Directors: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Writers: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Producers: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Cast: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Country: UK
Year: 1990
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at bottom of review)

Despite being about a serial killer, and the title notwithstanding, Call Me a Psycho is not a horror film. Rather it is a cop comedy about a couple of likeable but not particularly efficient policemen tracking down an escaped homicidal lunatic.

What it also is, is a fascinating time capsule. Because this isn’t the 2008 film Call Me a Psycho - this was made in 1990. Turns out the 2008 film is a remake by the same guys, the ‘Superteam Productions’ trio of Peter Ward, Andrew Jones and Ian Paterson, who share three-way credits for writing and producing and directing this zero-budget epic.

When I say ‘zero budget’, let me put that in context. The early scenes of the psycho (played by Paterson) escaping from a mental hospital are shot in an anonymous corridor where the signs on the various cell doors are hand-written on bits of A4 paper. One of the reasons why this can’t be considered a horror movie, even a borderline one, is because there is not a drop of blood, simply because there wasn’t any money to pay for it. (Though there are some animated dripping-blood screen wipes.)

And yet, as sometimes happens with these things, the enthusiasm of the film-makers overcomes their limitations and I actually enjoyed the film. Some parts are genuinely funny, mostly the bits which divert into Zucker-Abrams-Zucker-style surrealism: an alarm clock that makes bizarre noises, or a scene of a character typing in which he has three hands.

Typing on a personal computer circa 1990, that is. This really is a fascinating window into a world a quarter of a century ago. The cars! The clothes! The haircuts! The telephones! Wikipedia lists fewer than 30 British films from 1990, among them a handful of remembered titles including Memphis Belle, Nuns on the Run, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, The Krays, The Witches and Truly Madly Deeply. That really was the doldrums of the British film industry, and yet Superteam Productions grabbed themselves a camcorder (probably quite a bulky one!) and shot a reasonably coherently plotted, genuinely amusing feature-length-ish (69 minutes) comedy police movie.

The film’s success rests on the chemistry between Ward (who looks like a young Peter Sellers) and Jones as Detective Inspector Ward and D.I. Jones. They are clearly useless at their job, but not in a bumbling way, nor in a cynical way, just in a natural, easy-going, trying to do it but not very good and easily distracted sort of way. Most of the supporting cast are predictably wooden but the back-garden nature of the film renders that less of a problem than it might be.

There’s not much by way of plot: the psycho escapes, the two cops try to track him down while he goes on a (largely off-screen) killing spree. Scenes were shot outside Feltham Police Station in West London and at a local video store, Terminal 5 Video, which has a Terminator 2 ad in the window. It’s the little background details like that which make this so fascinating. One character wears a Skid Row T-shirt, another is evidently a fan of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. There is a trailer on TV for borderline mystical BBC sitcom Mulberry. And the soundtrack features a number of not-cleared for copyright songs including David Essex’s 1973 hit ‘Rock On’ and the Echo and the Bunnymen 1987 cover version of ‘People are Strange’.

Because this film is so obscure that it’s not even listed on the IMDB, it behoves me to list the cast which, in addition to the principal trio, consists of Tony Lloyd, Clinton North, Brian Da Silva, Barry Hutton, Margaret McEnechey, Steve Clarke, Darren Tyrel, Gidden Stratton, Maurette Cahill, Lee Burl, Richard Tyrell, Betty O'Brien, Gareth Burt, Kelly Bradford, Ryan O'Neil, Adrian O'Neil, Nicola Darge and Tanya Darge. Where are they now, eh? There are no other credits; basically Ward, Jones and Paterson did everything themselves.

The Superteam, erm, team went on to make several further shorts and features before returning, in 2008, to the Call Me a Psycho script and remaking the film, almost word for word, using some of the same sets and one of the same lead actors. Over the years their films have been available on DVD from their website although it’s not clear how this first version of Call Me a Psycho was distributed if at all. Fortunately for those of us who like to watch this sort of ultra obscurity, Paterson posted all the Superteam films to YouTube in February 2014, hence this review.

The rating below should not, of course, be taken as any indication that this is, in any way, a ‘good’ film but it’s far from a terrible film and I have to give the film-makers props for doing what they did (which was at least something) with what they had available (which was nothing).

MJS rating: B

Director: Drew Casson
Writers: Drew Casson, Jesse Cleverly, Sarah Perugia, ‘The Cast’
Producers: Miles Bullough, Jesse Cleverly
Cast: Drew Casson, Georgia Bradley, Tom Scarlett, Sam Carter
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
website: www.hungerfordfilm.com

I made two notes while watching Hungerford. At about 32 minutes into this 79-minute feature I observed (and wrote down), “Well, I wasn’t expecting that.” At about 52 minutes I exclaimed (and wrote down), “Ooh, that’s nasty.” I think we can consider those points the act breaks.

Hungerford is a decent little horror-sci-fi movie made by a startlingly talented and capable young man, with some fine acting and good production values. Storywise, it’s hardly the most original or groundbeaking slice of cinematic entertainment but it’s not the story that makes this interesting. Small town, alien invasion takes over the populace, handful of survivors try to work out what’s going on and avoid the threat. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of Dawn of the Dead, a scenario which has played out in endless movies, scores of novels and about three or four episodes per season of Goosebumps. There's a nice twist in the use of deodorant as a weapon, but that's about it as far as originality goes. No matter.

Writer-director Drew Casson stars as Cowen, a BTEC Media Studies student living with his best mate Adam (Tom Scarlett) and Adam’s sister Phil (Georgia Bradley); another mate Kip (Sam Carter) completes the household. Casson has Robert Plant hair but is only 19 meaning he’s not actually old enough to even remember the Page and Plant Unledded album, let alone any of the original Led Zep stuff. I bet he’s Googling this now to find out who Robert Plant is so that he can Twitter it on his iPhone to a Facebook Playstation meme LOL smiley face, ack!, haemorrhage!

Sorry, it’s young people.  What’s wrong with them? They should be bitter and twisted for having been born too late for things like punk, Sapphire and Steel, Star Wars without extra bits and Opal Fruits that had the proper name on the packet. Instead they swan about making ridiculously impressive and professional looking feature films. Do you know, our Student’s Union doesn’t even have a bar? It doesn’t have a bar! It has a fucking branch of Starbucks instead! That’s what’s wrong with the world, and I blame anybody 15 or more years younger than me.

Just pause the review for a bit while I go and have a lie down.

And we’re back.

As part of his college course, Cowen has to produce some sort of video diary so he sets about filming himself and his housemates. Adam is a bit of a loose cannon, prone to getting into fights and, we learn later, on probation for some unspecified offence. Phil is tolerant and supportive and, in a nicely subtle bit of characterisation, carries a torch for Cowen but is forced to keep it hidden as she lives deep in the friendzone. And Kip is a bit of a nerd who looks and sounds like Stephen Merchant.

Following a weird storm over the town, odd things start happening. During a party thrown by Rowan’s crush Janine (Kitty Speed) at her parents’ house, a girl being chatted up by Adam starts throwing up blood. And Rowan spots Janine’s dad (Colin Stark) repeatedly knocking his bloody head against a window. All this is captured by Rowan on his camera.

The tipping point is an attack by an alien-possessed postman, and here’s where the film loses itself a bit as, having killed the man in self-defence, the panicked quartet debate what to do with the body, eventually deciding to hoick it downstairs and leave it in a handy skip. Adam’s probation aside, it’s not clear why they can’t call the police, especially as local plod Terry (Nigel Morgan) is a good mate of theirs. More importantly, why the jiminy heck would they film themselves disposing of the body? The dropped camera conveniently records the fight but then they actually video themselves debating the next move, wrapping the corpse in a blanket and disposing of it to hide the evidence, thereby actually creating more damning evidence than they had when there was just a dead postal worker in their flat. That’s the point at which the found footage conceit breaks down and when I realised that not only was it not adding anything to the film, it was actually creating problems. And that’s before we get to the traditional found footage clichés like blood spattering onto the lens or hanging onto the camera while running from someone/thing trying to kill you.

While certainly not enough to spoil what is a very watchable film (and a staggeringly impressive debut feature by a director barely old enough to get served in a pub), I just found myself wishing that Casson had demonstrated his undeniable film-making talent with a more conventionally formatted movie. Sometimes the conceit works, sometimes it doesn’t – but in the sequences in this film (and many like it) where it works, there is no reason why that could not have simply been shot as POV. That, I think, is what people sometimes forget. Standard cinematic techniques do not preclude placing a camera where a character is standing to show us what they are looking at. Quite the contrary, it’s a very, very common technique, and it has the advantage that you don’t have to find some narrative reason for the person to actually be pointing a camera at everything.

The other thing that occurred to me – and I fully appreciate that I might not think of this if I had recently been attacked by a Royal Mail employee under the control of an evil alien brain slug – is that however well one disposes of the body, it would take the police about half a morning to find out who killed Postie by simply following his delivery route, seeing who the last person was to receive a letter, then knocking next door with the handcuffs ready. In the event, of course, this is moot what with the alien invasion and the brain slugs and all, but nevertheless.

Casson’s script also ducks the matter of how the authorities might respond to the goings-on in Hungerford, with no cops on view apart from Terry, who does say much later in the film that all his colleagues are dead and that ‘special forces’ sent to deal with the situation had also disappeared. Realistically, vast numbers of uniformed forces – police and army – would be deployed, not to mention all the media who would circle. And this brings us, sort of, to the one thing that genuinely does disturb me about Hungerford – and that’s the title. To the generation before Casson’s (ie. me) the name ‘Hungerford’ has one, and only one connotation. It refers to the 1987 incident in which Michael Ryan went on a killing spree throughout the town, armed with several automatic weapons, randomly gunning down strangers before taking his own life.

It was one of the worst fire-arms incidents ever in the UK and led directly to massive changes in the laws around gun ownership. It was a defining incident in late 20th century British history, law and politics. Google ‘Hungerford’ and of the top five links, two are about the town, three are about the ‘Hungerford massacre’. Casson (and most of his cast and crew) are way too young to remember this, heck they weren’t even born, but I can’t believe that anyone who lives in the town of Hungerford isn’t fully aware of that terrible event.

Yes, the movie’s shot in Hungerford (tempting to say: so were more than 30 people) but it doesn’t have to be set there. It’s not like the town is recognisable or well-known for anything except this one incident. Most people don’t know what it looks like, couldn’t find it on a map; I don’t even know what county it’s in. But people know the name. They say: do you remember Hungerford? They say: this thing that has happened, it's like Hungerford, isn't it? 'Hungerford', like 'Dunblane', is a name that everyone in the UK above a certain age knows for one, and only one, horrific reason. Attaching that name to something which is also horror, but horror as entertainment, is at best self-defeating.  It will mean nothing outside the UK, of course (until interested punters google 'hungerford+horror' - oh my God...) and to Casson's generation the horrors of that day are as remote historically as Aberfan is to those of us born in the late 1960s. But why even bring it up? This film could be set in absolutely any generic, made-up English town. In fact, I think the name Hungerford is only mentioned once, when Adam points to the weird storm and says “Welcome to Hungerford!” – which is immediately followed by a whole load of bangs that sound... like gunfire.

I don’t want to come across like a prude, but even I think that the title and setting of the film is in (hopefully unintentional) poor taste. What's the basic theme here? The movie is about ordinary members of the public in fear for their lives in a quiet English market town where something terrible, inconceivable and appallingly violent is happening. And what's the movie called? It's called Hungerford, and it's filmed on the same streets where Michael Ryan gunned down neighbours and strangers. This is basically inviting conservative film critics (are there any other sort?) to hate it. My advice would be to seriously consider a change of title and to loop any mention of the town name. Not just to avoid causing offence, but also to avoid this basically irrelevant aspect of the film swamping its many admirable qualities. Surely Casson and co want this to be discussed as “that amazing sci-fi/horror film made for a few thousand quid by a British teenager that’s better than half the crap pumped out of Hollywood”; not as “that sick attempt to sell a trashy, cheap sci-fi/horror film by capitalising on one of the worst UK crimes in living memory”. (I know it’s not an attempt to sell the film, but that’s what they’ll say it is, and that’s what people will read. If you want a precedent, some newspapers trashed the superb Mum and Dad because they got it into their heads it was based on Fred and Rose West.)

That would be a real shame and distract from some terrific aspects of this film, not least the four main characters who, in double-barrelled defiance of convention are both sympathetic and believable. It’s a real pleasure to spend 80 minutes with this lot, even as they struggle to avoid the alien brain slugs and their zombified hosts, given how many films I sit through which are populated by cardboard cut-outs I just want to punch in the eye. It’s a combination of a good script and some superb performances. I was amazed to discover on the IMDB that none of the cast seem to have any previous credits outside of Drew Casson’s earlier shorts, presumably indicating that they are not professional actors but simply Drew’s mates. ‘The cast’ as a gestalt entity, get a script co-credit which indicates a certain amount of improvisation; Sarah Perugia, who also gets script credit, is the drama coach who worked with them before shooting.

As well as writing, directing and starring, Casson also handled the edit and the visual effects, which include some reasonable exploding heads as well as the storm and some stuff right at the end. It says a lot about the sort of film this is that, where bigger movies will have endless lists of names, a little project like Hungerford has a single name but then a great long list of still photos, effects shots – even a font - which have been been provided by other people, presumably under some sort of creative commons deal. This is an increasingly common phenomenon and allows a low-budget movie like Hungerford to really kick above its weight. One of the few names in the credits to have other BHR experience is dubbing mixer Jamie Ward who worked on Dead of the Nite and Dark Vision. Post-production manager Patsy Hayden pulled a similar gig on Bill Bailey’s TV documentary about Alfred Russell Wallace!

Casson isn’t the first teenage director to make a feature movie. Michael Ferns was only 17 when he made the jaw-droppingly poetic and powerful Kirk, which sadly and swiftly disappeared into limbo due to, I think, disagreements between certain parties. Liam Hooper and most of his cast and crew were still at school when they made Darkwood Manor in 2011 (and, being brutally honest, it shows). And I have long championed the works of teenage trash auteurs Jason Impey and Thomas Lee Rutter, both now older but no less maverick in their film-making. Nevertheless, Hungerford is genuinely important for what it represents, not so much in the director’s prodigious talent but in the way that the project has come together.

This is the first movie from Wildseed Studios, a content development company set up by Jesse Cleverly, a former BBC script reader, and Miles Bullough who previously worked at Absolutely Productions (including on Absolutely itself, a box set I have recently been rewatching with enormous enjoyment: “It’s vid-AY-o!”) and also at Aardman. Wildseed has been set up to produce exciting new content across whatever platform is appropriate on the sort of microbudget that can produce something like Hungerford. Bullough and Cleverly (who gets a script credit) spotted Casson’s home-made shorts on YouTube and worked with him to develop Hungerford (initially titled Hunger Ford for no reason that I can discern) as a web series. It was shot over nine days in July 2013 but, in the edit suite, it dawned on everyone that it might actually work as a feature film. A couple of days of pick-ups and presto, one 80-minute feature which, it has to be said, does not betray its serial origins.

(As an aside, I know of several BHR entries which are feature-length edits of existing web serials – Vampires: Brighter in Darkness, Blood and Bone China, Helsing: A Monster of a Documentary and, of course, that brace of brushed-under-the-carpet horrors from Ben Grass and the Pure Grass Films team: Johannes Roberts’ When Evil Calls and NuHammer’s red-headed stepchild Beyond the Rave. But I don’t know of any other films which were conceived as a web serial then mutated into a feature during post.)

