. Perhaps Steve is the only one marching in step. A unique film-maker should have a unique filmography and should (of course) make unique films. Of which this is one. Another one.

But this is also the third in a series of films, following on from Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere, which chronicled the production of Steve’s masterpiece Firecracker, and Wamego Strikes Back which documented the distribution of Firecracker. Is Wamego: Ultimatum the final part of a trilogy or simply one more in a potentially endless series of reality-based films?

In one sense this is a return, after Part II, to the more straightforward Making Of format. Except that Wamego: Ultimatum is much, much more than a Making Of. Every two-dollar indie flick has a one-dollar-fifty Making Of nowadays. They’re not even featurettes any more; it has become standard for the Making Of to be as long as (or longer than) the film it’s actually about. Of course, very few film-makers would have the balls to market their Making Ofs separately; Steve does so because the Wamego films (named after his tiny Kansas home town) are not simply adjuncts to his narrative films, they are movies in their own right.

To get down to brass tacks, Ultimatum documents the development, casting, production and release of Watch Out, Steve Balderson’s film version of Joseph Suglia’s almost unfilmable novel of extreme sexual self-obsession. Steve shot this in Wamego in April 2008, taking the finished film on a roadshow tour before the year was out, a distribution technique which had been previously used for Firecracker.

Peppered among the actual documentary footage and talking heads (including Balderson and Suglia who never met until after the film was complete) are occasional, randomly numbered ‘film-making tip’ captions which for all their apparent facetiousness (“Get your cast and crew a discount at the local liquor store”) are actually well worth noting and paying heed to. What is largely absent from the film, curiously enough, is actual footage of Watch Out being shot or rehearsed. Probably because that’s the least interesting part of how Steve makes movies.

Instead we meet the cast as they arrive, one by one, for their allotted stay in Wamego. There’s none of the usual asinine “Oh, I love this film, I’m so excited, everyone here is wonderful, the director is a genius” bullshit that normally characterises this type of thing (actually ‘asinine bullshit’ is a mixed metaphor, isn’t it?). Which is not to say that cast and crew aren’t complementary about young Mr B and each other.

In fact, they’re all very friendly. “There sure is a lot of faggotry going on in here!” is one of the more memorable lines, said deliberately loudly near an open window in the hope of shocking the God-fearing Kansan neighbours. You do start to wonder, after a while, whether there were any heterosexuals working on this movie apart from father/producer Clark Balderson. But flamboyancy is held in check, smut is muted (at least within the documentary) and what emerges is certainly not a ‘gay film’. Steve has never made ‘gay films’ (whatever those are), he makes films about relationships which go far beyond the the normal sexual platitudes of modern cinema. Which is why the frenetic autoeroticism of Suglia’s novel so perfectly suited Balderson’s style.

One gets the impression that making Watch Out was a very happy experience for Steve. After the frustrations of the way his debut, Pep Squad, was treated by distributors (in the UK it was retitled and marketed as a vampire sequel!) and the massively complex organisation behind Firecracker (plus the frustration of trying to find an honest distributor for that, as documented in Wamego II), here we have the director demonstrating, with disarming honesty, that he was able to keep track of the whole production using nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet. Steve has found his niche, his home - it is his home. It’s Wamego.

So he works his cast and small crew hard - seven days a week - but he looks after them too: good food, plenty to drink in the evenings and a trip to the Oz Museum. And boy, does he come across as tolerant. There’s the script supervisor who deletes some continuity photographs to make room in his digital camera for new ones (never had that trouble with Polaroids). There’s the chef who offers to do catering for a week but leaves without explanation after two days (perhaps he was upset at the amount of faggotry going on). Where many directors would have been tearing their hair out and/or tearing people off a strip, Steve takes it all calmly in his stride. He is clearly a great boss.

So where is all this going? What makes the Wamego films different to the run-of-the mill Making Ofs that come with every DVD? I think it’s this: these films don’t document, they explain. Which makes them, I suppose, not so much documentaries as explainaries. Your standard Making Of is all about ‘how’: how we made the film, how we did the effects. The Wamego movies are only tangentially about ‘how’; they’re really about ‘why’. Why Steve makes the films he does, why they turn out so good, why you don’t need Hollywood if you’ve got friends, colleagues, determination, originality and a bucketful of talent.

There is no doubt in my mind that every independent film-maker should watch all three of the Wamego films. Every film-making class should show these movies to its students. Not because they show you how to make films (though there are some damn useful hints and tips in there) but because they show you why you should make films.

There is no need for every aspiring film-maker to rush back to their home town, rope in their dad as a producer and start looking for cult novels to adapt. That’s not the message of Wamego Has Risen from the Grave. The point is that Steve Balderson makes movies his way, how he wants. And if you aspire to film-making, if you aspire to any creative endeavour - well that’s what you should be doing.

As a final point of record, lycanthrope completists should note that in one sequence an actor sings a ukulele-accompanied song about a werewolf.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Bert I Gordon
Writer: George Worthing Yates
Producer: Bert I Gordon
Cast: Sally Fraser, Duncan Parkin, Roger Pace
Year of release: 1958
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Direct Video Distribution)

War of the Colossal Beast is terrific! It’s a genuine AIP classic and is pretty much unique among 1950s B-movies in being a direct sequel to another film, The Amazing Colossal Man. Think about it: apart from this, the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy and the Fly trilogy, what other 1950s SF/horror sequels are there? (You can’t really count How to Make a Monster.)

Russ Bender is the only cast member to return from the first film although he’s now playing a character named Dr Carmichael whereas before he was Richard Kingman (which was the name of Ed Kemmer’s character in Earth vs the Spider). Coincidentally Bender also played a ‘Dr Carmichael’ in War of the Worlds. He was also a doctor in Invasion of the Saucer Men and was in It Conquered the World, Panic in Year Zero and The Navy Vs the Night Monsters.

The colossal fellow himself, Colonel Glenn Manning, is now played by Duncan Parkin, who had been a grip on Bert I Gordon’s Beginning of the End. This film and a similar giant the previous year in The Cyclops were his only screen credits. Hideous skull-like make-up by Jack H Young (The Cyclops, The Brood, Salem’s Lot) covering half his face effectively covers the fact that the character is played by a different actor (Glen Langan) in flashbacks to the first film, which take up five minutes of the movie’s brief 68-minute running time.

At the end of Amazing..., sixty-foot tall Colonel Manning was blasted with bazookas and fell off a dam, presumed dead. In this film he is found alive in Mexico, but scarred mentally as well as physically. Parkin is never called on to do more than grunt or roar - this is a colossal beast, no longer a man (although calling the movie's story a 'war' is stretching things a bit...).

Sally Fraser (It Conquered the World, Earth vs the Spider) plays Manning’s sister Joyce who makes the incredible deductive leap that her brother has survived when she hears a jokey news report about a missing truck South of the Border. (The TV newsreader is Jack Kosslyn: Empire of the Ants, Attack of the Puppet People, Earth vs the Spider.)

John Swanson (George Becwar: Bride of the Monster) is the owner of the truck which apparently vanished into thin air, the young Mexican lad who was driving it having gone mad. Joyce investigates along with Major Mark Baird (a solitary screen credit for Roger Pace) who has a weird symbol on his uniform - an A inside a six-pointed star. What is that, the Jewish Air Force?

Well, it turns out that old Glenn has been stealing trucks for the food they carry, which makes no sense because at his size he would need to get through about 30 or 40 truckloads a day, but never mind the logistics. They find a giant footprint near where Swanson’s truck disappeared and there’s a terrific scene when Joyce and Baird climb to the top of an inaccessible local mesa - and find a dozen or so wrecked vehicles. That’s quite a clever, subtle bit of plot development for a Bert I Gordon movie!

The thing that was Glenn appears shortly afterwards. For the most part the matting and back-projection work very well; it was of course Gordon’s forte so he should know how to do it, and the flashback clips from the first film suggest a definite improvement in the technique.

Glenn is captured - using a truck full of doped bread! - and flown to the USA. There is a wonderful sequence where three different government departments shuttle the problem between themselves, all arguing that there is nothing in their legislative remit about handling sixty-foot tall men. And at this point I realised - this is a comedy! Pay close attention to the dialogue and there are some absolute gems as writer George Worthing Yates has real fun with the movie’s obviously daft central premise.

Anyway, Glenn is shackled up in an aircraft hanger at Los Angeles airport, breaks free, is restrained, breaks free again and goes on the rampage. Joyce still cares about her brother, however big and hideous he is, and somehow manages to touch the remnant of humanity within him so that he realises what a monster he has become. He strides over to some power cables - this one scene is actually a miniature set, rather than a matte - and commits suicide by electrocution. (Or does he? He just seems to disappear, rather than actually falling down or exploding or melting or anything...)

Famously, in those final few seconds the film bursts into Technicolor. Although the (full-frame) print used by DVD Ltd is as nice and crisp as anything in their Arkoff Film Library, the Technicolor footage is very ropy indeed, in even worse shape than the final colour reel of How to Make a Monster.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking to dip your toes into the world of AIP, this is a good one to go for. As with all the DVD Ltd Sam Arkoff films, there is a 50-minute audio interview with the man himself, plus nice poster-reproduction postcards and tatty trailers for nine films: Voodoo Woman, Blood of Dracula, Day the World Ended, The Brain Eaters, How to Make a Monster, The She-Creature, The Undead, Earth Vs The Spider and this one. The film was originally released in the UK as The Terror Strikes.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Richard Poche
Writer: Aaron Pope
Producer: Errol Poche
Cast: Liz DiPrinzio, Erika Smith, Taya Asimos
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.pochepictures.com

The Wanderer is a nicely produced, twenty-minute ghost film from Richard Poche (Oracle, The Wicked, A Candle in the Dark) with a simple premise bolstered by some stylish photography.

Gina (Taya Asimos) and Lucy (Liz DiPrinzio) are on the way back from the funeral of Sarah, cousin of the former, best friend of the latter. Sarah can’t have been terribly popular, despite appearing in flashbacks as a very pretty, happy young woman, because there are only three people at the graveside: Lucy, Gina and a young priest, Father O’Neal (Cliff Poche).

The funeral must also be an inconveniently long way away from where the only two mourners live as it’s pitch dark before they get anywhere near home. (Sorry, I’m picking here, but these things are worth pointing out.) Suddenly a young woman appears in the path of Gina’s car, clad only in a white dress and with her long dark hair hanging over her face in a frankly Ring-esque way. She’s played by Erika Smith (who appears to be the same Erika Smith that was in The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing!) and, let’s be honest here, we know immediately who she is. We would know even if we hadn’t seen all those flashbacks.

As has often been pointed out, the central premise of the relationship in Superman films and comics is that Lois Lane can’t recognise her boyfriend without his glasses. Similarly, Gina and Lucy can’t recognise Sarah with her hair hanging over her face, even though the audience can. This is the main structural problem with The Wanderer: the audience is immediately distracted by wondering whether we are supposed to know this is Sarah or not, even though it very obviously is. Maybe Gina and Lucy don’t know that, because they don’t know they’re in a horror film (although you expect one of them to say “Jesus, I thought that was Sarah for a moment.”). But we know we’re watching a horror film and we know the conventions, so it feels like there’s a twist coming up that we already know.

If we can skip over this - and it’s not difficult to skip over it because the acting and direction are both good - we find a simple tale of supernatural revenge, straightforward and admirably shot. It gets a bit talky in the middle as the ghost explains who she is and why she’s there and frankly that’s not needed. We know who she is, we’ll see Lucy’s reaction on realising this, this would have worked better as show-don’t-tell. The first part of the film - the funeral and the drive home works better than the later part because it relies on atmosphere rather than expository dialogue.

Nevertheless, The Wanderer is an effective supernatural chiller with a professional sheen to it that any horror fan will enjoy.

MJS rating: B+

This interview about UK vampire flickRazor Blade Smilewas conducted at the 9th Festival of Fantastic Films in September 1998. Present were writer/director Jake West, producer Rob Mercer and star Eileen Daly. I think a few bits of this interview may have appeared in SFX, but frankly I'm not certain.

How long is it since Razor Blade Smile started as an idea?
Jake West: "It's coming up to about three years now. By the time it's released it will be virtually three years. I'd been working in the film industry for about three years. I left film school in 1992 and Razor Blade Smile probably started bubbling around 1995. We shot it in 1996, then the post-production took until just a couple of months ago when it was finally finished. So that's been the kind of timeline on it. And the release is on Halloween."

When you started I suppose you weren't envisaging a theatrical release.
JW: "When I started I wasn't sure what was going to happen with it. I shot it on film in the hope that one day, if it was any good, maybe there would at least be the option to have that. So using film was important to me. But at the time I was shooting it, I thought chances were it would probably just end up on video. Therefore I would never get to make a print of it, but as it turned out, that wasn't the case."

Did you make a vampire film because the market's there in the goth/fetish crowd?
JW: "Well, I've always liked vampire movies. I wrote a couple of scripts before I wrote Razor Blade. The problem was just trying to get the money for them. I wrote a zombie film first of all, thinking that would be great to get off the ground. But I budgeted it out and it came to about a quarter of a million because it needed a lot of elaborate effects and things like that. And I thought that was a fairly low budget at the time, being quite naive about it. Because it is a low budget, quarter of a million, but it's impossible to raise when you haven't got a track record. So I then wrote another script, but that was a bit of a non-starter.

"So I specifically wrote Razor Blade because I love vampire movies anyway, but also a vampire movie was a very viable movie to do on a relatively low budget because you don't need mega-amounts of make-up. You just need some good teeth; blood effects are quite simple and easy to do; stuff like that. And I fused that with the action genre which I like; I've been quite influenced by a lot of Hong Kong movies. I wanted to do the kind of movie which hadn't been done in the UK, and the kind of movie which I wanted to see. But yes, I know people who love vampire movies, so vampire movies are always around. It doesn't really matter, because you can always reinvent the vampire story or whatever. It's just very appealing from that point of view as well. But the script just came out of me and I really enjoyed writing it."

How difficult was it to find a new angle on a vampire movie?
JW: "When I was initially doing the notes for the script, just working out all the different ideas, I did a brainstorm where I just wrote out all of my feelings about vampires before I started writing. I was just trying to get into the psychology of what I thought this kind of character would do. Because I wanted to make it a fun character as well. So my reasoning was that basically, if you were a vampire in the modern day, you would have to blend into society. So you would want to earn money. I thought, also you would still have to kill people for their blood and by that point you would probably enjoy killing because you would have transcended any sort of humanity. You would have become a different creature.

“So the idea of a contract killer: yes, that would be good because then the vampire character wouldn't have to worry about who she was going to kill a lot of the time. Or being killed as well. It gives you a great edge on a job like that, and if you enjoy killing it's a bit more of a challenge. I thought that was a great idea and I'd never seen a vampire contract killer. That was just a very appealing idea. Once I'd got that in my mind, the script just sort of took off and the Lilith Silver character evolved around this cool assassin character."

At what stage did you bring Eileen on board?
JW: "I mentioned the script to her when I was writing it because she'd worked on a couple of productions that I did. One was a computer game CD-ROM that we cut scenes for, and Eileen did a couple of pop promos with acting bits in. So I knew Eileen. I also knew of her involvement in Redemption and the whole scene. So when I was casting I was looking for a specific type and Eileen fitted that remit pretty well, but the role wasn't offered straight to her. I did extensive casting, seeing lots of people. I saw about forty people for that part. So Eileen only actually got the role about a week and a half before we started filming. So it wasn't offered her on a plate. The character wasn't written for Eileen, but it was written for the kind of character which Eileen would be good at playing. And she was the best person in the audition. Eileen was involved in the project. Even if she hadn't got the lead, I would have wanted her to be in it. But she did a great reading and got the part."

Does it help that, particularly now, Eileen has become something of a horror icon?
JW: "Oh definitely, yes. At the time I was doing that I already thought she was a bit of an icon anyway because of the Redemption stuff, and I know Nigel Wingrove quite well as well. Eileen's always loved horror and she's never looked down her nose at it like certain actresses do. So that was one of Eileen's strengths as well. To actually be involved in that whole scene, I think Eileen is a very positive person for the genre and has been doing good. A lot of the things that Eileen has done over the past couple of years, her profile has risen. Also because of the kind of coverage that you've done and the fact that Eileen's just got a few groovy parts and stuff, like Archangel Thunderbird and the Redemption Bravo stuff and those kind of things. I think I was just lucky really. So hopefully Razor Blade will be another great thing for Eileen so she can do her next project, so hopefully somebody offers her loads of money to do something else."

How did you get David Warbeck involved in the film?
JW: "I was looking for a cameo star to play the role that his character plays. I wrote that part because it could just be done in a day and it could be done by somebody who was known to the fans. The original idea was to get Christopher Lee for that part, and I tried for months to get him. His agent, Jean Diamond, she's a [expletive deleted - MJS] and she's only interested in money. You can quote that if you want to. I'd love to work with Christopher Lee. I've got no problem with Christopher Lee, but because I didn't know anyone who knew him, I couldn't get past his agent. She wouldn't even take pages of the script for the character. She wouldn't pass them on to him. I approached her the correct route, legitimately. We could only have offered him a very small sum of money for doing it because we just didn't have any money. I understand that he doesn't want to be associated with being a vampire and stuff like that, but the role in that part was quite an affectionate character, just a friendly scientist who doesn't believe in vampires or the supernatural. So I thought that might have appealed to Christopher Lee's sensibilities. I've seen him in interviews and he does like helping film-makers out. I don't think he's got any problem with that, but basically we couldn't get through his agent.

"So I was left in a bit of a problem because I'd been trying for so long to get him and I'd actually started shooting and I still didn't have anybody in that role. So it looked like I might just have to get anybody to do it. But because Eileen had worked with David Warbeck on Pervirella, and also I'm friends with Alex Chandon as well, I asked them both if they thought David would be up for it. I got David's number and gave him a call and he said, 'Yes, let me have a look at the script and I'll let you know.' And a day later, after I got a copy of the script off, he gave me a phone call and he said he'd love to do it. Which was wonderful. Also at that time he was going through a lot of trouble. I don't know if you knew. He was going through a court case and also he was ill. I didn't realise any of that at the time. He had this court case going on."

I believe he was under house arrest for running a brothel.
JW: "That's correct. That was still going through and he actually had cleared his name, so he was a bit worried because that was all coming to a head and he'd had a hearing. So there were a few factors. But he said, 'I'd love to do it.' He came down for the day and it was just wonderful. Working with David Warbeck was phenomenal. I now feel very privileged because at the time nobody expected him to pass away a year later. It was a shock because he was 56 or 57. But it was wonderful to work with him and I feel very lucky. He was such a charming and gracious man and an actor, I hope it inspires other actors so that as they get towards the end of their careers they'll help young film-makers as well. What he did was very positive. He didn't just help me, he helped a whole bunch of young film-makers. He was in Pervirella, he was in Sudden Fury. He's always been on the scene, he went to all the fan conventions. He would always be there for the fans, and for the film-makers as well. I can't sing his praises highly enough really."

What about the rest of your cast?
JW: "The only other known person in the cast is probably Christopher Adamson, the guy with the scar. He was Mean Machine in Judge Dredd and he's been in a lot of stuff. He was in The Fifth Element as one of the airport guards who blasts down the thing. He was in Cutthroat Island, he was in Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves, he did Mad Dogs and Englishmen and he's currently doing a film called Lighthouse which is being made by a friend of mine, Simon Hunter. It's a sort of serial killer, slasher-type movie and he's playing the lead killer in that. So Christopher's been around and he's one of those faces that you sort of know but don't.

“The rest of cast: I put all the casting details in Production Casting Report which is a thing that gets circulated through all of the actors and all of the agents. You put the synopsis and details of all the parts. And for the next couple of weeks, we got literally thousands and thousands of CVs which I had to sift through and look at what people had done. Also there were a couple of parts where there were a few actors I'd worked with before. Like the Jim Pilgrim guy, the American bloke on the internet, he's a guy I've worked with a few times before and I asked him specifically to do that role. But on the whole there was only about seven per cent of people and they were in smaller roles. So that's how that came about really."

How has working on CD-ROMs and pop videos helped?
JW: "I'd been making films since I was about 16 on video and then I went to film school and I had a chance to work on film. So obviously all of that was experience and I made lots of weird stuff which I wanted to do. Film school got a lot of shit out of my system - and I also made a couple of good things as well. When I left, getting a job in the industry is quite hard and my primary skill was as an editor, so I sold that skill, using that to get directing gigs. Then managed to get some pop promos and the CD-ROM stuff. What was good about that was it was giving me the chance to shoot film. Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't just writing a script for three and a half years and having not done anything. I'd done more since I left film school than I'd done at film school, really, in a more professional environment with people who would then help me out with this. So that was just a way of honing my skills really and just keeping on the boil. I was just lucky. Filming anything is good; you always learn stuff when you film."

Rob, you were the producer on this film.
Robert Mercer: "Co-producer with Jake. I came in quite late, basically just before Jake was going to start shooting. Jake had really pre-produced the whole shoot. On the shoot I was more helping out, line production, running around, nuts and bolts. Constantly just running into London and getting more blood basically. Then when it came to the post we both shared responsibilities. I basically post-produced, set up all the deals for that and organised where tape was supposed to go and made sure everything was going right. Then when it came to dealing with Manga, we both again worked together. I was more dealing with the contract side of things with the solicitor and with the American solicitor to get everything right. Generally, that was about it."

You've got an American release?
RM: "We've got an American theatrical release which comes out on 16th October. They've managed to secure in LA, apparently the most prestigious independent theatre over there. As a result, they've decided to bring the American release forward to match that. They're looking probably about a week or a week and a half after that to release in New York and Chicago. Then to release in London on the 30th. And hopefully, fingers crossed, they're thinking is: if it does well in LA then they will spread it out to more towns across the States. They've had a couple of test screenings and everything was very positive for that, so fingers crossed for that one."

