Director: Greydon Clark
Writer: Greydon Clark
Producer: Greydon Clark
Cast: Alex Cord, George Kennedy, Eric Larson
Year of release: 1987
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Braveworld)

One sure sign of a quality movie is that it’s not sure what its own title is: this is called The Uninvited on the front and back of the (3D!) video sleeve but just Uninvited on the spine and on screen. But could a film made by the creator of Without Warning, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders really be all that bad?

Alex Cord (Airwolf) plays rich guy Walter Graham - twice on the cover of Forbes magazine but actually a crook - and George Kennedy (The Naked Gun, Demonwarp) is his partner Mike Harvey. They set off from Fort Lauderdale for the Cayman Islands and provided they can reach there in three days they can get their hands on vast amounts of cash (the details aren’t clear - it may be some money laundering scheme).

As a cover story, Walter invited aboard his luxury yacht a couple of bimbos, Bobbie (Clare Carey: Waxwork and the Johnny Mnemonic video game!) and Suzanne (Shari Shattock: Witch Bitch). They in turn invite three students: sports jock Lance (Beau Dremon: Frankenstein: The College Years), yuppie law major Corey (Rob Estes: Phantom of the Mall) and quiet biologist Martin (Eric Larson, who has been in episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Angel).

Suzanne also brings aboard a cat which she has rescued from a dockside trash can. Also on the boat is henchman Albert (Clu Gulager: Return of the Living Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street II) plus Rachel (Dirk Benedict’s then-wife Toni Hudson: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), the boat’s captain whose father once owned the vessel.

Now, the key to all this is the cat. Back in the 1980s when I occasionally performed stand-up comedy, one of my routines involved demonstrating how Alien was actually a remake of Ten Little Indians and proving that the murderer was actually the cat. And on this ship - it actually is the cat! We know this because of a prologue at some scientific establishment where the cat escapes while being injected and then kills several people (the doctor in this scene is Greydon Clark himself).

The cat has some sort of deadly mutant creature inside it which climbs out of its mouth, but it takes a long time for even the audience to realise this because the effects are so hopelessly inconsistent. Is this thing just sticking its head out of the cat, or is it climbing out completely and then back in, or is the cat itself mutating when it attacks? In fact, the mutant thing does crawl out of the cat, yet somehow when it hurls itself on its victims moments later it’s twice the size of its host! A&A Special Effects are the people responsible for the hilarious hand-puppet which rips people’s throats out, apparently.

When the cat-thing attacks, it’s not only strong and vicious but also has poisonous saliva which contaminates the victim’s blood and causes them to break out in not-terribly-convincing bladder prosthetic effects (courtesy of the imaginatively named Makeup Effects Lab). Albert is first to go, then Mike, and gradually the crew is whittled down.

Meanwhile the engine has broken down (the cat’s doing of course!) and Walter has shot up the radio. The ending (and it’s not too difficult to spot which couple will survive) is a ridiculous let-down, and in an extraordinary editing cock-up, at one point there are two consecutive takes of the same dialogue!

This is not the worst monster-on-a-boat movie I’ve ever seen - that honour goes to Creatures from the Abyss - but it’s pretty bad. There’s no actual nudity though Bobbie and Suzanne do spend most of their time in tiny bikinis, and when they’re fully dressed it’s in the most awful 1980s fashions. In terms of wardrobe, this really is symptomatic of the Decade That Good Taste Forgot.

A film to be watched only late at night while very, very drunk. Unfortunately I saw it sober in the middle of the afternoon.

MJS rating: D+

Director: Chris Crow
Writers: Chris Crow, Frazer Lee, John Shackleton, David Shillitoe
Producer: John Shackleton
Cast: Michael Jibson, Jack Gordon, Elen Rhys, Scarlett Alice Johnson
Country: UK
Year: 2011
Reviewed from: UK DVD
Website: www.panicbuttonmovie.com

Panic Button is a well-made but unpleasant and ultimately somewhat shallow feature which is primarily notable as the return from the wilderness of Frazer Lee, whose short films On Edge and Red Lines were among the first rays of the dawning British Horror Revival. Lee is one of four credited writers, along with sophomore director Chris Crow, but the inverse square law of writing credits applies (sometimes known as Flintstone’s Law) and sadly the script features a plot which doesn’t make a lot of sense during the film and then falls apart completely, as soon as the credits roll, like a tissue in a rainstorm.

Keeping costs low while maximising on-screen production value, most of the film is four actors in one location, which is the cabin of a luxury private jet. Gwen, Jo, Max and Dave have won a competition organised by massively popular social networking site Facebook All2gethr and their prize is an all-expenses paid trip to New York. Once in the air, they are given a series of tasks by a disembodied voice (and a simplistically animated crocodile on their in-flight movie screens) as part of a ‘game’ which rapidly turns sour.

On first meeting the quartet in a VIP lounge at the airport, the only obviously unpleasant one is Dave (Michael Jibson: Freakdog), a smarmy creep who thinks he’s much funnier than he is. Max (Jack Gordon: Heartless, The Devil’s Business, Truth or Dare) seems pretty relaxed, with his multi-coloured woolly hat; Gwen (Elen Rhys, who was a flight attendant in World War Z) is a bit ditzy; and Jo (Scarlett Alice Johnson: EastEnders, The Reeds) whom we met in a prologue saying goodbye to her daughter, is ‘the sensible one’ I suppose. Real characterisation comes later as all four are forced to admit to character failings: one has an alcohol problem, one has a taste for dodgy Japanese porn etc.

The first act does a good job of establishing the premise as the foursome gradually realise quite how much danger they are in and how helpless they are to do anything except what they’re told. But it’s not just these four: infringements of the rules are punished by the brutal murder of friends/relatives, shown live via handycam. This tips Panic Button over into the genre of torture porn, albeit more in terms of theme than imagery as the killings happen elsewhere and are shown only very briefly in grainy footage (complete with the occasional mandatory BZZZT!). Naturally, the four passengers clash about what to do and naturally the situation on board the plane turns, before too long, to violence.

Chris Crow follows his rural horror debut Devil’s Bridge by swapping the agoraphobia of the wide, Welsh open countryside for the claustrophobia of a single cabin (plus loo) with no possible means of egress. And to his credit he does a good job of keeping the story flowing and the tension rising within the fugue-like limitations of four characters and one set. In this he is greatly helped once again by the cinematography of Simon Poulter who bathes much of the film in the sort of sodium-beige lighting that we associate with the inside of an aircraft. And there is no doubt that the four principal actors do a sterling job, bringing their characters to life and preventing them from being simple cyphers.

Ostensibly Panic Button is about the potential horror of social media: people’s willingness to put every detail of themselves online, and the callous disregard for humanity which reduces other people’s suffering to video clips and LOL comments. The trouble is that, by halfway through the film that side of things is largely forgotten in favour of a simplistic tale of a sadistic control freak forcing people to do horrible things in a desperate attempt to prevent their loved ones being butchered. Which is a lot less interesting. There are horror films to be made about the plague of social media – Backslasher is an example of one that works – but Panic Button ends up using its supposed main theme as little more than a hook on which to hang off-the-shelf violence and fear. There’s no depth to it and it never makes us think anything (except “ooh, that’s nasty” or “well, that person’s an idiot”),

One of the film’s biggest problems is that these four young people, while no angels, are not especially wicked. They haven’t murdered anyone, they haven’t even cyberbullied anyone, they’re just four meaningless individuals in the morass of impersonal crap that is Facebook All2gethr. So the punishments they face are not random but nor are they appropriate to the characters’ transgressions; they come across instead as utterly disproportionate. We can’t really sympathise with the characters but nor can we view their punishment as in any way righteous. The ending does implicate them in something a bit worse than previously revealed but that still doesn’t justify what is done to them and certainly can’t justify the murders of their friends and families. In fact, the ending is the film’s weakest point as it simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

It transpires that the voice they hear [spoilers on]  is the father of a teenage girl who committed suicide in front of her webcam, a video clip which these four and a couple of the other victims shared and mocked. But surely they weren’t the only ones? Why these four out of thousands? In a particularly daft-but-not-creepy twist, Jo’s nine-year-old daughter is kidnapped by the grieving father and forced to adopt the identity of his own dead daughter, who was 15. Which is never going to work. We also discover that the plane’s unseen pilot is just as much a victim as the four passengers, forced to fly the aircraft to Norway and there crash it into the FacebookAll2gethr headquarters, in order to prevent his own kidnapped family being murdered. None of this stands up at all. Why go to this massive amount of trouble and expense? Why murder Jo’s mum (looking after her grand-daughter) who had no involvement with the website? How has the father gained access to records of every webpage ever viewed or visited by these four? Where has he found the money to not only hire a private jet but also kit it out with all manner of screens and cameras, not to mention a never-explained HAL-like red bulb on the sealed cabin door (there is even a quote from 2001in the dialogue)?

How did the foursome get through customs at the airport believing that they were flying to New York when the plane was bound for Oslo? Or, if the plan was nominally bound for New York but changed course, why hasn’t it been intercepted once Air Traffic Control spotted it had gone of course? This is ten years after 9/11, after all. If the murders on screen were committed beforehand (as is subsequently revealed when they find bodies in the luggage compartment), how were they not known about? But the fact that Jo’s mum’s body is there implies that the father single-handedly (as his wife and adult son are seen at the airport) tortured and killed several people in different locations during the brief time the quartet were in the VIP lounge and smuggled the bodies onto the plane without any airport staff noticing. Above all, how the hell does the grieving father expect to get away with all this? It’s not like there isn’t a trail: you can’t just have a jet take off from a major British airport without filling in a LOT of forms! Honestly, this plot has [spoilers off] more holes than a string vest.

It looks like the film has been written (or rewritten) backwards, starting with the on-board situation and then finding a justification for the unseen manipulator to do this, and the problem is that when this is retconned into the actual plot, it’s just impossible to believe or accept that this would be the modus operandi of someone in that situation. Plus, as so often, the film relies on fairly intelligent people acting completely stupidly. There is a throw-away line observing how odd it is that there is no stewardess but really that’s a big clue. On a private luxury flight you have flight attendants who attend to your every whim and you would expect to meet them before take-off – and the pilot. And how come no-one questions why a social networking site would have a big publicity-generating competition without taking any pictures or video of the prize-winners, or indeed without ever mentioning it on the actual site or putting out a press release? Yes, it’s one big string vest.

The original story of Panic Button (then titled All2gethr) was a nine-page treatment by producer John Shackleton (who had previously directed a couple of horror shorts with Simon Poulter as DP) and co-producer David Shillitoe. Frazer Lee was brought in to to develop this into a screenplay and then Chris Crow was attached, the final credits listing all four gentlemen equally as writers. Interestingly, Julian Richards gets a ‘script consultant’ credit for some unspecified work on the screenplay. It’s a classic case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, I fear, with more people working on the script than characters in it... The film also has the hallmarks of a producer-generated picture: gaping plot-holes which could be ironed out but only by making some fairly fundamental changes to the original premise; changes which presumably weren't an option.

Tim Dickel (Sarah Jane Adventures, Elfie Hopkins) was the production designer with Sian Jenkins (Elfie Hopkins, Bronson) handling costume design. VFX supervisor Bob Thompson, whose work include some fine shots of the plane in flight, previously wrote and executive produced all three Bionicle features! The rich, fruity voice of the villain is supplied by Joshua Richards who also supplied the rich, fruity voice of Richard Burton in an obscure 2013 biopic. The supporting cast also includes Sule Rimi whose BHR credits include Daddy’s Girl, The Machine and Vampire Guitar but who is best known to the nation’s kids as Henry Smart on DNN!  There are nine credited executive producers including Robert Graham (Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection, Amityville Asylum, Valley of the Witch, previously production accountant on The Feral Generation) and John Shackleton’s brother (or dad?) Kevin.

Shot in September 2010, Panic Button premiered at the 2011 Frightfest with a British DVD release from Showbox in November of that year (and simultaneous VOD through Sky Movies Box Office). The American VOD release followed in April 2013 and the US disc finally hit stores one year after that, with a misleading sleeve image and strapline designed to make this look like an airborne slasher, thereby guaranteeing disappointment for a significant section of the audience (good move, Phase 4 Film). A number of other territories picked up the film and there was, somewhat anachronistically, a novelisation (by Frazer Lee, who since Red Lines has been hard at work as a Bram Stoker-nominated horror author). The German DVD copied the UK sleeve design (a montage based, for no obvious reason, around a 35mm camera lens) but managed to include a still from On Edge on the back!

There is no actual panic button anywhere in Panic Button, although the phrase is used once in a throwaway line of dialogue for no apparent reason except to tick that box.

MJS rating: B

Director: Michael Booth
Writer: Michael Booth
Producer: Michael Booth
Cast: Carol Roache, Joseph Curdy, Natalie Danks-Smith
Country: UK
Year: 2013
Reviewed from Vimeo (see link below)

Kuru is a complete vindication of everything I keep trying to tell people about the British Horror Revival, to frustratingly little effect. How can people still be bothered about bloated Hollywood crap, or pine nostalgically for the long-gone days of Hammer and Amicus, when brilliant, vital indie pictures like this are being made and freely distributed? It’s as if, in the late 1970s, everybody had been ignoring punk and instead listening to dreadful prog rock double albums or just obsessively listening to 1960s Rolling Stones hits.

This is where it’s at, horror fans. Wake up, sheeple!

Kuru cost about £250 to make. You can watch it for free on Vimeo. It’s expertly directed, brilliantly original, superbly photographed, bleakly depressing, thoroughly contemporary and features an awesomely powerful central performance. Watch it. Watch it now. Understand that this is where British horror is at. And understand that this is a good thing.

Claire (Carol Roache) and Ethan (Joseph Curdy) are an Anglo-American couple living in a nice house in the countryside which formerly belonged to Claire’s parents. He’s a writer, she’s a costume designer, and three months ago she had a miscarriage. Now Ethan has to leave his wife alone for a week or two while he travels to California for a final visit to his terminally ill father. Looking for something in the loft, Claire finds an old box, within which is a curious item, perhaps some sort of large nut, which contaminates her, making her ill.

The first act is a brilliant build-up, with fine characterisation from the two leads (plus a couple of neighbours) and a gradually mounting feeling of dread. We’re sure that something will happen, but not sure what. Particularly clever is the contrast between Claire in the prologue and flashbacks, a cheery blonde, and post-miscarriage Claire. Her brunette bob isn’t the only difference, just the most obvious. Roache tells us through her face how this woman’s dreams have been shattered, and Curdy does a terrific turn as the husband who would help in any way if he could.

But it’s the infection from that mysterious nut which instigates the film’s horror as sickly Claire transforms into… something. Not quite a vampire, not quite a zombie, though certainly more towards the former. Her hair falls out, she becomes increasingly photosensitive, and every type of food she tries to eat is just brought straight back up. Until… circumstances present her with human flesh, the one type of sustenance she craves.

Narratively, Kuru reminded me of Andrew Parkinson's I, Zombie in its tale of a person living alone, descending into mental as well as physical illness as they are forced to become a murderer and cannibal in order to survive. In a frankly superb performance, Roache plays the final hour in silence, and often alone on screen. Unlike I, Zombie’s urban protagonist who could stalk the city streets, visitors to the house are rare and Claire must take what opportunities she can as the remains of her life spiral down the metaphorical plug-hole.