Wildseed are already working with some recognisable BHR names including Ryan McDermott (Mark McReady and the Archangel Murders) and Johnny Kevorkian (The Disappeared) which bodes well for their future output. More importantly, they represent an acknowledgement of the power and potential of micro-budget film-making and home-grown talent (Casson has never been to film school, nor has he any need so to do). In the same way that Mum and Dad represented a breakthrough with Film London and EM-Media recognising that there was justification in funding films that only cost £100,000, so Wildseed’s funding of Hungerford knocks another zero off the figure of practical, viable feature budgets (what is more, they are investing as entrepreneurs with a genuine passion for genre movies, rather than as Lottery-funded State cash machines making a token exception from a steady output of serious, meaningful, unwatchably dull crap).

Mind, at 20 grand it’s still more than 400 times what Marc Price spent on Colin, and indeed well in excess of quite a few excellent British features reviewed elsewhere on this blog. But the good thing is that the money is visible on screen. This is a production which can afford to break furniture during a fight, simply because a fight in a living room that doesn’t cause any damage looks stupid. And while they can’t afford an actual car crash, they can at least afford to buy a car and turn it upside-down for a post-crash scene.

Hungerford premiered at SciFi London in May 2014 and, as I write this a few weeks later, the producers are deciding what to do with it. There’s talk of a possible theatrical release and, while every film-maker dreams of such a thing, I’m not sure that’s the route to go down.  It would be taking a movie that posits itself (possibly with justification) as the vanguard of a new film-making movement, and which builds (whether the film-makers know it or not) on a decade and a half of increasingly brilliant sub/urban British horror which long ago scrapped conventions and stuck two fingers up to the so-called ‘British film industry’ – and then shoe-horning that movie into an outmoded, antediluvian form of distribution which could actually damage its reputation. Cinemas are places for Hollywood blockbusters and weird foreign art-house stuff, not British indies. I know a lot of the BHR films reviewed here have had supposedly ‘theatrical releases’ but these are token screenings designed only to generate reviews and publicity for the DVD/VOD release which is where (a) most people will watch it and (b) most of the money will be made. And the downside of such a model is of course that it opens up your film to the mainstream press and their tediously predictable dislike of low-budget films (especially low-budget genre films (especially British low-budget genre films (how many brackets is that?))…one, two…). Sorted.

Wildseed ought to be able to do something better, something less predictable and strait-jacketed with Hungerford, though I don’t necessarily know what. Maybe roadshow it around universities like Freak Out, or give it a multiplatform release like A Field in England (or - though most people seem to have forgotten this, and I make no apologies for mentioning it a third time in this review - Mum and Dad). Distrify is where British cinema lives now, not the Odeon or the Showcase.

Hungerford needs to play to its strengths – cast, characters, direction, VFX, action, horror and just a soupçon of humour - and circumvent its weaknesses, chiefly the connotation of the title and the limitations of the found footage subgenre, which is so clichéed now that it automatically gets many people’s backs up and prejudices critics (pro and am) against a film. Don’t get me wrong: Hungerford plays the found footage card better than many comparable pictures, but neither the story nor the characters really justify the decision so it brings nothing to the film we haven’t seen before. Plus, and I’m being brutally honest here, Casson hasn’t quite got it right...

Too many shots are too nicely framed and too well lit to maintain the conceit of faux reality. He has taught himself too well and maybe needed to ‘unlearn’ some of what he knew about film direction. There is also a reliance on wobbly image and buzzy sound to indicate the camera being suddenly turned on or off (or something). I'm pretty sure that real cameras don't do that. Or anything like that. They're working or they're not. Plus there are a few scenes where footage is taken from a second camera, a Go-Pro strapped to someone's chest, visible in some shots. So in what way has this 'found footage' actually been found? Ironically, one of the most powerful moments in the film is 'genuine' found footage, a brief video message left on a phone by someone about to die. Although, while that's more believable than the old school method of people leaving messages on VHS tape, it still requires the finder (whose phone this isn't) to fortuitously go straight to this particular clip.

Interestingly, in a recent interview Casson said he could only name two other British found footage films but in fact it’s a prolific 21st century subgenre on these islands. Obviously there’s The Last Horror Movie, My Little Eye, Vampire Diary and The Zombie Diaries (and indeed The Zombie Diaries 2). To that list can be added Exhibit A, The Tapes, A Night in the Woods, Hollow, The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill, File Box, The Borderlands (Drew Casson actually had a bit part in that, so it must be one of the two!), The Big Finish, The Ghosts of Crowley Hall, 'untitled' and, erm, Sex Tape Horror Film. Now I haven’t seen all of these (certainly not Sex Tape Horror Film) but that’s 16, and I bet there’s a few others. I’d be amazed if Jason Impey hasn’t done at least one or two.

And while I certainly wouldn’t expect Drew Casson or Jesse Cleverly or indeed anyone on the face of God’s Earth to be familiar with all of those, or even to have heard of them (I could only compile that list by looking back through my annual British Horror Revival Round-Up blogs over on the Hemlock Books site), it demonstrates how crowded the field is and how the format in and of itself has lost whatever novelty it may once have had.

The above notwithstanding, I’m genuinely pleased to have been invited to be one of the first people to watch and review Hungerford and I am very much looking forward to seeing what Drew Casson and/or Wildseed Studios can produce next. And let me finish this review by clearing up something from earlier. I don’t have any prejudice against young people. It’s people in general I can’t stand.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Ray Austin
Writer: ‘Klaus Vogel’
Producer: Ralph Solomons
Cast: Vicki Michelle, Anne Michelle, Patricia Haines
Year of release: 1971
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Salvation)

Real life sisters Vicki and Anne Michelle play screen sisters Betty and Christine in this entry in the ‘home counties witchcraft’ subgenre which flourished in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The early entries into the field, such as The Sorcerers, had diversified into superior historicals (Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw) and rather tacky contemporary pictures such as this one.

Betty and Christine, innocents both, travel to London with a view to finding modelling work, accepting a lift from passing motorist Johnny (Keith Buckley: Dr Phibes Rises Again, Excalibur), who falls for the younger Betty while Christine is ‘auditioning’ at the offices of lesbian agent Sybil Waite (Patricia Haines). Sybil whisks Christine off to Wychwold, the country estate of her friend Dr Gerald Amberley (Neil Hallett: X the Unknown, Ghost Squad), ostensibly to shoot an ad campaign for cider, with Betty along as chaperone. (It is only when we see the name written down quite some time later that we realise people haven’t been talking about some satanic amusement park called Witchworld.)

The house and grounds are home to some creepy people, but photographer Peter (James Chase) seems nice enough. In fact, the whole thing is a front for a coven of witches, into which Christine is initiated at night, waking up the next morning in bed with Sybil and subsequently acting much more self-confident and mature. Revelling in the release of her latent magical powers, she plans to oust Sybil as High Priestess of the coven during Betty’s initiation the following night, but Johnny is on his way down to Wychwold to rescue Betty.

What starts off as a pretty crappy movie picks up towards the end, leaning more towards - though never reaching - the sort of unnerving, slightly too serious atmosphere of menace that characterised the best witchcraft films (The Devil Rides Out, for example). The idea of a modelling agency recruiting young girls for supernatural purposes is a tad too close to the nonsensical story in the second half of The Night Caller (in which Patricia Haines was the victim, not the abductor) although it seems slightly more credible as a witch’s plan than that of an alien from a moon of Jupiter. Nevertheless, once the movie settles down to a battle of psychic wills between Christine and Sybil, it becomes much more watchable and a lot more tense.

The script, bizarrely, is by producer Beryl Vertue (under a pseudonym) who went on to produce The House in Nightmare Park but is best known now as the matriarchal figure behind such hit sitcoms as Men Behaving Badly and Coupling (written by her son-in-law Steven Moffat). Vertue was an agent for Associated London Scripts (Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes) but this script (and her own novelisation of it) seem to be her only professional writing credits - and she keeps very quiet about them!

However the major selling point for the film back in the 1970s was the copious amount of full nudity from Vicki and especially from Anne. In fact, pretty much everybody gets naked in the climactic ritual, including some older members of the cast who undoubtedly add authenticity to the scene but dampen the sexual allure. The nudity in earlier scenes, such as Christine’s ‘audition’ for Sybil during which the older women touches her up under the pretence of taking her measurements, is often tacky, but in the scenes of black magic it is not only relevant but actually adds to the air of menace.

Vicki Michelle, two years older than her sister but here playing on her fresh-faced appearance as the younger sibling, went on to appear in Queen Kong and an episode of Space: 1999 before finding fame as Yvette in Allo Allo in the 1980s. Ann (credited on-screen as Anne Michelle) actually acquired a bunch of genre credits including Psychomania, House of Whipcord and the 1979 US production Haunted - in which she played, of all things, a native American - before disappearing from the screen to concentrate on stage work.

Peter Halliday (A for Andromeda, Madhouse) plays a nightclub manager while the coven members include Garth Watkins (Twins of Evil), Prudence Drage (A Clockwork Orange), Sheila Sands (Year of the Sex Olympics) and Steve Peters (Lead Roboman in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD!). Cinematographer Gerald Moss had shot second unit on Village of the Damned, while the very effective music is by Ted Dicks, whose other horror credit is the title song to Carry On Screaming!

MJS rating: B-

Director: David Lilley, Stephen Gray
Writer: David Lilley
Producer: David Lilley
Cast: Kevin Norcross, Georgia Blake
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.loonatikanddrinks.com

Vespers is a lovely little film. At just short of six minutes, it’s brief but not as brief as other Loonatik and Drinks shorts starring Mr McKinley or Lucy Spook. It’s not silent and not entirely wordless but you couldn’t really say there’s any dialogue. What there is - and it’s what we’ve come to expect from Messrs Lilley and Gray - is a stylish film with some superb visual effects that demonstrate what can be done for tuppence ha’penny on a home PC now.

Set in Bristol in 1880, this is a Victorian post-apocalyptic tale, something which I’ve certainly never seen before. In this sort of 19th century I am Legend, a solitary man (Kevin Norcross, normally employed as a graphic artist) wanders through the deserted city. Jackdaws and rats congregate around corpses in houses and in the streets, victims of a virulent plague which has wiped out humanity.

As the man searches for life, calling out in the desperate hope that he is not, in fact, the last man on Earth, he finds himself at the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The towers stand, the cable hangs between them and part of the span sticks out above the River Avon - but this is an engineering project never to be completed. This is a marvellous effect, shown from different angles in several shots, and is only marred slightly by the fact that the bridge was built in 1864.

Then - miracle - he sees a woman. They run to each other and both become victims, in their own way, of the cruellest of ironies. To say more would be to give away the brief plot.

Jointly directed and edited by Steve and Dave, Vespers looks simply magnificent, every angle chosen - and, where necessary, manipulated - to create a thoroughly believable deserted Victorian Bristol. Mr Lilley wrote and produced while Mr Gray handled photography - assisted by camera operator Simon Fretwell (DP on Close Your Eyes) - and visual effects. Together they have created a thing of beauty.

While it’s more than the single-gag 'plots' of the Mr McKinley or Lucy Spook shorts, the ‘story’ of Vespers is just a moment, albeit a crucial one. Actually, that’s not fair. The plot is just a moment but it’s constructed in such a way that the story is obviously much greater. In that respect it also scores over L&D’s last short, The Hand. But the frustrating thing about Loonatik and Drinks films to date is that they are so brief. I like to think that this is the guys practising their skills, ready for something meatier. Adaptations of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Horror of the Heights’ and Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ are promised and with such source material a more cohesive and satisfying plot is surely assured.

Georgia Blake plays the woman, credited only as ‘victim’ although Georgia’s CV reveals that the character’s name is Helen Winshaw! Rachel McWha (“creator of designer corsetry, costume and bridal couture”) was responsible for the costumes while the fantastically named Nikki Galan-Bamfield (Loyalty, The Return) handled hair and make-up. Kubilay Uner (The Hand) composed the music and Barry Parsons was the sound designer.

Vespers is an impressive, original, visually enthralling slice of retro-fantasy. More than that, it’s that rarest of things: a Victorian-set science fiction film which is neither a pastiche nor steampunk. All credit to those involved; now bring on the Conan Doyle and the Poe.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Darren Flaxstone
Writers: Darren Flaxstone, Bernie Hodges
Producers: Darren Flaxstone, Bernie Hodges, Chris Broughton
Cast: Bernie Hodges, Suzie Latham, Judith Haley
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.darkvision-movie.com

A combination of good acting, fine cinematography and interesting characters marks out Dark Vision as one of the better British horror indies of recent years. Admittedly, the premise is hardly original for a modern British fright-flick: a TV show about the paranormal reporting live from a supposedly haunted location. See also Steve Stone’s The Entity, Kevin Gates and Michael Bartlett’s Paranormal Diaries: Clophill, Steven M Smith’s Haunted and Simon Pearce’s Judas Ghost, to name just a few. But the characterisation and presentation on show in Dark Vision make up for the somewhat hackneyed plot.

Producer/co-writer Bernie Hodges (recently in Andy Bourne’s sci-fi short Two Extra Days) stars as Spencer Knights, the vain, self-important, oleaginous host of a paranormal TV show who turns up in his van, with a small crew, at an isolated building called Baylock’s Folly. His principal help is sensible, pragmatic Jo (Suzie Latham), who is reteaming with Knights for the first time in three years, although it is never made clear why they split up their professional partnership or why she is back helping him. The camera is touted by a young lad named Kev who is played by… Simon Pearce, director of that very same aforementioned Judas Ghost! There is also techie Xan (Oliver Park) who has already set up multiple cameras around their chosen location and, for reasons that remain obtuse, hypnotised actress/model Marva (Alicia Ancel: Kebab Killer).

Baylock’s Folly is an 18th/19th century castellated building, home to an enigmatic old lady named Clem (a belter of a performance from Judith Haley, also in Amityville Asylum) who has a taste for the sauce and layers of insight that will be peeled back as the story progresses. ‘William Baylock’ himself clearly didn’t construct the building named after him as he was, we are told, a plague doctor in the time of the Black Death. Most of the action takes place in caves beneath (and accessible via) the folly where Baylock is said to have conducted Satanic rituals involving child sacrifice. Or something. (I can’t find anything about Baylock online and so assume he’s purely fictional, which makes it a bizarre coincidence that this film was produced at exactly the same time as Anthony M Winson used the unusual name in his ghost feature The Haunting of Baylock Residence.)

One of Dark Vision’s strengths is that it does not rely on the ‘found footage’ tropes that other similarly themed films have used. Some shots are presented POV from Xan’s webcams, Kev’s video camera or little cameras held/worn by various people, but these are used sparingly within a conventionally shot and structured narrative film. That said, since some shots clearly are ‘TV footage’ it would have been helpful to have distinguished those in some way; a change in picture quality perhaps, or just a little red dot. As it stands, we don’t know whether what we’re seeing is viewed through a Xan-cam or just the director’s vision, although the lighting always seem to imply the latter, even when the angle/view implies the former. It’s ironic that, although the film has great photography (by Mark Whatmore, whose previous credits are documentaries on Simon Callow, Jacques Tati and lions) the overall movie might have improved a tadge if the photography had actually been (or had appeared to be) less impressive.