Are you going out there to promote it?
RM: "Yes, we'll be going out for the release on 16th October. I'll probably only be going out for the release there. Then these guys hopefully will be going from LA to Chicago, then to New York. But that is still to be confirmed."

Eileen, how was this role first presented to you?
Eileen Daly: "As Jake said before, I knew him through doing a couple of pop promos and bits and pieces like that, that he was doing at the time. He told me at the CD-ROM party that he'd written a script, there were three girls, three sexy babes that he needed. And he was pleased with the script and going ahead with it, and he was excited. I said, 'Can I have a role in it?' He said, 'Well, you'll have to cast for it, but yes, when it's actually finalised I'll give you a ring and tell you when it's on.' So he did. He said it was on, so I went up for a casting."

What was the stuff you'd done with Jake before?
ED: "We'd done a pop promo with me in a cornfield as a butterfly. But bloody thing - it rained and they couldn't get the sun right. So we had to come back the next morning and do a reshoot on that."

I can't see you as a butterfly.
ED: "I was a good butterfly."

JW: "Eileen was wearing a translucent rubber dress, like a condom dress, and she had this full-face make-up like a butterfly's wing across her face. We put her in this chrysalis and she tears her way out of it. So it's all very dramatic. It was for a band called The Rain, a rock band. They never got anywhere, but the video's quite nice. The first day was shit because it rained, but the second day it shined and it was sunny. It was all based around Magritte paintings. Bowler hats and stuff, and sofas in the field. All very silly, but it looked nice."

ED: "So I'd done that, and he said there was a casting going, come in. So I actually asked him to bike over the script because I wanted to have a look at it. I thought the script was fantastic. I looked at the script and I loved Lilith Silver! I wanted Lilith, I didn't want the other babes! I got my audition date. I was the first girl to be auditioned, wasn't I? And I knew there was some action in the movie, so when I was making the coffee, I got Jake in the kitchen and I started showing off. Do you remember me doing my kung fu kicks and everything? I was trying to impress him! Showing him my muscles, because I'd been training a lot then. I'd been training for three years and I was a lot bigger. I'd done kickboxing but mainly weight-training. I was really into weight-training, cardiovascular. I loved it, I ate the right food.

"So anyway, I didn't hear anything for about three weeks and he was obviously seeing loads of other girls. But I was saying to Nigel, 'Oh God, he hasn't rung, you know. He hasn't rung.' Every now and then I'd say, 'Jake rung?''No.' Anyway, he phoned up and he said we've now cut it down to about two or three people, so I'd like you to come in again. So I went in again and then waited another week, biting my nails. Because Jake would never jeopardise this; this is his first film, his baby, and he wanted to get it right. Just because he knows me and he likes me, there was no guarantee. With Jake, just because he knows and likes someone and he thinks they might be right for the part, if someone better came along, I know he would take that other person. Because he's put his life on the line, he wants the right person for it. And that worried me! But then Jake phoned up and said, 'I've got some good news. You've got the part of Lilith Silver!'

"So that's how it happened. I was so pleased. I trained out: I got someone in to look at my lines and help me with my lines on each scene. How would one act as a vampire assassin who was from the 18th century and is now in 1996 or whenever it was? All these elements. Do you play it like a Gary Oldman and go, 'A-a-ah, ye-e-es...' or do you play it with some sophistication but always have that element? Here I'm speaking quite fast and I'm quite animated. So I had to chuck all that away and calm right down to the point where I was on two demazapans a day. But I wasn't. My voice had to be a lot richer and a lot slower and a lot sexier. I thought maybe it will go that way rather than going the full monty of vampire stuff. So yes, we were shooting within a week and a half; we were on set and we were ready to go. It was good."

Was it a very intensive shoot? Hard work?
ED: "Terribly hard work. The crew were great. We all slept in the same house together - it was like a commune. Jake's mum did the food. Everything was really, really simple. Jake didn't have a lot of money to play around with all these fineries like we're sitting here now in a hotel, eating breakfast. But everything was really good. It was very, very cold, I remember. And the catsuit was great and it looked great, but after three weeks of wearing a catsuit, the catsuit did become like a second skin. It was becoming cold. I would sweat underneath the catsuit and the sweat would turn to cold, so when I took it off I would be wringing all round the crutch, all under my bust. So it was hard work, because we had to move constantly. We'd rehearse once, shoot, off. Because we didn't have the fineries of having six takes and four weeks' rehearsal pre-shoot. Because we didn't have a lot of film. Another thing was that Jake's parents were moving to Devon and we had to shoot because they were moving within the time-scale that we were shooting. Their house was so wonderful to shoot at, we had to do it there and then."

JW: "There was a lot of location work. We started off in Buckinghamshire, then we came to London and we did a week in London, then we relocated to Kent, so we had to move a whole unit around on a low budget. Normally you're supposed to keep everything isolated in one place. That was difficult, I think, for the actors as well. Eileen was there all the time, because not only was she doing probably the biggest role she's ever, but it was shot completely out of sequence. And Eileen did really well with that."

ED: "One minute we were shooting the beginning of the film, and the next minute you're in a scene that's at the end. that sort of thing. Mentally you had to remember the script and all the middle bits that go through it."

JW: "Plus you're getting worn out by all the milage. Everyone starts off with loads of energy, but a couple of weeks in, after 18-hour days, everyone's really feeling it. When you analyse the film in a cosy environment, everyone talks about, 'Oh, why did you do it like that? You shouldn't really have done that.' But at the time, in those sort of situations, just getting it done is sometimes all you can do. We were very lucky. I think we got very good results for the limitations of what we were under as well. Eileen really got into the character. I think it took a couple of days, but then you really got it. That thing you did at the beginning of the shoot, which isn't your favourite - the Transylvania one - that was about the second or third day."

ED: "It took a while to get into the shoot. It always takes a while to get into knowing people for a start. I knew Jake, but I didn't know the cameraman and the guy who did the lights. On big feature films, the first week's worth of filming they usually reshoot because everyone's warming up to each other. Everyone knows their limitations and their goals. But we couldn't do that. So my first scene was the Transylvania scene. Every time I see that scene, I think it was a great scene, but I would love to have reshot that scene. Why? Only because I can see certain flaws; I could have sort of done it more if I'd digested it and had a couple of rehearsals and then made it more of my scene, rather than just a scene like it was. I would have warmed to it and made it a little bit more gestured and thought about getting up or looking at my watch or talking to Ariana in way that I would talk to her if I was a normal girl."

JW: "One of the good things about doing a film like this, though, because it was such an intensive thing, is that we've learnt so much by doing it. We can look at it now and it's not like we're saying this is the best thing we can ever do. It makes you think, 'God, if it's possible to do that like that, just imagine if we have a bit of time and a bit of money and some space, then we can really do something special.' The learning curve is so steep, doing something like this because it's just crazy. it's not like anything else you can think of. That kind of low-budget shoot is crazy."

In reinventing the vampire myth, it's almost like you're having a dig at people who take this too seriously. Is there a danger of alienating your core audience?
JW: "There's always a danger of alienating an audience, but that's not a reason not to do stuff. Otherwise, if you're just going to keep it the same as always, then there's nothing new about it. I think the kind of things that I was laughing at and having a slight dig at are the things which generally people find funny about vampires anyway. I think the notion of somebody five foot seven turning into a bat which is about half a foot or whatever is a bit ridiculous, or turning into a mist. All those things used to make me laugh about vampires. So I never really believed in those elements anyway. To me, they were the more ludicrous elements of it. The whole idea of somebody who is immortal, who has this kind of regenerative system if they drink blood, they're not really immortal even. Vampires can always get killed. I figured decapitation is the way to kill a vampire, rather than staking, because if your head comes off you're not going to regrow a new head, however good your regenerative powers are. It was just things like that, things that I just thought, 'Well, if it upsets people then I'm sorry but...'

"On the whole, everyone who's seen it out of the goth/vampire audience, these people do have a sense of humour as well. So on the whole they'll have got the joke. If anything they're the people who possibly found it the funniest because they're more into it. The trappings of vampire lore are the kind of things that they actually talk about, whereas the normal Joe Public doesn't necessarily think about that all day."

Are you hopeful that this will get beyond the core audience and be seen as a New British Film?
JW: "Of course, yes. If there's a chance for a crossover audience, because it's a vampire film, then that would be wonderful basically. A vampire film has got a better chance of crossing over than maybe another type of horror movie. Although slasher movies have become very popular all of a sudden with Scream and the like. The bigger the audience the better, obviously."

Some of the mainstream critics are likely to look down at it a bit.
JW: "Oh, I think they will, yes. I've got absolutely no doubt that it will get crucified by a certain faction of the critics because it's just not their thing. But what can you do as a film-maker? If I was worried about what the critics are going to say, I'd never make a film. I am quite nervous about that, at the same time though, because I've been working on it for such a long time. It could be very disheartening to have people laying into you when really you're just trying to help the industry. We're helping the industry, we're not injuring it. If people don't like it, that's fair enough, but there's definitely an audience out there for this movie. How big that audience is remains to be seen."

Eileen, several things you've done have all happened at once. Suddenly Eileen Daly is everywhere. Is that exposure useful?
ED: "Oh, of course. I think any exposure is good. Hopefully it helps me to grow and get different parts. I don't want to be stuck as a vampire, even though I love doing it. I adore horror films and that is my main background; I do like that. But in my art as an actress, I would like to grow and do other things. there's loads of other parts out there apart from being vampires that I would like to challenge. Lady Chatterley would be a smashing one, only because I'm not strong in that. I'm Mellor's wife and I'm quite weak and very lovely. There's loads of things. I've been so unchallenged with my acting that I'd like to stretch a little further and work with other people. I just like to work; it's all I want to do. And it's wonderful that everything's coming out now that I've worked for over the past two years. Now it all seems to be coming together. But I hope it doesn't come together.

"It's like an orgasm really. You have an orgasm and go, 'Aaaah...' and then you have a cigarette and go to sleep! I hope it carries on. I'm doing my best to try and make it carry on, but I can't do it on my own. I have to have other people. Go and see the film. You can't slate this film because if you knew how much it cost and how hard we worked, why slate it? It's so easy to slate this film because it isn't your Godzilla, it's a small, independent film with a very talented director who's got great ideas. And he's a wonderful editor and he's very talented and no doubt one day he'll be picked up and he'll be in Hollywood, doing big things and good things. It's got some good actors and people worked so hard. It's so easy to slate a low-budget movie because we haven't got the money to make special effects and big squibs and car bombs and what everyone wants nowadays. But what this has got is a great little script, and a very tight, fast-moving, MTV-type concentration so the kids will love it. And the adults. It's got all the ingredients to make a beautiful cake, but if we had five million, maybe we may have lost those. If we had too much money, we might have lost that ingredient."

JW: "Hopefully it's got a little bit of charm to it. Often people only realise these things retrospectively. They'll look back at it, after I've made my next film, if I do get a better budget. They'll look back at this and go, 'Oh, it doesn't have the charm of Razor Blade Smile.' But it's hard to say. I don't know what the audience thinks of it yet because we've only screened it a couple of times. This is the second time. So far, the general feedback seems to be positive which is a good indication at this point. But who knows? It needs to enter into history and have the reviews, then see how the fans talk about it. You know how fans are, because they talk about these things for a lot longer than anybody else. So if it stays alive and people are still watching it in a few years' time on video or whatever, then it will be a success. If it's just an ignored little movie, then... It's really hard to say. You've seen enough independent low-budget movies to know: sometimes they just catch on and people really think of them as great things, and other times they just don't."

With a character a strong as Lilith Silver, are you looking, however vaguely, at sequels or model kits or whatever?
JW: "Any merchandising, I won't be doing, but I'd love it to death. I think it would be great and I'd love to have my Lilith Silver mug and stuff like that! Manga are talking about doing that so I don't know how far that will go. It depends how much money they've got to spend if they license it. There is interest in a sequel from Manga. In the contract they've got me, if they want to do a sequel then I've got an option to write that and I've got control if I want to do it. I can say no if I don't want to, but then they can take it off somewhere else. They're interested in a sequel, but I think it very much depends. We've all seen enough crappy sequels to things to know that just because a film has made a little bit of money isn't always the best reason to do a sequel. I think it's got to be because you've got a fresh spin on the character for the new story. I think the Lilith Silver character's great because she's a vampire and she can fit into different time zones and stuff like that. I think there is a lot of meat there. So if there is a sequel, it's got to be because there's a positive audience response and they want that character to be resurrected, not just because somebody wants to make a fast buck on it, really. Because it's too much hassle making a film to just do it like that."

Director: Jake West
Writer: Jake West
Producers: Jake West, Rob Mercer
Cast: Eileen Daly, Christopher Adamson, Jonathan Coote
Country: UK
Year of release: 1998
Reviewed from: UK 2-disc special edition
Website: www.razorbladesmile.com

Ten years ago I saw Razor Blade Smile on the big screen, writing rave reviews for SFX and Total Film - both of which are quoted on this DVD. You all know that I’m very supportive of indie British cinema so I was deliberately more generous than I should have been, knowing that most of the mainstream press would tear this little, low-budget action/horror picture to pieces and wanting to provide some sort of counterpoint.

Over the ensuing decade, some people have loved Razor Blade Smile, some have hated it and I have always wondered whether I was unduly positive in my published reviews. So, ten years on, I sat down to watch the DVD, expecting a cheap’n’cheerful piece of low-budget silliness.

But you know what? Razor Blade Smile stands up - and stands up well. This was a film shot on 16mm just on the cusp of a revolution in low-budget film-making. In 1998, ‘digital’ still meant something you operated with your finger. And this was also one of the last British horror films made in the doldrums of the 1990s before the ‘British Horror Revival’ was kick-started by the triple whammy of three great, gritty, British frightfilms: Darklands, Urban Ghost Story and I, Zombie. Suddenly, around 1998-99, British horror cinema exploded, a boom period which is still going on ten years later.

RBS was the last of the old guard and as such it’s a fascinating time capsule of a swiftly forgotten style of film-making. It’s not unlike watching a science fiction film made just before Star Wars. Yet in the same way that George Lucas’ masterpiece, for all its slick polish and technical whizzbangery, somehow lost the heart and soul that permeated the few SF movies made in the first half of the 1970s (think Silent Running, think Rollerball, think Soylent Green, think Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), so there seems, in retrospect, to have been a deadening, a flattening out of British indie horror in the past ten years. Sturgeon’s law says that 90 per cent of everything is crap; when the means becomes more accessible and the process more popular, the product becomes more prevalent and the average quality decreases.

Which is not to say that there haven’t been some fantastic horror movies made in Britain between then (1998) and now (2008). But one of the reasons Razor Blade Smile still impresses so much today is because Jake West and his team really had to work hard to make this film. There were no short cuts, no home computers, no web-based tools. This was real film-making and because of this, Jake can truthfully claim to be a real film-maker.

RBS is the story of a vampire named Lilith Silver, played by - who else? - Eileen Daly. There was a period in the history of British horror films when you pretty much weren’t allowed to make one without Eileen. Between 1997 and 2001 she appeared in Alex Chandon’s Pervirella, Elisar Cabrera’s Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft, Tony Luke’s Archangel Thunderbird, Razor Blade Smile, Sacred Flesh (for her partner Nigel Wingrove), Tricky Dicky Driscoll's Kannibal and then Cradle of Fear (for Alex again). That’s seven horror films (albeit Archangel Thunderbird is a half-hour short) in five years.

Lilith Silver is a professional hitwoman: Queen of the Damned meets Day of the Jackal with a side order of Emma Peel. Squeezed into rubber catsuits or squeezing out of black lace basques, Eileen was perfectly suited to the role and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else even being considered. Long black hair, alabaster pale skin, ruby red lips and the voice that Marilyn Monroe might have had if she was born in Catford. Eileen is Lilith is Eileen.

All that said, Eileen’s never going to win an Oscar and she’s better in the scenes without dialogue (and without occasional, unnecessary narration). But she has something more than great acting skill, she’s got charm and an undeniable chemistry with the camera.

Though less iconic, Christopher Adamson is also something of a British indie horror regular. As well as his role here as lead vampire Sethane Blake, he starred as the satanic Magus in Jake’s graduation film Club Death, he was one of the mad Welsh brothers in Jake’s second feature, Evil Aliens, he was the psycho in Simon Hunter’s Lighthouse, a randy priest in Sacred Flesh, a hitman in Whacked (the short film that Jake made inbetween RBS and Evil Aliens) and he was a psycho again in the prologue of The Last Horror Movie. But Adamson also has a career in more respectable - or at least, bigger-budgeted - movies including Judge Dredd (as Mean Machine Angel) and all three Pirates of the Caribbean pictures (as Jimmy Legs). He has also worked with Simon Hunter again in Mutant Chronicles.

So anyway, Razor Blade Smile. A black and white prologue set in the early 18th century sees Sethane vampirising Lilith after she gets involved in a duel he was fighting. Actually it’s a black, white and red prologue with Jake colouring in the blood, of which there is a great deal. Visual effects by Cinesite go a long way towards making this film look vastly more expensive than it was and are also evident in the James Bond pastiche title sequence.

In the present day, Lilith earns her living as a contract killer, explaining hypothetically to some weekend goths in a nightclub called Transilvania that this is what she thinks a vampire would do. You’re immortal, you need to not only stop yourself from being bored but also earn money so that you can pass for normal. Contract killing is the perfect job and also takes away the problem of who to kill and eat. Lilith’s technique is to blast the victim in the neck afterwards with her twin automatic pistols to obliterate the bite marks.

This is the crux of Razor Blade Smile: it’s a film based on the potential practicalities of vampiredom, clearly derived from young Mr West sitting down with a sheet of paper and an HB pencil and thinking: “Right, what would a vampire actually do?”

Lilith doesn’t deal directly with her clients. She works through a middle-man named Platinum who has no idea about her supernatural background. And damn me, behind the goatee beard and the floppy hair is a young-looking Kevin Howarth, five years before he became a horror icon as Max Parry in The Last Horror Movie. Between those two roles he was in Whacked, family fantasy The Ghost of Greville Lodge and an obscure horror-thriller called Don’t Look Back! and since then he has turned up in Summer Scars (for Julian Richards again), Cold and Dark (with Luke Goss) and the as-yet-unreleased Gallowwalker (with Wesley Snipes, who was arrested for tax fraud during production), both of those last two directed by the appropriately named Andrew Goth. Here Kevin has a few (tasteful) sex scenes with Eileen, as Lilith and Platinum fail to keep their professional and personal lives separate, plus an ironically prophetic torture scene while tied to a chair.

Tracking down this mysterious ‘hitman’, nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’, is Detective Inspector Price (Jonathan Coote: The Last Horror Movie, The 13th Sign), assisted in one brief scene by David Warbeck in his final role. In the late 1990s Warbeck became a great supporter of British indie cinema with roles in Pervirella, Sudden Fury and this film (albeit this particular copper, known only as ‘the Horror Movie Man’ was originally written with Christopher Lee in mind). Warbeck died in July 1997, aged only 55, from cancer and the UK indie scene lost a great friend.

Lilith is hired to take out some sort of mob boss named Leonard Arnold (Georgio Serafini: Five Children and It) and also kills his minders while she’s there but misses his Missus (Jennifer Guy, who back in the 1970s was in Don Chaffey’s Persecution and infamous Douglas Adams/Graham Chapman pilot Out of the Trees). She puts Price onto the idea that the killer was a vampire and he hires a student photographer (Grahame Wood, who is now over in North America making glamorous TV dramas like Beautiful People and Falcon Beach) to take snaps of the clientele in Transilvania, from which Arnold’s widow identifies Lilith.

But Price has an interest in the case entirely unrelated to his police work. He is a member of a secret Illuminati sect headed by Sethane Blake who all wear distinctive rings. The Angel of Death, who has apparently been responsible for murders dating back a century or more, is being hired by someone to take out the members of this sect. In what may be the first appearance of the internet in a British film, Lilith talks via webcam with a guy called ‘the Chill Pilgrim’ who identifies the ring design for her. Brad Lavelle, who played this role, was also in Nightbreed, Judge Dredd, Hellraiser II and Alien Autopsy and narrated one of the three versions of The Last Dragon. He dropped dead of a heart attack a week before his 49th birthday in 2007.

At this point I’d like to say that you can always tell a film directed by an editor. I’d like to, but I’m not sure it’s entirely true, although I think it’s inarguable that the three main types of directors - former editors, former cinematographers and those who go straight into directing - tend to make films in distinctively different ways. Jake frames his images with the confidence that comes from having already cut the film together in his head while he was writing it. He’s not afraid to play with form; not just flashbacks but little expressionistic fantasy inserts. Sometimes generically expressionistic - Lilith towering above London while Sethane calls to her from some sort of glowing starburst - and sometimes literally Expressionistic as in a couple of faux silent movie clips of Eileen turning into a bat and a mist.

If there’s a weakness in the film (some dodgy day-for-night scenes aside) it’s probably the climax, an extended chase around some rocks which goes on too long with the final twist, though internally consistent, slightly too pat to be completely satisfying.

Also in a respectable cast are Isabel Brook (who went on to appear in Brian Yuzna’s embarrassingly bombastic Faust), Peter Godwin (Sentinels of Darkness, Pervirella), the stunning Louisa Moore (who, as Louise Edwards, was Lady Death in Club Death) and Glenn Wrage (Thunderpants, Octane) as the other duellist in the prologue. Among the various crew members moonlighting as extras are production designer Neil Jenkins (Evil Aliens, Broken, The Devil’s Chair), composer Richard Wells (Evil Aliens, Mutant Chronicles and the UK release of Ong-Bak!), costume designer Dena Costello (Sacred Flesh, Warrior Sisters) and Quentin Reynolds (executive producer of Evil Aliens). Simon Hunter is a voice on a police radio, a favour which Jake repaid a couple of years later by providing a radio voice for Lighthouse.

Jake shared the producer credit with Rob Mercer, who went on to write and produce Stagknight while Marvin Gleicher from Manga Video was one of three executive producers. Cinematographer Jim Solan also worked with Jake on Club Death, Whacked and Evil Aliens and was second unit director on Lighthouse. Jake did his own editing of course.