But there are other layers here, revealed in flashbacks of uncertain provenance which make us see Ethan differently. But is there any reality to these, or are we viewing things through Claire’s diseased mind? There are no easy answers or pat resolutions in Kuru, but neither is there a lazy lack of resolution like the over-rated Kill List. Vastly superior to Ben Wheatley’s over-hyped crap (and much of the other horror which gets critical darlings salivating), Kuru demonstrates how to create a film which poses questions and makes its viewers think about what they have seen and what it could mean.

The cast are all excellent, including Joseph Curdy’s son as a little boy at the centre of a genuinely creepy and disturbing scene. The only serious mis-step is a trio of burglars whose good looks and posh, drama school accents suggest their drugs of choice are cappuccino and a nice glass of chablis. That aside, there is nothing to dislike here and much to admire, not least the cinematography and editing by writer-director Michael Booth. The film was originally in colour and ran about 110 minutes but Booth revisited the picture, cut it down to 94 minutes (which does include a rather long, albeit visually interesting, opening title sequence) and regarded the film into black and white. The monochrome works without a doubt, giving this bleak story a suitably bleak appearance. Props also to Henry Salmon whose wonderfully atmospheric scores adds hugely to the film’s professional sheen.

The supporting cast includes Natalie Danks-Smith, who was a hand-maiden in Attack of the Clones and has been in episodes of Doctor Who and Torchwood. Laura Barker handled the make-up, which includes some very good bald caps, and Lindsey Archer (Doghouse, Armistice) designed the costumes. Hugely experienced sound engineer Bob Burnell handled the sound, another area where the film scores points.

Shot over February to June 2011, Kuru had a single cast and crew screening in its longer, colour version. In april 2013, Booth posted the monochrome version to Vimeo – and there is has sat ever since, almost completely unknown and undocumented. Which is a bloody shame because this is a terrific little film. It’s British, it’s bleakly depressing, it’s brilliantly written, directed, acted and produced. It’s exactly the sort of undiscovered indie gem that people like me are looking for.

MJS rating: A-

Michael Booth wrote, directed, produced, photographed and edited the marvelous featureKuru. After I reviewed the film in August 2014, Mike very kindly (and very promptly!) answered a few questions about the movie. (NB. This is not the same Michael Booth who wrote and directed Diary of a Bad Lad and Tash Force.)

What was your film-making background/experience before you made this?
"Before Kuru, I'd really only ever made experimental little shorts. I made two or three short films at college that I haven't seen since, but it was always my ambition to make a feature film. After leaving college I started working full time at a cinema and in the meantime wrote films. That's about all the experience I have."

How did you go about casting your crucial central role?
"I kind of dreaded finishing the script because I knew I then had to find someone to play Claire. I didn't know how I was going to pitch it to an actor, what was essentially the part of a cannibalistic monster with no emotion. I started asking around through various actor friends in case they knew someone but it was slow going. Then one day I found out that Carol, who I worked with, was an actor. I sent her an e-mail with the script and was thrilled when she agreed to meet and talk about it. I remember she was enthusiastic about it and had a lot to say about the part and why she'd like to do it. I was very lucky because, as well as being an excellent actor, Carol has a great sense of humour. There were days when I was asking her to crawl around on the floor and throw up concoctions of dyed black porridge! She took it in good spirit  I was really pleased with her performance, she required very little direction on my part which was a massive help. I'm not sure I could have made it without her."

How were you able to create something this impressive on just £250.
"The short films I've made in the past I've done for little or no money, so I just made it the way I would have shot one of my shorts, just over a longer time. I knew my first film would have to be low budget, so I wrote it low budget. I set it in one location with as few characters as possible, and then shot it myself in my parents' house. The £250 went on make-up materials, batteries for the sound man, props....and sandwiches! If I'd have had more money, I would have distributed it amongst the cast and crew, because everyone was so good to give up their free time to make it, but I just didn't have the cash to pay them."

Why did you decide to turn your colour film into monochrome and how do you think that changes the movie?
"The film was shot, edited and first screened in colour. I'd always envisioned it as a colour film. I can't remember what made me do it now, but I decided one day to take a look at the film again in black and white and that was it. I converted the whole thing, having spent ages already colour correcting it, and mastered off the final cut in monochrome. It just works for the film. There's an otherworldly quality to black and white images that I find beautiful and engaging. I don't know if the film is better in black and white, but I think it adds to the tone of the film."

Which part(s) of the film do you think work best, and what would you change if you could?
"I find it very difficult to see Kuru objectively now. I spent so long writing and shooting and editing it, looking for faults, that I can't watch it without seeing things I would change. I'm happy with the overall tone, the sense of building dread. Henry's music did a lot of that work for me. I think I could have shot some scenes differently, given them more of an impact, made it scarier  It wasn't meant to be scary though, I always describe it to people as 'unsettling'. The main thing I would change is the location. The house was meant to be small, but I just couldn't find anywhere to do it. In the end I decided to make it at my parents' house which is a lovely big country house, and because of that I had to write in some back story to make sense of why a young artistic couple are living in such a large house. I should have rented somewhere and I did look into it but I can't remember why I changed my mind."

Why has the film sat unseen on Vimeo? Did you try for distribution or festival play?
"I did send it to some festivals when I finished the first cut. That would have been the slightly longer colour version  It was rejected by all of them. I actually spent more money sending it to the festivals than I did making the film, about £300. I was quite tired of the film by that point having worked on it non-stop for about four months, so the rejections left me deflated. I shelved it for a few months then eventually went back to it and re-edited it and converted it to black and white. I could have resubmitted it to festivals but I decided to just post it online so at least the people who worked on it could see it and show it to their friends and families."

To what extent is this, in your view, a vampire film?
"It's interesting you regard it as a vampire film - I always intended it to be a zombie film. I wanted to take a genre and try and do something different and original with it, and with zombies I thought I could do something. Claire isn't a typical zombie of course, I suppose I've created a new kind of monster. All zombies I've seen are mindless hungry beasts. The difference with Claire is she's intelligent, she's sentient. She hunts her prey. That's why there are so many references to spiders throughout the film. Spiders are so creepy because they always seem to be thinking. They sit perfectly still until their prey comes to them, like they're just waiting. That's how I described it to Carol, that she's really like a human spider."

What are your plans for the future?
"At the moment I'm shooting a short film about the artist JMW Turner (https://www.facebook.com/TurnerShortFilm) which I'm very excited about, I hope to finish that in October.  I'm also writing my next feature film Deadbeat which I hope to shoot next year.  It's a film noir about ghosts and murderers and femme fatales. After that, I'll just keep making films because it's what I love doing."

Director: Dáire McNab
Writer: Dáire McNab
Producer: Dáire McNab
Cast: Elliott Moriarty, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Neill Fleming
Country: Ireland
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/3sistersgiallo

An Irish giallo? Sure, why not?

While I’ve been banging on here about the British Horror Revival, I’ve largely ignored the similar boom in horror movie production across the Irish Sea (except in the cases of UK/Ireland co-productions and noting Irish films which lazy journos assume to be British).

Anyway here is The Three Sisters, And it is, frankly, brilliant.

Now, I’m no giallo expert and my knowledge of the genre doesn’t extend much beyond the early works of Dario Argento to be honest. But Dáire McNab (whose name has one of those weird Irish accents so is probably pronounced ‘Norman’) knows his stuff and has crafted an absolutely belting horror-thriller with an obvious but far from overpowering Italian influence. His aim is clear: “The Three Sisters is not an homage, it is not a pastiche. It is a straight-up giallo film, made with honesty and earnestness.”

Elliott Moriarty (who was in a stage production based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe) stars as Dylan who finds himself taking into his flat, and subsequently his bed, his ex-girlfriend Sarah (Gillian Walsh – not the Westlife wife). She is understandably shaken by the brutal and unexplained murder of her sister Emma (Selena Walsh), especially coming so close on the rather bloody suicide of her uncle (Henry McNab). It doesn’t help that her father (your man Giovanni Lombardo Radice: A Day of Violence, The Reverend) is bed-ridden, wasting away from cancer. Also into Dylan’s life comes a drily cynical, never-named Detective (an absolutely cracking performance from Neill Fleming, also in Bing Bailey’s comedy-horror Portrait of a Zombie and Jason Figgis’ vampire feature The Ecstacy of Isabell Mann) who is investigating the murder and its possible link to the suicide. And in the grand tradition of giallo detectives, he’s sure that something’s not right somewhere but he’ll take most of the film to eventually put his finger on it…

The Three Sisters is completely gripping: a horror-thriller that knows precisely what it’s doing and where it’s leading us at any given time. Dylan thinks that he can solve the mystery; Sarah thinks that he should be careful; the Detective thinks Dylan should leave it to the professionals; the viewer thinks that there’s more to all this than meets the eye. There’s a will-reading and a scrap of paper with mysterious hand-writing and family secrets. It’s pretty much everything you want in a movie like this. And yes, there’s a pair of black leather gloves. You can’t have a giallo without a pair of black leather gloves.

The acting is uniformly excellent, and McNab’s direction, photography and editing are all spot-on. The initial murder of Emma in particular is a beautifully constructed piece of horror-cinema. Most importantly, the script has been honed to perfection. Everything fits together completely logically and makes sense right at the end. That’s the hardest part in a thriller like this – making it make sense. There’s not a wasted word of dialogue, nor a scene that’s too long, too short or in the wrong place. Care has been taken and attention has been paid. This is film-making as a craft, and it has produced something thoroughly satisfying for the audience.

The title notwithstanding, it’s not Chekov. Sarah does have a third sister, Sinéad (Sinéad Moloney), who is menaced by a hooded figure in an underground car park, and also an unseen brother said to be in Switzerland. Jacinta McNab plays the siblings’ mother and Robert D Donohoe is Dylan’s mate Rob who takes over the running of the late uncle’s business. All the characters are believable, as are the relationships between them. The cast also includes Ciara Barrett, Emma Keaveney, Jack Nolan and Hugh Sullivan. Several of the actors were in Dáire McNab’s previous features The Farm and The Gingerbread Men.

McNab shot this for about four grand, operating as pretty much a one-man band, the only other credits being additional camera by Tom Rowley and additional sound by Andy Flaherty. The McNab boys – Dáire, Henry and Rory - collaborated on the special effects of the murders and suicide (or was it?). A hugely atmospheric soundtrack by Repeat Viewing also includes songs by Roison O and Tandem Felix.

The Three Sisters is one of those completely random films that just pops up in my inbox occasionally about which I know nothing in advance - which made it all the more pleasurable to watch. A gem of a film.

MJS rating: A

Back in March 1998 I interviewed legendary underground German film-maker Jorg Buttgereit by phone for SFX. His movie Der Todesking was out on VHS - and he had also recently published a German book about his great love, Godzilla movies. I was only able to use part of the interview. This full version has never been seen before.

I enjoyed Der Todesking but I didn't understand it. What was the idea behind it?
"The reason why you didn't understand it maybe is that it's a combination of a lot of ideas, not just a basic idea. For us, it was very important to set ourselves free of Nekromantik. The so-called horror audience was very pushy, and to top something like Nekromantik is very hard, as you can imagine. So we wanted to do some different things and we tried to put them all into one movie. We didn't care a lot about convention. So we did a movie with all these suicidal people and with no main actor at all, which is a terrible thing normally. The main actor was kind of the rotting corpse that is seen between episodes.

"It's a more kind of arty approach. It had nothing to do with mainstream cinema and we didn't care about the commercial success or anything like that. We just set ourselves free after Nekromantik because we were afraid of being a slave to our limited success. For this kind of movie, Nekromantik was a big success. Of course, we didn't make a lot of money with it but it had so much coverage from everywhere. Everybody was keen to see what's coming next, and that's a terrible thing to be. It's like Tarantino after Pulp Fiction: what is he doing? He's doing a very slo-o-ow movie. have you seen Jackie Brown?"

Not yet.
"Nothing is happening in this movie! You can watch very boring things a few times, but if it were not for all the good actors, this movie would have been terrible. But he's stuffed it with great actors, so it's great. But it's also a very arty approach."

Did you have any control over the English subtitling of Der Todesking?
"It's hard to remember. I think someone did it for us, but we produced the subtitled version in the end."

It's very funny when a five-minute phone conversation is subtitled 'I quit'.
"That was my idea. I felt so stupid trying to translate all the stuff he was saying, and in the end the only fact was that he quit. We had this finished movie and we had the need to do subtitles, and it gives you even more ideas. So that was something strange! It was funny too. This guy is talking to his job and telling them that he quits and he will get his things later and he will get his tax stuff and everything. All this normal stuff, and I didn't find it very worthwhile to translate it. And it's a good twist. Just: 'I quit'. I've never seen these things before."

If you were trying to get away from Nekromantik, why did you then do Nekromantik 2?
"It was not that we were actually going away from it. It was still about death and about corpses - though not corpse fucking. About the process of decaying. Our problem was that a mainly horror audience, who are always open-minded, which is good; they also just take you and tell you, 'You are now our horror hero.' And I thought that it could be dangerous. But if you have a look at Nekromantik 2, it's a totally different movie than Nekromantik. I found out later that - which is kind of a concept and seems to work - that this is a horror movie for women, maybe. Because it was shown at a women's film festival in Austria once. I think this was in '93. Even I wasn't allowed to go there just because I was a man; it was a strictly women only place. And it went down pretty well. Because out of context, it showed the whole movie from the point of view of a woman.

"Normally in those so-called general horror movies, you have women only in the movie to be victims. You need someone for the main guy to have sex with, or you can kill her or you can rape her. Normally, you only do bad things to women. We tried to do it the opposite way, to give a new impulse to the very sick horror genre. That was our intention. So I think Nekromantik 2 is in a way the same as Der Todesking in trying to get away from the bad things in horror movies. I'm not trying to say that horror movies are bad, I'm only trying to say that some horror movies are too stiff. For me, the meaning of a good horror movie is to broaden the horror. When you have science fiction stuff or horror stuff, you are able to do so many things. But normally, what the producers do is follow a certain concept that was successful one time, and that's starting to get boring."

Clearly Nekromantik 2 had a lot of problems.
"It was a problem, but now it's free again."

When you were making the film, did you expect that much response?
"Of course not. One of the drives behind the first Nekromantik was to see how far you could go before something happens like this - and nothing happened. With Der Todesking nothing happened also. So during Nekromantik 2 I felt pretty safe. But it seems that by the time Nekromantik 2 was released - it was at the end of the screening of Nekromantik 2, half a year after it was released - that this thing happened in Munich. Munich is a special difficult town for films like that - or it has been, it's not any more. So this happened and nobody was really prepared for it."

Over here we have very strict censorship.
"Yes, that's the reason why only Der Todesking is out. Der Todesking is also in a slightly edited version."

What is censorship like in Germany?
"For me, it's very hard to say because I would describe Germany as being as problematic as Great Britain because I had these bad experiences. But I had the same experiences in Great Britain too when I tried to screen Nekromantik at a film festival in Manchester. In Glasgow they didn't allow me to get into the cinema, which was strange too. But that is okay by me, because the main problem with Nekromantik 2 was that they really tried to destroy the negatives. And they tried to do this before there was a court decision. I had to prove that this film was art, which we successfully did in the end, but it took us two years. If we hadn't had any success, it would have cost us a lot of money too. In this case, the government had to pay for it because they made the mistake.