Parts of Dark Vision are overly talky, but not excessively so. Once it gets going, however, it’s suitably spooky with Baylock appearing in his plague doctor guise - or is that Kev in a costume provided by Spencer? Quite what Spencer is trying to do, and why, is never entirely clear. He constructs a pentagram of flames, having evidently carried vast numbers of tea-lights down to the caverns. We all know how fiddly it can be to light just one of those fuckers – it must have taken him ages to set this up. Jo keeps finding tiny, antique dolls, the significance of which is not clear but it must relate to the children that Baylock killed. And Clem comes into her own as Spencer starts to realise quite how out of his depth he has got.

Interspersed with all this are some captions from something called the ‘Dark Vision Hub’ which seem to indicate that Spencer’s show is one of five competing for some sort of prize, the sequential captions telling us as each rival show is knocked out of the competition. This is referenced once in the dialogue, but it’s really a distraction (and quite a confusing one). It adds nothing to the plot, is not necessary to provide a reason for Spencer and co. to be where they are, doing what they’re doing, and never gives any indication of how/why these various rival TV shows are eliminated (or why Spencer’s survives). The whole ‘Dark Vision Hub’ thing has the feel of something which was significant in an early draft of the script but has been whittled away to a stump of an idea which now serves no real narrative purpose.

Two other aspects of Dark Vision which were unnecessary and could have been dispensed with are a post-production video effect and the music. The generally good and atmospheric score by Al Lethbridge (whose many TV documentary credits include Marcus de Sautoy’s BBC4 series Precision: The Measure of All Things and the 2009 Children in Need Around the World in 80 Days challenge) makes the common mistake of thinking that something spooky on screen is made spookier by a music sting, whereas in fact the opposite is true. For example, there’s one shot where a wine bottle, untouched by human hand, moves across a table. And the music goes, “Brahm!” as this happens. If the bottle moved silently, unacknowledged by the score, the audience response would be: “Oh my God! Did I just see that? Did that just happen?” With the addition of the music sting, the audience is hammered over the head: “Look! Look at this spooky thing! Watch it happening! Make sure you don’t miss it!”

The post-production effect is essentially the same thing that irritated me about Hungerford, which is the extraordinary idea that video cameras, when switched on or off, go “Bzzzzt!” and make the image break up and shake about. I’m no technie but I’m pretty damn sure that cameras don’t do this in 2014, if indeed they ever did. I think this idea stems from a pre-digital age, back when video meant analogue tape. Film-makers imagining what video footage might look like in the future applied Quantel effects to make it look a bit different and futuristic. Well, the future's here and digital video cameras work just fine, thank you. Or the other place this might have come from is the idea of video transmission; this sort of audio/video break-up has been used many times as a form of interference, implying that a video feed from someone (usually on an alien planet or aboard a doomed spaceship) is only just able to make contact through the galactic static. But that simply doesn’t apply to modern technology – although, to be fair, a couple of channels on our Virgin Media package do go like that when someone answers the phone…

The above minor distractions notwithstanding, Dark Vision is a solid and enjoyable little horror movie. It doesn’t quite know when to finish and there are several endings, but most of them are genuinely creepy and scary. I enjoyed the film, which is well acted, well directed, well produced and glosses over its sometimes obtuse story in favour of style, spookiness and very effective characterisation.

Glenn Lewis and Olaus Roe are credited with the visual effects, which are very good, and Debbie Hampson (who was a trainee on The Hollow Crown) provided the effective and sometimes gory make-up. This is Darren Flaxstone’s third feature after Release, a drama about a priest accused of paedophilia, and Buffering, a “raunchy” sex comedy. By trade he is an editor (he cut Dark Vision himself) with a stack of credits including Ocean Odyssey, The Unseen Alistair Cooke and Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero. Dark Vision is an impressive first stab at horror and I’m keen to see what else Flaxstone, Hodges and co. can bring us in the future.

Shot in 2013, the film carries a 2013 copyright date and was first screened in Bristol in October that year although the official premiere was at the Coventry Film Festival in June 2014.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Anthony M Winson
Writer: Anthony M Winson
Producer: Anthony M Winson
Cast: Stacey Devonport, Fiona Shore, Michelle Darkin Price
Country: UK
Year: 2014
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at bottom of review)
Website: http://mrstitchfilms.wix.com

Baylock is not a common name. Wikipedia doesn’t bother having a ‘Baylock disambiguation’ page because there’s only one person of that name who has their own page - American jazz composer Alan Baylock (b.1967). I can find references elsewhere to baseball coach turned commentator Andy Baylock, Sydney University academic Brandi Baylock and an artist named Paul Baylock. But it is in no way a common name.

So it is a truly bizarre coincidence that spring 2014 saw the appearance of two British ghost films in which the principle deceased character was named Baylock. On the one hand, we have Darren Flaxstone’s Dark Vision, about TV ghost-hunters investigating the caves beneath ‘Baylock’s Folly’, named after medieval plague doctor 'William Baylock'. And on the other we have Anthony M Winson’s The Haunting of Baylock Residence, in which a much more recently deceased character is named 'Susanna Baylock'. What are the chances?

The only guess I can make is that both names were inspired by the character of Mrs Baylock in The Omen, the housekeeper who was played by Billie Whitelaw in the original and Mia Farrow in the remake. Still, it’s remarkable synchronicity given that more than 500 British horror features have been made in the last 15 years and, to the best of my knowledge, the name Baylock doesn’t appear in any of the others. (There is also a supposedly haunted house in Pasadena called the 'Blaylock Residence' - I don't know whether that may also have been an influence.)

In this film, Susanna Baylock (Lindsey Parr) lives in a three-storey Victorian villa with Annabel Blair (Fiona Ahore) who is described as her maid but is arguably a housekeeper, if we’re being precise. Susanna starts the film by falling downstairs and breaking her neck, prompting the arrival a short time later of her estranged sister Patricia Woodhouse (stage actress Stacey Devonport making her feature debut).

The set-up here is, let’s make no bones about it, unbelievable. Patricia is said to be Susanna’s only living relative, yet she was evidently not informed immediately of the death, not invited to the funeral, and hasn’t even been told how her sister died. Yet she has somehow inherited the eponymous ‘Baylock Residence’. None of this makes a lick of sense but fortunately ‘set-up’ is all this is, and before long we progress to the good stuff – the haunting.

Winson does a great job of wringing real spookiness and fear out of very simple things. There are no digital effects anywhere in the film except for a couple of ghostly fade-aways. Everything else is done by suggestive noises off or simple physical tricks: a door closing by itself, a book knocked off a shelf, someone or something not being where we (or Patricia) think it is. At first, Annabel dismisses Patricia’s claims of supernatural phenomena but then she starts to witness them too. Patricia does some research at a local college and determines that the problem is not a ghost or a poltergeist but an ‘entity’, which is explained in some detail.

All of this is shot, for no obvious reason, in black and white. And here’s what puzzled me: I couldn’t work out whether this story was taking place in the present day or Victorian times. Annabel’s hair-bun and shawl for example make her look distinctly 19th century (and who has a 'maid' now?), but some aspects of the film were very obviously contemporary. Then, about half an hour in, Patricia visits Susanna’s grave and we discover that she died in – and therefore presumably the story is set in - 1971!

With that information, I started to appreciate a little more the impressive effort that has gone into the production design of this fiver-and-change motion picture. Patricia’s dress is suitably old-fashioned, without being stereotypically seventies. There are no DVDs on the shelves, there’s no TV and the radios on display are suitably vintage. Much of the house is decorated in a Victorian style but that’s okay. What people often forget is that, in any decade, much of the décor hales from earlier decades. There were certainly plenty of quasi-Victorian homes around when I was growing up (I was three in 1971), especially family homes because of course the older generation in those days actually were Victorians.

So in all fairness to Winson and his ‘Mr Stitch Films’ team, they have made a sterling effort to provide a 1970s ambience and for that are to be commended. Of course, there are always going to be little anachronisms which cannot be avoided without building a set from scratch. All the light-switches, for example, are of the modern ‘rocker’ type rather than historically accurate ‘toggles’. There is no disguising the smoke alarm on the ceiling, or the design of the ‘fire exit’ signs in the college, and a brief shot of Patricia on a train is very, very obviously a 21st century carriage. (There is also, for some inexplicable reason, a framed issue of Spider-Man Weekly in the bathroom, which is completely out of whack with the rest of the house’s largely post-Victorian furnishings. As any fool knows, this journal of renown did not begin publication until February 1973, thereby completely destroying any credibility that this story takes place in 1971. What were they thinking?)

Once we know the story’s date, things become, if not clearer, certainly less distracting and we are able to concentrate on the plot and characters. I am mystified why there is no opening caption identifying the year (the more so, in having seen this just a few weeks after Hacked Off, which managed to have a caption which was out by ten years, causing problems all of its own). The 1970s setting explains, I think, the monochrome photography since it is easier to hide the colour saturation of the 21st century than try to disguise or excuse it. What isn’t explained is why the story is actually set in 1971; I have wracked my brains and honestly cannot think of any changes which would be required were the film to be set in 2014…

The plot to which we return, but which I don’t want to delineate in detail for spoiler reasons, involves Susanna’s husband Victor (David ‘dwyz’ Wayman, director of numerous shorts, music videos and fan-films) who was responsible in some way for the estrangement of the sisters and who apparently disappeared without explanation a few years ago. There are a number of ghosts seen in the house, including a little boy and a woman with a noose around her neck. In desperation, Patricia brings in Lilly (Michelle Darkin Price), the sort of spooky hippy who would have been a goth if we were not, in narrative terms, still 14 years away from the first Sisters of Mercy album. Lilly is genuinely psychic, it seems, but then the house is evidently genuinely haunted.

Together, Lilly, Annabel and Patricia uncover the house’s dark secret and find out (sort of) what happened to Victor. As so often, I’m not 100% convinced that it all fits together and makes coherent sense, but it’s a reasonably satisfying ending because some enjoyably bleak narrative strands are resolved (or otherwise), thereby adding to the overall air of British suburban supernatural miserablism.

Nottingham-based Winson has made several horror shorts over the past few years, gradually increasing in length, complexity and ambition. Apparently work on this film actually started several years ago, when it was entitled The Diary of Patricia Woodhouse, but all the footage was lost in an unfortunate computer error. Winson then concentrated on his shorts before returning to Baylock Residence in 2013. This picture, which had a premiere screening in February 2014 and was released onto YouTube two months later, is the first Mr Stitch movie to reach the magical (if arbitrary) 70-minute mark that still defines a feature, even in these post-Blockbuster days. A second feature film, Ominous aka House of Afflictions, is currently in post.

As is often the case in situations like this, he has built up a little rep company and many of the cast have been in one or more of his other productions; several were also in Zombie Hood. As is also often the case, this means that the director has cast based on the people he knows, rather than widening the net to find new, perhaps more suitable (or better) actors. In all honestly, some of the acting is really not up to scratch, while some is okay but won’t win awards. What really carries the film however is Devonport. She is terrific in the lead role, conveying real fear as the supernatural takes hold around her. In one scene she is even required to throw herself about on a bed as Patricia is physically assailed by an invisible force; this sort of thing is extraordinarily difficult to carry off without looking ridiculous, but through some combination of Winson’s direction and Devonport’s performance, the scene works, and works well.

Ghosts seem to be increasingly in vogue in British indie horror nowadays, with films like The Library, Dark Vision and Any Minute Now tipping their hats more towards Algernon Blackwood than George Romero. Perhaps this is a response to the success of NuHammer, a melding of traditional MR James-ian gothic ghost tales with a contemporary (or at least, non-gothic) setting. However, I for one much prefer something like this, made with real care, passion and affection for the genre, to the risible pomposity and by-the-numbers fake Gothicism of the over-rated Woman in Black.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Noboru Tanaka
Writer: Takuya Nishioka
Cast: Masato Furuoya, Izumi Hara, Misako Tanaka
Year of release: 1983
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: screener DVD (Artsmagic)

This has to be one of the most obscure films that Artsmagic has so far released - and I should know because as usual I compiled bio-filmographies of director and cast for the film. Well, I found out about the individual people, but a thorough search of my own files, the internet and the BFI library turned up absolutely nothing on the film itself.

So I sat down to watch the screener disc with absolutely no preconceptions whatsoever. What sort of film is this? A horror movie, an action flick, a drama? It’s a bit of all of them I suppose. It’s a revenge movie is what it is, but unlike that most high profile of recent revenge flicks Kill Bill - which is pretty much non-stop revenge from start to finish with the occasional flashback for justification - Village of Doom (Ushimitsu no Mura) is 75 per cent justification and only kicks into full-on revenge mode in the last half-hour or so.

Masato Furuoya, more recently seen in spooky TV series such as Juni Inagawa’s House of Horror and Tengoku e no Kaidan, stars as Tsugio Inumaru in this WW2-set tale. While other young men go off to fight in Manchuria, sensitive, intelligent Tsugio is left in the village because he’s not fit enough for the army. This has its apparent advantages - with so many husbands away, it’s not long before he loses his virginity to an older woman - but all that Tsugio feels is shame.

He lives with his grandmother Han (Izumi Hara: The Magic Serpent) and the two of them are soft touches who frequently lend money to others, unlikely to ever see it back. The isolated village, whose only link with the rest of the world is a rickety railway line, is an insular little place where cousins marry cousins and strangers aren’t tolerated.

Struggling to retain his honour, Tsugio finds that those around him have none. He is tortured by guilt over his occasional flings with other men’s wives and pain at his inability to relate to girls his own age, and a desperate attempt to pass the army physical leaves him feeling even worse. So he goes to the city and buys a gun. And when the village policeman finds and confiscates it, he goes back and buys lots of guns. And swords. And knives. And combat gear of all sorts.

And at the 83-minute mark, the tension which has been slowly building bursts and Tsugio makes his way around the village, coolly and brutally killing almost everyone he meets in a flurry of bullets and blades.

Director Noboru Tanaka (Watcher in the Attic, A Woman Called Sada Abe) worked under Kurosawa on films like Yojimbo before becoming a leading director of ‘roman porno’ soft porn films in the 1970s. Star Furuoya committed suicide in March 2003. The other cast members include Isao Natsuyagi (Tidal Wave, Virus, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge), Renji Ishibashi (Roningai, Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell, Tetsuo the Iron Man and stacks of Kinji Fukasaku and Takashi Miike films), Misako Tanaka (Gonza the Spearman) and Shino Ikenami (Evil Dead Trap 2).

Fascinating and intense, Village of Doom is a look inside the psyche of a troubled teen entirely unfettered by modern western concerns. It’s beautifully shot and elegantly written, but may just be too slow-moving for many potential viewers, because until that 83-minute point, it’s entirely unclear where this is going.

MJS rating: B

Director: Lou Vockell
Writer: Lou Vockell
Producer: Lou Vockell
Cast: Dustin Gilroy, Lori Morsch, Leslie Levine
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.onemanfilmindustry.com

Two things you should know, right off the bat. Although subtitled A Scary Movie, Stalking Hand is an out and out comedy and not actually scary at all. That is, I suppose, the joke. Also, the extraordinary and quite unique image on the front of the DVD sleeve is actually in the movie. It doesn’t make any sense but it’s a very cool make-up effect which has certainly never before been done so the hell with story and the laws of physics, let’s stick it in there.