In the booklet which accompanies the surprisingly lavish two-disc edition, Jake makes the claim that RBS is probably the lowest-budgeted feature film ever to have a UK theatrical release and he might be right. It certainly cost a lot less than the supposedly micro-budget Blair Shit Project although here, as in every case, one must bear in mind that the cost of post-production, distribution and marketing may not be included. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing that Evil Aliens cost a factor of ten times more than this and that Pumpkinhead 3 - which is still considered ‘low budget’ - cost another factor of ten more than that. As I pointed out to Jake on the Pumpkinhead set, at this rate his fifth or sixth feature will cost more than Titanic.

As well as the rather naive version of the internet on show (which is called ‘V-net’ and is, of course, dial-up!), there are mobile phones the size of bricks and a few other odds and sods which date the film. One interesting thing is that in the ensuing ten years the focus of low-budget horror has shifted somewhat. Vampires are, if not passé, certainly no longer flavour of the month. In the 2000s the monster of choice for cut-price film-makers is the zombie.

The late 1990s was not a great time for fans of British horror movies. I know because I was working on SFX from 1995 to 1998, desperately trying to promote whatever few films came along. This makes Razor Blade Smile (or Razor Blade, as the French know it) an oddity, out of time and out of context, devoid of directly comparative films and destined forever to rattle around in the subgenre bag marked ‘other’ along with the likes of Funny Man and The Killer Tongue. It’s ironic that in the production notes Jake commented, “I'm fed up with the British looking like the most socially repressed nation in the world - it's time we regained a sense of cool sophistication,” but that cool sophistication never came along, at least not in the world of low-budget horror films. Instead the subgenre flourished by taking the gloom and angst of that very same social repression and embracing it, creating a truly British horror cinema for the early 21st century that owed as much to Ken Loach as it did to Christopher Lee.

Manga’s Special Edition double DVD has a digitally restored widescreen image that really shows up the quality of Solan’s cinematography and a commentary with Jake and Eileen. The second disc kicks off with Club Death, followed by an hour-long documentary, Slice of Life - From Club Death to Razor Blade Smile. This is built around interviews with Jake, Eileen, Chris Adamson, Jonathan Coote, Kevin Howarth, Jim Solan, Neil Jenkins and Richard Wells and even includes a brief clip from A Bizarre Short Film About Death..., a 1989 student film directed by Jake at Farnham College.

There are two subtly different versions of the theatrical trailer, one of which is an unused variant with a couple of CGI effects in it, plus about seven minutes of bloopers/out-takes and about eight minutes of alternate/deleted scenes. This last is a bit misleading because, with the exception of a variant of the lesbian seduction scored with Richard Wells’ music (in case the music clearance didn’t come through), this is a montage of short clips, not whole scenes. There’s nothing significant here except an unused shot of the goth nightclub with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo by Jakey-boy himself.

Jake and Rob flew out to Cannes in 1997 to sell the film, armed with a ten-minute promo reel and a two-minute trailer, both included here - the promo reel introduced by Richard Wells - along with four minutes of self-shot ‘video diary’ which is frustrating in its brevity. There is a ten-minute slide show of 121 on-set/promotional photos and half an hour of previews for other Manga titles (all anime, naturally). I’m not usually a one for DVD easter eggs but since the review on DVD Times mentioned them I’ll point out a couple. On disc 1 pressing left on ‘Audio set-up’ gives you a one-minute slide show of 16 different pieces of promo artwork (I seem to recall that one of these posters was banned from the tube) while on disc 2 pressing right on ‘Manga previews’ gives you four minutes of different versions of the dream sequence and has the added bonus of not showing you any dreadful anime trailers. According to the sleeve there is also a script and some storyboards on the disc somewhere if you stick it in your computer. Altogether it’s a heck of a package and something that no-one could have imagined ten years ago when VHS was king.

For a while, there was talk of Razor Blade Smile 2. Jake wrote a script for this and I remember discussing it with him, Rob Mercer and Marvin Gleicher at Cannes in 2000, the night before I was interviewed by The Big Breakfast (a whole other story...). In the end, the ‘sequel’ became a gag scene in Evil Aliens and that - given that Eileen is probably now a little, ahem, long in the tooth to revive Lilith Silver - is how it’s likely to stay.

MJS rating: A

Director: Greydon Clark
Writers: Jim Kouf, Dana Olsen, Michael Spound
Producer: Greydon Clark
Cast: Julia Duffy, Scott McGinnis, George Kennedy
Country: USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

I can’t explain it, I can’t even excuse it, but I find something compulsively watchable about this desperately, desperately, desperately unfunny horror spoof. It’s like a car wreck. Every joke falls so completely flat (even the one or two that, handled properly, could actually have been funny) that it is difficult to tear one’s eyes away from the screen. In many cases, they’re not even real jokes, just jokoids: something which has the shape of a joke but isn’t actually humorous. Wacko comes from the school of comedy which says it’s enough to simply make a reference to something or recreate an image from another film - you don’t actually have to spoof or lampoon it in any way or, you know, inject any wit or anything.

A prologue set thirteen years ago sees High School student Pam Graves (Claudia Lonow: Knots Landing) preparing for the Halloween Pumpkin Prom. Her date drives her to the High School car park where the two of them are brutally killed by a long-nosed. pumpkin-headed maniac armed with a petrol-powered lawnmower. This is witnessed by Pam’s little sister Mary and her friends Bambi, Rosie and Johnny, all of whom are trussed up in the back seat.

Thirteen years later, Mary (Julia Duffy: Battle Beyond the Stars, Charlotte’s Web 2) is about to attend her own Halloween Pumpkin Prom at Alfred Hitchcock High School, where her date is a young man named Norman Bates (Scott McGinnis, who was in Star Trek III and Sky Bandits and directed episodes of Angel). Yes, he’s called Norman Bates: that’s the level of satire on show here. And of course he has a dead mother whom he pretends can talk. But there’s just nothing intrinsically funny about having a character called Norman Bates unless you do something with that name, use it to make a point - or at least make a joke. But it's not a joke, just a jokoid, as is the school name. There’s even a banner up announcing that weekend’s big football game between the Hitchcock Birds and the De Palma Knives. Oh, spare me.

Mary is the only Virgin in the High School. Rosie (Michele Tobin, who must have been very young when she made her debut in an episode of The Wild, Wild West) is a glamorous pricktease dating tight-trousered Travolta-esque Tony Schlongini (notoriously unfunny comedian Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, just credited as ‘Andrew Clay’) while Bambi is a squeaky-voiced cutie who lacks a date, played by squeaky voice artist EG Daily (credited as ‘Elizabeth Daily’).

Scuzzball detective Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker: Leonard Part VI, Cape Fear remake, Mars Attacks! and three Bond films) is convinced that the Lawnmower Killer will strike again, but he has so many suspects to choose from. There’s the hilariously named Harry Palms (Jeff Altman: Highlander II), evangelical Vice Principal of the school who punishes wayward students who indulge in ‘vice’ (get it?) by squeezing their heads in a large vice (get it!!!). There’s a bald escapee from a mental hospital, tastefully credited as ‘The Looney’ (David Drucker). There’s geeky loner school gardener Zeke (Anthony James: Return from Witch Mountain, Howling IV, Mortuary Academy) and science teacher Dr Moreau (Victor Brandt: Neon Maniacs, Sliver, The Cat in the Hat and two episodes of classic Trek) who injects the school football team with a chemical that turns them into beastmen, giving them their first victory in years (something we don’t actually see, presumably because it would cost too much to stage a whole ball game).

Back at Mary’s house, there’s her father, Dr Graves (George Kennedy: The Naked Gun, Monster Makers, Demonwarp, Death Ship) whose sub-Benny Hill lustings for young women are rendered distinctly dodgy by the fact that said young women are his teenage daughters. When caught in the act of spying he always claims to be “mowing the lawn”. Stella Stevens (The Nutty Professor, Invisible Mom - ah sod it, you all know who Stella Stevens is) plays Mary’s mother and Michael Lee Gogin (Critters, Munchies, Spy Hard, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) is her weirdo younger brother Damien who, with typical lack of subtlety, has three sixes on his forehead. There is also a strange bloke, credited as ‘The Weirdo’ (Sonny Davis), who keeps trying to catch Harbinger’s attention.

The sad part is that, though they may tick every comedy stereotype box, none of these characters are actually funny. Nor does the ‘plot’ make much sense; there’s one particular scene where Rosie and Tony are in the school cafeteria and moments later they’re in the back of a car. You might say that such sloppy story construction can be excused by the fact that it’s a hot-rod car used for school driving lessons which then chases another hot-rod car across the football field before one vehicle crashes and the other flies into the sky (in the manner of Grease), but frankly it can’t.

Filmed in 1981 but not released until two years later, Wacko is one of those films that tries to be a non-stop barrage of jokes but whereas that worked with Airplane (to which the video sleeve tries to compare this crap), it doesn’t work here because none of the jokes are even slightly funny. There are tick-the-box gags spoofing The Exorcist and Alien, neither of which is worth even a smile. The whole thing is just terrible beyond belief.

I love it.

I could watch Wacko over and over again (as long as there’s a gap of several years between each screening). It’s compulsively awful in a very 1980s way but not really ‘so bad it’s good’ (as the much abused cliche has it). It’s just crap frankly. But I must be achieving some sort of meta-entertainment because I’m certainly not enjoying it in any conventional sense.

The three-way script credit is shared between Jim Kouf (The Hidden I and II, National Treasure, Rush Hour and a producer on Angel), Dana Olsen (Memoirs of an Invisible Man, George of the Jungle) and Michael Spound (presumably the actor who went on to be in The Ring, though this seems to be his only writing credit). I’m guessing that one of them wrote the script, the second inserted jokes into it and the third one had some Tippex. Greydon Clark - who is right up near the top of my interview wishlist, I don’t mind admitting - also brought us the likes of Without Warning, Dance Macabre, Dark Future and The Uninvited (which also starred George Kennedy). Cinematographer Nicolas von Sternberg is, bizarrely but not unexpectedly, the son of Josef von Sternberg. A regular Clark collaborator, his credits also include Slaughterhouse Rock, Hospital Massacre and Dr Alien.

I’ve always had a fondness for the surprisingly extensive subgenre of lawnmower horror movies (no honestly, there’s loads) and maybe that’s the reason why I enjoy Wacko despite its status as a comedy vacuum. Plus it has the deeply wonderful EG Daily (the voice of Babe in Babe, Tomy Pickles in Rugrats and Buttercup in The Powerpuff Girls), one of the very few actresses I could legitimately claim to have a crush on. Neither of those things completely explains my appreciation of this awful film, but they must be considered as mitigating factors, m’lud.

MJS rating: D

My first epic interview with Jake West was done in the company of Rob Mercer and Eileen Daly, talking aboutRazor Blade Smilein 1998. Seven years later, in September 2005, Jake gave me the full rundown onEvil Aliensas well as all his other projects from the intervening period.

Whatever happened to Razor Blade Smile 2, which was going to be your next film?
"What happened is that I did write the script for it and spent about a year writing seven drafts which were commissioned by Manga or Palm Pictures as they are. Basically, the upshot of it was that I delivered a script to them which they said they liked but, in terms of actually putting money up for it, they didn’t seem to be very forthcoming with the cash. So my feeling was that the size of the project scared them."

Was it more ambitious than the first one?
"Oh, way more. It would have cost a minimum of a million quid and the budget could have gone higher than that. It started off in 1850 and you saw Lilith as a teenager and how she became a vampire, her interminglings with a few interesting historical figures. Then the story picked up in the Second World War and some events which took place then were impacting on her in the present day. So you had these three time periods. It was kind of a funky script, but to do it justice you would have needed to spend money on it, and I would have recast the lead as well.

“Eileen was fantastic in the first one but I always thought the part was a bit like a James Bond role in the way that it could be essayed by different actors. The part was bigger than the actor playing it - that’s what I thought anyway. As a vampire character, you could interpret it differently with different actors which would have been quite interesting. But unfortunately that didn’t happen so that just exists as a script. Maybe one day when I’m successful they’ll phone me up to say they want to do it."

When did you actually start work on Evil Aliens?
"After the Razor Blade 2 project, when nothing was happening in terms of the financing and nothing was coming together, I was a bit demoralised. Being a director and a writer and an editor, I have to keep myself afloat with other work. Writing a script takes a lot out of you when you’re not a professional writer, in terms of doing it day in and day out. So I basically had to go back to the drawing board and start thinking about other script ideas. It took me a while to come up with something which I was really pleased with. I was thinking of doing a zombie film but then I noticed that there were a lot of zombie movies coming up and I thought well, if I start mine now it will come out at the end of that crop.

“So I thought perhaps it would be better to steer clear of zombies and go for something more unusual which hasn’t been done. Then it was like: ‘Ah yes, aliens. They would make fantastic bad guys.’ Because you’re quite happy to see them slain and not feel emotionally upset about it. Much like zombies. You want evil bad guys that you can kill with complete impunity and the audience cheers when they get theirs. So aliens struck me as a really cool idea. They can just be evil; you don’t have to look much into why they’re evil. They’re defined by their actions and they sort of do what it says on the tin."

The film was shot two years ago in 2003. The digital effects that can be done now are very impressive.
"That’s also one of the reasons why it took so long."

When you wrote it, were you planning a smaller scale movie or did you think: ‘I’ll put these effects in and work out how to do them later.’
"When I did it, it was very important that, if we started it, it could be finished properly. If I was going to do it, I wanted the effects to be of a certain standard. I had worked with the visual effects supervisor on a few other jobs, who’s a guy called Llyr Williams who’s a really amazing 3D artist. We had done a few bits and pieces together like the exploding head in the Shock Movie Massacre title sequence, and we had done a few other bits and pieces. I saw some film work he had done and we did a few tests and we thought: ‘Yes, we can do this now but we’ll need to set up our own effects facility to do it.’ We weren’t sure how long it was going to take us to do it. Initially we were quite optimistic and hoped it would be about six months. As it was, it was double the time so it actually took a year. We basically set up our own miniature effects facility with six computers, all networked together in my flat. It was a pretty intense year of work."

How were you able to find the financing for the film?
"I tried shopping it round the industry, as you do, initially - hoping that I would get some industry finance. One company I worked for, there was a producer there called Will Jeffrey who was quite interested but then he got cold feet about doing a gory splatter film. He liked the idea of the alien abduction and stuff but he wanted to make it a lot more serious. Okay yeah, you could take the film in another direction and do a rewrite but I originally wrote the script because I really wanted to return to the fun, gory splatter stuff that I saw when I was a teenager. Because no-one was doing that sort of stuff now. I felt that the more serious stuff had already been explored in The X-Files and those kinds of things. It had been done and it didn’t lend itself so much to being a low-budget independent movie either, going that more serious route.

“Interestingly enough, one of the Blair Witch guys has just done some abduction thing which sounds a lot more the kind of thing that this producer was interested in. But I wanted to do a splatter movie! So basically we parted company and it was: ‘Oh God, that’s that financing option down the drain.’ There wasn’t any point taking it in to the Film Council. They would just have said, ‘You’re not making a splatter movie with our money.’ Then I was fortunate enough to get a phone call from Quentin Reynolds who managed a band that I had done a few pop promos for a few years ago. It was just after Christmas and he said, ‘Do you want to meet for a drink in the new year.’ I said yes, thinking nothing of it, just thinking it was touching base and saying hi.

“But during that meeting he said that he was quite interested in investing in film projects: I thought, ‘Oh okay. That’s cool.’ People don’t normally say that. He said, ‘Well, what are you working on?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been trying to get finance together for this script called Evil Aliens.’ I gave him a treatment and a load of artwork that we had generated. One of the things I had found out when we were taking the project round was that people always asked us what the aliens looked like and what did the spaceships look like. So it seemed like a smart move to just go and design them. That was also when I talked with Llyr the 3D guy and mocked up a spaceship so we could show people.

“Anyway he got really excited by these designs and he went away and read the treatment and he loved it - and then basically the next day he wrote me a cheque and said, ‘That’s it. Go!’ That’s what really got the ball rolling. In the industry I believe it’s what’s called an angel investor. We just had one investor who financed the whole film so there was no complexity of different investors arguing about how much they put in. It actually made the process very simple. Also he trusted me because he liked Razor Blade Smile. He knew that I could do a low-budget film and wouldn’t run off with his money. I got the most creative control that I think I’ve ever had which was a fantastic way of working. I was very lucky, despite the fact that we were still working on a fairly lean budget. But that’s the case with film-making."

Where did you find your cast and crew?
"There were a couple of people that I wanted to use definitely: Chris Adamson, who has been in all my films since my graduation movie Club Death, who’s my ‘lucky rabbit’s foot’ actor. He’s the guy with the scar. I really wanted to get him in there because he’s got screen presence and he’s a funny guy to work with. He always brings something to the party. I had worked with Emily Booth on the Shock Movie Massacre title sequence and I had known Emily for a couple of years at that point. Because she is an actual TV presenter it made sense to get her involved. Whereas everybody else in the film we did casting for, which took a long time. We sent our details to PCR, Production Casting Report, which goes out to all the agents. We just got thousands and thousands of people CVs through.

“Interestingly enough, that’s actually how we got the Norman Lovett cameo - because his agent sent his CV through! It wasn’t that we approached him or anything, it was just a bit of luck and - wow! We couldn’t believe that someone like him would be among the CVs. We wouldn’t have been able to afford him for longer but for a cameo it was fantastic working with him. The rest, we just did loads of castings. We did a couple of weeks of castings, saw everyone, and we did recalls and watched videos. Eventually we whittled the cast down.

“It’s an ensemble cast and there’s at least seven main actors in the film. Getting that blend right was very important because actors don’t always get on and also actors sometimes aren’t up for stuff. I explained to the actors at the castings that it would be a very difficult shoot: it would be a night shoot; there would be gore; it would be cold... All the things that actors don’t want to hear, so we could weed out anyone who really wasn’t up for it. Also anyone who felt themselves above the material. A lot of actors don’t really want to do horror films - and I can understand that. If that’s not something they’re interested in and they don’t want to get tarred with that brush, then that’s fine. The actors that you do choose do really need to have a respect for the genre, I think.

“I was delighted with the cast. They all got on really well and they all had a really great experience, and I think that some of that energy is transfused into the film. It’s the best feedback I’ve ever had from a cast. They all really enjoyed it and a lot of them said it was one of the most amazing experiences they had ever had. We were on location for five weeks straight and everyone really mucked in and got behind the project."

And your crew?
"The crew were basically a lot of people that I had gathered in stuff that I had been doing over the last few years. Quite a few of the key people worked on Razor Blade: Neil Jenkins did the production design; Jim Solan was the same DP that I had worked with. Then others were people like Jon Bentley, who built the sets, who I had met in Cannes a few years ago. He’s a fantastic guy and I had been wanting to work with him on a project for ages. That’s why we built the sets up in Yorkshire; because he could get stuff cheap. He found a disused meat-packing factory and that’s where we built all the sets: the farmhouse interior and the spaceship interior."

You always get creative use of cardboard with Jon, I find.
"He is the cardboard king! But on this one he moved up from cardboard to wood. He did have a reasonable construction budget. Like that farmhouse front room: it has people coming in through the windows and the whole room gets smashed. It wasn’t going to happen in any real location. We also needed a trapdoor so the whole set had to be built off the ground. So the whole set was a raised set for that farmhouse room, just to get that trapdoor in there and the gag where Emily gets her pegs pulled off, because we needed half her body to be under the set. So yes, Jon did an amazing, fantastic construction job."

As well as a location, the other thing you needed was a combine harvester.
"The other absolute key to the film was: because it’s set on a farm, we needed to find a farm that would allow us to shoot. Because you can’t fake a farm. It has to be real. That was a search and I was very lucky to have a good friend of mine, Adam Mason, who is also a film-maker - he did Dust. He’s a really good guy and he’s somebody I‘ve known a long time. Although a lot of people slag off him films for being low-budget, the guy works really hard. He does a lot of work on pop promos and if he ever needs my help on the crew, we just try to help each other out.

“He lives out in Huntingdon and because he has always lived in an area where there’s lots of farms, some of the people he went to school with, their parents were farmers. So he said, ‘I know a few people and I'll get on the case for you.’ In the meantime, Tim Dennison, who shot Revenge of Billy the Kid on a farm, he had a couple of contacts. So we spread the net out and we went to see four or five different farms. The farm we used was Foxhole Farm just outside Huntingdon in a place called Leighton Bromswold. A very Olde English country name. It was the parents of someone that Adam had gone to school with. We met these people and the guy who owns the farm is a research scientist and his wife runs the farm - Bill and Jan Baxendale. She runs it more for fun. They live on it and they own the land and they harvest crops, but they don’t take it too seriously. Some farmers are very, very serious and they wouldn’t even entertain allowing film-makers on their property. But because they knew Adam and they know he’s a film-maker, they were quite excited by the prospect and they allowed us to use their farm.

“We bought a couple of fields of crops off them so we could make our crop circles and mow down aliens in the crops and stuff like that. We shot just after the harvest and we needed crops in the fields so they didn’t harvest the whole area for us - and we had to buy the crops at a reasonable rate! It was just amazing, this farm. It had a lot of outbuildings so they became the art department and make-up and half the crew stayed on the farm because they had a couple of extra flats. So it was actually like Foxhole Studios!

“There was one quite funny incident in the scene when the aliens are mutilating the cow. That was a big cow that Tim Berry and Tris Versluis had made from a big mould. We had been doing a night shoot and it got left out in the field with some real cows the next day because they forgot to throw a tarp over it. This farm inspector guy came along and nearly had a heart attack. He was disgusted because he thought it was a real dead cow just rotting with these other cows grazing around it. He was going to throw the book at Jan and Bill and we had to explain: ‘No, no, it’s a film. This isn’t real.’ The guy was so convinced. Because it had fake blood on it, there were loads of real flies and it looked pretty horrible!"