"That's also one of the strange things. Over here, normally there is no censorship; there is no censorship law. It's mainly the FSK, which is like the BBFC, and you have to get your film to them if you want to have certification under 18. But over here it's kind of free. On paper, it says 'Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft' - free self-control for film business. So I said, 'If it's free, I won't take it'. Then they had to think of something to put me away. So what they did is, they just said that I am doing something against the law because I am glorifying violence, which is a criminal act. So they made me a criminal man. I did something criminal, and if I'm doing a criminal act, then it is no art at all. If they make you a criminal, then they can do what they want, and that is what they were trying to do."

When a film is banned, does it become more popular among horror fans because they can't see it?
"Yes, of course. The whole concept of censorship, the whole concept of freeing people from bad movies could be a whole commercial thing. I remember when I was young, films that had the '18' sign had more of a reputation. Like: this film is only a '12' rating, so don't bother going to see it. It was more attractive to young people, and censors should know this. That they are doing the best they can to promote the film, which is not their job, I think. On the other hand, it's kind of bad because it gives you a reputation for a certain theme, but you can't cash in on it because the film is not available to view. So it's really not getting you anywhere! It's a lot of hype, but no use. It's really depressing: sitting in your room, knowing that everybody wants to see your film but you're not allowed to give it to them. And that's one of the main reasons you are making films - to let them be screened in cinemas. But video gave a lot of freedom to some people. I think bootleggers were busy during that time."

Tell me about your early super-8 films like Interview with Frankenstein.
"That was kind of strange. I bought this camera, and on the same day I had this super-8 film which lasts 2.5 minutes. I just had this great Boris Karloff mask, I put it on my friend and we did this interview. I was interviewing him, and after 2.5 minutes it was over because Frankenstein is killing the interviewer! Normally I don't put these things into my filmography because it was just a film I showed sometimes to friends. There is not even a print, only the original is available. it was super-8, just the first 15 metres of film I ever exposed. That was going on for a while. I was shooting movies, showing them to friends, and then they showed them to other people. We built a super-8 cinema here in Berlin. When I was doing a new film, there was always a bigger bunch next time who wanted to see them. So it was always a very natural thing to just go on and on and on."

Did you learn things on the super-8 films that you could bring to the features?
"Sure, of course. That's the education I got, because I was turned down from a Berlin film school in '87. And when they told me that they wouldn't take me, I made Nekromantik as revenge. The funny thing is that the film school invited me, about eight years later, to do a lecture there. So I had the feeling that I did something wrong in the end. Because I didn't have any official education, but I just made movies and I just watched movies. While doing movies, you do all these mistakes and you learn a lot. It costs you some money, but it's okay. And my mistakes were funny enough for people to watch, so it was really no loss in the end. But my earlier films are much more funny, they are nothing compared to Nekromantik."

Why have you moved away from funny, fantastical films?
"That just happened. It's very strange. When I decided to do the first feature film on my own, it was just getting more serious. I don't exactly know why. Even today, I'm amazed how seriously people are taking Nekromantik, because for me it doesn't work the same way, as you can imagine. I always see the things that are wrong in that movie, and there's a lot of wrong things going on. There was no script, and stuff like that. The plus point on the movie is that you can see that the guys that did the movie are very into it. That's something bigger budget movies don't have: this kind of insanity that they just go for the sake of it. It's a very rare thing, and it's even more rare today, I think, to have these things.

"I did this four times. I did four feature films with no money, and after a while you're just reaching your limit of what you can do with this kind of money, and what you can do artwise. My approach always was, and I hope this can be seen in the films, that I don't want to do straight-faced horror movies. It was more like letting people start to think, giving them a few stitches, so they feel the need to think about what they see. I know that a lot of hardcore horror fans that are very much into Braindead and things like that get very bored by my horror films, because it takes a while before the things happen. It also takes a while before someone gets killed. After a while, it's not funny any more. I think it's mainly a natural approach I'm trying to get here, a fake documentary style to grab the people even more.

"And I never deal with any supernatural stuff, Like Romero for example. He did very great films but I think he was always best when he was doing realistic things. I very much prefer Day of the Dead to Dawn of the Dead because I think it's far more powerful. It's really not very fun after a while, and it should be like this. This gets me to the point where I always used to say that I don't think that I'm doing violent movies, because I don't think the violence is shown in a glorifying way or in a way that is letting you think that violence could be a solution or could be something harmless. I'm always trying to go for the real thing which is painful and very messy. That's why I'm always very pissed off when somebody, like in Germany, says that I'm glorifying violence and should be banned. If he wants to ban me, he needs another excuse! That's the problem."

There seems to be a recurring theme in your films of dicks being cut off.
"That's one of the easy taboos you can break - showing a dick. In Nekromantik it's very obvious that there's a connection between life and death, or sex and death. The main character gets his last kicks out of his own death. The idea came from a book I read where someone who was an executioner was writing his diary. He wrote that when he hanged someone, during the moment of death those people get a last hard-on, and they even get a last climax. I don't know why. But here you have the same connection, and I thought, 'Well, I've never seen this in a movie.' It was a very naive approach I had, but I also had the feeling that it was something that should be on the screen because it has something in it.

"Later on, in the other movies, it was mainly the same: just dig deeper into the subject. What is sex all about? What is life and death all about? The funny thing after all this, is that this is the problem. My films are not very harmful to people in terms of glorifying violence or something like that; they are just dealing with things that normally people are trying to hide. They just don't want to think about those things, not in that straight way. Surprisingly enough, my main enemies who are fighting against me, these lawyers and people like that, they have never seen my films. That concept is part of the whole censorship thing over here: that people who are against it never care to watch the films."

Have you made a film since Schramm?
"Not a feature film of my own, no. I wasn't really satisfied with the low budgets. It wasn't even low budget, it was really no-budget. And nobody got paid. I started to sit back and wait because what happens is that so many people like my movies, but there's nobody who wants to give money for them."

If somebody did come up with the money, do you have something you want to make?
"I have three scripts lying around. Once in a while, I approach a possible producer. They mainly like it, but it's not mainstream enough for them. So the things I did after Schramm were mainly music videos and I did special effects supervision on The Killer Condom. Then I did, although it has not been finished, another special effects job on a movie that will be done later this year for a guy who is one of the last independent film-makers over here. Right now, I'm starting to produce one episode of Lexx, which is starting to get busy."

Are these people who know your work?
"Yes, even the producer of Lexx, the guy who gave life to the whole Lexx project, Paul Donovan from Canada. I met him in Spain at a film festival and he saw my movies and he was totally amazed. But it was very hard for him to convince German producers who put money into the whole Lexx thing to get me for the job. Everybody in Germany is afraid of me because they don't want to be banned. So during the first season, they really pushed me away. Paul Donovan the producer was totally pissed off by that. So now that it's more successful, he wasn't very satisfied with everything, so he can now order me into the series. He's having more freedom now, because last time the Germans decided, this time the Canadians decide.

"But it's hard to say how much input I really can have into the thing because it's a limited thing. I think they are making 20 more episodes, and I am the creative producer on one episode, and I have the option of doing one or two as a director later on in Canada. But I don't know if I'm happy with it because it's a mainstream thing and I don't know how far I can go on TV. The things I did for TV in Germany until now are mainly documentaries. Documentaries about pathologists and stuff that is interesting me anyway. That's something which you can do in Germany on the documentary side. I did two or three TV documentaries, short ones, but only one has been screened by now. Also some video clips, and last year I wrote a book about Godzilla movies, which hasn't got much to do with my own movies. I think that's also one of the chances of the Lexx thing, to put my early '60s Godzilla fashion onto the screen too. Having something to do with science fiction, it's just an easy field where I find myself very comfortable. I don't have to push myself to go to work, when working on Lexx. Even if I don't think I can turn the whole series upside-down."

What do you do as creative producer?
"It's not quite sure at the moment because I'm just starting next week. What I'm doing now is just picking actors together with the producers. It's a German-Canadian co-production. I tell them which actors are cool and which actors are not cool! These type of things. It's hard to say how it will develop because I just started."

What do you know about Xenia Seeberg?
"I told the producer about her. She's kind of famous from a very cheesy nursing soap opera, called Geliebte Schwestern - 'lovely nurses'! I tried to watch it once, but it was terrible! But the producer asked me to name a babe and I guess that's what she is. She will be starting in episode three. I'm producing episode five, so I have to work with her. But I won't meet her until next month. But I guess shes quite good for the role."

Tell me about working on Killer Condom. Was it a big film in Germany?
"By German standards, it's quite big. The money came from Switzerland, because it's a done by a guy called Irwin C Dietrich, who's the main force, the main money man in the background. He used to do films with Jess Franco and all these sleazy exploitation things, '70s horror movies."

What was HR Giger's involvement with the film? 
"The problem with Giger was that he just came too late to the whole project. So we were trying to push him over to the art department, but it was too late also. He did something here and there but his involvement was not a lot."

Was he happy with his credit staying on Killer Condom.
"If I were him, I wouldn't have been happy. But the director Martin Walz told me that after the premiere, he told him that he very much liked the film, even if there was nothing of his in the movie, and that's a good sign, I guess. During the production he was kind of angry and I had the feeling that he was right. Because they mainly did try to cash in on his name, which isn't fair because he's doing great things. For me, it was okay. I met him and I gave him some of my films and he liked them very much. At the end, he also offered me a project, and we were trying to get money for a project for the both of us. It's a concept based on a castration machine that he designed. We built a story around that and we tried to get money for it which didn't work out yet. When I talked to one of the producers from Lexx, there was talk of maybe including this concept in one of the Lexx episodes but I don't want to spoil my own movie."

Is Giger working on Lexx?
"I don't think so. Giger was planned. The plan was that, because I worked with him - he really is an artist, and as an artist he really is not very easy to work with. So the idea was that if Giger is involved I should do one of these episodes. But I think they decided not to use him because they move so fast now that they simply can't put everything in place with him. It would be like in Condom, it wouldn't be the real thing in the end."

He's very annoyed about Species 2 using his name and only using his designs for about eight seconds.
"He should get used to this by now! I think in generally he's just pissed off - and he's right - at how the film industry is dealing with him. But what can you do? He needs to have more impact, more power on a movie.  But to have more power on a movie you have to be more bankable, but now he's treated as someone who's not very easy to work with. It's a shame. But all the concepts he's doing, he's not thinking in a money way. He's having some ideas, but most of the time the line producers get heart attacks because its just too expensive. That's also one of the problems with the project we had written. On the one hand it was too extreme, and on the other hand it was too expensive. I haven't spoken to him in quite a while because it's just not happening and I'm always busy with video clips or whatever. And there are these two other projects I would like to do too. I can't even get money for those - and they are cheap! It's just very, very complicated to get money for unusual films."

Would you be better moving to America?
"It's hard to say. I met Quentin Tarantino once at a film festival at Sitges and I gave him the story outline of that Giger project. He seemed to be interested, but I've never heard from him again. But he's busy enough with his own movies. My experience was that in America it's even more difficult to get unusual stuff done because they only care about the profits. I don't care about profits that much. I care about it in a way, because otherwise you can't do it. Doing films is so expensive, it has to be commercial - but people don't treat me like I'm doing commercial movies. If you compare my movies to bigger ones, then a film like Nekromantik is commercially very successful because it made its money back very fast. Not because it was such a big seller, but because it was so cheap!

"So in a certain scene I'm very commercial, but people can't put that into a bigger context, that's the problem. The German producers are not used to trying to get their money back from the rest of the world. They always try to get their money back inside Germany, which is pointless. I didn't make the money for my films in Germany. It all came from the sales to Japan or to Spain or to France. If I had kept on selling my films only in Germany, then I would be dead by now, I think!"

Finally, tell me about your interest in Godzilla.
"The Godzilla movies were the first movies I saw, and it always sticks to you. For as long as I can remember, I'm going to cinemas to watch Godzilla movies. In the late '60s I started when I was four or five years old - and it just never stopped. So when I heard that Roland Emmerich - our German Roland Emmerich - is doing a Godzilla movie now, I felt that it was time at least to do a book about those films over here in Germany. Because in Germany there's no literature about science fiction films, there's no literature about Japanese monster movies. The book I've written is mostly about Japanese monster movies, not only Godzilla but also the Gamera movies and so on. It's stuffed with 50 movies and it went down really well. It just came out three weeks ago and I did some promotional screenings with old Godzilla movies in Munich and Berlin and Hamburg. It went pretty well, so I hope at least the old Godzilla fans will grab the book. Maybe we might even get it to other countries."

Are the Godzilla films very popular in Germany?
"It's hard to say. People know who Godzilla is, but they laugh about it. Even the so-called serious film critics don't even bother watching them carefully. So my approach was getting the reputation of Godzilla in a better way out to the people. Because as film history they have so many things to offer that American monster movies don't have. This naive way of approaching the whole thing. They don't pretend to be realistic; they don't care about it. They just care about looking great! That whole concept. As a child of course, you are very attracted to large things that do what they want, because as a kid you are not allowed to do what you want. And that's what you want to do: you want to run around and smash everything. That's, I think, part of the concept why everybody is happy with Godzilla movies. All the metaphorical meaning in Japan is totally different; you really have to keep that in mind if you watch those movies to understand them."

In Germany, the Godzilla films all had strange title, mostly refering to Frankenstein.
"I think one of the reasons is that the Japanese did a film, which the American title was Frankenstein Conquers the World. That's where they really took the Frankenstein monster and put it into a Japanese context. That movie is the only one where Hiroshima actually happens on screen. That film came out quite early in Germany. Afterwards, they just tried to cash in on that Frankenstein name because Godzilla wasn't such a name in the late '60s and early '70s. So they just put 'Frankenstein' on everything - which is embarrassing! So if you have a movie like Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster, which is one of my favourites, in Germany the title translates as 'Frankenstein Vs the Devil-Monsters'. Which is even more strange than the film! That's very bad, but there is lots of good posters and artwork over here, and the book is stuffed with this kind of thing."

Did the 1990s Godzilla films come out in Germany?
"One small distributor was trying to get Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah out in the cinemas, but after two months the distributor went bankrupt. I don't know if that was a good or bad thing! So it was mainly straight to video, far more than you have in Britain. The thing is that after 1993 Toho didn't sell the world rights of the later movies because they were waiting for the American movie to be released, then they can make even more money. That's the idea; they don't want to spoil the market for the American production. Older films like Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster have also disappeared over here. I can still get hold of one 35mm print, and I screened it two weeks ago in East Berlin at the book presentation, but officially it's not available any more. I just got a list of DVDs from the US that are coming out. King Kong Vs Godzilla is announced for May. It's mainly the same thing that they put out in America all the time: Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the Raymond Burr version; Godzilla Vs Mothra, the '64 version; Godzilla's Revenge, Terror of Mechagodzilla and Monster Zero. Which is great, but you have Monster Zero also."

These films have far too many titles.
"That's also one part of the book: a whole film index. The German, British, American and Japanese titles are all in there."

Have the recent Gamera films come out in Germany?
"Only the first one, Guardian of the Universe. But after a while, I just started getting the laserdiscs from Japan. Far more satisfying. And now that DVD is getting further, it will be a new challenge to get those films in better versions. You have standard and widescreen versions, you have production notes, you have remastered sound and picture quality: all those things that are necessary! Warners are doing a great job. If you watch Mars Attacks!, it's really mind-blowing. You have freeze-frames as clear as photos."

website: www.joergbuttgereit.com

After I reviewed his excellent Dublin-shot giallo thriller The Three Sisters, Dáire McNab kindly answered a few questions for me in September 2014.