A prologue finds two young folks making out in a car. Johnny (Bill Randolph: not the guy from Friday the 13th Part 2) wants a “just a kiss” (yeah, right) but uptight minister’s daughter Mary Joe (Emily Arner) doesn’t want to be touched. When he accidentally rips open her blouse, she runs home to Daddy. From this, we cut to a crime scene where the cops are investigating three dead bodies: the young man died from loss of blood after his hand was cut off, the young woman and her father were both strangled. And the odd thing is that the hand in question is missing...

But never mind all that because it’s time to meet our main characters: dumb jocks Derek and Kenneth (Kevin King and Chris Jenkins) and their girlfriends, cynical brunette Cassandra (Lori Morsch) and blonde bimbo Kiki (Danielle Krull). Bored with watching the guys play basketball, the girls demand that they do something special and a plan is hatched to hold a Halloween party. Part of the deal is that Derek and Kenneth will find a date for Cassandra’s spooky goth chick cousin (Leslie Levine) who calls herself Morgana and speaks with a dubbed, bass voice. The guys pick local spod Charles Drelman (Dustin Gilroy) but warn him that he and the goth must keep out of their way.

To get the girls ‘in the mood’, Drelman is persuaded to recount the story of Johnny and Mary Joe which happened exactly one year ago. A lengthy flashback sequence begins with a repeat of the two-minute prologue (which probably wasn’t necessary) and then the subsequent events. Mary Joe (who isn’t wearing a bra and never bothers to refasten her blouse) runs to her daddy (Doug Palmer) who gets a chainsaw, much to the consternation of his wife (Lena Miller). The mad minister is determined to take revenge on the boy for daring to lay his hands on Mary Joe so he revs up the saw and cuts Johnny’s hand off, resulting in copious quantities of fake blood squirting everywhere.

As the ‘party’ progresses, Drelman and Morgana find themselves locked out of the way in the basement. However, Morgana has only to make a call to Satan on her cellphone to conjure up the ... dah, dah, dah! ... stalking hand, which proceeds to wreak bloody vengeance on the cool kids upstairs. This includes a bathtub electrocution and a hilarious death-by-cigarette-lighter.

The situation is resolved by the arrival of two cops whom we have previously met, one of whom (played by Russ Hurley) looks vaguely like Elvis and tells everyone who will listen that he is the only true son of the King of rock’n’roll. The Elvis connection becomes more significant at the film’s climax. (The other cop is played by Levine’s father Art, while the make-up effects are handled by her brother David.)

Stalking Hand (which dropped The from the title somewhere during production) is good, harmless fun. It has been shot cheaply on video and the effects are distinctly budget-priced, with the ‘severed hand’ mostly represented by simply framing it so that we can’t see beyond the wrist. However, there are a few shots where the hand’s owner has been removed by green-screen or some other technique and these are surprisingly effective. The cast are mostly good and the weaker ones get away with it because of the broad burlesque nature of the script. Characters are fairly simplistic but there is a nice gag in understated homo-eroticism of the relationship between Kenny and Derek. It’s not quite Brokeback Mountain, but it’s leaning that way... There is also a truly weird interlude with a couple next door to the party house, the wife being an uncredited actor in drag with huge balloon fake bosoms.

Cheap and cheerful, the movie doesn’t outstay its welcome and never becomes self-indulgent. Lou Vockell, self-styled ‘one man film industry’ has previously produced and directed softcore erotica with SF/horror leanings, including Killer Sex Queens from Cyberspace, Hookers in a Haunted House and Planet of the Erotic Ape. Stalking Hand is his first attempt at making an actual horror movie without any T&A.

However, the oddest thing about Stalking Hand is the sound effects. I was surprised to find (although you won’t be, having read this review), that Vockell has peppered the entire film with cartoon-like foley work. Almost every movement is accompanied by a rattle, gurgle, squeak or similar noise. It’s a bit like watching the film with a couple of friends who stopped off on the way to the cinema at The Swannee Whistle Shop and Snare Drums R Us. This is a little overdone, to be fair, but it never becomes distracting and it certainly leaves one under no illusions about how seriously this ‘scary movie’ should be taken.

MJS rating: B+

Lou Vockell, director of Stalking Hand: A Scary Movie, kindly answered some e-mail questions in July 2006.

Where did the inspiration for Stalking Hand come from?
“Well, I was watching television and the image of a very attractive person flashed on the screen. Within seconds a certain part of my male anatomy began to involuntarily react, as though it had a mind of its own. This got me thinking about body parts having a consciousness completely separate from their host organism. Since the idea of making a movie about an angry, disembodied penis seemed a bit much (even for me) I decided to make a film about an angry, disembodied hand.

“Okay, that's not really true. Actually a severed hand seemed like an inexpensive and fun subject for a horror movie. A monster that didn't require a lot of make-up, but could still wreak a lot of humorous, heinous havoc on people.”

Why did you decide to move away from the sexy movies you had previously made, and what was the biggest difference in making this sort of film?
"I wanted to prove to myself I could make a movie that didn't depend primarily on naked girls! Not that there's anything wrong with naked girls, but I was beginning to feel the T&A was becoming a creative crutch. The biggest difference between making this movie and one of our erotics was the shear amount of scripting required. Instead of being able to depend on nudity and simulated sex scenes to bulk up the action, I had to write the whole movie! This movie had like 80 pages of dialogue instead of the usual 40 or so.”

Despite calling yourself a ‘one-man film industry’, you still need a cast and crew: where did you find them?
“Local bars, the homeless shelter, mental hospitals, the dog pound, jail. Actually we have a stock company of people who have been working with us since our first film Killer Sex Queens from Cyberspace. We also did a conventional casting call for Stalking Hand. We had a phenomenal response and were able to use a lot of great, motivated people. Some genuine show business professionals, some talented amateurs. We were able to greatly expand the scope of our talent pool and we plan on working with many of these same people on subsequent projects.

“The ‘one-man film industry’ title was bestowed on us by Joe Bob Briggs (the journalist, actor, comedian and most prominent B-movie critic in the universe). Truth is I actually wear a lot of hats when it comes to getting the work done, but no one is really a one man band. Getting a movie finished and to market requires the efforts of a lot of people.”

What constraints of time, money, equipment, effects etc did you have when making Stalking Hand, and how did you overcome them?
“We don't even try to overcome our limits. We work with them. I honestly believe it's our ability to effectively exploit what relatively little we have that makes our shows entertaining.

“You never have enough time or money. We do have excellent professional grade equipment, although in limited quantity. We have always shot our movies in professional quality formats (Betacam SP and digital) and have non-linear post production gear that can and does produce a broadcast quality end product.

“On Stalking Hand we had a great guy handling the physical effects. We did the CGI ourselves. Making movies like ours is all about using whatever you have to its most entertaining effect. In spite of the obvious limits under which we function, I believe we have never failed to entertain in any of our movies.”

Why did you include all the cartoon sound effects?
“It's a serious character defect. Perhaps the influence of watching way too many cartoons. Animations are rife with sound effects designed to counterpoint the action. Also, using sound effects is like munching potato chips, once you start you just can't stop!”

Which aspects of the film worked out how you wanted, and which ones didn’t?
“That's a kind of personal question, isn't it? Listen, in every show there is stuff that works and stuff that doesn't. Stuff sometimes works on paper, but not when you roll the camera. You solve those problems on the spot. I use nearly all of what I shoot. I have very strong post production skills and I can usually finesse even borderline takes into a usable condition.

“Stalking Hand had no re-shooting, but we did end up going back and shooting one additional scene that helped set up the story. I will admit to having a little trouble with pacing in the first edit. I managed to pick up the tempo of the film by cutting scenes that were designed to run consecutively and cutting them together concurrently. This gave the impression a number of events in the film were happening at the same time and really helped keep things moving.”

What has the response to the movie been like from people who have seen it?
“Stalking Hand: A Scary Movie is a horror/comedy. When you're dealing with humour the audience is never ambivalent. They get the jokes or they don't. So far the response has been 100% positive. Most people seem to think the humour and the horror work well together, and not at the expense of one or the other. The only criticism has been constructive and instructional. I would suggest all your readers buy a copy of the film when it becomes available (very soon!) and make up their own minds.”

Where does the one man film industry go from here?
“Well, I've already directed another film for a company called OTR Productions titled Vagrant. It's an ultra-violent horror outing that's still in post production limbo. It's an absolute mayhem ballet and the first movie I made that I didn't own. Right now our erotic label, Hotmovies2000, is releasing like 40 new erotic titles on DVD. Stuff we licensed from another company.

“It looks like the next movie we produce ourselves will be an erotic comedy. I'm doing another nudie because I know it's a perennial crowd pleaser that I can currently afford to produce myself. Stalking Hand has gotten good buzz and looks like a winner, but that kind of film requires a much larger budget. So if there's anybody out there who wants to finance a horror/comedy just mail me.”

website: www.onemanfilmindustry.com

Director: Sean J Vincent
Writer: Sean J Vincent
Producers: Sean J Vincent
Cast: Sean J Vincent, Jenny Gayner, Tim Parker
Year of release: 2014
Country: UK
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.seanjvincent.com

I had fairly high hopes for The Addicted. It had a neat trailer and a cool poster. I happily accepted a screener. And then I watched it.

The Addicted is awful. A bigger heap of clichéed nonsense I haven’t seen for ages. It starts off bad and then goes downhill.

I rarely make notes when watching a film for review, but it rapidly became apparent that The Addicted was so irretrievably bad in so many respects that I was going to have to keep score. And some time after that, round about 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie, I realised that if I kept note-taking at the rate I was going, this would end up as a 10,000-word epic, which I really haven’t got time for, even if you have. So I’ll give you a flavour of the first third of the film and you can take it as read that the remaining 67% is more of the same.

Rest assured that I did sit through the whole thing. It was hard work but I was determined to give the picture a fair crack of the whip, as I always do. When it comes to movies I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy and I’ve seen more than one bad film rescued from total awfulness by one stand-out scene or a late-introduced character. However, in this case let me reassure you that nothing like that will happen here. If anything, the last 60 minutes is even worse than the first 30.

After an unnecessarily d-r-a-w-n-n-n-n o-u-t-t-t-t title sequence where each actor we’ve never heard of is listed individually – which must have been great for their mums at the cast and crew screening – we’re treated to a prologue during which four teenagers break into an abandoned building in order to play with a Ouija board. Already my heart was sinking, as no doubt is yours, and it sank a little more when one of the gang found a generator with the key in the lock, one click of which caused the whole place to light up. Barely have these stupid kids uttered a few lines of inane dialogue than they are dragged away one by one to be brutally slaughtered while light-bulbs pop around them. And that’s the last we’ll see of them. The whole thing is pure splash-panel.

Here’s what director-writer-producer-actor-editor-DP-ADRguy Sean J Vincent evidently doesn’t understand about splash-panel prologues. They’re meant to be exciting, to grab our attention. The prologue is there to dupe us into thinking that the whole movie is going to be great like that, or at least will get that good at a later point, thereby encouraging us to sit through the dull-but-narratively-important talkie plot scenes at the start of the actual story. What’s the point in having a prologue so awful, so hackneyed and boring that it’s likely to make any casual viewer switch off? Teenagers? Empty building? Fucking Ouija board for Christ’s sake…

Now we meet Nicole (Jenny Gayner, who played the title role in Gillian Taylforth: The Trial!), a vacuous blonde who is mid-job interview. Her prospective employer has been watching something on a screen and tells her it’s just not good enough, sorry. I held out momentary hope that Nicole was an aspiring horror film-maker and that the prologue was some test footage she was showing a producer, thereby justifying why it was so crap. Glass half full. But no, it seems she actually wants to be a TV news reporter, which means the prologue actually happened and, in cinematic terms, actually was just crap.

Nicole sets off home and we are introduced to a third set of characters before the 15-minute mark is upon us. A bloke is starting work as a security guard on an old building, presumably the same one from the prologue. His new employer tells him that these rumours of people disappearing are just gossip, that the builders will be around during the day, and that all the security guard (Simon Naylor, who was a bouncer in Corrie and another security guard in Primeval) has to do is wander around all night. Which he does, before being attacked by some unseen assailant while once again light-bulbs pop. We won’t see him again either.

No, it’s Nicole who is our central character. She is at home working on her laptop when her boyfriend Adam (Sean J Vincent, who should stick to directing other actors rather than trying to be one himself) comes in and shows her a website by plonking his laptop on top of hers. Hang on – did he log onto his wi-fi while outside, find that website, close the laptop and put it in his bag, then take it inside, take it out of the bag and stick it in his girlfriend’s face? Don’t try to get your head round it; far more nonsensical stuff is still to come.

Adam has found a news website with the headline ‘Security guard goes missing’. Well, I’m sure there will be a huge police investigation. All these people continually disappearing in the same place. Or…  maybe there won’t be. Adam’s bright idea is that Nicole should get some footage from this old building (rather than something which might impress a prospective employer, like an investigative report into whatever dodgy company owns the place). We should spend the night there, he tells Nicole. It will be fun, he tells her. We could take Mike and Liz.

We’re then treated to a couple of minutes of a completely inappropriate pop song over a terrible montage of Adam, Nicole and their two friends (Dan Peters, and Thea Knight: Jack Said) knocking back copious quantities of vodka shots. Because nothing impresses prospective employers more than work you did when you were drunk. (Not that it matters because in no subsequent scene does anyone act drunk, despite the four of them having demolished an entire bottle of vodka.)

What’s the point of this montage? Is this supposed to make us like these four morons? Are we supposed to be impressed? Supposed to empathise? Fuck them. They’re idiots. They’re going to break into a potentially dangerous old building (just from the age and condition, never mind any supernatural shenanigans) in the dead of night, on a whim, while under the influence of alcohol and without any suitable equipment or clothes. I repeat: fuck them.

So: what Mr Vincent has given us, after a prologue about four stupid, unlikeable teens breaking into an old building, is a film about four stupid, unlikeable adults breaking into the same building. Oh, and inbetween we’re treated to an aside about a security guard. So does this place have security patrols or not? Did the owners try that whole ‘security’ schtick once but the guy was ripped to pieces by a vengeful dead spirit on his first night so they’re not going to bother again? The stupid – it burns…

The background to all this is that the building, despite very obviously being a large Victorian factory/warehouse, used to be a ‘drug rehab clinic’ in the late 1980s. In scattered flashback scenes we learn that Nicole’s dad (Tim Parker, who was Henry VIII in Bloody Tales of the Tower) was the Clinical Director there who not only began an affair with the wife of one of the patients, but also provided that patient (Paul Cooper) with plenty of heroin so that he would sink deeper into addiction and eventually kill himself (shown in a brief scene so ineptly directed that it looks like he runs up the ladder and throws himself into the noose). “This place was closed down after a patient hung himself,” Nicole tells her friends, thereby demonstrating the one essential trait which all TV news reporters need: ignorance of the English language. It’s ‘hanged’, you dozy bint. Curtains are hung, criminals and suicides are hanged. Jesus, what do kids learn in schools these days? And anyway, isn’t it more likely that the place was closed down because the patients were allowed to sit around in comfy chairs shooting up?

So the wife divorced the junkie, married the Director and they had a daughter (or he already had a daughter) who grew up to be Nicole, but the wife and junkie already had a son, seen very briefly in one flashback. I wonder if that will become important?