Did you shoot on DV?
"No, it was shot on High Definition, HD. We shot on the same cameras that George Lucas shot Episode II on. Not Episode III - he used the new upgraded version on that. But we shot on the same cameras that he shot Episode II on and that Rodriguez shot Once Upon a Time in Mexico on. So this is the real Sony HD stuff, proper full spec digital kit with film focus lenses. It’s pretty cool because you’ve got high definition monitors on set so when you’re shooting so you can see exactly what you’re getting. There’s so much detail. The hair and make-up and effects guys can look at that monitor and see exactly what they’re getting. There’s no: ‘It’s not going to look like that when it’s done’ - that’s what it’s going to look like.

“Obviously there’s some grading work and other things that you do but that’s just changing the colours a bit. The detail is incredible. If you see the film digitally project it looks almost three-dimensional, it’s so vivid. You saw it projected off 35mm film. If you saw a movie off DVD it would look a bit blurrier. It just doesn’t hold in the resolution. HD is a 2K film res output. George Lucas shot the last Star Wars on 4K, I think, which is the ultimate uncompressed. But this is HD-CAM which is Sony’s system, not to be mistaken with HD or DV. This is a different ballgame. The camera’s about £75,000."

I believe that your world premiere in San Francisco a few months ago was quite successful.
"It was an awesome success. It was the best audience I’ve ever seen in terms of a festival crowd. It was a 300-seat theatre called The Roxy in downtown San Francisco and the crowd just went absolutely ballistic for it. They were cheering and we got a standing ovation. They loved it so much that the film was scheduled to play twice but they asked me to stay another day and they put it on again. And we won the audience award at that festival which was just one of the most amazing experiences that I’ve ever had, the most enthusiastic response to a film that I’ve seen."

A lot of people compare the film to the early works of Peter Jackson. Are you happy with such comparisons?
"Of course. I set out to make a splatter movie and obviously I’m a huge fan of those kind of movies. Ultimately, if you’re being compared in that ballpark it means that at least people are thinking of it in the right way. That’s the kind of film that it is. Whether it’s as good as Peter Jackson’s stuff is obviously debatable and that can only be decided by history in the long term. Sometimes in the short term it’s dangerous when people compare it to the work of somebody that everyone already loves. I think that it has a nod to those films in an affectionate way. But I’m equally influenced by Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series and the early work of John Carpenter like The Thing. Every film-maker is influenced by the films that they love. This is also influenced by Sergio Leone. But I think that when people review a film there seems to be a need to compare it to other movies. Obviously I’m happy that it’s being compared to that and not to something really bad. If it was Xtro I might be worried!"

The standout scene is the combine harvester chase.
"That’s the signature moment in the film. That’s the coup de gras of the movie in terms of the concept and the payoff and the fact that you’ve got the Wurzels there. When I wrote it, I was giggling just at the thought of it. It kind of sums up the whole tone and mood of the film. If somebody told you that there’s a sequence with a combine harvester set to the Wurzels’ ‘Combine Harvester’ and it’s a splatterfest and you didn’t find that amusing, then I guess this really isn’t the sort of film that you should go and see. Because ultimately it says everything you need to say about the film. It’s fun, it’s silly, it’s trying to just be enjoyable and give everyone a good time. I was delighted with the way that the sequence came together. Obviously getting the use of a real combine harvester was actually quite a tricky thing. We had to use gallons and gallons of blood and gore. And it’s actually pretty dangerous as well."

You have stuntmen in costumes running in front of a very dangerous machine.
"Also people who can’t really see where they’re going. The guy driving the combine harvester actually operates this machine and he laid out the ground rules of what we could and couldn’t do. We had a radio in the cab. If any actor was even slightly in trouble, we would pull it. When you watch the scene, it’s hilarious but when we were filming it, it was deathly serious. There was this huge fucking thing there which will kill you if it goes wrong. I guess that’s the difference between making films and watching them. But I was incredibly pleased with the way that the scene came together.

“If I had had more money I would have gone even more to town. It would have been lovely to put some full bodies through the actual blades but we couldn’t afford to fuck up the combine. Crops are actually quite weak compared to prosthetics so there was a limit to what we could get into the blades without causing damage to the machine itself. If it was a Jerry Bruckheimer production we could have just mown stuff down and blown the combine harvester up! We couldn’t do that on the budget we were on. But I think that we did pretty good."

You played San Francisco, you played Frightfest, you’re off to Toronto next.
"Toronto is ordered into sections and we’re programmed in the ‘Midnight Madness’ section. We’re going to be screening it in a 1,200-seat theatre which will be quite an incredible experience. I’m told that the Canadian Midnight Madness crowd are a pretty fun, wacky crowd."

Where have you got distribution deals?
"We’ve got distribution in the UK and US. Content Film are handling international sales and they’re doing the limited UK theatrical. In the States the film is being handled by Image Entertainment and they’ll be doing the theatrical and the DVD there. We’ve confirmed sales in Germany, France, I believe Japan. It should be right up the Japanese street. A few of the other major territories have sold but I haven’t got details. I think Spain, Italy, Benelux and maybe a few other places like Australia."

On top of all this, you have your day-job with Nucleus Films, which you run with Marc Morris.
"As you know, we’ve got our first couple of releases coming up which is two Spanish movies. The psychosexual thriller Between Your Legs with Javier Bardem and Victoria Abril which is a very Hitchcock-ian styled thriller, very intense. It’s a great movie with great actors. Then there’s The Ugliest Woman in the World, a more lightweight, sci-fi/horror fairy tale sort of film about a woman who looks very beautiful but she’s taking this serum to keep her like that and actually she’s this really deformed, hideous thing. She hates beautiful people so she goes out to kill all the Miss Spains."

What’s your and Marc’s rationale in terms of choosing films for the label?
"Our rationale is that we want to get films that we think are good movies, because we’re film lovers. We want to package them in the best way with the best covers and the best extras that are available - for the collectors’ market. And very much films which we think have longevity and which people want. Our next two releases are going to be Fausto 5.0 which is an absolutely breathtaking piece of cinema and we’re very pleased to have done the deal on that. That’s just gone through today. That won a lot of awards on the festival circuit and we really think it deserves a wider audience.

“We are also doing a reissue on Gwendoline which is not necessarily the greatest movie in the world, it’s a bit of an eighties curiosity. We’ve got it completely remastered in a beautiful 2.35:1 print, we’ve done an interview with Just Jaeckin the director, and we’re putting something special together. We’re doing a little bit more behind-the-scenes material like an exploration of the film and we might be using a few fetish models and things like that to make it interesting. As you know, it’s based on the John Willie artwork in the Perils of Gwendoline comic. It’s like Indiana Jones meets a fetish movie. It’s kind of fun; it’s an acquired taste but we think there’s a real collectors’ market for that film. And when you see the presentation, it really does look amazing. It has never been released on DVD before, it has only ever been available on VHS."

Are these discs going to be Region 2 or Region 0?
"I think we’re trying to do them all Region 0 for collectors because obviously Region 2 limits it."

And you’ll have good extras on there?
"Oh yes. On the Spanish films, obviously we’re more reliant on extras being created in that country. On both Between Your Legs and Ugliest Woman there were already Making Ofs done in Spain so we’ve just used those. Because obviously if we went to Spain we would have to have translators and everything and that would be a major chore. But wherever we can make extras we will do, like with Gwendoline we’re doing special stuff. Certainly with Fausto we might go over to Spain and interview Furia del Bau, the people who made it, if we can get hold them. But we very much want to target collectors; we respect that market because we feel that we are part of that. We’re both the sort of people who would buy these things anyway."

And you’ve been working on the Phantasm extras.
"I finished the Phantasm stuff yesterday and I can tell you the exact running time on the Phantasmagoria documentary is 97 minutes and 42 seconds. It’s a feature length documentary on Phantasms I-IV: new interviews with all the main players in the cast and crew plus a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that’s not been seen before. It’s a really in-depth exploration of that world. If you’re a Phantasm fan I think it will really delight you. I am a massive Phantasm fan and I had such an amazing time. I got to meet all my Phantasm heroes and they were all really nice people. We also did a location featurette with Reggie Bannister in character and there’s a few nice little things on there, like he’s being chased by a silver ball at one point and he goes through a space gate. So lots of really good, fun stuff.”

I met British actress Lynne Verrall on the set of Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes. Hers was one of the interviews I subsequently lost in the Great Microcassette Disaster of ‘06 so I was very pleased to be able to do an even better interview by phone shortly afterwards in June 2006.

What attracted you to the role of Haggis?
"I really, really liked the script. I hadn’t read the second one; when I went for it I didn’t realise there were two. So I went up on Jake West’s script and read on tape which was sent away - and he cast me from that."

When you went for this role did you know it would involve such a heavy make-up job?
"No. Obviously, when you read the script you know that she’s not forty! But I had never done a prosthetic make-up before. When, I think, they were very near to offering me the job Jake West phoned me from Romania and wanted a chat. And he was very clear to say, ‘Do you understand what the job is?’ and I said, ‘It’s rather a long time in a make-up wagon.’ But I think it’s always script, isn’t it? It’s always script that is the pull for any actor really. I just thought it had something."

Had you seen the original film?
"No. I’m going to have to be very honest with you. Horror is not a genre I’ve investigated - because I’m too frightened. I just get so scared. It’s funny because I’ve been to see what I think actually is a horror this afternoon. I went to see Lemming, a French film by Dominic Moll. Charlotte Rampling’s in it and Charlotte Gainsborough and I think it’s billed as a thriller. It’s not a thriller - I’m getting to know about horror now - it’s a little horror actually. So I managed to sit through that. I’ve never even seen The Exorcist. If I do genre I read thrillers because I’ve read them since I was a kid. But I have to be careful about what I see. I’m just too suggestible!"

Having got the role, did you watch the original performance?
"Oh my God, have I watched it! They sent me a DVD and I’ve just watched on my computer over and over. I just play it back, play it back, nuance it back, take three frames back - over and over and over again. That’s what I did before I came out."

Were you trying to match the original as closely as possible?
"That’s kind of what they asked me to do. Although the prosthetic isn’t quite the same, as you probably saw."

But it’s very dark. You don’t see much.
"No, exactly. Except that I am in shots outside. But obviously they’ll grade it down or whatever it is they technically do, all that kind of stuff. I’ve never actually had to do this before: do a role that has been established by another actress in that way. But I adored Florence Schauffler’s performance. I was so tremulous that I could get somewhere near there. I can’t be Florence because I’m not Florence, but I thought it was such an elegant performance and it has such power and restraint. It’s got a core of power in it. It’s such an economic performance. It’s the kind of acting I love.

"I loved her performance, I never tired of watching her, I really didn’t. And I only realised after I’d seen it: thank God I liked it, because it would have been hell if I’d hated it. It had never crossed my mind that I might hate it. And I really liked the film. I can understand, now that I know a little more, that it has a status within the genre, doesn’t it? And I can totally and utterly understand, having watched it, why it’s got that status. I now know about Stan Winston a little bit and all that side of things so I can appreciate why it has the standing that it does."

Haggis is actually quite a crucial character. A lot of people are excited at Haggis’ return because she wasn’t in the second film.
"Well, we don’t talk about that one. Jake said, ‘We’re sending you the first one. Don’t watch the second one.’ And I said to him, ‘Oh, bit of a blip?’ Yes, I think you can say that was a bit of a blip."

The second film uses the demon as a generic monster so you lose all this mysticism and morality.
"What I have enjoyed about entering the genre is that you can deal with very big themes. Because this is about how if you seek retribution and vengeance, the demon in a sense is a metaphor for: it messes with your head. It kills you, that kind of thing, because you have to come to some kind of acceptance of stuff and vengeance will never get you that. I found all that very, very interesting. Obviously it’s an entertainment but an entertainment doesn’t mean you have to leave your brain at home. And I’ve really appreciated that, I really have. Having seen Florence’s performance and the film itself, I was very pleased to be involved in it. It only enhanced what I felt about the script."

What do we know about Haggis? There’s really nothing we’re told about her. You’ve got no back story to work with.
"Well, I might have done a little bit of my own which I certainly wouldn’t share with you! I just think something has gone down for her, why she is this person. Because I see her as a facilitator; that’s what she is, isn’t she? She facilitates, she’s a conduit, without taking an attitude towards what people do, in that sense. There’s part of her that’s utterly - what’s a word stronger than exasperated? - with the human condition. And there’s another part of her that seems to have nothing but compassion for it. Do you know what I mean? She seems to be a person who totally understands the frailty of being human which means that we do seek vengeance when we shouldn’t and we’re stupid to do that. It’s not going to help us to do that but we’re human and it seems that she understands that. Our frailty, really."

How long did the make-up take to put on?
"About three and a half hours. Well, the first day was ages because Mitch Coughlin and I were both novices together with it and there was painting to do on it. But a lot of the painting got pre-done. I was there at the beginning of the month and then went back out to do the stuff in Haggis’ shack that was in the end of the shoot of III and then I caught the beginning of the shoot of IV because those sets were in existence for that period. By that time, I think we got it down to about three hours. I used to put part of my costume on, go away and put the rest of it on. I didn’t sit in the costume all the way through because that would have been ... hell! Mitch and I managed to sort it, really. We learned an awful lot on the first day, we made a sort of modus operandi and that’s how we did it. But he was great, absolutely wonderful and hugely supportive.

“He was joined, when I came back, by two other artists who came out, who work with him. They’ve all worked together before and they all knew each other. Sometimes they would do my hands and they would also help take it off because that would take about an hour and a half. The first time we did it, I said to Mitch, ‘My skin really likes make-up. It will stay.’ But he used full-strength glue - because you would - and when I went back the second time, we were down to half and half. My skin really does like make-up! So it would be about an hour and a half, hour and a quarter, depending on the day, for getting it off afterwards.

“But we had a lot of fun. We all got on, the three of them and the one of me. Mitch was obviously the main artist for me. I just loved them, they were fabulous to work with. Very, very skilled and a lot of fun. For somebody who has not done a prosthetic before, it is strange being in a mask but they made it really good, a fabulous experience. The whole job has been lovely. I’ve had a very, very good time on it. It was very harmonious, I don’t know if you picked that up on the shoot when you were out there. We all got on very well. People just got on with it and Karri O'Reilly runs a very good ship. I think it’s very nice that we’ve got a mix of nationalities as well."

How did you find working in Romania?
"I liked it very much. I’d not been to Bucharest before. It’s a fascinating city. I liked working with the Romanians that I worked with - very skilled, very good. Everybody was just trying to make it as good as possible. Erik Wilson the DP is Norwegian so one was working with Romanians and English and Americans and a Norwegian. What a nice mix!"

What were Jake West and Mike Hurst like as directors?
"They were lovely! Very different because they’re different people. They work differently but both of them are hugely approachable and that’s what you want from a director; that you can actually ask them something and be able to talk to them. I found them very supportive, very good and very nice."

Last time I saw you, you were up a twelve-foot tree stump, which looked pretty perilous.
"I thought: my goodness, I’m such an innocent, I’ll trust anybody. I just trusted that I would be looked after and it was all right. I didn’t fall off! That’s the main thing."

Did you have any scenes with the Pumpkinhead demon itself?
"I’m in a scene with him, yes, in IV."

How did you find acting opposite somebody in a body suit?
"Well, we didn’t shoot in that way. I think it will look differently but it wasn’t shot in that way. And obviously I know the person in the suit. I stayed deliberately and watched bits because I was very interested to see how he worked in the suit - because that’s a whole different ball game as well. How the eyes are worked and all that sort of stuff. It’s fascinating and it’s artistry as well, everybody’s coming at it from different angles but trying to be as truthful as possible, whatever it is you’re doing."

If these do well and they want to make V and VI, are you up for that?
"I am an actress! Come along! I don’t trust anything until I’ve signed the contract! But I’ve come back and all my friends have been, ‘How has it gone?’ It has been such an enjoyable job. I’ve really come back feeling very full. It’s been a blast. I think it’s very nice to come off a job and have no moans. I didn’t have any moans while I was there and I’ve just got on with it and really learned a lot. I just hope that people are not disappointed with this because when you have made something like the original, you can’t repeat it. You can’t because we’re twenty years later and we’re not the same people. Well, Lance is, bless him. It’s a different time and you can never replicate anything like that but you hope that you’ve remained faithful to the spirit of it, which I really hope we’ve done. Because it deserves it. I just hope that people are as thrilled by this as they were by the original.”

In April 2006 I had an absolute blast hanging out with Jake West on the Romanian set of his third feature, Pumpkinhead III, which was released asPumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes. I let Jake get back to Blighty and get some sleep before I interviewed him about the movie in July. Parts of this interview appeared in Fangoria.

What stage are you at on Pumpkinhead III?
“I am about to get picture lock. Once this cut goes out, we should get picture approval which means the cut will be locked, which means we can start on all the visual effects shots and sound design can begin. Processes like the ADR, looping - music, score - all that kind of thing. The cut is done but then all the rest of the post begins.”

With your background in editing, are you more at home leaning over a hot Avid?
“This time round I actually had an editor and it was very good actually. Because of the post-production schedule being quite short on this film, they needed to start the editing while we were shooting so the rushes were being sent back every day from Romania to the UK and a friend of mine, an editor who I’ve worked with for various companies, I got him in to do the edit. That also meant, although I’m not the credited editor, when I got back to the UK I did quite a lot of the polish editing because it’s my background. But it’s very much a Jake West film because I love the post production process.”

How did you actually get involved with this movie?
“I was very fortunate. I had two bits of good fortune which led to me getting this gig. The first bit of good fortune was the fact that a woman from the Sci-Fi Channel, Karen O’Hara, saw my picture Evil Aliens when it played at the Toronto International Film Festival. Obviously that’s a really big festival. She saw the film and approached me after the screening and said would I be interested in doing a film for Sci-Fi. I said obviously I’m always interested in doing work but it would depend on the script etc. etc., what the project was - but absolutely, of course. I was quite flattered because no-one’s really offered me a film before! So that was one bit of luck which meant that the Sci-Fi Channel would approve me as a director for something because you have to have approval before you can work for them, you can’t be an unknown quantity.

“Then the other bit of luck: as you know, we did a lot of extras for DVD companies and we’d done a lot of work for Anchor Bay in the UK. Mo Claridge at Anchor Bay was at AFM last year and he got approached by Brad Krevoy who runs Motion Picture Corporation of America who was putting together thePumpkinhead sequels - and he asked if there was any UK directors Mo would recommend. And he recommended me for the job! Then when I spoke to Brad I told him, ‘The Sci-Fi Channel loved my last picture,’ and he said, ‘Well, this is great because we will be able to get you approved as a director and move ahead very quickly.’ So I owe a lot to Evil Aliens and to Mo Claridge. This film is actually dedicated to Mo Claridge because I don’t know if you know but Mo passed away, which was very sad so I’m dedicating my picture to Mo. Because he was a great guy and he really helped me get this. It’s very rare that anyone actually helps you in this business!”

There was a gap of seven years between Razor Blade Smile and Evil Aliens but this must have come together around the time that Evil Aliens was released.
“That’s right. Evil Aliens got released theatrically in the UK in March and I was in Romania prepping Pumpkinhead, which was a very unusual thing. With Razor Blade Smile, everything just went stone dead - nothing - and it was very difficult to get the money for Evil Aliens. We’ve spoken about the Evil Aliens finance: I got lucky in the end, a private investor gave me the money. So from Evil Aliens to this was a bit of a ride and I hope to continue at this rate. It’s a much nicer way of working than sitting around, doing nothing for years.”

You were originally going to do both Pumpkinhead sequels. Why didn’t you?
“What happened is that they wanted me to do Part III and Part IV. I wrote a script for Part III and Part IV but the Part III script was co-written with Barbara Werner, who has written scripts for the Sci-Fi Channel before and was one of their approved writers. But then I came up with a scenario and we wrote a script for Part IV called Dark Hell. Love Hurts seems to have inherited that title now. I don’t know if it’s going to keep it but no-one likes Love Hurts so all that remains of my original Dark Hell seems to be the title! It was a very ambitious script but I thought it was the sort of thing that Sci-Fi Channel would like.

“At the end of Part III, which was going to be my classic Pumpkinhead story - Part III is basically a continuation of Part I, ignoring Part II which I don’t really think is that good - but Part IV was going to be a reinvention of Pumpkinhead. It was going to take the classic monster and then change him. I had the military coming to Razorback Hollow and taking away the corpse, then biogenetically engineering it for military spec. So the monster design was going to change. Everyone really loved the script but I think it was a bit too radical and I think people were worried about the budget. I wasn’t trying to censor myself, I was trying to have the evolution of the monster. Part III would be your classic feature, Part IV would be the next step up. It would start with the classic creature and it would become something else. I really liked that idea but, for whatever reason, that script didn’t get made. But hey, maybe if these two are successful they’ll come back to it!

“I don’t want to tease people too much with the details. But ultimately what happened was, at the eleventh hour, they thought about it and it got pulled. Then they asked me to come up with another idea. I had already been working on Part III and Part IV and I was about two weeks away from going to Romania to start the actual physical preparation. l said, ‘In that time I can’t prep Part III and generate new ideas for Part IV and prep Part IV and do all of the casting for Part III, start shooting Part III and cast Part IV. It’s just not humanly possible!’ Fortunately they saw sense in that so decided to cast around what other directors might be interested in doing Part IV.”

Did you know Mike Hurst at that point?
“I’d met Mike Hurst about five or six years before in Cannes one year. Just briefly, but he was a nice chap and he had just made Babyjuice Express at that point, or had just got the funding for it. That was the only time I’d met him but I knew of Project: Assassin back from the days when Roland Emmerich picked it up and that was always an interesting storyline. So I knew who he was and I’d read about some of the things he’d done. I’d met him once before and he was a pleasant guy, so when I heard that he’d got the gig for IV that was kind of cool because it meant I got to hang out with him and see what he’d been up to. And he’d certainly been up to a lot more than me!”