How would you define a giallo, and what are the best examples of the genre?
“The word 'giallo' means yellow in Italian, and was originally used to describe Italian editions of crime novels by people like Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett, which were printed with yellow book-jackets. They were so popular that Italian authors started writing their own crime stories, and these became widely known as gialli (plural for 'giallo'). I'll hand myself over to myself at this point, with an extract from my work-in-progress book on the genre:

“[A]t some point people outside Italy started using the term to describe a specific type of crime film, created by Mario Bava, then refined and popularised by Dario Argento several years later. Confusingly, Italians tend to refer to these films as ‘Thrilling all’Italiana’, although I will not be doing so, unless my word count comes up drastically short. These films do constitute a recognisable and definable genre, although, as with anything in this world, there are several exceptions which both prove and disprove the rule. Generally speaking, a giallo film will contain an unfolding mystery which is resolved in the closing moments, as well as several scenes of brutal murders, often committed by a masked killer, whose identity is often the mystery at the centre of the film. There are many, many films which I would, and will, classify as gialli which do not adhere to one or other of these above guidelines (and one, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, which barely adheres to either). Gialli are also noted for their soundtracks, visual inventiveness, sexualised violence, illogical plotting and outlandish titles, though none of these are requisites."

“Some people will refuse to classify any non-Italian film as a giallo, but some people are idiots. In my case, I've tried to compromise by bringing aboard Giovanni Lombardi Radice, who is an iconic figure in the world of Italian genre cinema.

“In terms of good examples, Bava's early trailblazers, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, are great entry-points. Anything by Argento (pre-1990s anyway) is also a good bet. There's also a fairly strong case for Don't Look Now to be considered a giallo. I could list a load of obscure films here, but won't, but I will mention one of my favourite gialli, Tinto Brass's Deadly Sweet, which is a fairly bonkers film made slap bang in the middle of the Swinging London era. It wouldn't be to everyone's tastes, and gets a bit boring in the middle, but it's well worth a watch. Oh, and anything by Sergio Martino pre-1980 is well worth a look.”

How difficult was it to make something that was recognisably a giallo without becoming a pastiche of the genre?
“It actually wasn't too difficult, but at the same time was definitely uppermost in my thoughts when making the film. The whole 'pastiche' fad is not something that's ever really interested me as a viewer, unless the filmmaker in question is someone with a serious talent for reappropriating generic conventions (eg. Tarantino [sorry for going for the obvious example]) in an interesting way. As far as I'm concerned, there are way too many grindhouse/exploitation-inspired films these days which cross the line from pastiche into lazy parody, with cheap jokes which often outright mock the original films/concepts. There's clearly an audience for this, so fair enough, but it's not a road I'd want to take.

“With this film I didn't want to make either a pastiche of gialli, or a neo-giallo (a sub-genre which has gained some traction over the past few years, and which generally dispenses with any mystery element in favour of following the killer for most of the film). I just wanted to make a film which fits snugly into the genre, and which, hopefully, will one day be listed among its cannon. It also works as a straightforward thriller film (hopefully anyway), and a lot of the time when I describe it to people I omit the word 'giallo', as I don't want to frighten people off by using foreign words.

“I think, to finally actually answer the question, that is wasn't too difficult to avoid pastiche because I put all of my focus on coming up with a decent plot, and then putting this plot on screen in as interesting a way as I could. I don't have a compulsion to let everyone know about the obscure films I've seen by including references to them, I only have a compulsion to make films. Having said that, I did put in a couple of credits which are a bit nerdy and referential; this was mostly to pad out the credits list a bit, as it's mostly just my name repeated over and over.”

What did you learn from your earlier films that you were able to bring to the making of The Three Sisters?
“It's difficult to put my finger on specific things, but, particularly at this (hopefully) early stage of my career, with every film I make I learn a huge amount (usually by making mistakes, and vowing never to repeat them). One thing I definitely learned is that if I'm going to self-finance a film which loses money, it's best to keep the budget as low as possible. I did this on The Three Sisters by keeping the number of characters low, and mostly casting people who were related to me, or friends. Both the previous films were shot in the traditional 'big block of shooting followed by several months of post-production' manner, but I thought that, given that I had no deadlines or anything, the ability to edit as I went along might be beneficial. This definitely proved to be the case, as I was able to incorporate several plot tweaks into the film as I went along. Previously I've had to try and patch things up in editing, this time I could patch them up as I went, to better effect. The editing-as-you-go approach is definitely one that suits filmmakers (but not actors or producers), although I did find that I'd happily go for months without shooting anything, and get a bit caught up in the editing.

“I think the biggest things I've learned have been related to the marketing and sale of the finished product. This film was the first time I've really thought ahead to what would happen after I finished editing. In fact, even the idea to make a giallo came about because I wanted to make something that I could market, but would also enjoy making.”

Beyond the obvious family connections, how did you find your cast?
“Yeah, most of the cast are family or friends. Everyone on screen, apart from three actors (and the unwitting extras in the background of some scenes) have been in one or both of my previous films. Of the three that weren't, one is the sister of the lead actress, and another is a friend of the lead actor. The third is Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who I got on board through email and charm, and a bit of money. He was great though, he didn't seem fazed by the minuscule size of the production, nor the fact that I hadn't really sorted out any costume for him. That's actually my biggest flaw as a filmmaker; I never think about costuming, beyond a continuity-specific capacity. Once I get good at costuming I'll be unstoppable (probably).

“I found using actors (and 'actors') with whom I've previously worked really beneficial in many ways. It allowed me to tailor their characters specifically to their talents and limitations, and I could even tailor the filmmaking process as well. For example, I shot all the dialogue scenes involving my mother in single takes, essentially to minimize her time on set (/discomfort on set), and I thought that my friend Rob wouldn't enjoy doing ADR, so I shot all of his scenes with live sound (all of other scenes were post-dubbed, apart from Giovanni's scene). It also helped in planning out the scenes with the main actors. Every actor is different, and, for example, some can process three or four notes given to them between takes, others can only make one adjustment at a time. Also, some actors can take five or six takes to warm up, whereas others can hit their stride straight away. Because I'd worked with everyone before, I didn't have to spend time rehearsing to suss out their own idiosyncrasies, and I was able to give them some leeway in terms of improvising dialogue. Actually, that's a far better answer to your previous question than the one I gave.”

What are your intentions for festivals/distribution of the film?
“I only finished the film a month ago (and am still regrading a few shots and polishing bits of the audio, and I haven't done the end credits yet), so there are as of yet no festival screenings confirmed, nor any distribution plans. I've entered it in several festivals, so hopefully one or two will respond positively to it. As for disseminating it to a wider audience further down the line, that kind of depends on what, if any, interest it engenders at festivals. I'd like to get a decent DVD deal at the very least, but we'll see.”

What is the horror film-making scene like in Ireland at the moment?
“It seems to be booming at the moment. When I made my first film, The Farm, in 2008, it was probably among the first ten or fifteen Irish horror films ever; there are about as many as that in post-production right now. A lot of them seem to be of the 'people-get-lost-in-the-woods' variety, which I suppose makes sense, as we have a fair amount of countryside about the place. It doesn't really feel like a 'scene' though, in the sense that I only know about these films from seeing brief items about them on various websites. There isn't a Horror Directors' Club or anything, or if there is they forgot to invite me. It's probably as much as anything a consequence of the democratisation of filmmaking which has been brought about by the rise of digital cameras; horror is a fairly established 'first film' genre. I suppose it's good in a way to see a lot of other films being made here, but in a much bigger way it's bad, as it increases the chances of mine falling by the wayside.”

I first encountered Steve Balderson's work (and indeed, Steve Balderson's father Clark, who produced some of his films) when I saw Pep Squad at Fantasporto in 2000. Since then, Steve has created a body of work which marks him out as one of the most important and fascinating independent film-makers in the United States today. A big career interview with Steve was something I had been promising to do for ages. Eventually in September 2014, prompted by the release online of Steve's brilliant documentary Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere, I sent a bunch of questions over to Kansas and these great answers were returned a few days later.

When you directed your first feature, Pep Squad, what were your hopes and ambitions with regards to film-making?
"Well, I had no idea what the reality of that world was, is. I was barely an adult, and so totally naïve. I thought we'd make the movie, it would get picked up by a major distributor (which it nearly did several times), and we’d have instant fame and fortune. And, indeed, we received a lot of notoriety globally – but no fortune. Lloyd Kaufman arranged for the film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France, and Harvey Weinstein called us personally to see the film, as did other mini-majors at the time. Then Columbine happened and none of them would touch it.

"Soon after many of the people who wanted our movie ended up stealing our ideas to make nearly identical movies, such as Jawbreaker. A friend of mine who was a Senior VP of one of the majors told me everyone knew what happened with Pep Squad, so my advice was to just keep making movies, that none of them would expect me to. Funny, many moons later I met Darren Stein and told him what had happened, and he felt really badly. He confessed to getting notes from Jodie Scalla and Clint Culpepper (the people he answered to with Jawbreaker, who were the ones who previously wanted Pep Squad), but pleaded with me to believe him that he didn't outright copy my film on purpose and wouldn't have had he known.  He claimed to never have seen Pep Squad, so I sent him a DVD and he hasn't called me since. I can’t imagine his embarrassment. Anyway, to make a long story less long, hahaha, I had absolutely no idea about the real world of filmmaking at the time. Even though I was very confident in my abilities as a filmmaker."

I believe you made a bunch of low-budget films prior to Pep Squad, including an unofficial Anne Rice adaptation. What can you tell me about those?
"Oh, they were horrible. Just terrible. (Laughs out loud). Many of them were made when I attended CalArts film school, and some even when I was even younger. The adaptation of The Vampire Lestat was awkward, but a blast even if totally amateurish. The assignment at CalArts was to make a short film with 'texture' or some kind of weird aesthetic bent. I never made a short film in my life at that point, and only thought of things in long-format storytelling. And I'd just finished reading The Vampire Lestat and thought it would make a marvelous movie. I still do, and think I ought to be the one to make it professionally.

"So I made the thing on VHS or some similarly archaic kind of tape recording device, and sent it to Anne Rice for Valentine’s Day. I don’t remember what she said about it other than 'Thank you,' I'm sure she couldn't bear to watch it. No one could. (Laughs again). I'd filmed the movie in Kansas during a winter break, but stayed gone long enough to finish editing it. When I returned to CalArts ;my teachers asked sternly WHERE HAD I BEEN. I told them I was busy doing “the assignment' and handed them a double-tape VHS box set (the movie was over two hours in length, and at that time a single VHS tape held only two hours of running time). My teachers looked puzzled, and a bit overwhelmed, not sure what to do with me."

There was a big gap between Pep Squad and Firecracker. What changed for you in that time, and what drove those changes?
"Yes, it took many years to find the funding needed to make Firecracker. Most of this process is documented in Wamego Part 1 (Making Movies Anywhere). I think the largest growth during that period was in myself personally. As anyone knows who has experienced it – a person 'grows up' considerably between the ages of 21 and 26. And then again, from 27 to 32. So much so that while I think my core values and beliefs have remained the same most of all my adult life, there are aspects of that person all those years ago I don’t recognise.

"Such as the terrible need I once had to fit in, be accepted and loved. When I was 18 and while making Pep Squad it occurred to me (wrongly) that if I were famous and rich, that people would love me and that would make me happy. Truthfully, all I needed to do was figure out how to love myself and build my inner self. Which is something I began to do during the process of trying to get Firecracker off the ground. I'm not sure I'd have been able to create Firecracker had I not been in that exact moment in life. Adolescence was dead, I was an adult, but not really (I don't think anyone should really be mentally and emotionally considered an adult until one turns at least 40). I'd also just met the person I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with. More on that in a minute. (Laughs again)."

How do you feel when you look back at the massive complexity and ambition of Firecracker, given how contained your later films tend to be?
"While the scope of Firecracker was massive on a crew-to-cast ratio, I haven’t felt any of my movies being simpler to make. And in the case with Casserole Club, I’d say it was more challenging than Firecracker in a lot of ways. I think that what I learned most while making Firecracker was that one didn't need a separate person to do a single job, but that it was more efficient to have one person handle several jobs – thus cutting down on the size of the crew and keeping costs lower."

Your self-distribution of Firecracker (as documented in Wamego Part II) was innovative and radical - maybe even a bit maverick - nine years ago but in today’s world of multiple distribution channels, any film-maker can be their own independent distributor. Rather than you adapting or compromising, it’s like the industry has actually come to you. How do you feel about that?
"I love it. I don’t know how many people out there are aware of what we did back then. I mean, it was before Facebook. Before social media of any sort. We still had to fax press releases. I often wonder how it would be if that time were today. Would it have been wildly successful, or would we have been lost in the dust? Back then nobody was doing something like that, so we stood out and got a lot of attention because it was unique."

To what extent were the Wamego trilogy intended to document and/or inform, and to what extent were they your own catharsis in response to the shit you went through around Firecracker?
"My objective all along was to help document our journey – struggles and all. When I started out there wasn't a map to follow, or hidden secrets shared by other filmmakers. It was rare to find any real information, so I decided to share it with the world, no holds barred. Even when there are moments of failure, or success, it was important for me emotionally to never shy away from them. I'm so very thankful I did that. I've actually heard from quite a few filmmakers throughout the years since how much they appreciated learning about my journey and how it helped shape theirs."

Watch Out is probably your most extreme film: how much leeway or restraint did you exercise in terms of potential (or actual) ‘shock value’?
"Well, I’m not one to normally like shock value for the sake of shock value. While I love John Waters’ movies, my studies came from learning Hitchcock – a master of showing as little as possible to gain the maximum impact. In the book Watch Out, the descriptions were so vividly described, it was nearly vomit inducing in some parts. I also learned a lot about sound while making Watch Out. Paul Ottosson, who won the Sound Design Oscar for Hurt Locker and nominated for numerous other movies, did the sound with me. In the scene where he's cutting off the pop star's toes, it's the sound that makes it extreme. You really only see a bloody toe and foot in two shots that each last for less than 24 frames. And, of course there's the masturbation scene. The moment of ejaculation needed to pass by so quickly the viewer could miss it if they blinked, and then wonder: 'Did I just see what I thought I saw?' I think showing that kind of subtle restraint when working in extreme matters is more effective than simply being gratuitous."

Your films often have distinctive colour palettes, so why did you choose to shoot Stuck! in black and white?
"I really wanted to give it that film noir feel of the women in prison films from the 1950s. Caged and I Want to Live were my inspirations. I wasn't all that interested or inspired by the exploitation women in prison films of the '70s."

By the time you made The Casserole Club you had developed an incredibly efficient and simple filming strategy. How did the way you and your cast and crew worked on set affect what audiences saw on screen?
"By creating an environment that is fun and enjoyable, the chemistry that actually exists in real life is easily passed through the characters on screen. Casting that film was tricky, in that it was important not only that the person be right for the part, but also that they had the right personality to balance the overall group when the cameras weren't rolling. We lived together in two vacation rentals in the same neighbourhood, really making the environment like summer camp. I developed a manifesto for the process and made everyone read it. By getting everyone on the same page from the get-go there were no surprises. People knew what was in store for them. And the people who couldn't handle the manifesto weren't considered to be on the cast or crew. One person lied on the manifesto (my assistant) and was fired on the third or fourth day. From that moment on, I've always respected the purpose of the manifesto and use it still."