In the grotty old factory, which has been lit up using that same easy-to-locate generator with the same key in the same lock, Nicole sets up her equipment: a video camera on a tripod and a couple of DSLRs gaffer-taped to stuff. They are all set running, pointing at nothing. Occasionally the film cuts to a shot through one or other of these cameras, sometimes of ghostly activity which cannot be seen by the human eye. Presumably these cameras are the same low-grade make as those used in Dark Vision and Hungerford because they do exactly the same thing with the shaking image and the BZZZT! noise. Come on, low-budget film-makers! You use cameras like this all day long! Have you not noticed that they don’t do this? Ever.

Also, anyone who has been on a low-budget location shoot knows that the biggest problem is batteries running out, but Nicole apparently has magic camera batteries that will last the whole night through.

Since no-one is watching the view-finder, no-one sees the ghost of the junkie, but they hear a voice say, “No-one leaves” and then another one of those damn light-bulbs goes pop (must have been a defective batch). Understandably unnerved, they decide to go to a different part of the building. Then they come back again. There is a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing around the building in this film but most of it is for no purpose and to no effect.

It transpires that all the exterior doors are locked, somehow, so Adam proposes going up to the top floor where there’s a fire escape. “I’ll go on my own – it will be quicker,” he says. Well, no it won’t because if the fire escape does present an opportunity of egress, you’ll have to come all the way downstairs again to get the others, then all go back up again. After Adam leaves, Mike – who has already been dragged off across the floor by supernatural forces once but seems none the worse for it – follows him because he wants to bum a cigarette off his mate. That’s the level of motivation which these one-dimensional non-characters exhibit.

Of course, the real reason why Mike goes looking for Adam is so that the film can get him on his own and have something hideous happen to him. Long story short, there are two threats in the building tonight. There’s the psychotic ghost of the noose-jumping junkie who was cuckolded by Nicole’s dad, and there is the psychotic son of the junkie whose hobby is dressing up in an orange boiler suit and a grinning mask then attacking people with a nail-gun and/or hypodermic needles full of smack. I can’t imagine who this masked killer could be. I mean, there’s only two male characters and he’s torturing Mike so… you know… it’s a Gorgon-level mystery, really.

I suppose he could, theoretically be the briefly-seen TV news boss (Rich Keeble: scAIRcrows, Eva’s Diamond, Survivors) or the guy who sent the security guard off to his nocturnal doom (John Cusworth). The irony is that both of those gents, despite neither having more than a minute or two of screen time, demonstrated more actual characterisation than any of our main quartet.

And so it goes on. Quite late in the film, we’re told that no-one’s mobile is working, for no apparent reason. Then near the end we find that the old sofa they’ve been sitting on is right next to a wall-mounted telephone which nobody even bothered trying. It is also, apparently, right next to a pile of builders’ tools which includes a hammer and a hand-held circular saw. A freaking heavy-duty electric saw, running off the mains power supplied by that oh-so-handy generator. Our lone survivor finds this literally right where she has spent the whole film, uses it to try and cut through a bolt on a door, then gives up and we’ll say no more about it.

Eventually [spoiler protection on] a mobile phone starts working again, for no reason, as Nicole receives a call from her dad. She explains that she’s in the old rehab clinic, that Mike and Liz are dead and that Adam is trying to kill her. So does her dad (who now has a beard but otherwise looks no older than he did in the ’25 years earlier’ flashbacks) call the cops and turn up with heavily armed peelers? No, the only person he brings with him is Nicole’s previously unmentioned younger sister (Charlie Cameron, who has done voices for Angelina Ballerina). Because when a psycho with a nail gun and a heroin fixation is on the loose, the person you really need with you is a worried teenage girl.

The whole thing seems to have been some sort of revenge plan designed to bring Nicole’s dad to the former clinic. But it makes not a lick of sense. If Nicole’s dad is the target, why did Adam savagely murder Mike and Liz (and if his plan was to murder Mike, why do it so theatrically when the only witness wouldn’t be able to tell anyone?). And if Adam’s dad’s ghost is seeking revenge on the man who stole his wife and drove him to suicide, why has he been killing security guards and Ouija board-toting teenagers? Furthermore, what’s the relationship between Nicole and Adam? If his mum divorced his dad (or was widowed when he jumped into the noose) and subsequently married Nicole’s dad, then the two are step-siblings. Dude, you’re dating your stepsister – WTF? But since we’re not told the characters’ ages, if Nicole is meant to be less than 25 then they’re actually half-siblings – dude, that’s even worse! Either way, it’s inconceivable that they haven’t known each other most of their lives, yet we’re expected to believe that Nicole doesn’t know her boyfriend’s background. A long, boring epilogue ends (eventually) in a ‘shock’ [spoiler protection off] that is, if anything, even more predictable than the preceding 90 minutes.

Sometimes when people watch a crappy film they ask: “How did this get made?” But with The Addicted, the question is surely: why did this get made? Did Sean J Vincent look at the current range of DTV horror titles on Netflix or Lovefilm and think: What the world really needs is a low-budget film about random spooky and violent things happening to a group of unlikeable, undefined morons who go somewhere they shouldn’t be for no really good reason without any planning or forethought. Yes, that’s what horror fans will want to watch. Because nobody has made a film like that since, well, let’s see, what time is it now?

There really is nothing commendable about The Addicted, which was shot in September 2011 and first screened at a cinema in Letchworth in November 2012 (hence the 2012 copyright date). Fair play to Vincent, he got himself a distribution deal: Revolver put the film out in the States in June 2014 with a UK disc from Safecracker two months later, which was briefly retitled Rehab before hitting shelves as The Clinic, with a sleeve design that ditched the killer's mask for an image unrelated to anything in the actual movie. (Ironic, isn’t it? The film has had three titles and none of them shows the slightest spark of originality or wit, thereby perfectly summing up this waste of an hour and a half.) So Revolver and Safecracker both believe there are enough undiscriminating horror fans that they can turn a profit on this. Maybe there are. They’re not the people who read this blog.

For everyone else, this is just risibly bad. Some bad films are boring but at numerous points throughout this film I was genuinely crying with laughter as my naïve belief that it couldn’t get any more clichéed or nonsensical was repeatedly shattered. I could forgive the bad acting (no-one here is likely to win any awards); I could forgive the cheap visual effects; I could forgive the hamfisted direction, lousy music, half-hearted production design. Heck, I could even forgive Vincent’s cinematography which is hopelessly misguided, everything being lit for atmosphere and effect, not credibility (let’s have some back-lit smoke machine spooky mist here because – why not?). What I can’t forgive is the towering stack of horror-by-the-numbers clichés; the unsympathetic, characterless ‘characters’; the who-cares-if-it-makes-sense ‘plot’; the bland, stale dialogue; or, most egregiously, the fact that in the middle of a new golden age of low-budget British horror, when film-makers with similar micro-budgets are producing so many great horror movies - interesting and/or entertaining and/or powerful, thought-provoking horror movies – The Addicted is an off-the-shelf, limp throwback to the sort of formulaic crap the British Horror Revival is reacting against.

The last time I saw anything this uninspired and flaccid was when I forced myself to sit through dross like Spirit Trap and Credo in order to write them up for my book. Except those at least had some token pop star name value. I really can’t see the point of The Addicted. Who could possibly enjoy this? Is the target audience people who have never, ever seen a low-budget horror film before? And yes, a lot of hard work went into the movie but people aren’t paying to watch hard work, are they? Heck, think of the amount of hard work that goes into making the Transformers films, and that doesn’t stop them all from being huge cinematic turds.

This is actually Sean J Vincent’s second feature following a non-horror movie called Shoot the DJ. (His day-job is in the music industry as a sound engineer – and now I come to think about it, the sound mix on The Addicted is pretty good, probably the best thing here. But like the saying goes, you don’t walk out of the theatre whistling the sound mix. Well, I suppose in a way you do…) He has followed this up with a second horror movie, Seven Cases, starring Page 3 stunna turned lezza pop-warbler Samantha Fox and former Republica vocalist Saffron. Two pop stars? Maybe he has indeed been taking inspiration from Spirit Trap and Credo. Also in the cast is Stephen Berkoff, previously seen in Strippers vs Werewolves, Dead Cert and Just for the Record. My God, considering he’s one of Britain’s finest stage actors, he hasn’t half been in some shit films!

Perhaps Sean J Vincent will get past this stage of his career and go on to better things. It has happened before. Adam Mason’s first two features were utter cack (just ask Adam!) but he then made the sublime Devil’s Chair and the slick-but-nasty Broken; now he’s in Hollywood. Or look at Johannes Roberts: from daft rubbish like Sanitarium and Hellbreeder to the powerful drama of F and slickly commercial, star-driven theatrical releases like Storage 24. It can happen. Stick at it, Mr V. Well, don’t stick at this. Stick at making real films, films that have something to say (even if it’s just wooo, ghosts are scary). Make films that matter, that matter to you, not this tedious paint-by-numbers crap. Films with characters, films with plots, films with dialogue, films that repay your audience and leave them happy, or relieved, or spooked out, but never, ever bored.

A quick round-up of other credits now. The three producers are Vincent, Gayner (who was also casting director) and composer/sound designer Jon Atkinson (who allegedly provided some of the music for the 2005 remake of Roobarb and Custard!). Someone called Lawrence TW Alderman stumped up the budget and got exec prod credit (plus a cameo as a rehab centre worker), and has done likewise on Seven Cases. Special FX are credited to Ian Holmes (also listed as ‘gaffa’), a lighting designer by trade who has worked with the likes of Steve Hackett, Kim Wilde and Kajagoogoo, and who presumably knows Sean Vincent through his music industry connections. Natalie Cherrett (Ill Manors, Never Mind the Buzzcocks) handled the hair and make-up.

The four twentysomething ‘teens’ in the prologue are Samantha Spurgin (who was in a stage production of The Dunwich Horror), Brooke Burfitt (also in Martin Gooch’s Death and Stuart Brennan’s Plan Z), Jos Slovick (the big budget Les Mis film and Tales of the City on Radio 4) and busy stage actor Paul Giles. And then there’s Taryn Kay, who plays the junkie’s unfaithful wife in a couple of flashbacks. The best actor on screen here by a country mile, her credits include Michael Winner’s notorious all-star comedy Parting Shots, a spell as a professional cheerleader, music videos for Beardyman, Will Young and Jedward (as the twins’ mum!) and well, quite a lot of ‘mum’ characters. She is credited here as ‘Adam’s Mum’ (is that a spoiler, ah fuck it). But her most impressive credit is that she was the lift girl in several episodes of Are You Being Served? All together now: “Ground floor: perfumery, stationary and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food. Going up…” Taryn Kay, we salute you! What are you doing in cobblers like this?

So is there anything good to say about this movie? Any hope? Yes, just a faint glimmer. There is one possible escape plan for The Addicted. One genuine reason why some-one might watch it. One definable audience who will take something positive away from this film. And that is aspiring low-budget horror film-makers. Because this really is a master-class in what not to do.

Fucking Ouija board, man. Honestly…

MJS rating: D

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]

Director: ‘Nicholas Medina’
Writer: 'Henry Krinkle'
Producer: ‘Noble Henry’
Cast: Shauna O’Brien, Paul Michael Robinson, Jenna Bodnar
Country: USA
Year of release: 1996
Reviewed from: UK DVD

With a knife featured prominently on the sleeve and a still on the back showing someone lying in a pool of blood, it would be easy to mistake this DVD for a horror film. And indeed I did, assuming that this disc, its packaging devoid of any credit block or copyright date, was the 2006 anthology Hell Hath No Fury partially directed by Vince D’Amato of Vampires vs Zombies notoriety.

In fact this turns out to be a completely different Hell Hath No Fury (IMDB lists five features, six shorts and 29 TV episodes with that title), a retitling of Friend of the Family II, a 1996 in-name-only sequel to a 1995 feature. The only actual connection between the original (aka Elke) and this is the presence of Shauna O’Brien. Generically, this film has no real horror elements, instead it falls squarely into that most lowly and reviled of cinematic genres – the erotic thriller.

Who exactly watches straight-to-video erotic thrillers? What purpose do they serve? They’re not particularly thrilling. Sure, there’s some tension, duplicity and the threat at least of violence, but nothing to write home about. Granted they are intermittently sexy – certainly more erotic than all those terrible micro-budget spoofs from Surrender Cinema with ‘Erotic’ in the titles – but that sexiness is largely token and arbitrary. The plot simply stops for five minutes every so often so that two people can have a shag.

At least a porno serves a purpose, but who is actually satisfied (in any way) by watching an erotic thriller? That said, I’ve seen worse than this.

Paul Michael Robinson (a regular in Alain Siritzky’s 1990s run of Emanuelle in Space softcore silliness) stars as Alex Madison, a Californian businessman who hasn’t been getting any since the birth of his daughter six months earlier (and presumably for several months before that). On a business trip to New Orleans (identified through plenty of second unit footage of mardi gras), he befriends and rapidly beds Linda (O’Brien, a regular in Siritzky’s slightly later series Emanuelle 2000, albeit not as the title character). She falls in love with him and rejects her fiancé Marcel (Emmett Grennan: Zarkorr! The Invader). When Alex returns to LA, Linda is distraught but not as much as Marcel who blows his brains out and is discovered in a pool of blood, a suicide which gets mentioned once later on (when Linda confuses Alex by calling him a murder) but otherwise has no effect on the story.

Linda somehow tracks down the Madison house and fortuitously arrives just as Alex’s wife Maddy (Jenna Bodnar: Huntress: Spirit of the Night) is interviewing prospective live-in nannies so she can return to work. Alex himself is away on a trip to New York (perhaps having another affair?) so knows nothing of this until he comes home and is introduced to the new nanny.

Blackmailing Alex, by virtue of still having the note he left her when he skedaddled, Linda forces him to rekindle their affair at night while Maddy is asleep; even while she and the mother of her charge are becoming new best buddies. Adding to complications is that Maddy’s virginal slacker brother Byron (Kevin Patrick Wallis: Blade, Scream) is staying for a couple of months and takes to watching the shapely Linda undress from the bushes outside her window. She begins a second affair with the very grateful Byron, telling him that his brother-in-law is forcing himself on her. She also shags Alex’s colleague Mark (Jeff Rector: Dr Hackenstein, Hellmaster, Terminal Force, Dinosaur Valley Girls, Dinocroc vs Supergator and many, many more) after hosting a dinner party for the boss (Arthur Roberts, who was in both the 1988 and 1995 versions of Not of This Earth as well as Wynorski’s Chopping Mall and Ray’s Mom’s Outta Sight plus many, many more) and a visiting Japanese client (Sam Hiona, whose other gigs for Ray include Mom Can I Keep Her?, Phoenix 2 and Cyclone) while Maddy is in hospital recovering from Linda-induced food poisoning.

It all eventually comes to a head with murder, a couple of cops and an interestingly bleak open-ended denouement. More interesting than the rest of the film, anyway. There are half a dozen or so sex scenes, all featuring Shauna O’Brien (who was Penthouse Pet of the Month in January 1992). There’s no denying that she’s got a fine body (if rather small tits at this stage of her career) and can reasonably simulate passionate ecstasy better than many. Robinson has a finely chiselled bod, although the other two gents don’t work out quite so much. Of course you don’t see anything because of camera angles or strategically placed hands. But the problem is that the sex scenes are just a bit too long and dull. Not the fault of this particular film; it’s a defining feature of the genre.