What did you think when you got out to Romania?
“I had already been on a location recce for Part III and Part IV - for my script - in January, so I’d already been around to the studio and a lot of the locations. I had found locations for both films and did a lot of planning set designs for the military stuff too, which didn’t get made. So because I’d been there I knew what to expect. But when you first go to Romania it’s an interesting culture shock because on the one hand you’ve got a fairly modern city at the centre and then as you go out to the country, towards the studio, you see gypsies on horse-drawn carts and people selling stuff on the side of the road and it feels like you’ve gone back in time. But working with the Romanians, in terms of the studios that they’ve got there and the crews that they have: we had a full crew, we had a great kit. They’re incredibly good at building sets and just the level at which they pace themselves, which I was incredibly impressed by. The crew and all of the art department and everything was really top-notch.”

How did you cope with going from a minimal crew on your first two films to a full-size crew?
“There were about seventy people and it was an absolute delight, that’s all I can say. I had a big smile on my face because for the first time in my life I wasn’t the guy unloading the van at the beginning of the day and then loading it back up again and decabling and driving it back, whilst trying to pay actors money and organise all the travelling and trying to find food for people. So it was actually the first time I’ve been able to just concentrate on the directing. Hopefully that shows in the final product. I think it’s a much more polished piece of work. I’ve got a better level of actors, the production values and everything has just gone up a gear and that’s what money can buy you - and it’s wonderful to have that opportunity.”

Isn’t there a downside of having less hands-on control?
“It was interesting because that’s something that you worry about when you start a project like this. But the way that I was allowed to develop the story, with another writer, in the context of what I wanted to do, I think you’ll see a lot of Jake West trademarks in there. Yes, there are things that are subject to more approval and the one thing that I wasn’t allowed to do, because of the Sci-Fi Channel rules, is: you’re not allowed sex or swearing. So this is the first Jake West film that hasn’t got sex or swearing - but some people may say that’s a good thing!”

Is there going to be an unrated director’s cut at some point?
“They could do it but I don’t think there’s really going to be that much difference. I didn’t shoot any swearing or sex and obviously the cut I’m doing is the right one. But there’s a theatrical cut and a TV version so there will be a slight time difference in those but I don’t think there’s going to be a huge amount of difference between the two. Obviously the theatrical version is the one to see if you get the choice.”

Have you had to shoehorn it into the Sci-Fi Channel structure of ad breaks and so on?
“The script was developed with that in mind because you have to be aware of those things. But because this is a Pumpkinhead film, we did ask them if they would allow us to have a much slower build-up in the first act. I think it’s unprecedented on the Sci-Fi Channel that we’ve been allowed to have about 25 minutes before the first ad break, which is quite unusual apparently because normally they only allow 15 or something. There was an argument that Pumpkinhead doesn’t build in the normal way because we are resurrecting this creature, and you have to understand the set-up of the film beforehand. So it’s a little bit different to the Sci-Fi Channel’s normal format in that respect and I think it stays true to the Pumpkinhead mythology. I’m a huge fan of the first film and what Stan Winston did in there with the actual mythology of the beast. I really wanted to keep that clear and clean so hopefully fans of the first one will really see that there’s a lot of respect paid to that.”

How important was it for Lance Henriksen to be aboard?
“I think it was amazing; to me, it was the icing on the cake. When we were first writing the script, I asked the question: would it be possible to get Lance? Although obviously we know that his character died in the first one so it wasn’t going to be the story of Ed Harley. Then the word got back to me after about a week or so that somebody had contacted Lance and asked him if he would be interested in reprising that role. And he said yes. I remember that I got to speak to him on the phone. He was: ‘Hey, how’s it going, dude?’ So I explained that I love this character of Ed Harley and I’ve got this idea of where I’d like to try and take it in terms of how he’s haunting the character of Bunt from the first film.

“What’s interesting about this Pumpkinhead - even the design on the Pumpkinhead is slightly different from the last one - the idea is that this time, the physical remains used to become the beast are the physical remains of Ed Harley. So it’s actually a different monster from the first one, in that sense. Physically it has regenerated from different flesh. So I like the idea that the person doomed to become the next Pumpkinhead gives a slight physical difference to it each time round. This Pumpkinhead is very wiry and athletic and a bit sharper in terms of its joints. Lance was at such a physical peak when he played Ed Harley in the first film, I really like that wiry look that he had and we tried to put some of that into this one.

“Some fans may be upset that it’s not an exact copy of the last monster but I thought that it would be wrong to do that actually and it would be interesting to try this as an idea. Whether that will work or not, we’ll see whether the fans go for it - but it’s still recognisably Pumpkinhead and, compared to the embarrassment of Part II, I think that we’re on the road to where it should be. As for Lance, the guy’s instincts are absolutely spot on. He knows how to make these things work, he knows just what to do, he’s very instinctual. And when you meet him, he’s just so relaxed. And he’s so easy to collaborate with.”

Everybody’s very down on Part II which, if viewed as separate to the franchise, is an okay monster film in its own right.
“Yes, but it doesn’t have respect for the mythology of the subject. I just felt that the mythology set up in Part I was the thing to follow and therefore this is actually a continuation of that storyline because we have the Bunt character who’s grown up. He’s got his sister there and he’s got involved with this dodgy town doctor played by the wonderful Doug Bradley. Then we’ve still got Lance because he’s haunting Bunt but also he becomes Pumpkinhead, he physically regenerates into the monster as well. So you’ve got an interesting level of play, I think. On the one hand you’ve got Lance as the beast, on the other you’ve got him as this kind of mentor who’s trying to get Bunt to do the right thing. So there’s an interesting dichotomy between the two things that he is in this film.”

With Brad Krevoy being involved with Part II, is he aware that it’s not really liked?
“Brad Krevoy himself acknowledges that it’s not a very good film but he wouldn’t want us to be slagging it off because I don’t think that would help. The approach is very much that Part III is very much a continuation of Part I, it’s a truer sequel to Part I, and I think if we can keep it in that field then everyone will be happy.”

It must be a thrill to have Doug Bradley aboard.
“It’s a great thrill. I had actually met Doug about three times. What’s really interesting is that the first time I ever met Doug Bradley was when they showed some Hellraiser shorts at the NFT, back in the early ‘90s. As part of that slot, because the guy who programmed it needed some more stuff to put on, they screened my short film Club Death which, as you know, is on the two-disc edition of Razor Blade Smile. Club Death was my graduation film which I then finished after I left. It was quite a bit overly ambitious for a £3,000, 16mm film. So that screened with those shorts and Doug Bradley came down to introduce those shorts - and that was the first time I ever met him. He obviously didn’t know who I was and he had forgotten that himself.

“But then I met him again when we filmed the Hellraiser extras for the Anchor Bay UK ‘cube’ set, so it was great seeing him again. And then, by another piece of good fortune, Evil Aliens was invited to the Luxembourg Fantasy Film Festival, Cinenygma, and Doug was on the jury there. He was one of the guests at the festival and we shared a plane ride together back from that festival. We were on the same flight and I was just reading a draft we had finished of Pumpkinhead III. I mentioned to him that I had a film coming up which I might have a good part for him in but I didn’t tell him it was Pumpkinhead at that point because I didn’t know whether it was going to go ahead. This was before script approval.

“And then, lo and behold, when we got to the casting stage I managed to get Doug. Because obviously as a horror fan and a horror aficionado, to work with Doug Bradley is working with a horror star. He’s a bona fide British horror icon and I think he’s one of the only few now. And a top bloke and a great actor. Very underused, I think he carried forth the legacy that was started by people like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, he is of that ilk. So it was a real coup for our film to get him, and I remember Mike Hurst, when he knew I’d got him, was like: ‘You bastard! You’ve got the only British horror icon left!’ I said, ‘Well, you could try for Christopher Lee but he won’t get out of bed these days for this kind of thing.’ So yes, that was a big thrill, I must say.”

How closely did you work with Gary Tunnicliffe?
“Gary Tunnicliffe is an absolutely top, smashing guy but his shop is based out in Los Angeles so I had numerous Skype conference calls and conversations with him. He sent designs through and we chatted. He’s just great, he went above and beyond the call of duty in what he did for us in terms of the money we had. He even offered to build the transformation effects. I think he may have spent all of the profit he might have made by ploughing it back in! Because he got really enthusiastic about doing the beast, and then he sent over a great crew of guys that you met: Mike, Blake and Mitch. They were really experienced, they’ve all worked on other films, but Gary is this presence behind them. Everyone’s always telling you stories about Gary. Obviously Doug Bradley had worked with Gary a lot as well, so we had a lot of laughs. So I feel that I know him, even though I’ve never met him in the flesh. When I get out to LA I’m going to meet up with him and take him out for quite a few beers because he’s a top guy.”

When you were actually shooting in Romania, what was the biggest surprise?
“I think I was surprised because I wasn’t sure that I was going to be allowed to do stunts and blow things up. I didn’t know that I could do that because that’s outside my realm of experience from working on lower budgets. When I first met up with the stunt supervisor, he showed me a reel of things that he could do: these guys on wire rigs and jerk-backs and pyrotechnic stuff. Then the next day I phoned up Barbara and we discussed this and we started writing a lot more action into the script. That was something that I was really excited about because I just didn’t realise I would have it. We were in Romania and obviously the dollar stretches a lot further out there. But we did some pretty major stunts. You saw that explosion: it was pretty fucking incredible! So things like that was my biggest surprise and delight, because when I was originally working on the script I still had my low-budget head on and I was avoiding things which I thought would cost a fortune. And then we managed to write in much more in there than I had ever envisaged I would be allowed to do.”

Are you comfortable now working at a TV movie level rather than an indie movie level?
“I never approached this film as a TV movie. We completely approached it as a theatrical film. There seems to be a good chance that it will get sold theatrically in some territories. Obviously because it’s funded by the Sci-Fi Channel they’ve got their cable premiere for the US but I believe they’re talking to a number of companies about the possibilities of doing theatrical releases elsewhere. That depends on how it goes. But I don’t think: this is a TV movie, I’ll put less effort into it. I put exactly the same amount of work and passion into it that I would do for any film I work on.”

I was thinking that the scale of the production is bigger than your last two films. Is this how you want to work now?
“Well, I’d like to work on a bigger scale! But Evil Aliens was a big leap up from Razor Blade Smile. On Evil Aliens we had £227,000 or whatever but to me that was a huge leap up from £20,000. So this exponentially is a similar kind of leap up from there.”

By your fourth or fifth film, you should be making Titanic II!
“If I could approach any James Cameron level budget, I’d be very happy! But ultimately it depends on the film and what the budget needs. If I had a low budget film idea and I really wanted to get it made, I would still consider making an independently financed picture, but if I get the opportunity to make bigger films and work with a better level of talent, which is really what the budget buys you. When you work with someone like Lance Henriksen, it gives you the bug to want to work with that level of actor. It’s a different league of performance that you’re getting.

“One thing you continuously get criticised for on your low budget films is always the performances. I think that’s unfair. It doesn’t make you a better director because you’re working with better actors. The acting is better because these actors are just naturally better: they’ve had twenty, thirty, forty years of experience. And you can’t get that when you’re working on low budget films. That is one of the things that I think sometimes fans are too overly critical of. I think they should cut people more slack because actually people are just trying to forge their careers and you only get good by practising, you only get good by working. So therefore I’m very keen to work and continue working and also continue pushing myself creatively and challenging myself.

“This film was a big challenge for me because it allowed me to do things that I’d never had the chance to do before. Like this time I’ve got a visual effects company doing the work, it’s not me in my bedroom with a friend for a year, doing it with five computers set up. So that kind of thing is really a treat! You’re working as a professional rather than as an enthusiastic amateur, I guess, but it was Evil Aliens which led to this. I think that Evil Aliens has been very well received generally, by the horror community anyway, maybe not so much in the mainstream, but that’s what really got the break in the first place and I hope that will continue. Obviously it depends how this film does and what people think of it when it’s done. I hope it will lead to more work.”

Legendary effects bloke Gary Tunnicliffe created the monster suit for the brace ofPumpkinhead sequels which were filmed in Romania in 2006. Although he didn’t visit Bucharest himself (leaving that to Mike Regan and co) I was able to interview Gary by phone a few weeks later in June 2006. (Picture shows Gary (centre) with two of the on-set Pumpkinhead team, Blake Bolger and Mike Regan.)

Are you in LA at the moment?
"Yes, back in Los Angeles. It’s kind of crazy. We’ve been doing reshoots on Pulse. It’s been a manic couple of weeks. We’ve just moved to a bigger and better workshop so everything’s been kind of manic but hopefully it’ll calm down in the next few weeks and I can get my breath again. On top of which, Pumpkinhead was probably one of the most nightmare-ish pre-productions I’ve ever had. I went in with my eyes wide open and knew what was going on."

How were you approached about this?
"Actually I was first mentioned through Alwyn Kushner who is Donald Kushner’s daughter. I’ve done a lot of work with Alwyn over the years and she recommended me. I get a call from Karri O’Reilly and obviously I already had a relationship with Donald Kushner so I was asked if I was interested in being on Pumpkinhead. Obviously the design factor was already there but the budget was very tight and also the pre-production schedule was nightmare-ish due to the shooting schedule. They had to shoot in the first week of March and I got the call at the end of February. The actual production time we had - including the nightmare of trying to get things to Romania which is at least a ten-day add-on - basically gave us four weeks to make Pumpkinhead."

Given that the basic design already existed, how long would you have liked to have to create the suit?
"It would have been nice to have two months. The reason that I took the job is it was a no-profit project. I had just finished on some work as it was and we were kind of winding down, we were just moving workshops. The last thing I needed to do was to get involved in a pretty intensive creature suit. But both of the directors were awesome and also it was a chance to get my fingers into a design that everybody loves.

“Stan Winston released a full foam version of the suit; it would have been the easiest thing in the world to get one of those, mould it and run the pieces out of that. But I really wasn’t interested in doing that. I really wanted to try and basically take the 1988, brilliantly executed design - but obviously things have got better now, sculpting has got better over the years - and really try and push some of the form to it. Add a bit of Tunnicliffism to it, if you like. At a cost to myself, really. We made sure that we hired some really awesome sculptors and I managed to get the bits into it I wanted. Jake West wanted to change the design a bit, he wanted to lose the big bones on the shoulders and he didn’t want any teeth on the exterior of the mouth. He had actually done a design himself which was very Alien and I was frightened that it was getting very bony, very spiny and it wouldn’t feel like the original Pumpkinhead. Whereas my design interest was to make something a bit leaner which had a bit more musculature.

“I wanted to go back in and really refine some of the form on it. If you look at Stan’s original it’s a bit lumpy and bumpy in places. It’s brilliant, it’s wonderful but the body is a bit lumpy and bumpy. I wanted to do that and I really wanted to refine the hands and show the bone structure of the hand. And that’s what I think we were able to do. We kept the essence of Pumpkinhead. You saw it; hopefully when you saw it you didn’t go, ‘What the hell’s that?’ I think in retrospect I would have liked to make it a bit wider, a bit bigger in places but we were working on the form of our puppeteer. If you get too big it tends to wrinkle and buckle in a very weird way so we tried to make it more lean, more sleek."

Was it daunting to work on something that’s not only popular but sufficiently old that everyone thinks they know about it?
"Yes, it was daunting without a doubt. As I said to the producer at the time: I know the first film was a low-budget movie but it had the full weight of Stan Winston Productions behind it. Here was a Stan Winston production making Stan’s creature. So I knew that at the very least I was on a slippery slope straight away. I was damned if I do, damned if I don’t to be honest. The best thing I could ever hope for was for people to look at it and go, ‘Oh yes, that looks like Pumpkinhead.’ My mantra was always that if Stan Winston saw it he would go, ‘That looks pretty cool.’, not ‘Oh my God, what have they done to it?’ or ‘Eugh, what a mess.’ Jake West wanted to make Pumpkinhead very dark and I pulled him back a bit and said, ‘Look, you’re going to be shooting at night. You still need that light colour.’ But I didn’t want to go with a yellow Pumpkinhead, that kind of dead flesh colour, so we warmed him up a bit and made him more earth tan."

Did Mike Hurst have any input?
"I think Mike was very understanding of where we were at and how cramped we were. He was very trusting because he said, ‘Whatever you can give me, I know that you guys are under the gun as it is. I’ll be happy. I trust you - go for it.’ And Karri O’Reilly and the producers were great because they said, ‘We know for a fact that anything we can get beyond Pumpkinhead is a gift so whatever you can do in the way of blood and gore and death and horror it’s purely a bonus.’ They were wonderful to work with. It’s hard enough when you’re on a low budget production if you’re being treated badly or you’re waiting for payments. Everybody seemed to know that we were struggling and didn’t have any time to waste. We were treated very, very kindly by everybody. It was wonderful, one of the best productions I’ve ever had for that."

How do you design something which already exists? Did you make a maquette?
"It was great actually because, very luckily, there’s been lots of maquettes done over the years. There have been so many wonderful model kits and the one that was used as the basis for ours was one which I thought had a great pose and a great form to it. It elongated some of the form for the original. I looked at the original maquette Stan had done which was released by Sideshow and again I thought it looked a bit lumpy in places. I wanted to try and streamline it a little bit so I found this other kit and put it into Photoshop, did some additions on that and showed those to Jake West. He said yes but by that point, because we were on such a time constraint, by the time I was showing designs to Jake we were already sculpting!

“It wasn’t like: here’s the design, what do you think, what would you do differently, let’s get your input. It was: here’s the design and just to let you know it’s being moulded tomorrow. This is it, this is what you’re going to get. It was like a menu of ‘spam and eggs, spam and eggs, spam and eggs, spam and eggs’: I hope you like spam and eggs because that’s what we’re cooking right now. ‘Yes, we want spam and eggs.’ Well, it’s a good job! Luckily, everyone liked spam and eggs. The menu special was what everyone wanted."

What is the suit made from?
"It’s all traditional, good old-fashioned foam latex. In reality, it’s probably almost identical to what Stan had done for the first film. It’s a foam latex suit. The only thing we did differently on the head was, instead of standard one-lid eye blink we did a double-lid blink. So both lids came up to meet each other. It was a nightmare for Mike Regan who was doing the mechs because I said to him very early on, ‘I don’t want it to be a standard blink.’ He looked at me and was like, ‘We don’t have time,’ and I was like, ‘I know, but I don’t want a standard blink.’ ‘Yes, but we don’t have time.’ ‘I know, I understand that we don’t have time. But we are going to do a double blink.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ I did a little design and he was like, ‘Yes, I guess so.’ It meant a few extra late nights for him but I think it makes a difference when you see the creature blinking.

“Luckily the design is such that it allows things which require a lot of mechanisms. Because Pumpkinhead has got white eyes he just has to look around so that negated the mechs in the eyes. So we just went with a very traditional jaw, lip snarls, brow and then we enhanced the blink a little bit. But it’s a foam latex suit, a foam latex skin head with a fibreglass underskull and all those good old-fashioned techniques that work so well. We didn’t have the luxury of trying to reinvent the wheel. Nor would I want to. It worked perfectly well for what it was. Silicone skins weren’t needed for this, we just needed it to last the duration."

Did you make two suits?
"You always say that you make a hero and a stunt but what really happens, the truth is they’re both hero suits. When one gets the shit beaten out of it, it’s the stunt. I had the producers saying, ‘Well, Pumpkinhead only shoots for 19 days out of the 36,’ - and of course Pumpkinhead shot for virtually every day of the shoot. Full credit to Mike, Mitch and Blake and the Romanian crew, Ionel Popa and Daniel Parvalescu, who I know were basically every day having to repaint and patch and fill and all those nightmares of trying to keep the suit the best it could be. I’m sure at the end of the film there are going to be a few shots where it probably looks a little bit worn down. But luckily Pumpkinhead is a demon who has been born from the earth so a little bit of slime here, a little bit of blood there - and he looks as good as new!

“The thing for us was: as long as he looks good from the torso up - good chest, good head, good hands - I’m happy. I always know that, due to the design of the leg, in the first film whenever Pumpkinhead is seen in a wide shot, he’s on wires. They made it so that Tom who was wearing the suit in the first film was suspended so they could make the legs a lot sleeker. We had to make a stilt for our leg. You’ll always have a problem there because you have to deal with the shape of a human foot and the actor who was wearing the suit had big feet! I always look at him in wide shots and think he looks a bit off but that’s just the nature of the design unfortunately."

Were you responsible for Haggis’ make-up?
"Yes, we did Haggis’ make-up. That was insane. The turnaround on that make-up was absolutely insane. I think we turned around that make-up in three days and that was for a four- or five-piece make-up. We didn’t even have time to do a cowl. I think we did basically a large brow-piece that blended off and then a nose. Luckily Neill Gorton out of the UK did the live cast. They cast Lynne Verrall literally a few days before she was shooting. We got the life cast, I blocked it out and Mark Maitre worked overnight on it. I did blocking on the pieces, Mark took the pieces and worked on them through the night, brought them back in the morning and then we started the moulds. Then we ran out the pieces we needed so Mitch had something to apply. Mitch took the first three sets of appliances with him on as excess baggage.

“I really wanted it to look like the first Haggis but it just wasn’t possible. The girl who wore the first make-up was very long and had a huge neck. They had done a full cowl and we just hadn’t the time or the resources to do that. So what we basically had to create was a hag make-up, a witch bitch make-up. The only thing I was amazed by, nothing to do with the make-up, was when I heard Lynn’s voice. I’ve never heard such an incredible recreation of the original character in my life. It was fantastic, she sounded just like her. When I saw the trailer I thought she’d been dubbed. I thought they’d taken lines from the first film. I was just blown away. Blake and Mike and Mitch said no, Lynn was really dedicated to try and recapture that and listened to the first film over and over and over again. She was wonderful and Mitch had a good rapport with her. The great thing about that is: prosthetic make-up is only ten per cent of the character, it doesn’t work if it’s on somebody who isn’t into it or is no good. It’s like Pinhead - so much of that is Doug Bradley. I think we were able to pull off something very, very fast and luckily Lynn’s dedication to the character brought it to life so a total tip of the hat to her. After that of course, we had to do a whole bunch of transformation stuff."