Your next two features – Culture Shock and The Far Flung Star– were lightweight, ‘fun’ movies which seemed like a reaction against (and release from) the intensity of your previous films. Is that a fair judgement?
"Absolutely. Casserole Club took a lot out of me emotionally. In hind-sight, I was probably picking up psychically on my ex’s betrayal (which at that point was in full effect unbeknownst to me); so the messages I had about relationships and marriage were really deep and sometimes very painful and personal. I deliberately wanted to do something light, and without meaning. You know, several people mentioned that Culture Shock and Far Flung Star weren't real Balderson films, because when the audiences finished watching there was nothing to talk about. Sure they were fun, and entertaining, but most people missed the inevitable conversations that come from my movies. They wanted to dissect the characters and really analyse the story—but there was nothing to discuss. Which is, at the time, what I needed emotionally and creatively. I wanted to make something frivolous and just, well, entertaining. Eye candy for the sake of nothing more than eye candy."

It’s 15 months now since you sent me the screener of Occupying Ed. Why has it taken so long for this wonderful film to be seen by other people?
"Well, to pick up from my early story… Just weeks before I was to direct Occupying Ed, I discovered my partner (of 13 years) had hidden his tax returns for the previous 10 years or so, and for whatever stupid reason, had forgotten to take them with him when he abandoned me a couple weeks prior. So I Xeroxed all the records and bank statements, and in doing so, I discovered he betrayed me, having conned me out of about $250,000. It was devastating. My friends and family now refer to him lovingly as 'Bernie Madoff.' (Laughing).

"I’ll tell you, one of the hardest things in the world to do is produce and direct a romantic comedy-drama after being blind-sided by your husband who turns out to be a sociopath. My job was to direct a film about love in the middle of feeling total despair. I’ll also tell you – the film might have just saved my life. With friends and a good solid support group around me, I was able to make it through Occupying Ed without too many breakdowns. There are some amazingly tender scenes in that movie, which I poured a lot of my soul into. And the two songs by Samuel Robertson, 'Continents Were Made to Sink' and 'I am Your Planet' were songs I'd listened to repeatedly with Bernie back when I believed his affection was real. I'm so thankful for Samuel allowing me the rights to license those songs for the film. Even though I didn't write Occupying Ed (Jim Lair Beard wrote the screenplay), it became so personal to me that I felt every word, and saw every frame of film, in the roots of my soul. It was incredibly healing to actually make the film.

"But, it took a long time to finish. And in the months since I sent it to you for review, we've been trying to get it screened publicly. Yet, very few film festivals have had the courage to program it. Not because it’s too unusual, but my hunch is that it’s because romantic comedies are so cliché that many people avoid them, or somehow can’t take them seriously. Which makes some sense to me. It's rare that any film festival or high-art establishment screens romantic comedies. But, with the support of many festivals in Europe, we finally begin our festival run with the premiere at Raindance in London on 29 September."

Do your belly-dance documentary Underbellyand your avant-garde feature Phone Sex fit neatly into your cinematic career or should they be seen as experimental anomalies?
"Oh, I think they’re a different thing altogether. Phone Sex for one was originally conceived as a video installation for an art gallery. The 'premiere' was actually had at a gallery, where it became interactive with the people who came to the opening. I treated it as an art opening, rather than premiere. Underbelly was a great exercise in being a journalist. I felt that perhaps I was a secret television station out to do an expose on this amazing world of burlesque, comedians, belly dance and the amazing women and men who inhabit that world. I’d definitely do another documentary in the future, but it's a lot to invest in two years of your life…  So it would have to mean a great deal to me."

Several of your films have premiered in London. Why do you think your small-town-in-Kansas approach to films chimes with British audiences?
"I have no idea, but I love it. I think it’s also hysterical that if I have a screening in London it sells out, the entire room is packed with fans and interested moviegoers. Whereas, if I hold a screening in Kansas City, hardly anyone comes. (Laughing again). Seriously. When I screened Casserole Club in Kansas City there were about 12 people there. Yet, when we screened it in LA we packed the 1,000-seat Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. And in London it was sold out as well. I don't know why but maybe my sense of humour is inherently British? My ancestors are from northern England after all. Or, perhaps it's the exoticness of the worlds I've shown on camera. The Kansas prairie, the Palm Springs desert mad-men style era, or the carnivals and old-timey Americana. Who knows. But I love it."

The Big Question: looking back at your own filmography, what do you think defines a Steve Balderson film?
"Well, like I mentioned earlier, I think one ingredient is definitely that after viewing the film can be debated with, discussed and examined more closely. For hidden meanings, metaphors, and that sort. But, I'd also say that my films are a bit autobiography. In the sense that they are about the very thing that is most interesting to me at the time. Usually when I decide to make a movie, it is the subject that I want to learn more about. I love learning about new things. Like, most recently, melodrama and killing people."

Finally, what’s the latest news on Hell Town and what else have you got cooking?
"Hell Town is one of my greatest. Of course, I share the writing and directing credit with filmmaker Elizabeth Spear. But, she and I have such a similar since of sick and dark humour that you won’t be able to tell what came from me and what came from her.  Imagine Pep Squad on steroids. That’s Hell Town. I’m so in love with it. We've currently locked the picture edit. So now that the edit is done, we can begin sound design and music. I've worked with Mark Booker as an actor several times, but he's also an amazing musician and sound editor. He's currently working on Hell Town. I hope to have the color timing complete end of November, and then it's off to film festivals and midnight screenings. I'm so excited for everyone to become a hellion.

"Recently, I went to Los Cabos, Mexico, to direct another feature with Susan Traylor. That one, called El Ganzo, is still in the editing stage. It’s a mysterious memory remembered like a dream. It feels like my finest film. It co-stars Anslem Richardson and is set entirely in the Los Cabos region of Mexico – which was recently decimated by hurricane Odile. Please share this for support: www.cabohurricanefund.com

website: www.dikenga.com

It's ironic that, although he is best known for low-budget horror movies, Pat Higgins' most terrifying feature is actually a documentary about notorious shock-rock singer Erika Spawn. In September 2012, to tie in with the new Director's Cut of The Devil's Music, Pat kindly answered a few questions about this powerful and disturbing film (For fun, we also did a 'fake interview' in which Pat pretended that The Devil's Music was fiction, just one of his low-budget horror movies.)

How has your view of Erika Spawn and the events chronicled in your film changed between 2007 and now?
"I went into the project believing that Erika was either massively deluded or the perpetrator of one of the greatest hoaxes in popular culture. I was wrong. It occurs to me now, looking back at the footage, what an incredibly brave and perceptive woman she was."

What did the film’s participants think of The Devil’s Music, and are you still in contact with any of them?
"Eddie Meachum, Erika's manager, was very happy with the original cut. I heard he turned up to one of the festival showings and just sat in the back row, watching the audience react. I always liked Eddie and we kept in touch for quite a while. Around 2012, he deleted all social media and all his phone numbers stopped working. I heard he'd applied to that Google 'right to be forgotten' thing. I think it all just got too much for him yet again; he’s probably gone off to live in the desert somewhere. ZC, the drummer, apparently thought the movie was ‘okay’. I couldn't give a shit what Adele Black made of it."

I understand that since recording the commentary for the Director’s Cut you’ve been convalescing. Was your health affected by the stress of having to revisit this intense subject matter that you thought you had finished with?
"They've labeled that commentary 'director's breakdown' or something on the DVD, which I think is a bit of a low blow. I always knew that revisiting the material was likely to provoke an intense reaction but I took the risk anyway. But, yes, it's been stressful. I can't imagine I'll be doing a tenth anniversary special edition in a couple of years. I’m now officially done with it."

What did you think of David Suddenham’s 2010 biography of Erika Spawn, which covered some of the same ground as your film but came to different conclusions?
"Suddenham is, I'm sure, sincere about the conclusions that he's come to given the limited research materials available to him. I'm sure he considers it a competently researched and adequately written biography, and I wish him well."

Two years ago an extraordinary (but somewhat blurry) photo surfaced allegedly showing Robin Harris, Stef Regan and Adele Black together at a party. Erika Spawn fans are massively divided over whether it’s genuine and what it might mean. What do you think: another level of mystery, mistaken identity or a troll with good Photoshop skills?
"I think it's genuine, sadly enough, and I think that the only real thing left open to discussion about the photograph is the date. Some argue that it was taken in 2005, but I've heard others argue for 2009 which, given the timelines we're dealing with here, would throw the veracity of everything we think we know into doubt."

Do you have any regrets at ever taking on this project?
"If I could have my time over again, I never would have gotten involved. I still hear voices in the night. Whispers in the shadows. He had teeth in his throat back then, and he still does."

website: www.jinx.co.uk

When I interviewed Pat in 2012 about the director's cut of his notorious rock documentaryThe Devil's Music, we thought it might also be fun to do a 'fake' interview as if the film was just one of his low-budget horror movies. The questions and answers below should be read in that light.

The Devil’s Music was a terrific film to start with. Why did you feel the need to tinker with it (you George Lucas, you!)?
"First of all, thanks very much! It’s great that the movie found a small but extremely enthusiastic audience. Cine du Monde were eager to put something really special for the release and out-do the incredibly cool (but long deleted) US release from 2009. There were a couple of great bits that we'd lost for running time reasons, and I wanted to bring them back. The re-release was a great opportunity to scratch the itch!"

Why did you decide to record an ‘in character’ director’s commentary and is/will there be a real one?
"The US release back in 2009 also had an 'in character' commentary, but it was poorly recorded and didn't synch up the way we’d wanted. It did, however, seem that the idea itself worked just fine, so we had another crack at it and I think it works pretty well. I loved the idea of just carrying on the idea that the whole thing was 'real' for longer than we needed to. Almost like the way Stewart Lee uses repetition in comedy , where something goes from really funny to less funny to tedious to really funny again. I guess we wondered if the same principal could be applied to 'creepy' if we just held the pretence long enough. As for a 'real' one, we just ran out of time. Maybe we'll do one as a download or something."

What sort of balance is there inside you between the frustrated actor and the frustrated rock star?
"In the early '90s, I made countless music videos and four-track demos with a bunch of mates. My frustrated rock star was in full effect during that period, but hasn’t often reared its ugly head since then. I've never been hugely interested in acting since discovering at age four that you didn't get to do it in real time. Before that, I thought Sam J Jones would turn up on set and just be Flash Gordon for 100 minutes. Snog Melody Anderson, blow some shit up, fly a rocket cycle and go home with the job done. At that point, acting sounded amazing. Once I learned the truth - not so much."

Why did you make a one-day, half-hour remake of TrashHouse?
"Why not? It was a bunch of really creative people doing something crazy just for fun. TrashHouse took 18 months and thousands of pounds back in 2003/2004 so I was fascinated with what we could do nowadays with a single day and no money whatsoever. Technology has changed, I've changed. Felt like a cool thing to do, and to approach it entirely as a democracy (no one person 'directed') and just put it online for fun was extremely liberating. We screwed up the sound a bit, but otherwise I think it was a hell of an achievement for a day’s work. I got to work with a bunch of old friends, alongside incredibly talented people like MJ Dixon who I’d never had the opportunity to work with before."

In the past year you’ve produced a Special Edition of KillerKiller, a Director’s Cut of The Devil’s Music, a remake of TrashHouse and an audio sequel to HellBride. But you haven’t made an actual new feature in seven years. What’s going on?
"Don’t forget the live masterclass things! We’ve been doing them too; ‘Werewolves, Cheerleaders & Chainsaws’ is still online as a freebie. I’m doing the last date of ‘Fake Blood, Real Guts’ at Horror-on-Sea East in November and then we start the new show ‘How Not to Make a Horror Movie’ in January. So, God, we’ve been busy.

"As you mention, though, we haven’t shot an entire feature ourselves for seven years, and my completed scripts that we have in-house are looking more likely to get made on bigger budgets elsewhere. I’d love to shoot another micro-budget feature at some point, but it ends up dominating an entire year of your life in a way that smaller or shorter projects don’t."

Whatever happened to Evil Apps?
"It’s still very much on the front burner (I was only tweaking the script yesterday, as it happens) but once again it’s likely to end up being sold elsewhere rather than filmed by Jinx. It’s a really interesting, edgy script – it feels a bit like a high-tech, blood splattered cousin of Mean Girls and Heathers – and we’re determined to find a terrific home for it."

Do you, Jim Eaves and Al Ronald have any plans to complete the Death Tales trilogy?
"I couldn’t possible comment. But I’m sure I will soon."

website: www.jinx.co.uk

Director: Miguel Bardem
Writer: Nacho Faerna
Producer: Francisco Ramos
Cast: Roberto Álvarez, Javivi, Elia Galera
Country: Spain
Year of release: 1999
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Nucleus Films)

I saw La Mujer Más Fea del Mundo at Fantasporto in 2000 (where it won the Silver Mélies) but it has taken five years or so to make it to Britain as one of the first releases from Marc Morris and Jake West’s Nucleus Films label.

On New Year’s Eve 2010, police detective Teniente Arribas (Roberto Álvarez: Nos Miran, Between Your Legs) sits alone in his Madrid apartment watching a movie about spaceships (a clever bit of misdirection which briefly fools us into thinking that this sci-fi movie is going to be something else entirely). Shortly after midnight he is called to the scene of a particularly gruesome murder in an old people’s home, where he meets up with Sergeant Pelayo (‘Javivi’ - aka Javier Gil Valle: Los Lobos de Washington).

What could become a simple Euro-cop movie set in the near future becomes more involved when we (reasonably swiftly) discover that the prime suspect is the mysterious and glamorous Lola Otero (Elia Galera, later a presenter on the Spanish version of Pop Stars). A few years earlier this statuesque beauty had appeared from nowhere and become a regular feature on magazine covers as she dated and became engaged to Spain’s most eligible bachelor, Luis Casanova (Alberto San Juan also in Between Your Legs and Los Lobos de Washington plus comedy horror flick Cosa de Brujas) - until he was discovered to be having an affair with that year’s Miss Spain.

After the Casanova wedding, Lola disappeared from society and the happy couple were discovered murdered.

Through flashbacks to Lola’s childhood we discover her dark secret: she was born hideously, hideously ugly - bad enough to make people vomit when they saw her. Teased mercilessly by her schoolfriends who nicknamed her ‘the Malaysian foetus’(!), but befriended by a blind nun, she became understandably embittered. But help was at hand in the shape of Dr Werner (Héctor Alterio: Scarab, Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and Blood) whose revolutionary and controversial treatment transformed the ugly girl into the beauty who graced the society pages. However, Lola requires regular injections of Werner’s genetics-altering drug to remain as she is.

As Arribas and Pelayo investigate the case further they discover that the latest murder is one in a series, some previously recorded as fatal accidents, and that all the victims are former Miss Spains. The film climaxes at that year’s pageant with the cops trying to figure out which of the girls is the killer in disguise.

A very funny near-future black comedy, The Ugliest Woman in the World suffered slightly from unfair comparison by being released around the same time as the Sandra Bullock starrer Miss Congeniality which has a similar plot to this film’s final act (without the SF elements). Arribas and Pelayo make an appealing double act and the latter supplies a subplot; when we first meet him he has come from a fancy dress party where he was ‘Clark Gable’ and met a very lovely lady lion tamer who subsequently turns out to have a secret.

The actual SF elements of the movie are slim but essential to the plot. Young Lola’s face is always kept hidden and it is only right at the end that we get to see her in all her hideous glory. Though this scene is a triumph of prosthetics and bladder effects, augmented by a little CGI, the finished result can never live up to the ugliness that we have been promised because nothing could.

Thoroughly enjoyable, wickedly comic and unashamedly Spanish, Ugliest Woman is a smashing movie which, like so many other recent European genre movies, has been unfairly ignored internationally. It’s great to see it finally made available in the UK, nicely packaged with some great extras as one would expect from Nucleus.