Yes, they are physically attractive people. Yes, they are reasonable actors. Yes, they are simulating copulation. We get it. Can we move on with the plot now please?

Ironically, Hell Hath No Fury proved considerably more watchable than many other films I’ve seen, probably because behind the directorial pseudonym ‘Nicholas Medina’ stands reliable film-factory Fred Olen Ray. Currently listing 134 directed features on his IMDB page, Ray made this the same year that he directed Night Shade and Over the Wire (also as Medina), Masseuse (as Peter Daniels), Star Hunter (as Sam Newfield) and Caged Fear/Fugitive Rage (as himself). And Invisible Mom. It is that facility to pump the pictures out, switching back and forth between genres, that has kept Ray at the top of the work-for-hire B-movie game for so long. His rival and friend Jim Wynorski was producer ‘Noble Henry’ on this movie which was made by Andrew Stevens’ company Royal Oaks.

Robinson later reteamed with Ray for Active Stealth/Shadow Force and Stranded/Black Horizon/Space Station (because no really good B-movie can have only one title) while O’Brien reteamed with Wynorki for his Bare Wench Project series of cheap-as-chips sexy horror films before retiring from acting in about 2008. Don Scribner (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Alien Armageddon) is Alex’s client in New Orleans; Claire Polan (Angels’ Wild Women, Bikini Drive-In)  is a candidate for the nanny job; Steve Scionti (Megalodon, Mom Can I Keep Her?, Invisible Dad) is a waiter. I’m not sure who plays the cops at the end and I can’t be bothered to look it up, frankly.

Veteran cinematographer Gary Graver (too many titles to mention) handled the photography. He subsequently directed Masseuse 3 which was retitled Hell Hath No Fury 2 for some territories! Production designer David Blass subsequently moved on from B-movies to reality TV shows like Beauty and the Geek and America’s Next Top Model. Fred’s son Chris Ray was second AD. And composer Adam Berry progressed to scoring animation, working on shows like Kim Possible, The Penguins of Madagascar and even South Park!

The identity of writer 'Henry Krinkle' isn't clear, but here's something bizarre. 'Henry Krinkle' is of course a false name which Robert De Niro gives to the cops in Taxi Driver, but according to the IMDB it was also a the name of a character in a 2010 TV series called The Renfield Syndrome. That chracter was played by Rob Carpenter, who write and directed a segment of the 2006 anthology... Hell Hath No Fury!

The nature of these sort of B-movies is that all that work results in an utterly forgettable film which will never be anything more than a title in long IMDB lists. This cheapo-cheapo British DVD, which boasts ‘special features’ of interactive menus, Dolby 2.0, aspect ratio 4:3 and scene access (so no special features at all then!) is so cut-price that it carries neither a copyright date nor even the name of the distributor (Third Millennium, apparently, but I had to go to the BBFC site to find that out). In some other territories the film was released as Passionate Revenge - I particularly like that Russian DVD cover.

Marginally better than I expected, but my sights were set low anyway, this will pass 85 minutes of your time but do little more.

MJS rating: C

Director: ‘Napoleon’ Jones
Writer: ‘Napoleon’ Jones
Producer: ‘Napoleon’ Jones
Cast: Sebastian Street, Sophie Anderson, Jeff Rudom
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener (Left Films)
Website: www.stagnightofthedead.com

I try to like these things, I really do. Look, you know me. I’ve been championing dodgy low-budget independent B-movies for the best part of two decades. I do everything I can to promote pictures like Stag Night of the Dead, but when it comes to a review I have to be honest. I’ll cut a film some slack, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t and won’t deceive you.

SNOTD has some original ideas and has been made with sincerity and enthusiasm. But I would be lying if I said I actually enjoyed watching it. In truth I was neither entertained nor engaged. Let me tell you what the film is about, and then what works and what doesn’t and, in the latter case, why - and maybe how it could have been fixed if picked up at an early stage.

Sebastian Street (Airborne, The Zombie King) stars as groom-to-be Deano, out on a stag do with his mates on the eve of his wedding. After ritual humiliation in a bar, a small group set off in a stretch limo (which doesn’t seem to come with a driver) for an activity session with a difference. On a disused army camp which is nevertheless full of military personnel, they engage in a bout of ‘zomball’, which is like paintball except that instead of shooting each other, you shoot zombies.

Dean, who arrives at the camp naked so togs up in his morning suit, is accompanied by stag-organiser Marky (Bruce Lawrence: Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice, Sisters Grimm, Back2Hell!) who is supposed to be a bit of a disreputable, shag-anything jack-the-lad but actually comes across as quite a decent bloke. In lieu of a Token Black Guy there’s a white TBG, DJ Ronny (Joe Rainbow: Night Junkies, Sisters Grimm) aka ‘DJ Hymen-Buster’ who is gleefully gangsta, very much in the manner of Lee Nelson (of Well Good Show fame - please note I only know of this show through trailers, I’ve never actually seen it).

There is also TC (James G Fain: Hardcore, Dark Rage), so-called because he has ‘Tourette’s Condition’ although he doesn’t act like he has Tourette’s, he just swears a lot. Plus Dean’s imminent father-in-law Gordon (Doug Grant) who is suitably dismissive of Ronny’s big man bluffery. There is a sixth bloke who seems to just be making up the numbers. Judging by the cast list this must be Sanjay (Rez Kempton, who was in Bollywood boy wizard parody Hari Puttar!) although I don’t remember him being Asian. That’s either a heartening vindication of our multicultural society or a demonstration of how bland the character is.

Finally there’s Candy (Sophie Anderson: Sinbad and the Minotaur) a statuesque stripper in a red PVC catsuit. It’s not really clear why she’s accompanying the boys to the zomball rather than just waiting at wherever she’s going to do the stripping, especially as we have already seen her stripped and whipping a naked Deano in the lengthy bar prologue.

SNOTD takes a long time to get going. Once the gang arrive at the base there’s a whole load of malarkey about a large, flamboyant American civilian who is in charge. Credited as ‘Mister Ree’ and played by Jeff Rudom (Beyond the Rave) - who died in 2011 and to whom the film is now dedicated - his exact role isn’t clear. After explaining flamboyantly at great length the simple premise, he spends most of the film flamboyantly watching events on some sort of computer/videoscreen, attended by his dwarf assistant Mr Big (former Ewok Brian Wheeler).

Eventually, after a dragged-out scene between Dean and Candy, the male sextette pass through a gate to the zomball playing area, equipped with large guns. And here is where the film scores its biggest bellyflop. What do we expect in a zombie film? Well, blood would be nice. A bit of gore, a dab of grue, a soupcon of carnage and a spot of the old ultra-violence.

The guns are, in fact, stun-guns. They fire an added-in-post jaggedy ray which knocks out any zombie it hits. For five minutes. And the guns need recharging at strategically located charging stations every so often. So despite TC’s constant exhortations to “blow their fucking heads off”, no heads get blown off in any way. Some shuffling zombies fall over when hit by a zigzag zap that looks very like something from Ghostbusters (I still can’t believe that six grown men would do something like this without one of them saying “Don’t cross the streams”...).

“What begins as a fun but gory game soon turns into a fight for their lives” says the publicity but the game is about as gory as Monopoly. Frankly it doesn’t look particularly fun either. Although one of the characters subsequently enthuses about how awesome the experience was, what we see on screen doesn’t warrant any such enthusiasm. All you did, dude, was stand still with your pals pointing a ray-gun at some slow-moving people who then fell gently to the floor and lay there for five minutes. Sheesh, talk about easily pleased.

Sorry, but temporarily stunning zombies is no more fun to watch than it would be to participate in. Where is the thrill? Where is the excitement? For them or for us. In fact, what is the relevance of the zombies in all of this? If all the guns do is knock people out, you might as well use students as targets. At least they’d be a bit more lively and more of a challenge to hit.

I have no doubt that the stun-ray-gun thing is a cost-saving measure. Special effects make-up costs money. But look, if you can’t afford to show zombies being blasted in the head - don’t make a zombie film. Or just make a short. God knows there’s nowhere near enough story here to justify 80 minutes of running time. This could have been a half-hour short and the money saved from not shooting those extra 50 minutes could have paid for a box of squibs and a couple of exploding heads.

Here’s the second problem: there is no sense that the zombies are a threat. These are traditional shuffle-shoes drool’n’lurch Romero zombies. They appear some way up the road, hobble forwards, get zapped and fall down. We don’t see them attack anyone or anything in this part of the film. In order to give the sense that this is a dangerous, exciting game played with live zombies, two things were needed, both conspicuous by their absence.

First, the participants should have been togged up in basic body armour. Nothing over-the-top, just sporting padding, goggles etc, something to give the impression that what they are about to do is at least marginally more dangerous than hopscotch. If they looked like they were ready for combat, we would perceive the zombies as much more of a threat.

My second suggestion is that we could, in fact should, have been shown the zombies beforehand, attacking something. Maybe ripping apart an animal carcass. A demonstration of what could happen if our players don’t stay alert. Like chucking a lump of meat into a seemingly placid pool to prove that it’s full of piranhas. Either, preferably both, of these things would have made the film more exciting. Or exciting. But not a handful of guys calmly zapping a bunch of slow-moving, large, placid targets at a considerable distance.

After this fast-paced, thrill-an-hour sequence, the gang relax but then somebody lets the zombies out of their cages. We’re not shown how they are rounded up after their five-minute naps and returned to captivity. But then we’re not shown who lets them out. I was losing interest by this point but as I recall there’s a close-up of a hand slipping open a bolt. I don’t know whose hand it is, I was more wondering at the staggeringly lax security. Haven’t these people heard of padlocks?

The plot, such as it is, surprisingly revolves around deliberately irritating and unfunny comic relief DJ Ronny. He falls in love with a zombie girl (who isn’t locked up or unconscious for some reason, nor is there any explanation of why she is not hungry for flesh). From there he decides to become king of the zombies or something and transforms into the film’s main antagonist. There is also an angry-looking military officer (1st AD Mike Busson, who was Randolph Gerbles in Hardcore) whose role isn’t clear. And quite what the large, flamboyant Yank is up to is anyone’s guess.

Stiff, old Gordon undergoes a transformation at what can roughly be considered the start of the third act but not enough is made of it. He’s not dull enough beforehand and not really dynamic enough afterwards. He seems calm and polite throughout whereas Gordon Mk.1 needed to be bored and irritated by the antics of the young men while Gordon Mk.2 should have been a testosterone-dripping, yelling action-machine.

But all of this is, to some extent, by the by, because after the zombies get loose - the geography of the base is never made clear - most of the film becomes a load of running and shooting (mostly still with those uninteresting stun-ray-guns) and it’s difficult to care about the characters inbetween all that padding. There is some sort of half-hearted explanation of where the zombies came from in a TV news report (delivered by ‘Georgina Romero’!) about bird flu. But you will learn far more from the film’s publicity than you can work out from what’s on screen. Also worth noting are commendably exploitative not-in-the-film promo images like the zombie hand-bra DVD sleeve and the rear-sleeve shot of Deano surrounded by morning-suit-clad living dead.

The acting is, on the whole, okay. None of the characters are particularly subtle or rounded so the cast aren’t called on to do a great deal. Jemma Lewis is Dean’s fiancée and Eva Gray (The 13th Sign, Dead Crazy) plays the future mother-in-law. Technically the film isn’t great, alas. The photography by Richard J Wood (Dark Rage, Blood + Roses) is grainy and at times looks like it was shot on 8mm and the sound is distinctly variable (almost certainly caused by the large number of credited ‘sound recordists’, which suggests a you-can-hold-the-boom-today approach).

I was looking forward to Stag Night of the Dead, which premiered in 2009 and was released online in November 2010 before an eventual DVD release through Left Films in January 2012. But it doesn’t live up to its marketing campaign. I was expecting a mixture of sex, laffs and gore but all three boxes remain unticked. It may be that if your expectations are low, your blood alcohol level is high, your mates are jovial and your pizza has just been delivered - then the film could satisfy you. But in this house it counts as a good try but a miss.

Director Neil Jones is credited as ‘Napoleon Jones’ which might sound daft or pretentious but at least helps to differentiate him from the other 14 Neil Joneses on the IMDB, especially as one of those is also a British indie horror director. To be clear, this is not the same Neil Jones who directed The Reverend and Deranged.

MJS rating: B-

My first contact with Tristan Versluis was when I was working for the old East Midlands Arts Board in the late 1990s and the Film Officer showed me an article from the Derby Evening Telegraph about a local young man who was making a name for himself in the field of special effects and make-up. I finally got round to interviewing Tris in October 2005 about his work onEvil Aliens, which was done when he was half of an FX company called Life Creations. (Tris subsequently moved into directing his own short films starting withPlastic Reality. I interviewed him again in 2008.)

How did your company Life Creations get the job to work on Evil Aliens?
“Life Creations got the job of working on Evil Aliens from myself being in contact with Jake West from an early stage. We were originally discussing Razor Blade Smile 2 and how he wanted proper effects guys on board for that to do some cool stuff. Then a treatment ends up in my inbox and it’s this Evil Aliens film. I read the treatment and was like: “Hell... that sounds wicked... and full of effects work!” Straightaway we started discussing gore effects for the film; Jake wanted us to give ideas on gags etc. We then did an exploding head for Jake which was enhanced with CGI (for Shock Movie Massacre) which worked quite well. I sculpted a small maquette for Evil Aliens and that kind of bought the deal, along with being there from the start.”

What sort of brief were you given for the film, in terms of realism, level of gore etc.?
“Jake’s brief for the film, with regards to the gore was: over the top and as full on as we could afford with the budget we had. Jake just wanted us to ram as many tubes and sprays of blood that we had, at each shot. It got to a point where any spare hands on set were handed a pango (device for blood splats). We really did spend every cent we had on putting maximum carnage on camera.”

What was the most difficult and/or most complicated effect in the film?
“The most difficult effect and most risky effect on the film for us was Cat (Jennifer Evans), when she turns into an alien. We decided to go real old school for that effect. Jake wanted the alien’s head to literally burst out of Cat’s own head. So we made this hollow silicone head of Cat, pre-burst, with veins etc. We then took a painted-up head of the alien look, on the end of a pole. Inside the chest and neck area of the prop body we mounted a bag of blood and guts. We pre-cut sections of the outer silicone skin and then just pushed the alien head up, which pushed guts etc. out the mouth and nose and tore open to reveal the alien head. It worked great. It was totally untested due to money and time, but I am so proud of that effect, and with Jake’s fab editing it works a treat.”

What sort of things did the cast have to cope with in terms of make-up, and how did they bear up?
“The cast that had prosthetic make-up on were all so patient and loved the experience. Our key alien - whenever you see an alien get his helmet ripped off, it was him - was a star, considering he couldn't see hardly anything through the oval shaped lenses he wore. I remember one day we were doing a scene when the alien gets smacked in the head by a cricket bat... well, he did get smacked by a cricket bat! Everyone froze, thinking: ‘Oh god, that's our lead alien actor quitting.’ But no, he got up and just kept going. That was the general attitude on set.”