On Lance Henriksen?
"Yes, that was basically me. Over a weekend I made a whole bunch of mechanisms. We did a change around which was great because we were able to basically use the technique from An American Werewolf in London but use silicone which is much more stretchy and more realistic. So I made one of those and I made a chest section which would suck in and I made a face plate with a change-over mech underneath it. They were literally all done over a weekend; it was a crazy, crazy weekend. I even drew boards for that and spoke to Jake about it. I said, ‘Look, as long as you keep cutting away to flames flickering and shadows on the wall, I’ll give you a couple of elements.’

“We made a bladder. It was literally a case of any chance we got to make anything else: ‘You’ve got five minutes, make me some bladders.’ ‘You’ve got five minutes, start making some latex sheets and I’ll wrap a skeleton inside them to make the Lance Henriksen husk.’ The body I made on the table one day by taking a skeleton and binding it in latex. All those years of doing Dracula 2000 and things like that prepare you well for making corpses. I had a wonderful, wonderful crew. Everyone got involved. I was in the fortunate situation that I could throw jobs at crew members and everyone would get behind it. And people were keen to work on it too because it was Pumpkinhead. They were excited by working on Pumpkinhead. The first day we tested Pumpkinhead - got the actor on a table, dressed him in the suit and put the head on - it was great to see everyone’s eyes light up."

Did you find a real enthusiasm and excitement about Pumpkinhead because it’s something special, not just another monster?
"We were excited too, you know. Pumpkinhead is an awesome creature and it's a good, solid, little horror film. We went back and watched it again. I think everyone who watches it goes: ‘Wow, Stan Winston could have just gone off and had a nice little career as a horror movie director.’ I think at the heart of it is a very cool creature. If there’s a credit missing from this film, whether it’s Stan or some of his guys, it’s whoever did that original design. That’s where a good creature can endure. Then I think you’ve got a couple of directors who understand action and pacing. Certainly from the trailer I saw, I was very excited."

Do you know Stan Winston? Does he know about these films?
"I have no idea at all. I don’t know Stan well enough to give him a call and say, ‘Stan! We’ve got your creature!’ I’m sure if it was a film I’d directed I’d be curious to see what someone else had done with it. Obviously it’s more of a sequel than the second film, this follows on from the events of the first film. I’m sure there’ll be some nitpicking from the guys when they see my bastardised version of their wonderful creature but I hope that they’ll look at it and realise the budget restraints and say, ‘That’s a pretty good job, actually.’ It’s a different Pumpkinhead but at the same time it’s got the core of it.

“Luckily I had some great sculptors, people like Dave Grasso and Tully Sumners who had just worked on Silent Hill. Richard Addison-Wood, the WETA workshop supervisor on Lord of the Rings and King Kong, did the eyes for me in New Zealand. Because he is a Pumpkinhead fan so I wanted to get him involved. I tried to pull in a few favours from people. One of the painters from Spider-Man 3 came over and helped me for a few days. It was great to be able to call people and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come and work a few days on Pumpkinhead?’ Instantly people were, ‘Yeah, that would be cool!’ They would come in and see the head and go, ‘That looks really cool!’ Even after all the crazy hours - and it was crazy hours, every day was a very, very long day and no weekends for that four-week blast that we had. But the first day that we were able to get the suit on, a couple of the producers came over. We turned off the lights in the shop and we made some cookies and we lit him from underneath and we brought him to life. Everybody, myself included, was: ‘Wow, look - it’s Pumpkinhead!’"

Who's that handsome devil?

If these do okay and they make V and VI, would you be up for those?
"God, yes. I’m up for anything. I’m a horror film whore I am, I don’t care. I’m up for Pumpkinhead XXVIII! It would be good if we got a few more dollars. I’m sure the producers would be: ‘Well, you’ve got the moulds.’ Yes, absolutely. Certainly if it was the same production team as before. They were so courteous and so wonderful to work with. You can only dream of having that kind of support. And the same from Jake West and Mike Hurst. To get phone calls from your director from another country the day after Pumpkinhead shot to just say, ‘Thank you so much. It looks amazing. We’re just blown away that there’s a creature here I can film.’ To get e-mails after the show saying, ‘Thank you again. It looks awesome. We’re just jazzed with the creature and your guys were awesome.’ I know that Mike and Blake and Mitch were put through the wringer and were having to come up with a lot of stuff on the spot so credit to them for backing me up. Unfortunately I couldn’t get out to Romania. I had to send them because I was dealing with Pulse reshoots and stuff like that. But I was getting phone calls nightly from Karri O’Reilly and from Mitch and Mike, post-being drenched in blood or post-being rained on."

There was some pretty unpleasant stuff out there.
"I know. That’s why I sent them! We keeping hope for that horror film, a Caribbean zombie movie or Caribbean werewolf movie where the visitors to a beautiful Caribbean resort are terrorised by one zombie. I invite any writer out there to write that because I would happily do that. Scuba divers who get terrorised by a zombie, that would be great because I could dive all day.”

Website: www.garyjtunnicliffe.com

My longest, most detailed interview with Jake West to date was done in May 2009, shortly before the release of Doghouse. A very heavily edited version of this was published in the late, lamented DeathRay magazine.

• More Jake West interviews: 1998, 2005, 2006

Let’s pick up where we left off. You made Pumpkinhead 3: a bigger budget than you had before but with the constraints of the Sci-Fi Channel format.
"Which tied my hands in many ways, because it was a made-for-cable project. The Sci-Fi Channel have a lot of strange rules which you have to get familiar with when you do a project for them. You can’t have any real swearing, well, any swearing, because of Middle America and the Bible Belt. You can’t have any drug use."

All the things we look for in one of your films!
"Exactly. So that took a lot of the ‘Jake West stuff' out."

Was it a positive experience for you, working on that film?
"It was a positive experience. Any film you get to make is a pleasure, in terms of learning, from the point of view of the director. You don’t get good at making films by not making them, you get good at them by making them. Certainly, making a Sci-Fi Channel film is very hard work. We’re shooting in Romania with a crew that don’t speak English. We shoot for 19 days and we don’t have the creature shoot ready until the eleventh day. All these things that tend to make you think quite practically about how you’re going to get thing made. So from that point of view, the pleasure was that I got to work with Lance Henriksen and Doug Bradley. You met the guys doing the creature effects, Gary Tunnicliffe’s guys. They were fantastic. There was lots of positives and also there was lots of difficult stuff."

Were Sci-Fi Channel happy with the film?
"Sci-Fi Channel as far as I know were very happy with it. It got reasonable ratings and it’s a film that they can keep on screening every Halloween. Certainly the feedback we got was good and the lady from the Sci-Fi Channel said to me if I wanted to make more stuff for them she could get me some work. To be hired as a film-maker is a great way to make a living and anyone who moans about it, there’s something wrong with them. But obviously as a film-maker, my ambitions are beyond work-for-hire projects - and that’s why something like Doghouse is such a breath of fresh air.

“Working on the script with Dan Schaffer, we developed that over a year and it had the kind of love and attention that you want these kind of films to have. Pumpkinhead had to be done very quickly on a budget. It was more money than I’d had but you’re paying for a full crew, you’re shooting in a foreign country. It was only $650,000 or something like that so it wasn’t a huge budget. It just felt a lot for me. Because we had, like, film cameras! You came out to the set and I think you saw that we were enjoying it."

Absolutely. I had a good time.
"For me, one of the most disappointing aspects was the very shoddy CGI. I shot all of those plates assuming that the creature that was going to be put in was actually going to be quite reasonable. Now I know Sci-Fi Channel sometimes have cheap CGI but the stuff in Pumpkinhead was like Playstation 2. I was very, very disappointed with that work - which I had no opportunity to do anything about, unfortunately. It was all added in after the edit was finished. It was just dropped in and it was just soul-destroying to see that, because obviously a lot of people commented. And quite rightly so because it wasn’t good enough. So that very much turned me off CGI. That’s why, with Doghouse it’s pretty much all make-up and character effects."

So what were your career options after Pumpkinhead was finished?
"Well, what Pumpkinhead did, because I got paid for it, rather than a film like Evil Aliens or Razor Blade Smile where I had to invest my own time and effort and hope I might get something back one day. Which is not a way of making films and making a living and that’s why I do all the Nucleus work as well, because it generates some cash, and I hire myself out as a freelance editor. Whatever way I can earn money between projects is a way of being able to develop the next project. What Pumpkinhead really did is it afforded me enough money to spend some time developing a project without needing to go off and find other work.

“That’s where Doghouse obviously benefited. It meant I wasn’t distracted in trying to develop Doghouse and having to do a lot of other things at the same time. And working with Dan Schaffer was an absolute pleasure because we just click and are on the same level. It was a pleasure for me not to have to write. I’ve always had to get involved with writing my stuff because I couldn’t afford to hire a writer. I love structuring stuff but the actual writing process isn’t my naturally favourite part. I’m not saying that I won’t write again but certainly working with Dan was such a pleasure for me because he’s such a good writer in my opinion. That’s why, when we sent the script out, it got picked up before we’d even shot a frame. For an independent film, that’s virtually unheard of, certainly in the UK."

How did you and Dan Schaffer get together?
"Basically it was just by pure luck. I did an interview about Evil Aliens for a magazine called Alternative London, which you may be aware of or not."

I can’t say it’s made it up to Leicester.
"It was available in Camden Market and other places. The journalist on that was a goth girl called Secky - Secretia - and she was just great. We hit it off when we were just chatting. We did the interview and then had a couple of glasses of wine and carried on talking about stuff because we had a lot in common. She said, ‘Have you ever read Dogwitch?’ I said, ‘No, what’s Dogwitch? That sounds cool.’ She said, ‘You’ll absolutely fucking love it, it’s the most hilarious amazing thing!’ When she told me that one of the reviewers who had read Dogwitch had likened it to Evil Dead II, I thought hold on, I’m in.

“So she said, ‘Look, I’m friends with Dan Schaffer, the guy who writes it. I think he really loves Evil Aliens as well but I’ll check and I’ll get you one of his comics to read.’ Naturally she just thought that we would click and her perception was correct. I said, ‘If you can get me a copy that would be fantastic, if that’s cool.’ And I thought maybe I’ll never hear from her again, maybe it’s the wine talking and that’s the end of it. But literally the next week, she said, ‘I’m in Camden, are you home?’ And she dropped off the first two volumes of the Dogwitch graphic novels. And I read it and immediately got back to her.

“I thought it was absolutely fantastic, some of the best and funniest stuff I had read in a comic book for ages. And I loved Dan’s artwork as well. He’s a great visualist and a great writer which gives him a big advantage I think. Because I loved it, I got in contact independently with Dan Schaffer and said, ‘I think your book’s brilliant, I’m friends with Secretia, if you’re around let’s have a drink.’ And we hooked up, just on that chance meeting. So it was a bit like meeting you and you recommending a bit of work and then meeting the creator of that work. So it was one of those very, very fortunate situations. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have Doghouse."

Whose idea was it?
"Dan came up with the initial idea when his girlfriend had a really bad cold or really bad flu - and he thought she looked a bit like a zombie! Then we were just throwing some ideas about. I can’t remember this a hundred per cent clearly but I remember us saying what if a bloke had a really bad cold: it would be man-flu. Then that introduced the whole gender thing because Dan is very interested in gender politics and a lot of his work has dealt with that. I think the idea of something we could then genderise and have a battle of the sexes subtext in, seemed a hilarious idea for a horror film. Certainly for a zombie film, it seemed a very fresh way of doing the zombie idea in a way that we haven’t seen done before.

“Then you say hold on, has it not been done before? Let’s just check. Literally, it was something we felt had not been done before. Subsequently I found out, from reading things on the internet, that some people think Doghouse is ripping off Jack Ketchum’s Ladies Night. Ladies Night is a project that Stuart Gordon was developing for some time. I met Stuart, ironically; I was on the jury with him at the Fantastic’Arts Gerardmer international film festival in 2008. We were both jury members. I was telling him about Doghouse and he said, ‘Oh, I developed this thing called Ladies Night.’

“But I didn’t know it was a Jack Ketchum novel and things like that. So on the internet I’ve been reading some people saying it’s a rip-off of that but it isn’t, it’s an original idea by Dan Schaffer. Jack Ketchum’s stuff is very, very violent, visceral, super-nasty. But Doghouse was developed very much as a horror-comedy idea with a real sense of Britishness about it. So I hope that it’s not like Ladies Night. It’s always weird when you’re doing something you think is original and then other people starting saying you’re ripping something else off. That’s certainly the case here."

What is curious that you’ve got ‘lads go away into the countryside and face off against female zombies’; Lesbian Vampire Killers has ‘lads go away and face off against female vampires’; and the film I saw after I met you the other week, The Scar Crow, has a bunch of lads in the countryside against female ghosts. There’s a microgenre developing there!

"That’s interesting. It’s kind of weird because obviously all horror films to some extent have virtually the same set-up: a bunch of people go somewhere and they get trapped and something happens to them. That’s virtually every horror film. Sometimes it’s weird that you might get a cycle of films. But The Scar Crow is a very independent film so obviously most people aren’t going to be aware of that. Not that it doesn’t deserve attention but it’s not going to be in the public eye.

“Whereas something like Lesbian Vampire Killers is obviously something which had a huge marketing budget and had a massive presence because it had Horne and Corden, popular comedians. Unfortunately for that film I think the Corden-Horne bubble had burst. It seemed that their TV series didn’t live up to expectations. As I said to you, I really enjoyed Lesbian Vampire Killers on the level of it being just a comedy but I didn’t think it was a horror film particularly. It didn’t have much horror content in it. Doghouse is genuinely a horror-comedy whereas I would say that Lesbian Vampire Killers is a comedy with some... vampires in it!"

Is the horror-comedy balance in Doghouse about the same as you had in Evil Aliens?
"I think the horror-comedy balance in Doghouse is probably better than it was in Evil Aliens, in a sense, because the capability of the performers in Doghouse allows them to create much more realistic characters who are believable as this group of guys. Whereas I think Evil Aliens was much more a deliberate splatstick. We didn’t have any really accomplished actors, it was just for the glee and gore and fun. Evil Aliens was my homage, my love letter to all the movies that I loved as a kid. And obviously people who got that really got on board with it and loved it and people who hated it criticised it for not being original enough and for being too influenced by things, I can understand where they’re coming from with that but the spirit of Evil Aliens was just to have a good time.

“I think with Doghouse what we’ve got is a better storyline and better actors that will bring out subtext - and the subtext is in many ways what will bring out the humour. The humour of the situation comes from the fact that you’re finding these believable guys caught up in this fantastical situation which kicks off. Because they respond to it in a more believable way, I think the humour is funnier. It’s the opposite of the humour in Evil Aliens, in a sense, which was just through the splatstick nature of the thing and the absolute over-the-topnesss of everything.

“Certainly with something like Lesbian Vampire Killers, every scene felt comedic. None of it was played for being real. They were treating things as a joke so therefore the whole film was a joke and it did feel more jokey. I don’t think Doghouse has that flavour. I’m very reticent to compare Doghouse to something like Shaun of the Dead because it’s the obvious example that everyone always quotes, because it‘s the most successful British film of the last x years or whatever in the genre. It’s a tired comparison really but what I do feel is that tonally Doghouse is much more on a level of Shaun of the Dead. Because Shaun of the Dead had beautifully observed performances. You can see how comedy can work at a higher level when performances are that good.

“You’ve had a little glimpse, a little taster of Doghouse and hopefully you’ve got a sense of where that’s going to go. Like I say, I feel that when you see the whole film, you’ll hopefully understand that, although Evil Aliens and Doghouse are two sides of the same coin, they’re definitely different sides of the same coin. How you can do something with more money and better actors and a better storyline. I think Doghouse is a better film. Not that I dislike Evil Aliens, I just think Doghouse has a better chance to cross over more to the mainstream and connect with people who certainly wouldn’t see a film like Evil Aliens. By having our cast - Danny Dyer, Noel Clarke, Stephen Graham - we can reach that mainstream audience.

“Also I think the female audience will enjoy it. At the moment, with the way the film’s being marketed, that’s perhaps not clear to the female audience. But what the women will get out of it - and a lot of girls who’ve seen the film love it - is that you get to see these blokey blokes terrorised by these women. There’s this feeling. We’re on the edge of this gender politics thing. There has to be an edge to it. Yes, Danny Dyer’s character is a jack-the-lad, he is a misogynistic character, but he suffers because of his views. We do discuss the gender politics in it and it does have a brain in it as well - disguised as a funny, gory horror-comedy. You know, the better horror-comedies work when there’s a little bit more beneath the surface. And there’s not really that many examples. The best ones I can think of are American Werewolf in London and Shaun of the Dead. I think Severance was on the way as well."

I have always maintained that an effective horror-comedy is one where, if you take the comedy element out, you still have a decent horror movie.
"I agree with you there, Mike. Certainly when you’re watching Doghouse you’ll know you’re watching a horror film, because it is very much ‘in genre’ still. Where I will liken it to Evil Aliens is that I make my films with a love of the genre and that’s definitely there. And it’s proud to be in that genre. I think where some films go wrong is that they’re a bit embarrassed about being in the genre. If you look at Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, those guys love the genre, they know their references. They have respect for the genre, despite doing it as a comedy. Whereas I think Lesbian Vampire Killers felt more like it was a spoof and I think that’s always a danger.

“When I saw Lesbian Vampire Killers, it was a fun movie but it felt more like a Carry On film than it did like a Hammer film. Although the production design was very good and I enjoyed lots of different bits of it. But it was just a comedy at the end of the day. It didn’t feel like it had a big horror influence. I met Phil Claydon who’s a terrific bloke and I don’t want to say a bad word about the film because a lot of people just slagged it off. I know how difficult it was for him to get the film off the ground and make it, and all the things that people don’t appreciate.

“Obviously that film has become a bit of a target, which may cause us some problems because everyone’s going to want to compare this to LVK, which would be a bad comparison. But you just know that a lot of lazy journalists who don’t like the genre will tar it with that brush, probably in a negative way just because they want to. Which does piss me off a bit because of obviously the amount of work that you have to put into a film to get it to this level. But hopefully Doghouse will reach a wider audience because of who’s in it and the fact that it’s having a lot of support and a wide release. We’ll see.”

Moving back a bit, what happened after you and Dan Schaffer had written the Doghouse script?
"We’d finished writing the script and we’d done a couple of drafts of it before we were ready to show it to people. Just by pure chance I got invited to a photo shoot for a magazine about UK rising film talent. Somehow I got recommended by somebody! I don’t normally get put on those kind of things. Ironically, I think the magazine went bust before they did the article. But on that shoot I met Terry Stone who was one of the executive producers of Rise of the Footsoldier. He had done that with Carnaby Films and he was looking for some other projects.

“He knew that I’d done Evil Aliens and he knew I had a bit of a following with the horror audience and he was interested in any kind of horror stuff that I had. And I said your timing is pretty good because I’ve just finished developing this with Dan Schaffer and told him about Dan and what we had done. He said, ‘That sounds fantastic,’ and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you first look at it and you can decide yourself whether you like it and whether you want to get involved.’ Because he was saying that he felt he may be able to get some money together. Because he had a company called Hanover Films that raised money for stuff.

“Basically, he read the script and the next day he got back to me, which once again is very unusual in the film industry. Normally when someone says they’re going to get back to you, you never hear from them again. And he absolutely loved it and he said, ‘Look, my company Hanover can put some money in towards the budget of this. And I’d like to take this into Carnaby because they raise money through EI schemes.’ He did that and it became a Carnaby/Hanover production because the guys at Carnaby loved it and they fast-tracked it. Then they started raising money. When I say ‘fast-tracked’, obviously it took them about a year to raise the money but that just meant we could develop the script even more. So after that I didn’t need to ship it to anyone else because it got attention straight away.

“When Carnaby came on board and they raised money for the production, they sent the script away to Sony who came on board as distributors straight away before we’d even shot a frame. Normally you don’t do any deal on your distribution for an indie film until you’ve shot it, and then you take it to festivals or you have special screenings. You know what it’s like and how hard it is for indie films to get distribution on board."

At what point did the film get cast?
"The film got cast, in essence, once we had finished the fund-raising with Carnaby, which took a bit longer than we had hoped. Because there was no point going out and casting until we knew we had all the money in place. The casting process started quite early because I really wanted to cast the net and try to get as good a cast as possible. So we spent a couple of months casting it. But obviously landing a name was really key to getting people excited about it. Interestingly enough, the first person we actually got on board for the film was Jimi Mistry from The Guru and East is East. He was the first biggish name we had on board because he loved the role of Graham. He was on board and then a few other actors started hearing about it.

“We worked with casting director Jane Frisby and that started creating a little wave of fun and people started reading it and realised it was really good. Then Danny Dyer came on board and once Danny was on board it all started rolling from there. We saw a lot of people and when Noel came in I was very surprised that he was interested because he hadn’t done anything like this. He’d done Doctor Who obviously but he hadn’t done anything in the horror genre.

“He came in just for a meeting to discuss what part he might be interested in and I was thinking I don’t know if he’ll really dig it. But he came in and he absolutely loved it. He was so enthused about the project, it was fantastic. Because he had just directed Adulthood which was very different and obviously had done very well at the UK box office. So he came in and he just loved it, then we got him back to do a reading with Stephen Graham and Danny Dyer, to see how the chemistry would work. So he was great and from there we had our bigger names in.

“The hardest part to cast was Vince because in many ways that’s the hardest role in the film. He’s the one who’s depressed because he’s getting divorced. That character has to play all very ‘in’ so we needed an actor who could handle that but it wasn’t a showy role. There was a big development, a big character arc on Vince. So we wanted someone really solid for that and it was only finally the week before shooting that we finally managed to do the deal with Stephen Graham. Stephen came in at the eleventh hour really because we were talking to people who had other commitments.