The cast also includes Saturnino Garcia (Acción Mutante, Rojo Sangre), Ramón Barea (Acción Mutante, La Madre Muerte), Alicia Agut (Almodovar’s The Flower of My Secret) and Luis Ciges (The Dracula Saga, Vengeance of the Zombies, Horror Rises from the Tomb, House of Psychotic Women, The Vampires’ Night Orgy, Night of the the Seagulls, Island of the Damned, Human Beasts - blimey!). Quite a number of the actors were also in Alex de la Iglesia’s La Communidad and/or The Day of the Beast. The uncredited actor seen briefly on TV as the President of Spain is Santiago Segura (Blade II, Beyond Re-Animator, Hellboy and, erm, Killer Barbys). Reyes Abades is one of the credited special effects men; his extraordinary CV includes Abre los Ojos, Tesis, The Devil’s Backbone, Tie Me Up! Time Me Down!, The House of Bernardo Alba, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Rowing in the Wind and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom.

MJS rating: B+

Directors: Don Adams, Harry Picardi
Writers: Don Adams, Harry Picardi
Producers: Don Adams, Harry Picardi
Cast: Michael Galvin, Mark Vollmers, Susan Karsnick
Year of release: 2001
Country: USA
Reviewed from: US DVD (Tempe/Cult Video)

Hidden behind an exploitation title which sounds like a dodgy Italian 1970s zombie film is in fact an old-fashioned ghost story, in this first feature from the team of Adams and Picardi (who also made Jigsaw and edited Frankenstein Reborn!).

When teenager Eric goes to stay with his grandfather on the outskirts of a tiny, middle-of-nowhere town, he finds an old commemorative spoon, dated 1933, under a woodpile. He wakes one night to see a ghostly little girl sitting above him on a swing then later, seemingly sleepwalking (the movie was filmed as Sleepwalker), he goes to the town cemetery, opens up a grave and burns the remains of the body within (Old Flames was another working title, apparently!). Another night one of the town’s old residents, who lives in an old school bus, is killed by arson, again perpetrated by Eric, who is having strange dreams of the little girl, Julia, both as an eight-year-old and as a young woman. There are also flashbacks to a violent attack on Julia’s parents, in the course of which the little girl hid in a wooden chest.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to work out that supernatural forces are somehow controlling Eric and using him to take much-delayed vengeance on the attackers. The problem is that it’s completely unclear how aware Eric is about what’s going on. He apparently knows he’s committing murder, and even goes to the trouble of chaining himself to his bed one night, to no avail. There must be some major internal conflict going on in his head, which his conversations with Julia could have externalised, but we never get that. And Grandpa, though solidly played by Mark Vollmers (the bartender in Jigsaw), seems curiously unconcerned about the murder of two of his friends - certainly far less concerned than he should be...

The ending is an interesting twist, but some earlier development of this idea would have been welcome. As it is, we seem to be just skimming the surface of the story, which is a shame.

Technically, this is a well-made film, though one can clearly see development in Adams and Picardi’s ability in their second film (Vengeance... was actually filmed seven years before Jigsaw). The grainy image suggests the film may have been shot on 8mm, and the DVD exhibits some nasty artefacting in a couple of places (for some reason, both times after an image of ‘snow’ on a TV screen). The film-makers are a little too eager to switch to black and white or sepia at the drop of a hat, but that can be put down to youthful enthusiasm. There’s also an odd sequence when an old guy spies on his teenage grand-daughter getting undressed then imagines a stripper cooing, “I love you, Grandpa.” Far be it from me to complain about a shapely young lady getting her kit off, but this doesn’t seem to have any connection to anything (the body is a stripper named Dallas but the voice is none other than Ariauna Albright from Polymorph, The Dead Hate the Living, Witchouse 1 and 2, etc).

Like all the current batch of Full Moon/Tempe collaborations this is nominally executive produced by Charles Band. Included on this double-sided ‘Lunar Edition’ disc are a director’s commentary, another (shorter) Adams/Picardi film Schrek (with commentary and making of, and not to be confused with any animated ogres), plus rather pre-emptive ‘making of’ featurettes for two of their forthcoming films, Warwolf and Red Eyes. Seems odd to have a ‘making of’ for a film that’s not actually on the disc, but there you go...

Nevertheless, on the basis of their first two features, Adams and Picardi exhibit both passion and talent. As directors they’re great, though they do need to put more work into the plots and characterisations of their scripts.

MJS rating: C+

Director: Kazuya Konaka
Writer: Keiichi Hasegawa
Producer: Kiyoshi Suzuki
Cast: Tetsuya Bessho, Kenya Osumi, Kyoko Toyama
Country: Japan
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener DVD

Watching this latest incarnation of the long-running movie/TV series, I couldn't help thinking about the similarities between Ultraman and Doctor Who. Both franchises started in the 1960s ('63 for the Doctor, '66 for the big silver guy) and star an alien who comes to Earth where he befriends and protects humans, while also continuing his adventures in outer space. Both characters have 'superhuman' abilities of some sort and super-advanced technology without being conventional superheroes and can pass for human when necessary.

Both series have changed constantly over the years, including not only their lead actor but the nature and identity of the lead character, even though that lead character has in other ways remained constant (and both have experimented with teaming up different incarnations of the lead character in various combinations). Both are primarily TV franchises which have spun off into films, books, comics, stage shows and other media as well as inspiring plenty of toys and collectables. They are, on the one hand, children's series yet enjoyed by many adults - not merely for nostalgia value - and have attracted a cult following outside their country of origin where the subtleties and intentions of the stories can be widely mis- and re-interpreted.

On the negative side, Ultraman and Doctor Who have both become bogged down - the former with repetition and formula, the latter with continuity and back story. They limit themselves by catering increasingly for established fans at the expense of those coming to the franchises anew. And their effects, especially their monster effects, have become outdated and a little embarrassing - or at least, are viewed as such by many people who don't actually watch the series, which is almost as bad.

In 2005 Doctor Who returned after a 16-year-hiatus (the longest that Ultraman has ever been absent from the screen, I think, is four years) with Christopher Eccleston in the lead role. The new version skipped over a lot of the old continuity without contradicting it or throwing it out, leaving viewers pleasantly uncertain/unbothered about whether this was a sequel (effectively, a continuation of the old series) or a reinterpretation (basically starting from scratch again). The essential premise remained unchanged, successfully fulfilling both the concept of that premise as it existed in the wider cultural zeitgeist and the concept as understood by the hardcore fans. Sufficient iconography was there to please everyone, no matter how detailed or vague their memories - TARDIS, Daleks, sonic screwdriver - without getting in the way of those for whom the series was something completely new.

Around the same time, the character of Ultraman was similarly reinvented in this movie which hit Japanese cinemas in December 2004 - and with, in this reviewer's opinion, similar success. What do we know about the Doctor? He's an alien, a 'Time Lord', who travels in time and space using a spaceship that looks like a blue telephone box (called the TARDIS) which is bigger inside than out. He has a young female companion with him in a strictly platonic relationship, and of all the races he encounters the most deadly are his sworn enemies, the Daleks.

And what do we know about Ultraman? He is an alien who comes to Earth and somehow melds with a military or quasi-military individual. When danger threatens, usually personified by one or more giant monsters, that individual can transform into Ultraman who is a giant humanoid, clad in a silver and red outfit including a helmet with blank staring eyes. Ultraman is never seen without this outfit which may actually be part of him - is that really a helmet or is it his head? He is handy in a fight against any giant monster, whether grappling one-to-one or blasting off rays. But he can only exist for a short time and must return to human form when a light on his chest starts flashing to indicate that his strength is nearly exhausted.

The more recent series - Ultraman Tiga, Ultraman Dyna and Ultraman Gaia - sought to reinvent the franchise from scratch and although they were evidently more successful than the rather poor 1996 Doctor Who telemovie, nevertheless they may end up being viewed as some sort of 'alternative' franchise. On the other hand, the new TV series Ultraman Max (featuring episodes directed by Gamera helmer Shusuke Kaneko and Takashi Miike!) which is in production as I write this in mid-2005 apparently returns the character closer to his roots and it could be this movie which becomes the equivalent of the Paul McGann Who film.

So what is Ultraman: The Next all about? Tetsuya Bessho (Godzilla vs Mothra, Parasite Eve) plays air force pilot Lieutenant Shunichi Maki, who flies an F-15 Eagle and whose nearly-six-year-old son Keimu (Ryohei Hirota) suffers from a terminal blood disease that means he may not see his seventh birthday. Understandably wanting to spend more time with his little boy while he has the chance, Maki retires from the air force and takes a job piloting a light aircraft for private travellers, operating from a small local airport.

Just before Maki retires, he and his wingman Captain Kurashima are scrambled to intercept a mysterious radar blip travelling at incredible speed. Kurashima's instruments go haywire and force him to abort but Maki carries on and finds that the UFO is a glowing red light which envelopes his plane. He finds himself seeming to float in some sort of glowing tunnel where he can see a giant humanoid. (The tunnel effect is, by coincidence, basically the same as that used in the title sequence of Doctor Who!)

Maki's Eagle explodes and he is believed dead, but he later stumbles into a roadside diner, tattered and bruised but without any serious injuries, and with no idea how he survived.

Once into civvy street, Maki's life settles down until a passenger on one of his flights (who has been secretly following and photographing him) pulls a gun and forces him to divert to a nearby highway, which has been specially closed by the military in order for his plane to land. He is then driven to a top secret military base where he is interrogated about what really happened on that mysterious flight. Back at the airport, Keimu waits for his daddy with Maki's wife Yoko (Nae Yuki) and their joy when his plane lands turns to dismay when they find that the pilot is not Maki but Kurashima, accompanied by two soldiers. Kurashima can't tell them anything about where Maki is, but he can at least confirm that he is alive.

That female passenger who pulled a gun and is now interrogating Maki is a military scientist named Sara Mizuhara (Kyoko Toyama: An Obsession) who works for an anti-terrorist organisation called the BCST. She explains that a similar (but blue) light was reported in the seabed location of a downed UFO a few weeks earlier and had similarly affected the minisub pilot who was sent to investigate it: the sub was destroyed but he somehow survived. Archived security camera footage shows this poor soul, Takafumi Udo (Kenya Osumi), in a cell where he can be seen to be gradually mutating into some sort of reptilian beast. He later escaped, drawing to himself and absorbing hundreds of lizards which enabled him to grow and mutate, eventually blasting out of the base. We actually saw this in a dimly lit prologue, with Sara unable to fire at the monster as Udo's human face reappears briefly.

With the monster (codenamed 'The One', and still played by Osumi inside the costume; interestingly he is actually a professional dancer) now on the loose somewhere, the military are naturally keen to contain and study Maki as his development may give them some clue about how to defeat The One. He is codenamed 'The Next' - which explains the movie's apparently ungrammatical title - and held in a fortified underground cell. When The One comes calling, apparently attracted by some sort of psychic link with The Next, something takes over Maki and he is able to break out of his cell, then grows to about twenty feet tall and mutates into some sort of silver-clad alien being.

It's a measure of the maturity of the film-makers that we are nearly halfway through the film before we get our first sight of Ultraman (and that the character is never referred to by that name until right at the end of the film, when a news reporter comes up with it).

The two large (but interestingly, not giant) aliens fight as Sara looks on, incredulous. At one point, she is about to be thrown aside by The One's lengthy, powerful tail but The Next throws himself in the way. Eventually The One smashes its way out of the building, as a light on The Next's chest starts to flash and he collapses into a heap, morphing and shrinking back into the form of Maki.

There are further revelations between this point and the climactic return match, but they mostly concern the people, not the monsters. We never find out what The One and The Next actually are, or where they come from, or what sort of hold they may have over their respective hosts. We do later see Udo once again in human form, further cementing the similarities between the two aliens, although the alien-human connection seems to be different with Udo/The One. The implication is that two warring entities have come to Earth and are continuing an existing fight, with humanity now caught up in the middle. This gives the film a strong narrative thread which stands alone without requiring any foreknowledge of Ultraman's past.

Where the movie really scores is in exploring the way that all this impacts on the lives of Maki, Sara and everyone else who is directly or peripherally involved, which I have always held to be a large part of what good science fiction is about. Take your science fictional premise - whether it's aliens or artificial intelligence or time travel or nanotechnology or whatever - and show how that would affect people. (The new Doctor Who does this terrifically too. For the first time, we get to see how the sudden 'disappearance' of the Doctor's companion affects those closest to her.) We learn more about Sara and discover why she didn't kill Udo/The One when she had the chance, and there is redemption for Kurashima who feels guilty over his collusion with his friend's kidnappers. There are some great minor characters too, including the boss of the airport where Maki works and a junior military officer who challenges Sara over her actions which have resulted in the deaths of some of his men. When did you last see a monster movie where somebody was actually bothered that a squad of miltary grunts had been killed by the beastie?

Although the 'terminally ill son' subplot gets a wee bit soap opera-esque at times, it gives the character of Maki greater depth and clearly defined motivation, both in seeking normality and in resolving to accept the responsibility thrust on him to aid the military organisation which kidnapped him. But more than this we get some real insight into what it might be like to actually be Ultraman's host - a concept which of course implies that Ultraman himself is a form of parasite. Maki doesn't know that he is (or could be) the defender of mankind against alien attack. All he knows is that under certain circumstances he loses consciousness and/or control and something alien (in every sense) takes him over for its own ends. We do later see Ultraman save a mother and child from a collapsing building, but we are left to make up our own minds whether this is the action of a sympathetic human father (Maki is the first ever Ultraman host to have a wife and kid) or a philanthropic alien - or some melding of the two.

Ultraman/The Next may be a superhero (he isn't really one in this movie, except in the broadest possible sense, but he could become one) but Maki isn't any sort of hero at all, super or otherwise. He's just some poor guy who is being used by something beyond his, or anybody's, understanding - and also being used by the military. The great irony lies in the fact that Maki was a military man himself, a terrific Eagle pilot, but he tried to escape the responsibilities of that life, only to have something bigger and worse thrust upon him (and by proxy, upon his family) against his will. It's his acceptance of this, but only on his own terms as much as he can (for example, he briefly escapes his captors when he hears that his son is in hospital) which makes him an ersatz hero, not his uncontrollable ability to grow to 50 metres high and fire energy blasts from his forearms.

The difference between this version and previous incarnations is summed up perfectly in a line that a shaken, confused, possibly even terrified Maki says after that first big fight with The One: "I became a monster." In fact there are numerous dialogue references to Maki's new giant alter ego as a 'monster' - and none as a 'hero'.

And yes, Ultraman does grow to his traditional giant size before the final battle, to match the now-similarly enormous The One, although there is an unusual scene at one stage where the good guy, even at 20 feet or so, is dwarfed by the newly grown monster, something that has rarely if ever been seen before.

As well as a script which brings new depth and breadth to both plot and characterisation, Ultraman: The Next also benefits from good special effects, including a CGI Ultraman for the climactic flying sequences (these were directed by Ichiroh Itano whose anime credits include Urusei Yasura, Macross and Megazone 23). Those who consider anything less than state-of-the-Hollywood-art effects to be 'cheap' will no doubt bring their prejudices to bear and still mock, but this movie is a huge step up from 1970s/1980s series that many people in the West might recall. There are still limitations in the suitmation; for example The One has a quite long but completely rigid neck - the actor's head is between the costume's shoulders - which means that the monster often tends to not look at where it is going or what it is doing. This is a shame because the head itself is an excellent animatronic effect with moving jaw and eyes. If a flexible neck couldn't be achieved on the budget available, then the neck should have been shortened to almost nothing. It's a design problem rather than a construction one.