I understand that the mutilated cow which you created was extremely realistic. Can you tell me a bit about how you made that and what it looked/smelled like?
“The mutilated cow we made was so funny. It was made from soft foam, gelatin, fake fur and loads of syrup based blood. The day we were setting up the cow scene was classic. We were given this field to set up the cow and it already had three real cows which were in there. Fine, I thought, what could they do? When we opened the gate holding a (to them) dead cow, they raised their heads and focused very quickly on what was going on. As we walked in carrying the cow, we got about half way to where it needed to be set up and suddenly they started running full steam at us. Not being a expert on cow behaviour, I took this as bad and dropped my rubber cow and ran! The cow was staying in the spot I dropped it for all I cared! What was funny is: the cows at first seemed really saddened and kept walking round it, not touching, really silent but flinching as it moved in the wind. They were so freaked out. But two hours later I came back and they were licking the syrup off it!”

What have you been doing since Evil Aliens?
“Since Evil Aliens, Life Creations has sadly ended, so I have been off freelancing, which has been going really well. Such things as Queen Elizabeth - Virgin Queen, Doctor Who series 1 and 2, Titty Bang Bang, Celebrity Swap, Hex series 2, a feature film called Isolation and various commercials for Barclays, broadband and Guinness.”

website: http://tristanversluis.tumblr.com

In April 2008 I solicited a half-dozen e-mail answers out of my mate Tristan about his short filmI Love You. Was this really two and a half years after our previous chat? Good grief.

What features were you working on immediately before and after (or during!) the production of I Love You?
“Before starting shooting I Love You I had pretty much just finished working on the new film from Clive Barker’s Book of Blood series - the film has the same title - which has been shooting up in Edinburgh. I was providing various prosthetic effects for that.”

What did you learn on Plastic Reality and Pixel that was useful to you on this film?
“I learnt to work with actors more this time round. Also with my crew; I feel I am starting to gain more confidence with my ideas and how to deal with my crew to get the image I am looking for.”

I notice that there's no writing credit on I Love You. Does a film this simple in concept have a script in any conventional sense and, if not, how do you convey what you want to your cast and crew?
“There wasn't a script as such, more of a treatment. It was always so heavy visually that I didn't feel a need to write a full, super-detailed script. I knew my crew trusted my crazy ideas and would go with it despite the lack of a full script. Leslie Simpson and I talked about what the part was and we both felt that it was always going to be a visceral and spontaneous piece of work - drawing from what we could drum up on the day of shoot.”

How closely did you work with Duncan Jarman on the prosthetics?
“Duncan helped apply all the prosthetic work on the film whilst I did the prep work, inbetween making dead people on Clive Barker’s Book of Blood!”

I was impressed with the sound design - what sort of input did you have on that?
“I knew what I wanted from the sound early on; quite basic really, with plenty of ripping flesh sounds to make you feel what he's going through even more. The music was always going to be low key but effective in its atmosphere and tension which Ian Morse my music guy did perfectly.”

Why has I Love You been finished before Pixel, which started first? When will we see Pixel?
“Ha ha... Pixel was shot first, but it is still having the finishing touches done to the CGI effects in it and I just couldn't wait any longer before making another film. I Love You was born from the frustration in me, in needing to get a film out there for people to see. I hope that Pixel is finished soon, before I get too hungry for more and make something else!”

website: http://tristanversluis.tumblr.com

Director: Stuart Wood
Writer: Stuart Wood
Producer: Stuart Wood
Cast: Stuart Wood, Tara Jennings, Peter Scivier
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: YouTube

I watch this stuff so that you don’t have to. And I don’t mean that in a nasty way.

Liberty Bleeds describes itself on YouTube as an ‘amateur horror film’ and that is completely accurate. It’s horribly shot, has no discernible story, drags on way too long and is of no interest to anyone except those who made it and British horror completists. In the spirit of fairness, I’ll give the film-makers props for honesty and for not trying to pretend their picture is something it’s not, but it’s still unwatchable crap.

Storywise, this is a thoroughly generic slasher with assorted young people stalked at home or in Southampton town centre by a killer wearing a rubber Statue of Liberty mask (hence the title, which is easily the best thing about it). Early on there are some Scream-inspired phone calls from the killer to his potential victims but that angle is swiftly forgotten.

Writer/director/producer Stuart Wood and Tara Jennings star as teenage siblings Camron (sic) and Julie Carter whose parents are away. Who the rest of the characters are is not clear, although one of them is played by Peter Scivier who with Jennings shares ‘co-director’ credit. There is a small boy who gets hanged by the killer while Julie is supposed to be babysitting him. And there’s a ridiculously young-looking and abusive cop who interrogates the siblings on suspicion of the boy’s murder. More than that I could not tell you.

Eventually, Camron collects together all those who have been attacked by the killer but survived – his sister and three others – and they all go to a large isolated house in the countryside where, predictably, the killer turns up and starts attacking them. Julie thinks it’s Camron but it’s not. I don’t know who it actually is, despite an unmasking and numerous subsequent scenes, including a long, dull sequence of the siblings holidaying in Tenerife. Two characters in the end credits are identified parenthetically as ‘(Killer 1)’ and ‘(Killer 2)’ so presumably they share the rubber mask, but I don’t know who they are, and certainly don’t care. It almost goes without saying that no-one in the cast can act and none of them have made any other films, so far as I can tell.

Speaking of the end credits, I feel obliged to reproduce the minimalist crew credits which are as follows:

• Pre Production Scriptwriter – Stuart Wood
• Editer (sic) – Stuart Wood
• Camera Operators – Everyone
• Stunt Co- ordesigner (sic!) – Peter Scivier, Sam Saunders

I suspect that ‘Pre Production Scriptwriter’ may be a unique credit in the history of cinema, although not as unique as that bizarre chimera of stunt co-ordinator and production designer! Even more bizarrely, the exact same credits, with the same errors, are then repeated - except for the third line which is replaced with ‘Special Effects Editor - Jacob Drewett’. After general thanks, the credits round up with a detailed list of all the copyrighted music used without permission in the film, including tracks by Black Eyed Peas, Dizzee Rascal, Rihanna, Chase and Status, Kula Shaker and Moby.

Music aside, one aspect of the soundtrack does stand out and that’s a news report on a murder, heard in two separate scenes. Now, one thing that always bothers me with no/low-budget productions is that directors cast poor actors as news reporters. I always think: if you need somebody reading a news report, why not cast a presenter from your local radio station? They’ll probably think it’s fun and may even be keen to add a film credit, however minor, to their CV. They’ll almost certainly give you some free publicity on their show. And they’ll sound professional. Win win win. So when I heard what sounded like a real news report from a real reporter, I was initially impressed that somebody had had the right idea.

…Until I realised that it was a real news report. Specifically, it was a report on the murder of Sophie Lancaster, a 20-year-old who was attacked and killed by a gang in Lancashire in 2007. Lancaster’s death was a high profile case because she and her boyfriend (who was badly injured) were attacked for being goths, thus the incident contributed to a broadening of the concept of ‘hate crime’ as something which could apply to any subculture or group. Lancaster’s mother established the Sophie Lancaster Foundation in her memory.

I must say that – irrespective of the amateur nature of the film or the non-existent budget – using a recording of a report on a real life, brutal, unprovoked murder as background in a horror movie is utterly tasteless and insensitive.

The above notwithstanding, Liberty Bleeds is basically a bunch of mates larking about and shouldn’t be considered as a ‘real’ feature film aimed at an external audience. On the other hand, Wood and co went to the trouble of uploading the whole thing to YouTube in 11 ten-minute chunks. (The last is only two minutes but nevertheless 102 minutes is clearly way too long for something like this, even if the last ten minutes are credits/out-takes. The film could easily lose half an hour and still be feature-length, although it would be no more comprehensible, entertaining or interesting.) There is naturally a pejorative view of ‘releasing’ a feature film onto YouTube as the lowest cinematic rung of all (at least Vimeo has a certain class) but on the other hand it is a valid distribution model and there are plenty of good, well-budgeted professional movies which have been made legitimately available on YouTube. Freakdog and Fired spring to mind as a couple of examples.

So the fact that this is on YouTube should not necessarily count against it, although the ten-minute chunks thing does to some extent. On the other hand, it’s so unwatchable for anyone not directly involved – featuring as it does a mixture of unlit, shaky handheld footage and camera mic-recorded dialogue frequently drowned out by background noise – that it’s very difficult to stomach more than ten minutes at a go. Only 175 viewers have made it all the way through so far.

And there, really, is the dichotomy of modern amateur film-making (I touched on this in Urban Terrors): the sort of crappy home movies that people used to make on 8mm and show to their mates are now available for the world to view. By virtue of being posted online in March 2010, Liberty Bleeds has to be counted as a ‘released’ film and hence a title in the British Horror Revival. Shot between August 2009 and February 2010, it was actually the second film from ‘Liquid Productions’ following an earlier ‘teen slasher’ called Screamer, shot in the first half of 2007.

Wood and Jennings subsequently became ‘South Lunar Productions’ and began work on a third feature in February 2011, entitled Purgatory: “A Movie about the paranormal and a group of friends who find themselves lost in the woods and seek for help in an abandoned psyciatric hospital to find out things we'rent what they seem.” Production was halted after one week and seems to have never restarted, although a two-minute clip of one scene was posted in May of that year to a Facebook page which went completely silent six months later.

Now this may be a coincidence, but at exactly the same time that shooting on Purgatory fell apart, Jennings was in court, being fined for assaulting a journalist from the local paper. When Jennings’ mother was convicted in October 2010 of falsely claiming more than £50,000 in benefits, a hack from the Southern Daily Echo took a picture from across the street of her leaving court with her daughter, who took exception to being snapped, grabbed the journo and screamed, “I’m going to kill you!” Charged with a public order offence, Jennings failed to turn up for her hearing in February 2011 (possibly because she was busy making a crappy horror film…) so a warrant was issued and she was arrested. Jennings was fined £350 with £250 in other charges, which was probably considerably more than she and Stuart Wood had ever spent on any of their films.

And that’s pretty much all there is to say about Liberty Bleeds: woeful technical quality, no discernible characters or plot, pirated music, of passing interest as an example of how anyone at all can make a feature-length film and distribute it online, and notable for being followed by an unfinished project which was apparently abandoned because one of the film-makers was nicked for assaulting a journalist covering the story of her benefit-fraudster mother. Which is different at least.

I would have notched this up to a D for the title, which I still think is pretty cool, but I have to knock it back again for using the Sophie Lancaster news report.

Like I say, I watch these things so you don’t have to.

MJS rating: D-

Director: Vincent D’Amato
Writer: Vincent D’Amato
Producer: Damien Foisy, Rob Carpenter
Cast: Bonny Giraux, Maritama Carlson, Brinke Stevens
Country: Canada
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Hardgore)
Website: www.creepysixfilms.com

Sometimes you just want to relax with a shitty horror film, but bloody hell, does it have to be quite this shitty? Vampires vs Zombies is, despite my best efforts to find something good to say about the thing, a pile of muddled, boring, amateur rubbish whose sole saving grace is a small role for everyone’s favourite marine biologist, Brinke Stevens.

Aside from Brinke, this whole thing is a sorry mess, not least because it singularly fails to feature the promised ‘vampires vs zombies’ schtick. It has vampires, it has a few zombies and it has some things that can’t decide if they’re vampires or zombies or both. But at no point do vampires (or even a vampire) fight zombies (or even a zombie).

Bonny Giraux (who played Ophelia in an indie version of Hamlet) and CS Munro star as Jenna and Travis Fontaine who are supposed to be father and daughter although both appear to be in their early thirties. Jenna has a weird trout-pout and muscular man-arms; Travis is a thin guy who close-shaves what little hair he has left, leaving him looking like the lead singer in a not-very-good REM tribute band.

They are driving nowhere in particular when they meet a mother (Brinke) and her two daughters, one of whom (Melanie Crystal) is bound and gagged because she has ‘the plague’ and the other of whom, Carmilla (Maritama Carlson) - isn’t because she doesn’t. The mom asks the Fontaines to take Carmilla with them so that her sister won’t infect her. Or something. And this they agree to do, for some reason.

A long and tedious scene at a gas station - though to be fair, it’s not that much more tedious than anything else in this movie - involves a goth chick with a dog called Bob. That is, the goth chick (Ligaya Allmer) is called Bob; we’re never told the dog’s name. Producer Rob Carpenter is the gas station attendant who gets vampirised by Carmilla when he unlocks the toilet door for her and who then vampirises Bob in turn, and also some other unnamed guy in a jeep (Derek Champion).

Brinke and the other girl later arrive at the same gas station, or possibly a different one, where we discover that the girl, Tessa, isn’t her daughter but has been kidnapped, though she makes absolutely no effort to escape. An old guy with a white beard called ‘The General’ turns up. That is, the old guy (Peter Ruginis) is called The General; we’re never told the beard’s name. (Seasonally typecast, Ruginis and his beard have only three other IMDB credits, all as Santa Claus.) He thinks that Tessa is Carmilla, who killed or attacked his daughter, or something, so he takes her and she doesn’t bother telling him who she really is.

The General is in phone contact with Travis who says that he has the real Carmilla. So The General lets Tessa go, whereupon she attacks him because she is a vampire. Or something.

The Fontaines’ car breaks down so they flag down a passing jeep which turns out to be the guy we saw before who is now a vampire who they have to kill. Carmilla and Jenna take off in the jeep with Travis in the car, now repaired by the addition of a small bottle of water to the engine. They’re heading for some meeting point with The General, which turns out to be an ‘old church’ that has been converted into a ‘convent’, despite the fact that neither the outside (huge, late 19th century municipal building) nor the inside (huge, 20th century municipal building) looks like either a church or a convent.

A frankly bizarre line of dialogue about, “They converted lots of these churches into convents,” made no sense until much later when I realised that the bozos behind this film don’t actually know what a convent is. They think it means a Catholic girls’ school. Which it doesn’t.

Carmilla and Jenna, who had a completely unerotic topless sex scene in the (parked) jeep on the way here, have another in a room which they both describe as creepy and weird even though, like every other interior, it’s just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill room with featureless, painted walls. There is absolutely nothing creepy or weird about this location whatsoever so the film is reduced to shooting characters in tight close-ups and hoping that we’ll believe them when they talk about what a spooky place they’re in, in defiance of what we can see over their shoulder.

Half a dozen vampire/zombie girls then turn up from nowhere for no reason, dressed in white blouses and check skirts like rejects from the auditions for a Britney Spears video (this was when I finally twigged that the film-makers don’t know the difference between a convent and a convent school). Travis appears, also from nowhere, shouting “Look what I found:” and spends a couple of minutes hacking the zompire/vambie girls up with a convenient and unexplained chainsaw.

There’s something in the crypt about Carmilla’s coffin and there’s a scene back outside where The General reveals that he has found his dead daughter in the back of Fontaine’s car, leading to a chaotically inept fight between various people which ends with Travis suffering mild injuries from a wooden stake through his shoulder (like most people in crap vampire films, his boneless, muscle-free torso must have the consistency of mashed potato). The General’s daughter (Erica Carroll, whose TV credits include episodes of The Outer Limits redux, Battlestar Galactica redux, V redux, Supernatural, The 4400, Smallville, Fringe and Masters of Horror) is despatched when Jenna picks up some stuff from the floor of the car, sellotapes it together and dangles it in the other girl’s mouth, causing her to cough up blood and expire.

For some reason and in some way.

Mixed in with all this half-witted nonsense are random scenes of Jenna in a hospital or at home with a doctor (Roy Tupper) who turns up eviscerated in a bath in his early scene but later appears fine. I think, perhaps, maybe, this is supposed to suggest that the entire Carmilla storyline is taking place inside the head of a mentally ill Jenna. Or something.