“By which point we then lost Jimi Mistry because Roland Emmerich was shooting his movie in Vancouver and offered him silly money to go out and do that but that interfered with our shooting dates. So we then had to recast the role of Graham and Jimi had kindly recommended Emil Marwa who was also inEast is East with him. So he came in and did a fantastic reading so we got Emil involved. But I think two of the real finds for the film were Keith-Lee Castle and Lee Ingleby. Obviously they’ve done stuff before but they’re not names and they’re both fantastic actors. I’ve seen Keith in Seed of Chucky and his Urban Gothic thing."

He does vampires all the time. He’s the dad in Young Dracula.
"That’s right. Young Dracula I wasn’t familiar with because it’s a kids’ thing but I found out about it later and watched it and thought it was really funny."

He’s in Vampire Diary too.
"That’s right. I hadn’t seen Vampire Diary. So we got him in and he brought this unusual energy to this part. He plays this role absolutely beautifully, he’s like an ex-goth guy who’s had a job in the city and he’s actually in the middle of his own breakdown, trying to cure himself with self-help tapes. Because all of the lads are so focussed on trying to cheer up Vince, they don’t notice that he’s really slipped away. He does a fantastic performance in the film, really brilliant, and he was a smashing actor to work with, a really lovely guy. Then Lee Ingleby, he’s a rising star that guy. A really amazing performance; he knows how to bring a lot of humanity into stuff and make it seem very real, and how to play the comedy. Just one of the best actors I’ve worked with in his natural instincts."

What about casting Emily Booth, was that something you wanted to do anyway?
"Having worked with her on Evil Aliens, working with Emily’s great because she’s fun to have around. Also she loves horror and she knows horror. I was telling her about the film as I was developing it. When I was speaking with Dan, because he liked her in Evil Aliens, we were thinking well let’s get her in as one of the zombird characters. She loves horror. Let’s give her a character where there’s not loads of dialogue because that’s not her strength. She’s not really an actress-actress, she’s somebody who’s got into acting through her other work. Rather than give her more dialogue stuff, play to her strengths and give her a really memorable horror character.

“So we actually designed the character of the Snipper based on her. If you look at the concept drawings, he had pictures of Emily. The character was made for her really. And because she’s got a great fanbase in the horror community and she does lots of stuff for Zone Horror and for Frightfest, it just seemed a brilliant way of working with her again and getting somebody involved who loves horror films. Certainly none of the guys on the set were complaining with Emily there, she’s a laugh to have around."

Who did you get to do all your make-up effects?
"The make-up effects were done by Karl Derrick. I’m sure you’re aware of his work. He was make-up supervisor on Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, he worked on some of the Harry Potter films, he did 1408 with John Cusack. The guy’s done a lot of work and he was very, very good. We needed a make-up artist who could do stuff as good as you could get it. Obviously with zombie make-up we’re all used to seeing a certain level of zombie make-up. But this had to be stuff that had character design in it as well. You saw a lot of the concept drawings, Mike. We did all those concepts, which were incredibly helpful when we were taking the work out to tender to the make-up companies because they could see exactly what we were trying to achieve: this is pretty much where we want it to go. Obviously the budget will affect what can and can’t be done, but let’s talk about it and how would you do it?

“Karl had wanted to work with me on Pumpkinhead originally and had put a pitch in on that but he just couldn’t compete with the cost that Gary Tunnicliffe could do. Gary had an outfit that had done a lot of films in Romania and had an infrastructure there so he could do that for a lot less than somebody coming over from the UK. Basically, Karl just couldn’t afford to do that, the building of the full creature and all the rest of it, on the budget that they had. In the end I don’t think Gary made any money on Pumpkinhead, I think he just did it because he fancied the idea of doing the new Pumpkinhead. He didn’t really make a profit out of it as far as I can tell. So anyway, I knew Karl and was enthusiastic to work with him. He was the only guy who came in and basically showed how he could structure it. We had a lot of performers who needed a lot of make-up. He needed a lot of make-up artists who were going to be doing the applications and the sculpts. It was a huge job.

“Carnaby had never done a horror film before so they didn’t really understand the process. We needed to start all that make-up work ages before we started shooting. We needed twelve weeks’ prep time as well but they’re not used to that sort of thing. They’re used to doing a few weeks’ pre-production on their other films. This needed about twelve weeks’ pre-production on the make-up and about six weeks’ normal pre-production. But also the village of Moodley was another thing because that took two months to build. So this film was logistically far bigger than anything they had ever done. It wasn’t the biggest budget of anything they’d ever done because there was The Last Drop. But this was by far the biggest logistical film that they had ever done.

“And it needed more forethought, so therefore we needed the right heads of department for this. That’s why getting Karl involved, and his level of experience, became invaluable. And having Matt Button, the production designer, who had worked with Carnaby before. We went on numerous location reccies, trying to find Moodley, with Matt and he’s the one who eventually found the hospital for us. He was doing another shoot for a Sky job and he found this place. No-one had ever shot on it before until he arrived there and he went, ‘Right, we could turn this place into a village,’ because we’ve been looking all over the place. We had been inspecting disused airfields.

“Just trying to get permission for what we wanted to do would have been impossible in any normal town or village. They don’t want you blowing stuff up at night, a huge amount of noise, zombirds screaming and attacking. It became a practical thing to try and build a real village. It was really nice and quite magical to see this place being built before you. That was a really great thing but that took a long time to sort out as well. It meant that we could do things properly and we could think about them and plan it so it would work for the shoot, which was really nice. Unlike Pumpkinhead where you turn up in Romania, all the Romanians tell you you can do things and then you turn up on the day and they go no you can’t do that. Which isn’t a very nice way to work. This way, we could plan it and be certain about what we could achieve."

In terms of logistics, from your point of view as the director, was it a lot bigger than you had done before?
"Oh yes, absolutely. It’s always difficult when you’re doing something with a big ensemble cast anyway, which I’d learnt on Evil Aliens. Because in Evil Aliens we had several main characters and the way I wrote it was so that they got split up fairly quickly. Because I knew how much hassle it is directing large groups of people all the time. If you’re doing a dialogue scene with seven or eight people in it, it actually is quite complicated because of all the eye-lines. It’s the kind of thing that when you’re watching it you obviously don’t really think about but when you’re shooting, it becomes important. When you’re working with good actors, you’ve got to make sure that each of them gets their coverage. Just stuff like that.

“So Doghouse was a logistical challenge from the point of view that we had a large amount of characters who stayed together for quite a while. When you see the film (and this is a spoiler) none of the guys get killed until the third act. Because we were trying to really make people like these characters before anything happens to them. So they get away from narrow escapes and you get some other kills but not them. So it was designed to work slightly differently. So yes, logistically it was tricky to film. Plus with all the make-up times involved. Sometimes we would have a lot of zombirds in their make-up and they would all need three or four-hour make-up application time. So it just means that the production has to be very. very well organised.

“The advantage of having money is obviously you can then afford to have the right amount of people applying the make-up. We had a good line producer who was Gerry Toomey, who’s incredibly experienced, who made sure that all that stuff ran like clockwork. So that’s working with experienced people and having a bit of money. If you can’t do that on a low budget, what tends to happen is people say they can’t do it or they turn up late or whatever. On low-budget films it’s actually a lot harder. But on Doghouse we had two million pounds. Even though that’s still a low-budget film, we had the budget to pay people and we had the right people there. That meant that you can be the captain of the ship and not have to do lots of other jobs at the same time. Whereas on Evil Aliens I was bloody unloading the van. That is an appreciable difference which is great because it means you can concentrate more on your job. Which is how you want to work as a director."

Was there anything that you wanted to get in the film but which, for whatever reason, you couldn’t get in there?
"There was a scene that we really, really wanted to shoot but we had to drop just because we literally didn’t have enough time. The thing that fucked us most when we were shooting Doghouse, and it was an incredibly successful shoot. By being on that hospital complex, which we effectively turned into a studio, everyone was staying up there as well as filming there. We had our own village! It was amazing, it was like shooting a film in Pinewood but you’re living there as well. So when you get up in the morning you’re on set, which is incredible. You don’t have any travelling time or anything. What did fuck us was that we had really, really terrible weather last summer.

“It was raining virtually all the time. Which meant that we kept on getting behind schedule because we couldn’t fucking shoot because we were waiting for the rain to stop. We were doing night shoots and obviously at that time of year you don’t get super-long nights. We were shooting August-September so the night would only last a certain amount of time and then as soon as it gets light you can’t shoot. If it’s raining at a certain heavy density you just can’t shoot because it starts reading. We had already come up with the idea, we did a wet-down every day on the town because we knew that it might rain. In England you can pretty much assume it will at some point. So we established the look fo the wet-down which is really good for the lights anyway because it brings everything to life a lot more.

“But we had a lot more rain than we thought so we got a bit behind schedule. And there’s a sequence that Dan really loved which involved a fire extinguisher. It had a bit of an elaborate gag where they jump down some stairwells using this fire extinguisher and they’re going to use it to hose back the zombirds in the church. It gets turned on and it’s a metaphor, another one of Dan’s metaphorical things. All this elaborate thing kicks off and they get it into position. They turn it on and only a tiny drip of water comes out. It’s like the males showing that their virility isn’t what they think it is. It ends up with: ‘Look Vince, you’re firing blanks, mate - let’s get out of here!’ It was a nice little scene, it was only about a page and a half, but it was actually quite elaborate to film so it kept on getting bumped on the schedule so that was something that had to get dropped.

“Obviously there were other things in there that did get dropped, when you go to your pre-production meetings and you start going through the script. There’s another sequence where we had a fight out on some roadworks in the middle of the road. But we would have had to create this huge area of roadworks. There would have been a big hole in the ground, and stuff like that logistically was just going to be too expensive for us to do. So it got dropped a bit earlier. But Dan was on hand all the time so whenever we encountered a problem we were rewriting the script with him there. Because he was there as we were shooting and he never stopped writing, so if there were any problems it just meant that we could work our way around it and still have the right people making those decisions. So it was very organic in the way that we developed the film.

“Whereas normally you can’t do that. On a film like Evil Aliens, if something goes wrong, you haven’t got any time to rewrite, you’ve got to figure a way of either making it work or just dropping it. With this, we managed to keep all of our core ideas in and not lose anything really important. There were a couple of night scenes that got dropped but that’s just the reality of any project. Once again, there’s a finite amount of money you’ve got for something. Of course you want it to be as big and as good as it can but you’ve got to be realistic about what you’ve got to achieve and the time you’ve got to do it. We had six week to shoot Doghouse which is quite a lot more than the 19 days I had for Pumpkinhead. So that was nice and that helped the shoot. Shooting is what really eats up the budget because you’ve got to pay your crew and your actors for the time you’re shooting, and it’s amazing how quickly that money goes when you’ve got a full crew down there."

You are an editor - so is the post on a film like this as much a part of the process as the actual shooting?
"Absolutely. I think that really, in fact, in any film that you do, the true art of film really comes into it in the editing room a lot of the time. That’s where you make the final decisions on things. That’s where you give it its shape and its timing. That’s the soul of a film, the editing. I think it’s one of the most important processes and a process that’s unique to film: the manipulation of time and space in vision and sound. It’s what make films unique and I think to ignore the power of that is foolish.

“I love that process, I absolutely love editing. I couldn’t wait to actually get into the editing room. Also, as a director, it’s a pleasure because all of a sudden you’re in a room and the film is yours again. For that period, the film is yours and you can play around with it. You can do that and it’s great when it comes together in a way that you really want to see it come together. From what you’ve shot, seeing it evolve like that. That’s one of the big pleasures of film-making, I think."

I understand you shot this film on the Red camera.
"It was shot on the Red, yes."

What advantage did that give you?
"On Pumpkinhead we shot on 35mm and obviously I loved the aesthetic of it but it does mean that you’re always worried about not being able to shoot so much, especially when you’ve got a limited budget. It gets to the point where you have enough money that it makes no difference but on a two million pound budget it can make a difference. On a horror film where you have a lot of characters and you need to get a certain amount of coverage. Shooting film, we were looking at the costs of it and it was getting a bit too expensive. And it would have meant that we could only have shot with one camera as well.

“The advantage of shooting with the Red - we were one of the first films to shoot with the Red because it was just becoming popular at that point; not a lot of people had used it. The producers were quite concerned about that because they hadn’t shot Red before so they were saying, ‘Are you sure we should be testing it?’ Because it was still in one of its beta builds when we were using it. What inspired my confidence in it was when we found Jeff Brown who was our Red guy. He was the guy we had on set who was going to be there if we had any problems. He’s an owner-operator, he had the kit but he’s one of the few people in the UK who’d been speaking with Red from the very beginning. He had one of the first cameras and he’d been updating it. Basically the guy’s a complete geek who knows everything about Red, so when something did go wrong it could instantly get addressed.

“Whereas some producers who had had difficulties with the camera just didn’t have that person on set. They thought that they could solve things themselves if they had trouble - and you can’t, you need somebody who’s a real tech-head. So we had no problems with the Red camera at all because we had the right person there so if there were any potential issues it was just solved straight away. We had him there all the time and he was the guy doing all the data transfer at the end of the day. He set up a system where we had our room with computers and hard drives in it in arrays. We would shoot drives and he would be uploading footage during the day, everything was being checked. Which was brilliant because it means that as soon as you’ve finished your day’s shooting you can go and watch your rushes - at full spec!

“Which is fantastic, it gives you a lot of confidence in what you’re shooting. The advantage of shooting onto hard drives means you can keep the cameras rolling and shoot as much as you want. The other advantage was it meant we could afford to have two cameras all the time on set, so I could shoot two cameras rather than one camera. Which once again gives you an advantage because when you get to the editing room you’ve got all that extra footage. I was reading an interview with John Woo the other day. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, John Woo’s style is amazing.’ He said: ‘I shoot with as many cameras as possible because I don’t know how I want to cut it until I go into the editing room. I’ll shoot with different cameras, all shooting at different speeds, and later on I’ll decide how I want to do it.’

“So he doesn’t actually plan his edit because he doesn’t like storyboarding. And John Woo shoots with up to 17 cameras! Now, it’s interesting when you start hearing stuff like that. I really plan my stuff, plan it to be shot in a certain way. I’ve never had the privilege of thinking: what would happen if I shot with 17 cameras? Obviously his films are incredibly well edited and John Woo is a visionary director, I’m not taking that away from him. But to me, to shoot with two cameras was great! That meant we could shoot with two cameras all the time. We didn’t always use the second camera; sometimes when you’re shooting the intimate dialogue scenes you only need one person. But when we were shooting any action we shot with two cameras which was great.

“We shot the zombirds with high-speed lenses and we shot in 2.35:1 cinemascope. So we were shooting with exactly the same lenses we would have shot with if we were using 35mm film. The lenses were just beautiful. And shooting in the 2.35:1 ratio, I’ve always wanted to shoot in that ratio and Doghouse was perfect for it because we’ve got six or seven guys so you’ve got frames to fill with a lot of characters. You get these lovely shots of them all in frame at the same time. It’s really lovely to shoot in that aspect ratio."

What sort of push is Sony putting behind this? There’s about a month to go and there’s not been a lot about it so far.
"Well, obviously Sony made the decision to release it at the head of summer rather than waiting for an autumn slot because their opinion is that it will do better if it comes out quick. The downside of that is then, obviously I only finished the film on Friday. That means with the print deadlines and stuff, there’s no way they’re going to get that sorted. Because, as you know, print deadlines are two to three months ahead. That means they’re taking a risk on it. You’re not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like. I feel a bit disappointed in that sense but they have committed to a £600,000-£700,000 P&A spend which means there will be a big print campaign and a big television campaign."

Is it going on the sides of buses?
"I don’t know. I’m waiting to find out what their campaign is. We’re having a screening of the film tomorrow and I think they’re going to talk about what that media campaign is then. I haven’t been really very involved in it because I’ve been doing the film! Literally we mixed the trailer last week as well, while we were doing the film, because that was running behind time as well. So trailers are now out in cinemas I believe. There’s been about 600 trailers gone out to cinemas around the country. I’m told it’s a 200-screen release, a proper nationwide release with a substantial TV and print campaign.

“They are spending money on it so I’m assuming that people will know about the film. But obviously the internet and websites is the primary way of getting the word out. How effective that is in the time span we’ve got remains to be seen. Obviously I want to do everything I can to ensure that people hear about the film but obviously they do have their own PR team. Sony are using Vertigo to release the film independently in the UK because they handle a lot of their own independent releases. So Vertigo and Sony are the ones guiding that hand. I’m always worried about these things because I don’t like it when things feel as if they’re being rushed. To me, the film is finished and I’m very happy with the final result of the film."

Do you think it’s something that might do okay in the cinema and then pick up more on DVD?
"With these kinds of films, to a certain extent the DVD is always going to be the market where it’s expected to do better. If it does well at the cinema then that’s unusual because, as you know, most British films don’t do very well at the cinema. But because they’re going out on 200 screens and because of the cast we’ve got, there is a chance that we could make some money at the box office. But it would be very foolish of me to make any prediction on that because it could make no money at the box office and I’ll just end up looking like an idiot for making that prediction. Whatever I say won’t be correct. But if things go well then maybe it could do some business because of our cast.

“Obviously, people have got to know that it’s there but once people start seeing the TV ads and things like that, all of a sudden people are going to start saying, ‘Hey, I saw your film on TV.’ A bit like when Noel Clarke spoke about it last year at Christmas. So I’m assuming that hopefully people are going to be interested in it because of our cast. Much more so than because of me. I’ll do as much as I can but I would imagine it’s Danny and Noel and Stephen who will catch people’s attention more than me because my fanbase is quite obvious. If you look on the web, it’s all over the horror websites, the horror guys all know about it. They’re not the ones we need to get the word out to, it’s getting it out to the mainstream which is important.

“However, you could argue that perhaps sometimes with a campaign like Lesbian Vampire Killers, maybe they did too much and it actually pissed people off. Everyone knew about it months and months beforehand so when it finally came out they were fed up with it. At least with Doghouse they’ll go, ‘Oh, it’s a surprise, it’s a sleeper, it’s come from nowhere.’ Certainly it won’t give people time to get fed up with it. But I don’t know whether that’ going to work in our favour or not, mate!"

Have you left it open at the end so that if this is a big hit there could be a Doghouse 2?
"Indeed there could be. When we were writing the script, it was very much discussed between myself and Dan. There is so much mileage in this idea that absolutely there could be. We designed it and we have sketched out how it could be. But it works as a stand-alone film which is very important because we’re not banking on the fact that we’re ever going to make another Doghouse film. But the actual overarching idea behind it lends itself to being extended and also it lends itself to putting the boot on the other foot with the next film where things will mutate and the virus will start affecting men.

“So you get to see the other side of the sexual politics played out as well. Which is something we thought would be a lot of fun if we wanted to do it. Obviously we need to see how Doghouse does because there’s no point otherwise. We’ve got the ideas for how we’d like to do it but that’s only ever going to see the light of day if Doghouse does well. I don’t want to get involved in developing a sequel to something that people don’t want to see. And I’m really hoping that they do! It would be great if people want to see more of it, but we’ll see."

Are you taking it to Cannes?
"No. I’m going to Cannes because I’ve got duties with my Nucleus Films label, as you know, with Marc Morris, and we need to find a few more acquisitions. Also I could do with a bit of a break and I want to have a few meetings about some potential future projects that we’ve got. I’ve got two more with Dan Schaffer, a couple of scripts that are finished, They’re nothing to do with Doghouse. One is a satirical horror film, like American Psycho meets Clockwork Orange, called The Killdarlings which is very mad and fun. We’ve also got a film called Rollover which is what I call a revisionist action film. A very funny, quirky action movie but with the Jake West stylings in there. Those two projects we’ve got finished scripts on so we’d like to see if we can get them off the ground.

“So I’m hoping to see how that will go but obviously we won’t quite know the lay of the land until we see how Doghouse does. Because people are only going to want to give me more money if Doghouse is a success. If it’s not, then I’ll go back to the drawing board. So I’m very excited about doing some more projects together with Dan Schaffer because we worked so well together on this film. We really clicked, we have a real simpatico thing going on. So it would be delightful if this would be the first of many, but like with all film projects, you never know what’s going to happen!

“You’ve asked me about this in the past: what’s your next project. It never ends up being the one that I told you about! Therefore I don’t want to promise anyone. But these are things which we’re interested in doing and we do have a couple of finished scripts to go on. So if there is some heat off the back of Doghouse, we want to try and press one into production if we can."

Last question. With this, a decently budgeted, named cast film going out widely in cinemas, 2.35:1 and all that... are you finally at the place where you want to be in terms of your career?
"Ironically, it’s quite interesting: from that point of view, when you say it like that, it makes me realise that this will be regarded as my first proper film. So it’s almost like my debut movie. To the wider world, that is. Because obviously the only people who know about my films are people who are into strange cult movies. The rest of the world doesn’t know I’m a film-maker. So in a sense, this is what most people go through with their first film: a two-million pound film with some rising actors and an interesting concept. So in a sense, to the wider world, this is my debut!

“But yes, absolutely. I feel very happy about this because I’m very happy with the script and with the development process and what we’ve got. I’m genuinely satisfied with the film. Obviously, with any movie you always want more time and more money and there’s still things that I could improve and do better on. Because, being realistic as a film-maker, you know that’s true. I think that with Doghouse, it’s a piece of work that I’m very, very proud of and I’m anxious to see how it goes down with the public. It may be that it connects with them and people really enjoy it or it could go the other way. You just can’t tell - but that’s part of the magic, isn’t it?

“For some reason, films sometimes spark the public consciousness and people really get into it. If that was the case, that would be really wonderful. But I’ve never been in that position and I don’t know what that’s like. If not, it will just become another cult film so I’ll be back in the same place. But I do think I’ve made a better film and I hope that it does well financially and it means we can get a bit more money to do another interesting project. Because we are trying to do stuff which is original and different to what other people out there are doing. I think that’s what the film world needs, I think it needs some people who are going to do some stuff which maybe nobody else will do! And we’re your guys!”