On the whole, however, The One is a terrific monster. There is a marvellous sequence towards the end of the film when he draws to himself, and absorbs, hundreds of crows. As with the lizards (and rats in another sequence) this causes him to grow and mutate, in this case sprouting a massive pair of wings in preparation for the climactic aerial showdown with The Next. In striking a heraldic pose, and in another shot when he bursts out of the ground, The One reminded me of the recent Thai monster flick Garuda, though this is probably just coincidence. The removal/destruction of these wings, incidentally, is arguably the highlight of the film, a pair of successive images which form a real 'double wow' moment.

Ultraman's own costume is fantastic. It looks enough like the (many) previous incarnations to be recognisable but has been given a 21st century make-over, resembling a suit of body armour or an android body. As mentioned above, I subscribe to the theory that what we see as a 'costume' is actually the being himself, and this stylish, effective design plays to that idea much more than the old silver ski-suits with their baggy wrinkles at hips and shoulders ever did. We do, incidentally, finally get to see the iconic crossed-arms pose but like so much else here a rationale has been found for this. It's a way for the character to steady his forearms and blast off his energy bolts accurately. He doesn't just stand like that because That's What Ultraman Does and the fanboys expect it. Similarly, the flashing light on the character's chest, which has always previously been an entirely gratuitous 'ticking clock' to add tension (and sometimes to keep effects sequences to an affordable length!) is finally given a genuine reason to exist in this movie.

Another interesting point of note is that there is very little miniature work on show. Two of the three main Ultraman-vs-monster fights (monster-vs-monster?) actually take place indoors and the third is mostly green-screened (very effectively, using low-angled shots) against real buildings, before shifting up into the sky. The camera is frequently positioned at human eye-level, looking up at the two giants, which works wonders. There is a tendency for effects unit directors on kaiju eiga to place their camera at the eye-level of their protagonists which often hinders the suspension of disbelief required to accept that these are giant beings, not just two men in costumes. Similarly, many effects directors on these pictures don't bother to overcrank the camera during action shots, which is essential to slow down the movement slightly and give these giant beings weight; it's done properly here. Ultraman: The Next is a film made by people who have looked at current and previous productions within this genre and learned from them, without ditching what made them great in the first place.

This is director Kazuya Konaka’s fourth Ultraman movie, following Ultraman Zearth 2, Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Dyna and Ultraman Gaia: The Battle in Hyperspace (which was actually a three-way team-up between Messrs Gaia, Tiga and Dyna). He also directed the thoughtful sci-fi picture Dimension Travellers and ghost story Shigatsu Kaidan. Keiichi Hasegawa’s other scriptwork includes the aforementioned Gaia/Tiga/Dyna picture, various episodes of the Ultraman Tiga TV series and the Godzilla kaiju-fest GMK: All Monsters Attack. The cinematography is very dark but that is more likely a problem with the timecoded DVD-R screener that I watched rather than the work of DP Shinichi Ooka. Yuichi Kikuchi (GMK: All Monsters Attack, Godzilla X Mechagodzilla) is credited as special effects director.

I would love to see more Ultraman like this, although by all accounts Ultraman Max restores such temporarily absent elements as the character’s origins in Galaxy M-78 (and slightly baggy silver ski-suits). Maybe production company Tsuburuya have decided that pleasing the hardcore fans is the way to go. But given how many times the character has been reinvented over the years, I would like to think that there is sufficient room for both sorts of Ultraman.

Being picky, my biggest problem with the film is the music. I recall a meeting with the UK Sci-Fi Channel in the mid-1990s, trying to persuade them to show Ultraman and the biggest stumbling block (apart from the fact that the channel was only prepared to pay peanuts) was the martial, orchestral music, which the channel said would need to be replaced with something more techno. Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) nothing ever came of that meeting. In this film, the music (credited to Tak Matsumoto aka 'B'z') is rockier and generally very good but unfortunately his 'Theme from Ultraman' which plays whenever the F-15s appear on screen (and that’s quite often during the first 20 minutes or so) is a stirring pastiche of the Top Gun theme which rapidly becomes as irritating as it is derivative.

That’s a shame, but not nearly enough to spoil a corking movie, and most of the other music is great. (The closing credits play under an English language song by Matsumoto's group TMG called 'Never Good-bye', written by bassist Jack Blades, formerly with Night Ranger and Damn Yankees, and sung by Eric Martin from Mr Big - who must be a kaiju fan because his 2003 solo album was called Destroy All Monsters.)

I can't claim complete familiarity with every incarnation of Ultraman - God knows there have been enough of them - but I really did enjoy Ultraman: The Next hugely. It works not just as a new version of a cinematic/televisual icon, and not just as a terrific sci-fi romp, but as one of the new breed of more sensible kaiju eiga. If you can accept the basics, not least that a fifty-metre tall humanoid could exist and move freely without collapsing under his own weight because of the vastly increased size-to-mass ratio, then what you will find here is a well-written, well-made, exciting, thought-provoking science fiction adventure which explores its premise and builds to a rip-roaring finale.

It's not your parents' Ultraman.

MJS rating: A

Director: Sidney L Caplan
Writers: Sidney L Caplan, Tom Weiner, Steve Kramer, Wally Soul
Producers: Noboru Tsuburaya, Sidney L Caplan
Cast: Barbara Goodson, Steve Kramer, Joe Perry
Country: Japan/USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Isn’t it bloody typical? For years I search the video shops of this land for Ultraman tapes (or indeed any other Japanese superheroes). All I ever find is multiple copies of Ultraman: The Alien Invasion, a feature-length re-edit of the first few episodes of the Australian series Ultraman: Towards the Future. I’m not even sure that the second volume of that was released in the UK; I assume it must have been but I’ve never seen it.

So, in the summer of 2005 when I was writing about the character’s history in a feature on Ultraman: The Next for Neo magazine, I stated with some confidence that the Aussie series is the only one ever released in the UK. And while that issue was on sale - while it was on sale! - I came across this 1983 tape of the 1979 animated version, which was simply called The Ultraman. Bloody typical.

The on-screen title, clearly generated after the fact, is Ultraman 2: The Further Adventures of Ultraman which is all very odd because of the four episodes which make up this faux feature, the first is the series’ opener about the creation of 'the' Ultraman himself. So what, if anything, was in the first animated Ultraman ‘film’, if such a beast exists?

Okay, here’s the set-up. In response to some weird writing that appears in the sky, the Earth Defence Force (sometimes called the Earth Defence Organisation) establishes ‘Emergency Science and Defence Squads’ in every ‘zone’ on Earth. Captain Adam (sometimes called Captain Adams) is put in charge of the Eastern Zone ESDS. He agrees to the job provided that he can have at his disposal a super-amazing aircraft (and occasional submarine) called the Super Star (sometimes called the SS13 - as you can, see there’s not much consistency here).

He gathers around him a team of four people: fat comedy sidekick Marconi, tall engineering genius Glen (who is not mentioned by name until the second episode), beautiful Lieutenant Ann Johnson and enigmatic Commander Harris who has been serving aboard Earth Space Station 3. Piloting his one-man spaceship back to Earth, Harris goes through the usual Ultraman scenario: red light blah blah blah lose control blah blah blah giant figure blah blah blah. Ultraman (for it is he) tells Harris that he must go to Earth, using Harris’ body: “The survival of the whole universe, including Earth, depends on it.”

The story proper starts off with an iceberg that crosses the equator without melting and which eventually cracks open to reveal a giant bipedal dinosaur thing which somehow, shortly afterwards, turns into four identical giant bipedal dinosaur things. And let me tell you folks, with their little arms akimbo and mincing gait these are the campest monsters you ever saw. Nevertheless, the crew of the SS13 - which can launch smaller aircraft from itself - succeed in keeping a straight face long enough to defeat the beasties with the assistance of a mysterious giant stranger dressed in red and silver. (Harris has a green star which he places on his forehead to become Ultraman for a limited time. Of course, as is traditional, none of the others have a clue that their giant benefactor is actually their colleague.)

And so, 22 minutes in, we leap to a different episode which takes place just before Ann’s birthday. Marconi and Glen both have crushes on her, of course, but she is most interested in Harris. In this episode a tornado attacks a power station which derives energy from a giant whirlpool. Investigations reveal that at the centre of the tornado is a monster that looks like a five-tentacled heart. After some more flying around, Ultraman appears and gives it a good hiding.

The third story starts with the team enjoying a bit of a holiday but they are swiftly called back into service to investigate a giant red cloud. Glen manages to capture some of it in a bottle, takes it back to the lab and discovers that it coalesces into a living thing when it gets wet. Adams tells him this is very useful information but it’s not really because it has already started raining and the cloud has become a giant pink yeti. The SS13 battles the big beastie until Ultraman appears, dispels the rain clouds and causes the monster to revert to cloud form.

Probably the best of the four stories is the final one, not least because it has a vaguely decent monster, a sort of giant crocodile thing. We start with Marconi destroying this threat by himself using a hand-held rocket launcher at close range - which everyone agrees is very impressive. We then see something that must happen after most kaiju eiga but rarely gets shown: somebody clearing away the bloody great reptilian corpse. The guy supervising the crane and lorry involved turns out to be the Chief of the Space Biology Group who wants the body to study. Oh, and it’s not quite dead (sorry, Marconi). At the same time, a young boy discovers a baby version of the monster and adopts it as a secret pet, despite local warnings that the authorities are looking for a strange creature which could be dangerous. Of course, ‘Baby’ grows at an alarming rate and eventually becomes a full-grown crocodile-thing. Both plots in this episode show some promise and it’s just a shame that there is no apparent connection between them.

Oh, and there’s one really curious thing which I haven’t yet mentioned: the obligatory robot sidekick. In this case it’s a squat, crinkly, alien-looking blob named PDQ who carries a very tiny grey monkey on his shoulder. He makes no significant contribution to any of the stories, is absolutely never explained (nor is his monkey) and really only serves to raise the weirdness quotient of this otherwise distinctly lacklustre cartoon.

Even if you enjoy anime (and as I have observed elsewhere, I can’t stand the stuff) you have to be pretty tolerant to sit through Ultraman II. Stuff like Battle of the Planets may have been fun when we were kids but it doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of 21st century eyes and The Ultraman isn’t even up to Battle of the Planets standards. Frankly it’s barely up to Thunderbirds 2086 standards.

The characters are one-dimensional, the plots arbitrary - not nonsensical enough to be entertaining, just boring - and the animation is as simplistic and basic as the scripts. The music is derivative and obvious, the monsters for the most part are bollocks and Ultraman is hardly in it at all. This is definitely one for completists. I watched the tape once then gave it away for someone else to ‘enjoy.’

The Ultraman/Ultraman II has no connection with the rest of Ultraman continuity, kicking off with an origin story in a world where the Ultra Brothers are completely unknown (much like Ultraman: The Next, but there the similarities end!). In Japan this version of the character was apparently known as Ultraman Jonias or Ultraman Joe and featured in some stage shows as well as the cartoon. It took me a while to track down confirmation but apparently there was a previous western release of animated episodes which was called The Adventures of Ultraman. However, as this ‘sequel’ kicks off with episode one, it’s difficult to see what could have been on the first volume.

Despite the very obvious breaks between episodes, it’s clear from the linking narration that it was added after the shows were combined into this ersatz feature. The ‘film’ finishes with a series of still images which presumably were designed to play under the closing credits of the episodes if the show was broadcast. There was evidently a Region 1 DVD release of this a while back but that is now deleted.

The voice artists are Barbara Goodson (who was the voice of Rita Repulsa in the early series of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and both Power Rangers films, and also contributed voices to Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, Digimon, Cowboy Bebop and stacks of other interchangeable anime), Steve Kramer (who wrote the English script for Zeram), Tom Weiner (also credited as narrator) and Joe Perry. Director/writer/producer Sidney L Caplan apparently also produced Bert I Gordon’s Necromancy and Reginald Le Borg’s So Evil, My Sister. The film is presented as ‘produced by Tsuburaya Production Company Ltd and Associates Entertainment International’; Noboru Tsuburaya’s credit as producer is the only Japanese name to be seen.

MJS rating: C-

[Addendum: Would you Adam and Eve it? Less than a month later, I found a 1987 reissue of this film so it was actually released twice in this country. - MJS]

In a very short time, Jonathan Sothcott has established himself as a major player on the UK indie film scene, producing a range of genre pictures through his production company Black and Blue Films. He kindly answered a few questions for me in August 2010 around the time ofDead Cert’s premiere at Frightfest.

Can you sum up how your previous career has led you to your current work as a film producer?
“Since seeing Jaws on Betamax as a very small boy I always loved films, and genre films in particular. Growing up on a diet of Hammer Horror, 007 and Doctor Who defined my tastes clearly, but living in the country with no connection at all to 'the media' I didn't realise till quite late that I wanted to be a film-maker and wouldn't have known where to start anyway. But I wanted to be involved with film... so became a film journalist. An obvious part of that was studying how films are and were made, so I had a bit of an advantage.

“I also worked in TV as a buyer, so had a certain understanding of the commercial realities of the business. Eventually, aged 26, I decided that making my own films was the way forward. Four years on and five films down I seem to be getting away with it!”

How much are you developing a rep company and how much are you just tapping into an existing group of London actors who all seem to keep appearing together on screen?
“There are two sides to this - reading your (excellent - and very fair) review of Just for the Record, I noticed you picked up on the fact that I used a lot of the cast from Football Factory and Rise of the Footsoldier. Why? Because between them they have sold over two million DVDs in the UK - and I think people enjoy familiar faces in genre films, which is one of the reasons we love Hammer movies.

“As a rep company, though, its a fuckin' great one - Steven Berkoff, Sean Pertwee, Craig Fairbrass, Colin Salmon, Phil Davis, Billy Murray - these are all world class screen actors! And then look at the girls - Jane March, Lisa McAllister, Jaime Murray, MyAnna Buring - again, brilliant talents all of whom audiences like. And we even get wild cards like Victoria Silvstedt who paid her own flights to come and do JFTR as a favour for me. We're very blessed.”

The character of Derek La Farge in Just for the Record, played by Danny Dyer, is specifically stated in the credits as being based on you: to what extent is it an accurate depiction?
“Welllllllllllllllllll it is and it isn't. Ha. Danny is one of my best mates, he's brilliant and when we looked at the script he said, ‘I'm going to play this as you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, preening excitedly at the prospect of screen immortality, ‘how do you mean?’ He then did his impression of me which was pretty funny and it went from there - he wore my ties in the film too (and in Dead Cert).

“You know, the biggest wasted opportunity on JFTR (which is a dreadful film but has some nice performances) is that we finally had an opportunity to do something different with Danny and we squandered it on a crap film. Danny is one of the most talented screen actors in the country and has a very real range - for my money he's my generation's Michael Caine - and I'm slightly ashamed that JFTR wasn't a good enough showcase for that. But wait till you see him in Devil's Playground - a quality film featuring a brilliant performance from DD.”

The problem for British independent films has always been one of distribution: how are you overcoming this?
“That's not the problem - I have great relationships with ever major distributor - Momentum, E1, Lionsgate, Sony, Revolver, the lot. If you make a commercial product, distribution isn't the issue. The issue is making it in the first place - ie. funding - it's so hard to fund indie films in this country. The private sector is riddled with wankers and bullshitters who actually don't have any money and don't realise that they're fucking with people's lives. The Film Council (good riddance) was no help to my kind of films either - we weren't trendy enough and didn't wear sandals - and I hope somebody comes up with a realistic, commercially-driven alternative so that film making in this country can become a real business like it is in the States or France.”