And zombies? There are two scenes on the road when grey-putty-faced shuffling individuals are deliberately ploughed down by cars and there’s a final scene (possibly a dream) when Jenna and Carmilla, having killed Travis and The General, escape to a motel room which is suddenly, inexplicably filled with zombies. Who then eat them.

Absolutely not one shred of this makes the slightest bit of sense. An appallingly bad script, amateur-ish direction, wobbly camera-work, occasional random inappropriate music and minimal production design combine with some of the most wooden, two-by-four acting I’ve ever seen in my life to turn this entire film into a huge, stinking pile of crap. I bought this from Poundland and frankly I think they overcharged me by about 75p. It’s not even entertainingly bad, it’s just dull. Despite the amount of throat-bitings, stake-stabbings, chainsaw-hackings and other bloody mayhem, this is the dullest film I’ve sat through for ages. It is entirely devoid of tension, excitement, thrills or any smidgeon of interest. It’s 77 minutes of boring stuff happening slowly to people we don’t care about for no apparent reason.

This only avoids a D- through the presence of the ever-reliable Ms Stevens whose acting talents (and knowledge of undersea ecology) are, I fear, sadly unmatched by any discerning judgement in what projects she chooses. Brinke also turns up as a state trooper shortly after the jeep guy is killed and it’s a toss-up between whether it’s dumber that she doesn’t spot a dead body hastily hidden under a couple of bin liners or that none of the others spot that she’s Carmilla’s mother. Or is she meant to be a completely different character who just looks the same? Who knows? (Other titles in Brinke Stevens’ 120+ filmography reviewed on this site include The Naked Monster, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots, Witchouse 3, Invisible Mom and Caesar and Otto’s Summer Camp Massacre. All of them are much, much better than this, even Witchouse 3.)

Incredibly, Vampires vs Zombies claims to be based on J Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. Well, it has a lesbian vampire called Carmilla whose mother leaves her with a father and daughter, the latter of whom she seduces. And there’s a guy called The General, but really I think that’s about the closest the film gets to anything LeFanu ever wrote. On the other hand, it’s a lot closer to LeFanu’s story than it is to what’s written on the back of the sleeve:


Nope, there’s nothing like that in the film. Not any of it.

Now, to be fair to film-maker Vincent D’Amato, he wrote this as Carmilla 2000, shot it (on 16mm in Vancouver) as Carmilla the Lesbian Vampire and then saw it distributed by The Asylum (when they were handling pick-ups rather than producing their own mockbusters) as Vampires vs Zombies. On his website, he reckons that he and partner Nicole Hancock agreed to what they thought was just a video sleeve strapline and were shocked to find out it was the new title.

But even as a strapline it would be a lie. And under its production title the film would still be massively unsatisfying because, instead of wondering why there are hardly any zombies, viewers would be wondering why the hell there are any zombies at all in a vampire picture. The trailer has a voice-over saying that “after the zombie-vampire wars left the cities destroyed, the conflict moved to the country” which doesn’t explain anything and isn’t alluded to in the film.

While I’m giving this a good kicking, it’s worth pointing out that, although the driving scenes indicate that there are very few cars around on these lonely roads, during the gas station sequences vast amounts of traffic can be seen driving past outside.

Really, what can you expect from someone whose pseudonym expresses an admiration for the works of Aristide Massaccesi? ‘Vincent D’Amato’ indeed. Many of the cast and crew have also appeared in or worked on other features or online serials by D’Amato and friends including Corpse-O-Rama, Hell Hath No Fury, The Renfield Syndrome and Heads are Gonna Roll, a short which was shot during the production of this film.

Apparently D’Amato has now restored both the original title and some cut gore but dude, that’s not going to be enough to save this. Embarrassingly poor on every level, Vampires vs Zombies should be avoided under any title and in any form even if you have a 77-minute shaped hole in your near future when you would otherwise be self-harming or abusing animals. Anything - anything - is better than this.

MJS rating: D

Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: Eric Black
Producer: Kirk Edward Hansen
Cast: Debra Mayer, Riley Smith, Kevin Calisher
Country: USA
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Prism)

It doesn’t take long to spot that this is a David DeCoteau film (from his later period). Six young men, all of whom look like they are auditioning for the lead role in a TV movie called The Jude Law Story and who spend a considerable amount of time shirtless. Hey, why not? If it was a half dozen young ladies wandering around in their skimpies, no-one would bat an eyelid - but the film would be indistinguishable from a million others.

Besides, there’s the gorgeous Debra Mayer (Prison of the Dead, Hell Asylum, Decadent Evil) to distract those not interested in the masculine eye candy.

Riley Smith (Alien Arsenal, Eight Legged Freaks) stars as Christopher Sawyer, a young man who enrols in the mysterious Carmichael Bible School which has a maximum of six students and two staff: glamorous thirtysomething widow Mrs Bouvier (Mayer) and the eponymous Reverend Carmichael (Chad Burris, not a great actor and apparently now working as an agent). Her late husband, we learn, investigated zombies in Haiti and discovered the scientific basis behind them. The Rev has founded his own weird church and has devised a form of confessional booth which draws out its occupants’ sin by some pseudoscientific means.

Sawyer joins his five almost identical room-mates in the small dorm which they share. (Frequent stock establishing shots show the building to be very large, so you have to wonder what goes on in the parts that aren’t the dorm, the classroom/chapel, the dining room and Mrs B’s quarters. Carmichael, we are told, lives down the road.) Anyway, we have hunky Rusty Sankervitch (Huntley Ritter: Wishcraft), blonde, rebellious joker Billy Parker (Kevin Calisher, who seems to have no other screen credits apart from an episode of Roswell), plus Mike McCready (Ben Indra: Raising Dad), Paul St.Clair (Drew Fuller: Vampire Clan, Charmed) and Sam Vollero (Travis Sher) who are somewhat short on identifying characteristics but make up for it by being abnormally good-looking.

The previous sixth student was Blake Godfrey (Rhett Jordan: Crocodile) whom we saw in a lengthy prologue being seduced by Mrs B while Carmichael looked on, rubbing his chest in lustful excitement (he’s not that much older than the boys in his charge). Some sort of weird magical ritual was attempted but it evidently failed, Blake was ‘disposed of’ and his schoolmates were told that he had been summarily dismissed after being found smoking a joint.

During class, Rusty is invited into the confessional booth. At dinner that night, he appears wearing a white vest, straining somewhat to contain his pecs, instead of the customary shirt and tie. Mrs Bouvier doesn’t seem to mind and allows the boys to drink a glass of wine each, which Christopher declines. That night Christopher sees the others tossing and turning and then moaning as, still asleep, they rub their hands all over their firm young torsos.

This goes on for some time.

Apparently the VHS version is about 20 minutes shorter than this 92 minute DVD, most of the missing material (snipped by executive producer Charlie Band for being too homoerotic) being from the prologue and this very, very long sequence. To be honest, even if nubile young nymphets had been doing exactly the same thing I would have got bored after, I don’t know, eleven or twelve minutes of it.

While Sam, Paul, Billy and Mike are writhing semi-naked on their beds, Rusty stands up and sleepwalks upstairs to Mrs B’s apartment, furtively followed by Chris who witnesses the unholy and weird ritual that the school’s only two staff are perpetrating. The next morning, Rusty has disappeared and the others have adopted his ultra-casual look. Can Chris save his friends from succumbing to the satanic practices of the Reverend and Mrs B?

Voodoo Academy was shot in four days (even quicker than Decadent Evil) and that shows in the limited cast, limited sets and lengthy scenes. There is a half-decent story buried in there and DeCoteau’s direction (under his own name) cannot be faulted; most of the acting is good too. The story doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense, completely ignores huge questions (there is, for example, only one passing reference to the boys’ parents) and requires great leaps of logic. But there is some sort of sense there: it seems that Mrs Bouvier requires six completely pure souls in order to achieve... whatever it is she’s attempting to achieve. I think she mentions at one point that if she is successful she will have the power to raise a zombie army and rule the world. Or something. The script is by Eric Black who also wrote Bikini Goddesses and co-wrote and co-directed (with Matthew Jason Walsh) The Witching.

Opening with a ‘Cult Video presents’ caption, this is nevertheless identified in the closing credits as a Full Moon film although curiously the only appearance of Charlie Band’s name is the credit for Bennah Burton-Burtt (“assistant to...”). DeCoteau went on to direct more homoerotic horrors for his own Rapid Heart company and used his ‘Richard Chasen’ pseudonym on the shortened version of this which, according to some sources, was retitled Subhuman. This was one of the last credits for producer Kirk Edward Hansen (The Vampire Journals, Frankenstein Reborn!, Witchouse, Totem, The Dead Hate the Living).

Cinematographer Howard Wexler also lit Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy, The Brotherhood, Totem and Leather Jacket Love Story for DeCoteau and now spends most of his time working on ‘erotic thrillers’ such as Sapphire Girls, Visions of Passion and Model Lust. (‘Model Lust’? ‘Sapphire Girls’? It’s like they’ve run out of sensible two-word titles and now just open the dictionary at two random pages). Though the photography is good, the image itself is incredibly grainy in many places though this may be a transfer fault. There are also some noticeable scratches on the print which is unusual for a straight to video movie!

Regular Charlie Band effects guy Christopher Bergschneider (Totem, Witchouse, Blood Dolls, Leeches) and Jeffrey S Farley (Babylon 5, Leeches, Scanner Cop II and the Red Dwarf US pilot) together provide ‘prosthetic and puppet effects’ - and yes, they do involve dolls. David Lange (Ozone, Jigsaw, Bad Movie Police) is credited with ‘special visual effects’. All the significant effect shots are featured heavily in the trailer which should probably be seen after the film. However, one cannot avoid knowing that Mrs Bouvier turns into a sexy horned demon because that is how she is depicted on the front of the bloody DVD sleeve.

Not a terrible film by any means, Voodoo Academy is a brave attempt to subvert the genre by substituting gorgeous guys for sexy gals. It raises the questions of what the film would have been like if the students were female. The seducer would probably still have been female and there might have been some actual lesbian fondlings whereas, for all its homoeroticism this movie’s hunks are as pure as driven snow and limit themselves to fondling their own muscles, never even sneaking a hand inside their bulging Calvin Kleins. Nevertheless, you can kind of see why Band snipped the film down to 70-odd minutes: not just to reduce the homoerotic content but also to give the thing some pace and stop it getting bogged down in endless (well lit, well shot) sequences of young men rubbing their chests.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Fernando Mendez
Writer: Ramon Obon
Producer: Abel Salazar
Cast: Abel Salazar, German Robles, Ariadna Welter
Year of release: 1957
Country: Mexico
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Mondo Macabro)

For all that people rave about Hammer’s 1958 classic (Horror of) Dracula, it was actually the fourth significant vampire film of the 1950s. First there was the Turkish Drakula Istanbulda in 1952, then from Italy in 1956 came Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri, and finally El Vampiro was made and released in 1957 down Mexico way.

Long relegated to a footnote in horror movie history, this film is now available on Region-free DVD from Mondo Macabro and turns out to be an absolute belter. Viewers expecting campy shenanigans on a par with the Santo movies will be surprised to find a well-made, atmospheric horror flick.

Aradna Welter (The Devil’s Hand) plays Marta, returning to her family home, The Sycamores, where lives her uncle Emilio (Jose Luis Jimenez: Santo in the Wax Museum) and two aunts, Eloisa (Carmen Montejo, who started in films in 1943 and is still working!) and Maria Teresa (Alicia Montoya: Santo Vs the Martians). Except that she turns up a day too late, Maria Teresa having just been interred in the family tomb. Accompanying Marta is Enrique (producer Abel Salazar: The Curse of the Crying Woman, The Brainiac), a travelling salesman she met at the railway station who is invited to stay the night. The whole local area is riddled with superstition and fear - folk don’t go out after dark - and this may be connected with the family’s mysterious neighbour, Hungarian Count Lavud (German Robles: Castle of the Monsters, Curse of Nostradamus).

But not all is as it seems. Maria Teresa had been talking of vampires before she died, and Enrique is really a doctor summoned by Emilio to examine her. Lavud is of course a vampire and so (fairly obviously) is Eloisa - and now it seems that Maria Teresa is also rising from the tomb. But the family servants know a deeper secret. Could it somehow be connected with the hacienda’s former owner, also buried in the crypt below, a fellow named... DuVal?

The great sets are loaded with secret passages, the direction and camerawork are exemplary, the acting is excellent (especially Welter, who is both strong and vulnerable at the same time) and the story, when finally unravelled, actually makes sense. Are characters alive or dead? Who is in league with whom? This is cracking stuff. The effects used to show items moving by themselves when reflections are checked in mirrors are top-notch, while appearances, disappearances and transmogrifications are achieved by simple but effective jump-cuts and dissolves. Granted, the string holding the rubber bat is visible - but it’s not a bad puppet with properly flapping wings, and is used minimally. It’s certainly a lot better than the rather embarrassing rubber toys flung about on later Hammer ‘classics’.

Salazar is a likeable leading man who looks a touch like Bernard Cribbins and is cheerful enough to keep the film entertaining. Spanish-born Robles, making his big-screen debut at age 28, is one of the truly great screen vampires, devilishly handsome and imperious; it’s an interesting thought that his inspiration may not have been Lugosi, since the Mexican release of Universal’s 1931 Dracula would have been the Spanish language version with Carlos Villar. According to Stephen Jones’ Essential Monster Movie Guide, Robles’ role was originally intended for Carlos Lopez Moctezuma (Night of the Bloody Apes). Director Melendez also made Misterios de Ultratumba and The Living Coffin (and something in 1943 called Las Calaveros del Terror which I would love to see). Screenwriter Obon wrote those two films and returned to bloodsucker territory with World of the Vampires and Empire of Dracula, as well as occasional directing chores on interesting titles including La Mansion del Terror and Dynasty of Death.

Mondo Macabro’s print is fantastic, with only a few tiny speckles here and there and a wee bit of soundtrack noise for a couple of minutes just over an hour in. The first reel in particular (for some reason) is simply stunning, with a clarity and contrast that makes it look like it was shot yesterday. I doubt if the film looked this good even when it was playing cinemas South of the border in the late 1950s. (Cinematographer Rosalio Solano worked on more than 150 film from 1943-86, including some later Santo movies and also a few US productions, notably the Jim Brown-starring blaxploitation classic Slaughter!)

The disc defaults to the (preferable) original Spanish language soundtrack and English subtitles, but there is an option to play the K Gordon Murray-produced American version, with Matt King (I Eat Your Skin) dubbing Robles and director Paul Nagel/Nagle dubbing Salazar. There is also an episode of the Mondo Macabro TV series, covering Mexican horror, and a photonovel version of the film’s sequel The Vampire’s Coffin (which reunited most of the cast and crew six months later) with the captions in English. It would be nice to know where this photonovel originated, and some background notes on the cast and crew would also have been appreciated. One other minor quibble: a montage of highlights from the film playing under the menus does rather spoil some of the suspense.

But these are just suggestions on how to make a terrific disc of a fantastic movie even better. Hopefully Mondo Macabro will follow this disc with some more Mexploitation: The Crying Woman, perhaps, or The Aztec Mummy or The Brainiac. I will certainly be buying anything else that the company releases in this vein. Take a chance on El Vampiro and discover a world of Latin American horror you never dreamed of.

MJS rating: A-