This interview with the always effusive Eileen Daly was conducted on the set of Elisar Cabrera's feature Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft, in 1997.

• Other Eileen Daly interviews: 1998

"What was that other thing we met on? I know I played Miki."

Archangel Thunderbird.
"That was it!"

You don't even know what they're called!
"Yeah, yeah, yeah! I just about have time to look at the script, let alone know what they're called! It was a little while ago and I've done so much since."

Didn't Elisar discover you as an actress?
"He says that. I don't think he did. As a feature film actress, yes he did. He put me in his first feature film. As an actress, no, because I'd already done quite a lot. I'd done a lot of theatre and I'd also done adverts and corporate videos for companies. But my first feature film was Demonsoul. Actually I met Elisar when I was doing a student film and I had to do a nude scene with this dreamboy character. Elisar was on the pay- roll, doing the boom or something, and came up afterwards and said, 'Eileen, I've got a project...' It was about a year and a half, two years after, but we kept in contact because I like him, he's a nice man, and then I did Demonsoul. So it was quite a while from when I first met him to when I actually did Demonsoul."

You're becoming almost a regular on the low-budget horror scene.
"I think it's great, I really do, I love it. I love low-budget. I've never done a big budget really, so I don't know what it's like doing one. Obviously I've done bit parts on big film productions, but I've never had a main lead or a supporting lead. So I don't know what it would be like, but I'm sure it would be brilliant!"

Tell me about your character in this.
"Ah, Raven. Raven is looking for Hyde. Hyde is the warlock. Hyde has been captured and Raven captures him back to do this Spell of Mashenka. She needs this spell to make her all-powerful - she wants to conquer the whole world and then get rid of Hyde. But Hyde's got other plans. He wants to do the spell - but I've got the book - and he wants to then get rid of me and conquer the whole world. But we've just got one little bad penny, and that's Celeste, the good witch, who's trying to stop us both from using the spell to take over the planet. I get killed in the end. Celeste actually kills me, she rips my heart out. Hyde betrays me. It's all fun and games really.

"I got the script about two weeks ago. Read it, liked it. Even if I didn't like it, really, I like working. With Elisar and with a lot of young directors you can always put your two-pence-worth in and say, 'Well, I don't think this works quite well. Could I actually possibly say it this way?' or do something in another way. They're a lot more easy going, so it's more of a family atmosphere that everyone can contribute a little bit if it's going towards making a better film. Whereas I'm sure in a big budget movie, you just get your lines and just do it. There's no question of anything:. 'Excuse me, sir, do you think I should...?''No, just do it that way.' Of course there's a lot more money involved. As you know, I do a lot for Redemption..."

Are you still doing the video covers for them?
"Yes, still doing the covers. Actually Redemption's going to make a movie, a Redemption movie, so the character actually comes to life. Nigel's working on it at the moment."

You did those little intros for Bravo.
"Yes, but that's nothing to do with it, that's for Bravo. Now Nigel's working on the movie which is a similar character but it's obviously going to be different costumes. Something you can walk around in! And he's going to mix it in with the millenium. So that should be good. The Bravo things are coming up in November again. Other than that, I've got this and Pervirella and Razor Blade Smile. Razor Blade Smile hasn't been finished yet - it will be finished in Spring next year. Manga's taken it up, and they've invested a lot of money.

"And, I heard through the grapevine - actually through Jake West over the telephone! - that they might put up the money for a sequel. Because Lilith Silver carries on. That was great to work on. And this is great to work on. Much better than Demonsoul because it's more professional and there's been more money put into it. Everyone's been fantastic; we've got some wonderful actors - and Hyde is just a real cheesy one! He's a very kind man and I love working with him."

Have you got any fight scenes with him?
"Actually, no. I've got a love scene with him. I don't actually fight him. He's kind of a big man to fight, so I'd have to have super-super-human strength to pin him down. Because he's a wrestler in real life! But I don't know when this is going to come out. Forbidden Planet have asked me to do some signings near Christmas, so that should be really good. I'll be signing T-shirts, posters, anything really!"

You're becoming Britain's home-grown scream queen now.
"Oh how exciting! I'd love that! I'd like to go on doing this as long as I can. It's just entertainment and I love it."

Would you like to work in America or are you happy here?
"I think both. I'm happy here, I love it, this is my home. But if they invite me over there to do one, of course I'd fly over there because it would be new, it would be different. I'd be meeting new people, working in a different way on different scripts. I'd learn a lot and still entertain. Actually, it's quite interesting really because when I met Hyde and we were sitting there chatting, he's bringing out his new skin-care range. Did he tell you that? And he said he would like me to fly over there and do a video for him. Skin care for vamps! Everything is great. For about three years I didn't work as an actress at all. I was just getting tiny little bit parts. BBC wouldn't touch me with a bargepole. My agent would send my CV in, and my showreel, but I was too glam. Then there was a loophole. Actually I think I developed my own loophole. I worked so hard in trying to get things and I don't know what I did but it came together and created a gap."

Have you got any ambitions to become a serious actress?
"Oh yes, I'd love to."

Do you think the horror work might be holding you back on that?
"Of course not. I don't think so. I am a serious actress. I did Shakespeare last year; I played Lady Anne for Richard III, which was a film. So I do do serious stuff. I do anything, you know! I won't touch pornography and I won't do anything that would ruin what I've built up. But I'll do anything - just give me a script! So yes, I'd love to be a serious actress, I'd love to over to America, but I'll never be a Michelle Pfeiffer and I'll never be a Cher or anything like that. I'm happy to plod along if I never make it and carry on doing this. I don't want to end up, though, as one of those old scream queens. I'd be so sad! I would say 'Shoot me'!

"Do you know what? I was in the post office the other day and I saw Christopher Lee in the queue. I noticed him straight away, but it didn't register. I thought, 'What a good-looking chap that man is.' Then as I looked, I thought, 'Oh my God, that's Christopher Lee! Oh my God!' I was blushing! What a handsome-looking man, and how old is he? Seventy?"

He's so dignified and powerful.
"Yes. As he walked past, he looked - well, most probably he just looked because I've got big tits! - but I smiled. But what a nice-looking man he is. So I'd grow old gracefully and still do films. I love horror, though. I love sci-fi and horror. I'd love to be in Star Trek! I wish we'd make an English one - and I'd be Captain!"

I spoke with Alice Krige about playing the Borg Queen and she said she loved doing it. And she said they tested all the make-up to see if she was allergic to any of it.
"I bet she did. She looked fantastic in that - beautiful! She came down on wires. But that's what a big budget does. They can do that. On little low-budget ones, they put something on your face and you can come up in a rash but you still have to work through it. They haven't got the budget. They've got about 120 quid to spend! Or they use somebody as an extra who they just met in a pub and they're using the same lip-brush, so if that guy or that girl's got herpes on their lips... That is where low-budget and big features are different."

I met Sherilyn Fenn a couple of weeks ago and she had brought her own make-up person with her.
"So she'd know the contours of her face and know exactly what make her look good."

She started off in low-budget things like Zombie High.
"Well maybe this will be a stepping stone to something bigger. I'm terribly terribly proud of everything I've done, it's all close to my heart. The only thing I'm not really proud of - is Demonsoul. Every time I watch it I go... - not that I put it on every night! When people say they've seen it, I go, 'Oh, you poor sod.' But you've got to learn your trade, because you can't learn it in school. You can go to acting school till you're blue in the face. You've got to come out and actually be able to do it. You've got to have screen presence, there's loads of bits. It's all got to go like a big cake and gell in. If it doesn't gell in, you could be the most fantastic actress in the world, but you don't work on screen."

How did you get involved in Tony Luke's project?
"I was doing - what was I doing? - it was - you're going to say, 'Oh Eileen, you do rabbit!' Oh, I know! I was sitting there saying 'Ten Saturns' for the Sci-Fi Channel: 'Ten Saturns I give that film.' And that's how I met Steve. I reviewed a couple of feature films. And Tony went to him with this idea. He said, 'I'm really looking for Miki', so he said 'Why don't you get Eileen Daly in? She'll be a good Miki for you.'"

'She'll do any old rubbish'. Or rather: 'she's a diverse actress'.
"Of many talents. So Tony got in touch with me and said, 'Do you want to do it?''Yeah!' It was quite good, because I met Doug Bradley. He's a nice bloke. I often thought of him as quite gothic, but he's just a normal man, isn't he?"

website: www.eileendaly.net

Directors: Mark James, Phil O’Shea
Writer: Phil O’Shea
Producer: Michael Riley
Cast: Morven Macbeth, Anna Walton, Keith-Lee Castle
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc

Lesbian vampires - it’s a surprisingly extensive but unsurprisingly disreputable cinematic subgenre. It all dates back to J Sheridan LeFanu’s classic tale ‘Carmilla’ of course; then you have Hammer’s ‘Karnstein trilogy’, all loosely based on ‘Carmilla’. You have pretty much everything Jean Rollin has ever done and a number of Jess Franco films and Daughters of Darkness and Vampyres and the list goes ever on, eventually disappearing into a murky mass of ultra-low budget crap starring Misty Mundae and chums.

It’s a sort of lowest common denominator movie which simply can’t lose. You get two or three reasonably attractive young women, strip ‘em naked, give ‘em some plastic fangs bought from the local joke-shop and then film them licking and stroking each other. Edit it together into about an hour of softcore footage, tag on ten minutes of opening and closing credits so that it just reaches that magical, Blockbuster-friendly seventy minutes - and hey presto. There is someone, somewhere who will buy that crap. Over and over again.

Vampire Diary, while it is admittedly shot on video and is indeed about two lesbians, one of whom happens to be a vampire, is about as far from the typical ‘lesbian vampire film’ as it is possible to get.

Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a (straight, non-goth) video maker shooting a documentary about ‘weekend vampires’, four friends who are part of the goth/fetish scene and who actually like to pretend they are vampires, with little fake fangs and everything. It’s mostly all in fun, a bit of dress-up that goes just a little further than the normal leather, latex, eyeliner and mascara, although some of the ‘weekend vampires take it a little further still by ‘exchanging’ - cutting themselves for others to drink their blood. Weirdos, the lot of them.

The contrast between ‘vampire’ sub-culture - all Anne Rice novels and Sandman tattoos - and real vampires has been explored before in Jake West’s Razor Blade Smile and in ‘Vampirology’, the best-remembered episode of horror anthology Urban Gothic. As it happens, the lead character in ‘Vampirology’ was played by Keith-Lee Castle who is also Eddie, one of the weekend vampires in this movie. He must have a thing for such roles because he plays Count Dracula, the main character’s father, in BBC kidcom Young Dracula. And he was in a vampire-themed episode of bonkers Canadian-German SF series Lexx, although he only got to play Renfield in that one.

Eddie is a DJ and a bit of a poser, the others are jack-the-lad Brad (Justin McDonald, who was in an episode of Torchwood), sensitive Adam (Jamie King: The River King) and vivacious, voracious Haze (Kate Sissons). One night, when they’re having a little party at Holly’s flat, they are joined by a girl name Vicki (Anna Walton: The Mutant Chronicles, Hellboy 2). Not quite as goth as the others, she seems to have arrived with Eddie but is actually new to the area, as Holly discovers when she reluctantly allows Vicki to crash over.

Over time, Holly’s defences break down. After Eddie is found murdered, she shrugs off Vicki’s hand-on-shoulder with, “Are you trying to console me or fuck me?” - but not long afterwards the two become lovers.

There is a sex scene, actually I think there are two in the film, but they’re very tasteful and while the sight of two young ladies making love cannot help but be arousing, if you’re looking for a lesbo movie to get your rocks off, this ain’t it. The sex scene is also where one of the movie’s conventions breaks down somewhat, which is that everything is seen through the eye of a video camera.

Holly carries her camcorder around with her wherever she goes and there are lots of elements that try to make this look like ‘real footage’: blurred or badly framed shots, wobbly shots that end with the camera being placed on a table, crazy movement as Holly runs. Vicki, for reasons which are never explained, also carries a camcorder and there are some conversations between the two when they stand facing each other, camcorder in hand, and we cut between them like a lesbian horror version of Peep Show.

Although this post-Blair Witch conceit is maintained for the bulk of the film, there are some sequences when we just have to let it go and the sex scene is one. A single, locked-off, left-the-camera-running shot would not have worked so we get a montage of angles and close-ups and just have to accept that it’s what it would have looked like if the ladies had been nimble enough to control several cameras and a live edit suite while they were enjoying the delights of sapphos.

Holly wonders where Vicki goes, late at night - and when Brad goes missing, she starts to suspect. What surprised me was that the revelation of Vicki’s vampiric heritage is not the climax of the film but merely a development about halfway through.

Vicki, we learn, is a real vampire. She has no fangs - they were removed at the age of nine and she casts a reflection and can walk in daylight. Vampires are biological entities, not supernatural beings. They live on the fringes of society, feeding on the lonely and dispossessed. And they need human blood to survive.

In a particularly clever twist, Vicki’s preferred method of despatching her chosen victim is a bolt-gun of the sort used to kill animals in slaughterhouses. I like that idea: it’s a quick, clean kill which allows her to then feed at leisure rather than trying to fight someone, and it requires no ammunition.

Because Holly is now in love with Vicki, she seeks to help her rather than hand her over to the cops and gradually the two begin a downward spiral of destruction with further developments only making their life harder. The relationship and situation are both beautifully observed and we completely accept Vicki’s story - because we’re watching a vampire film. It’s only near the end that the prospect is raised: has Holly - have we the audience - been suckered into believing vampires are real by the charismatic lies of a simple psycho with a taste for blood?

Vampire Diary (shot under the title Vampire Video Diary) is a moving, thought-provoking, occasionally gruesome horror film. That it has a gay relationship at its centre is almost incidental. This would work (although not as well, I suspect) if it was just a Thelma and Louise-style friendship. To be honest, you would need to be an extreme homophobe to not enjoy this is you’re a fan of gritty British horror.

While many films have a director who shares writing credit, this one has a writer who shares directing credit. It’s not clear how Mark James and Phil O’Shea shared out the helming chores but only O’Shea (who wrote Spirit Trap and episodes of Ivanhoe: Dark Knight) gets a writing credit. James’ previous credits seem to all be documentaries, including one about Vincent Van Gogh. Executive producer Margaret Matheson has overseen everything from Sid and Nancy to Space Island One; the other ex.prods are Robert Bevan and Keith Hayley who both worked with Julian Richards on Summer Scars.

Robbie Drake, whose credits include Max Headroom and Nightbreed, provides the prosthetic effects while all the goth hair and make-up was designed by Janine Murphy Franklin. The small amount of CGI blood and stuff was provided by Nick Forshaw (Captain Eager, Jeb's Jobs). Also in the cast are Rupert Baker (London’s Burning) and none other than Hardware/Dust Devil director Richard Stanley who appears in a flashback. (I thought that might be the IMDB up to its old tricks but the producer of Vampire Diary assured me it's the guy.)

The movie premiered in March 2007 at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and has been released in the UK by Peccadillo Pictures who specialise (albeit not exclusively) in gay-themed films including an obvious companion piece to this one, gay werewolf chiller The Wolves of Kromer.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ian Paterson
Writers: Ian Paterson
Producers: Ian Paterson, Peter Ward
Cast: Peter Ward, Tracy Redington, Dave Marley
Country: UK
Year: 2008
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at bottom of review)

For a couple of years now, Call Me a Psycho has just been a title in my BHR masterlist. It was originally made available on DVD through the Superteam Productions website in 2008; frustratingly I only discovered this after Urban Terrors had been published, placing this among the addenda to that critically acclaimed tome.


Call Me a Psycho, while not exactly horrific, is both very obscure and very interesting – because it’s a remake of itself.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. Way back in 1990 three mates – Ian Paterson, Peter Ward, Andrew Jones – made a comedy cop movie entitled Call Me a Psycho. Then they made a bunch of other stuff. Then, 18 years after the original, they remade Call Me a Psycho. And not a loose remake either but the same script, give or take a couple of extra scenes.

The original was jointly directed by Ward, Jones and Paterson, with Ward and Jones as the cops and Paterson as the psycho. Eighteen years down the line, Paterson restricts himself to directing solo (apart from a brief cameo as a corpse) with the psycho played instead by Dave Marley who, it must be said, is much more suited to the role. Skinny, young Paterson never convinced as a dangerous psychotic mass murderer, but Marley is very tall, very fat, and has a small moustache that pulls his face into a permanent sneer. He looks like he could and would kill you. But in a funny way.

Although there is no sign of Jones beyond a courtesy credit, Ward is back, looking 18 years older, 18 years chubbier and with 18 years less hair. Actually that’s unfair. He’s neither fat nor bald, but he no longer looks like a young Peter Sellers. Realistically, who among us does? His partner this time is a woman, Detective Reddington who is taller than Ward, rocking a trouser suit combo and spiky black hair (Tracy Reddington was in the even more obscure Box of the Dead aka Satan’s Box and also had uncredited bit parts in Quantum of Solace and The Fifth Element). That said, there isn’t quite the same chemistry between Ward and Reddington as we saw in the original film between Ward and Jones.

Most of the script is word for word identical. There are a few extra short scenes, but they just add a little context. The discrepancy in running time – the original was 69 minutes, this is 86 – is actually down to a massive 14 minutes of out-takes which run under the glacially slow credits. (I’ve always said: if you’re going to drag out the credits, at least run bloopers under them. Finally, someone listened!) Anyway, as the maths graduates among you can see, the remake is actually only about three minutes longer than the original.
We still have the psycho (here given a name: Cy Coe) murdering a fellow patient due for release and thus absconding from the loony bin where he has been incarcerated. A few more conversations between two doctors pad out this sequence and dupe us into thinking this won’t be an exact remake, but the first scene of Ward and Reddington in the car on a stake-out of a drugs den lets us know that this will be, fascinatingly, the exact same film made 18 years later. Furthermore, the location of the stake-out looks very much like the same street/house used in 1990 and throughout the film there are sequences which, if not shot in the original locations, match them pretty closely. Certainly the exterior of Feltham Police Station is back for more.

What was a scene in a video shop is now a scene in a shop that seems to concentrate more on second-hand computer games, although the dialogue still calls it a ‘video shop’. The final sequence, previously set in a derelict building, now happens in a deserted Spearmint Rhino club, although who knows, maybe that was built on the site of the original’s scene? A throwaway gag subplot about an old man who gets stranded on a roundabout (the road junction, not the playground equipment) is slightly fleshed out with more back story for the old man. A newsreader replaces the original’s captions (she looks familiar, and is: it’s Gabrielle Amies who was the ex-wife in Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit).

So how does the 2008 version square up against the 1990 original? It’s better, of course, if only because it has a budget, microscopic though that may be. There are better locations (for some scenes), actual costumes (police uniforms!), actual props – the whole thing has moved up from a few mates larking about with a camera to a legitimate entry in the 21st century renaissance of British independent film-making (and arguably the BHR). The film-makers are more experienced now, and that shows: this is slicker and more professional (though still bargain basement on an absolute scale, of course). There is even, in lieu of copyrighted pop songs, a properly written theme song by a band called The New Assassins (who appear as themselves in one of the new scenes). The events and characters of the intervening Superteam productions are referenced in some new dialogue which seems to be trying to tie all their films together into one continuity.

There are casting links too. The legend that is Norman Lovett – he of Red Dwarf and Evil Aliens– appears in one scene as the psycho’s father, having previously starred in probably the best known Superteam film, retro-scifi-western-epic Roswell 1847 (also now available on YouTube, after what seems to have been some wrangling between interested parties). Lovett’s two daughters appear with him as passers-by, concerned that he is being harassed by the police.

Speaking of YouTube, distribution is the other huge change between 1990 and 2008. The original film would only have been viewable on VHS, and only made available to anyone who knew the Superteam trio personally, or possibly may have been advertised in fanzines back in the day when ‘cut and paste’ literally involved scissors and Prittstick. But by 2008 there was an interwebs and even a YouTube and Superteam Productions could have a web presence that made their reach global, rather than a five mile radius of Feltham Nick.

Although there are instances of film-makers remaking a short as a feature, there are very few features which have been remade by the original film-makers at a later date with a wee bit more money. The only one I can think of right now is Pete Jacelone’s Psycho Sisters (which shares with Call Me a Psycho the interesting situation that the remake is on the IMDB but the original isn’t). So if there are any film students out there looking for a subject on which to write their dissertation, with an interest in low-budget film-making, here is a golden opportunity. The same film, made 18 years apart, by the same people in the same place with the same script. It’s a study in contrast, and while I certainly don’t have the time to go through it with a fine tooth comb, comparing and contrasting every element, some enterprising undergraduate certainly could.

Also in the cast, most of whom have been in other Superteam films and/or the related works of American executive producer William Cheney, are Ari Gill (director of short thriller The Briefcase), Neil Higham (Waiting for Dawn), Michelle Kernohan (The Good, the Bad and the Undead), Stephanie Montreux (who was in Get Him to the Greek, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and the 2006 Royal Variety Performance!), Rob Talbot (Jack Says, Peter Goddard’s Season of the Witch and Any Minute Now, The Butterfly Tattoo plus horror shorts Waste Disposal, Evil of the Vampires, Vampire Gang Origins and Attack of the Zombie Vampires), Marlon Williams (Stormhouse, Girl Number 9 and two episodes of Torchwood) and Susannah Todd (background roles in EastEnders, Holby City and Sherlock).

On close inspection, some of the minor characters are played by the same people, including (I'm fairly certain) the guy in the video store and one of the witnesses to a massacre in a McDonalds. Most fascinating of all, some of the out-takes under the credits show Peter Ward filming scenes with a male partner who I presume is Andrew Jones – what on Earth happened there?).

Although the remake is better than the original, the film-makers had more to work with – in terms of props, cast, experience, opportunities etc – and thus the rating, for what it’s worth, remains constant.

MJS rating: B