Why do you think that Black and Blue films has been able to establish itself as something of a movie factory when others have made grandiose announcements and promoted ambitious production slates then disappeared? What are you doing right?
“Well I hope we're doing okay. I think we are making solid genre films at a price, which is really the secret of independent film making. We also use quality talent on both sides of the camera (with the odd blip!) and you have to remember I'm not just in this game to make money. I'm a genre buff too, I go and buy this stuff in HMV like everyone else and I guess I'm trying to make the films that I'd like as a punter.”

I gather that the remake of Exposé has a very different story and now may not even end up being called Exposé, so in what sense is it a remake? [It was eventually made as Stalker - MJS]
“Going back a few years it was a good jumping off point - there are similarities, but ours is a cleverer, more sophisticated movie - in a lot of ways it’s more like those ‘60s Hammer psycho-thrillers like Taste of Fear and Paranoiac. It’s a really smart, fun little movie with some great performances, brilliantly directed, and I think people will like it.”

As executive producer, what was your involvement with Wishbaby and what are your views on the film?
“Parsons and Sprackling are both old mates of mine and I came in late and was really only involved in the financing. I think it was an intelligent, well-made art house horror movie that should have done much, much better business. But you know, sometimes movies just fall through the cracks - the time isn't right for them - and are rediscovered 20 years later when they find an audience. I'm proud to have been involved with Wishbaby though.”

What do you think Dead Cert brings to the vampire genre that hasn't been done before?
“Cockney gangsters! Haha. No, it really was conceived as a homage to films like Dracula AD 1972 and Count Yorga, by way of Fright Night and Vamp. It’s a fun romp with some great performances - Craig is by far the best and most credible action man in British cinema, Lisa's a born movie star who it’s almost impossible not to fall in love with, Billy and Berkoff are towering thesps giving a real gothic feel to the proceedings and Danny's cameo at the end - which he came and did as a favour - is a lot of fun - that got a huge round of applause at Frightfest last night.”

Website: www.richwaterfilms.com

Gabriel Thomson played the title role in The New Adventures of Pinocchio, though he has since become better known for playing the younger son in BBC sitcom My Family. I interviewed him on the Luxembourg set of The New Adventures in May 1999, and part of this interview appeared in the children’s section of The Sunday Times!

How old are you, and how long have you been acting?
“I’m 12 and I’ve been doing amateur acting for a long time, in different plays. I used to go to Devon every year, which is like our family’s second home, and we did plays called Golliards, but they’ve finished now. They were great fun; I did that since I was about four.”

Do you come from an acting family?
“My dad was an actor and he’s now become a drama teacher in the Guildford School of Acting, and my mum’s a choreographer.”

Is this your first feature film?
“Yes. I did Great Expectations on the BBC, but this is the first cinema film I’ve ever done.”

How did you land that role?
“When I was younger, we knew the casting director of a film called Painted Lady, and the casting director said, ‘Come along, it’s a really small role but it’ll be some fun. Just a couple of hours’ work.’ And I did the couple of hours’ work and the director liked me so, however long after, he called me back and asked me to audition for Great Expectations. So I did, and I was recalled and recalled again and I got that part.”

How did you get this role?
“They just asked. They said, ‘We saw Great Expectations, and would you like to be in it?’ At first I said no, because I’m hoping to audition for a film called About a Boy by Nick Hornby. I really wanted to audition for that. Then my agent, who I signed up with after Great Expectations - he asked if I wanted an agent and I said yes - said, ‘It’s going to be done by this company called New Line or something, so it’ll be big and it’ll be good.’ So I said ‘Yes, okay, I’ll do it.’ I also found out that I could possibly send a video of Great Expectations to the director of About a Boy, see if he liked it or whatever, and then go to a recall.”

How much time are you yourself on screen, and how much time is the character a puppet?
“It’s different in this film. In the first, he’s a puppet most of the time, but in this I only spend two or three scenes as a puppet, and then we go on to do whatever we do. I did the voice-overs in about half an hour in a studio yesterday actually, so it didn’t taken long.”

Have you seen the puppet of yourself?
“I haven’t seen it in action yet, but I’ve seen bits of it and it looks amazing. The one I’ve seen has eight motors in its head to do each expression, and the one that’s going to do all the close-ups is going to have 22 expressions. I’ve seen Gepetto’s version of the 22-motor one, and that looks amazing, but I’ve only seen the eight-motor one of mine. I’ve only worked with Gepetto’s so far.”

How have you found Martin Landau to work with?
“Martin Landau’s brilliant, he’s really good. The classic example of an actor is all: ‘Oh, I can’t do that, oh no.’ Martin Landau has done so many films, and yet he’s still really down to Earth and really nice. I really like him.”

When you turn from boy into puppet, how are they doing the effects?
“I think some of it’s going to be done by graphics. If we get round to it, we’re doing it today. I believe it’s going to be me drinking an elixir, then they’re going to do something with graphics, then I’m going to have a latex mask they’re going to put over my face and they’re going to glue it down. So it will be the puppet’s face and look wooden-ish, but I’ll still be my size. Then they’ll do some more graphics as I turn into the puppet, and then it will be the puppet shot.”

Are you keeping up your education?
“Yes, I’ve got a tutor, who also did Gemma and Gregory, who are playing Blue and Isabella, and Ben Ridgeway who’s playing Lampwick. She’s really nice, and she’ll take me out or we’ll stay at the hotel and do some lessons, learn about Luxembourg. We did some Aesop’s fables, and really good, fun stuff. It’s more fun than school, except you don’t get to see your friends which is pity.”

What do your schoolmates think of your career?
“Most of them are really happy for me. Some of my less close friends can be a bit nasty, but most of them are really nice. My good friends are really supportive of it, which is good.”

Do you want to keep doing this when you grow up?
“When I grow up, yes. What I’m trying to do is do as many films as I can possibly get in a short time,and then leave a huge gap, doing school. Then, once it comes to a time when I’m older, I can go to drama college. I can pay my own way through drama college, so I’m trying to get some parts now, so I can pay for it.”

Have you tried to keep the character the same as played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas in the first film?
“I saw the first one, but because it was so short with Jonathan Taylor Thomas, mostly it was just his voice. So it’s quite a lot different. Even continuity: like he has blue eyes in the first one. They made a huge point of it, saying, ‘We’re going to paint his eyes blue like the sky.’ And I’ve got brown eyes! So it’s things like that. I’ve tried to be the sweet character that Pinocchio is.”

Is all the money going into a trust fund for you?
“I’m going to take some of it and put it in my bank, just a small percentage of it, and then I’m going to put the rest of it in a building society and let interest build up, so then I’ll have more money when I’m older.”

What would you like to do eventually? What great roles would you like to play?
“No specific great roles, just challenging roles that are great fun. And I’m desperate: I’m going to have to try to get into an audition for Anakin Skywalker in Episode Two! I was just looking through magazines with Anakin Skywalker in, and thinking, ‘I even look like him! Ah! Why?’ So I’m trying to work up for that. That would be brilliant.”

Director: MJ Dixon
Writer: MJ Dixon
Producers: MJ Dixon, Anna McCarthy, Mem Ferda
Cast: Jade Wallis, Craig Canning, Paris Rivers, Jane Haslehurst
Year of release: 2014
Country: UK
Website: thornmovie.webs.com
Reviewed from: online screener

Legacy of Thorn is a prequel to MJ Dixon’s previous feature Slasher House, though you don’t need to have seen that movie and the only direct connection is a fun little epilogue. Slasher House saw Eleanor James terrorised by three hulking supernatural psychos; Legacy of Thorn features one of those in his own movie.

Thorn (who is never named) is a tall, big-built monster with a silver mask on his face and a pair of machetes somewhat smaller than the impractical, anime-inspired things he wielded in the previous film, although you still wouldn’t want to get in their – or his – way. He comes very much from the zombie/mummy/Frankenstein school of horror chasers in that no matter how fast you run, he’ll catch up with you at a steady walking pace. And then he’ll hack you to bits without any display of emotion.

Really, Legacy of Thorn wants to be a Friday the 13th movie. And there’s nothing wrong with that. On the face of it, the plot is fairly simple: a sequence of people being hacked up by Thorn, their attempts to fight back or escape largely ineffectual. But actually there’s much more going on here, both structurally and narratively.

Four young people manage to subdue Thorn (through the first of several electrocution scenes, all of them rendered somewhat unbelievable due to the guy’s thick-soled rubber goth-boots), remove his mask and chain him up. There’s blonde Jess (Jade Wallis, a model/actress who was in Danny Cotton’s short Revenge of Death), around whom the plot revolves; busty brunette Alice (rising horror starlet Jane Haslehurst who was in Philip Gardiner’s Exorcist Chronicles and Dead Walkers: Rise of the 4th Reich, as were several other cast members), muscular black guy Eric (Paris Rivers) and skinny white guy Clark (Craig Canning, also in those two Philip Gardiner pictures). The two fellas were respectively boyfriend and brother of one of Thorn’s previous victims. Once the monster is restrained – and humanised – the previously clear-cut morality of killing him becomes a little fuzzier, leading to some splendid scenes of character conflict.

This all takes place on 29th February 2012. Intercut with the 2012 story is a series of scenes that occurred exactly four years earlier, on the previous Leap Year Day, involving the same characters plus others. It took me some while to realise – and I felt greatly rewarded when I did realise this – that in an audacious conceit Dixon is presenting the 2008 scenes in reverse order. So that, as one strand of the narrative progresses forward, the other gradually peels back layers, showing us how our characters came to be in the situation in which we first meet them. Eventually, the 2008 story will roll back far enough to reveal the truth behind what’s going on. Or at least hint at it.

In 2008 the characters are 16 and, somewhat bizarrely, seem to be at an American high school – where the girls are cheerleaders and the guys are jocks – even though all the characters are British. That’s an obviously deliberate disconnect which heightens the unreality of this far from realist film. We meet Clark’s sister Becca (Stephanie Jezard, also in ‘psychological urban western’ The Profesional [sic]) and queen bitch school bully Sally (a cracking performance from Strasberg-trained Evie Constanti) plus arsehole jocks Zach (Aaron Jeffcoate: Molly Crows) and Tommy (Anas Belarbi). But because of the reversed chronology, we generally meet people as they die, and then discover how they came to be where they were. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

On top of all that, there are a number of scenes of with police squads attempting to take down Thorn, and a few brief hints at some sort of secret cult, identifiable via tattoos, acting on Thorn’s behalf. That might be a story which is explored further in the promised follow-up, Wrath of Thorn.

Dixon, who likes to be credited as ‘Mj Dixon’ is largely a one-man band, handling cinematography, editing, music, design and multiple other chores. In some areas he was assisted by producer Anna McCarthy, 1st AD Daniel Busby, VFX supervisor/gaffer John ‘Bam’ Goodall (who plays a creepy janitor) and helping hand Paul Malcolm Swindells in various combinations. Despite this, a clear idea of the communal, everyone-pitch-in-together nature of the production is evident in the preponderance of cast names among the crew credits, often en masse. Craig Canning is credited with stunt co-ordination and Mita Patel (Zombie Run, The Fall of Rothan) with make-up.

When ‘Mj’ made Slasher House, he went for a red/green aesthetic so extreme it could be mistaken for two-strip Technicolor. On this film, blue is the predominant colour, with splashes of orange. It’s a more effective colour scheme but doesn’t diminish the stylish look of the photography which is a step above many similar (or at least, similarly budgeted films). This is actually Dixon’s third feature, including the still unreleased Creepsville; before that he made a few shorts including Thorn, a 2009 pre-feature try-out which won a competition at scaryordie.com and which has effectively been remade as the first part of the 2012 story here. There is a clear progression from Slasher House to Legacy of Thorn as the director builds on his own experience and hones his craft while establishing an idiosyncratic style which marks him out as One To Watch in British horror cinema.

If there’s a mis-step here – and I’m being picky – it’s the decision to frame this in a rather extreme ratio which doesn’t benefit the picture. This isn’t a film of wide landscapes or even Kubrick-ian corridor shots, it’s teenagers running away from a seven-foot psycho-demon and too often heads or legs are unhelpfully truncated. Also, in all honesty, some of the ADR is less successful than others. For example there’s a scene at the end by a river, clearly filmed on a very windy day, and the looping is so obvious it threatens to distract from the actual words being looped.

Nevertheless, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy Legacy of Thorn very much. It’s full of action, blood, violence and tension without sacrificing character or story, a tricky balance to pull off, especially when also lighting every scene like the bastard son of Mario Bava.

A solid cast includes Sam Cullingworth (from Eileen Daly’s ghost-hunting trilogy), Lee Bibby (from Antoni McVay’s horror shorts), Simon Craig (The Last Zombi Hunter, Dense Fear Bloodline, Zombie Women of Satan 2), Nikki Webster (the alien thing in Dark Watchers: The Women in Black) and Eschatrilogy director Damien Morter as coppers; plus Nathan Head (Tuck Bushman and the Legend of Piddledown Dale, Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders, Theatre of Fear) and Melissa Hollett (Dead Cert, Apparition of Evil) as Jess’s parents.

Thorn himself (a character conceived by Dixon as a reaction to the watering down of Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers in later sequels) is played by Richard Daniel Thomas Holloran who was the Demon in Slasher House (where Thorn was payed by a different actor). Mem Ferda (Experiment, Revolver, Ill Manors) as a detective - also a producer - provides the closest thing to name value. Legacy of Thorn is dedicated to actor/photographer Dave Laurie who has a significant role as the mysterious Isaac but who passed away before the film was completed.

Shot over 18 days of production in Oldham and Preston in 2013/14, Legacy of Thorn premiered at The Living Dead Con in Liverpool in October 2014 a week or two before its DVD/VOD release. Impressive, ambitious and largely successful, not to mention unashamedly entertaining for all gorehounds – especially those looking for something with both style and substance – Legacy of Thorn is definitely worth seeking out.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Drew Cullingham
Writer: Drew Cullingham
Producers: Drew Cullingham, Charlie Falconer
Cast: Doug Bradley, Rita Ramnani, Jonnie Hurn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener (Left Films)

‘Umbrage’ is a great word, isn’t it? It stems from the Latin ‘umbra’ meaning ‘shadow’, from whence we also derive such brilliant words as ‘penumbra’, ‘adumbrate’ and, of course, ‘umbrella.’ Its only previous significant artistic use that I know of was ‘Takin’ Umbrage’ by The Federation, a 1988 comedy single which spoofed The Archers.

Now here comes Umbrage: The First Vampire; no relation to Blood: The Last Vampire and the vampire here isn’t called Umbrage, although there is some talk of shadows. It was shot as just Umbrage.

First: confession time. I was really looking forward to watching Umbrage, which has a cool-looking trailer and some reliable people in front of and behind the camera. But despite my best efforts to enjoy the film, I found it disappointing, frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying. Which is a real shame, because it’s trying to do something different and in many respects does it well.

It is, for example, a good-looking movie. Any time I see James Friend’s name in the credits I know I’m in for a visual treat. For my money, he’s one of the best cinematographers working in British indie films. The production design by Charlie Falconer is also good and Scott Orr (The Zombie Diaries) provides a small number of decent gore effects.

Where the film falls down, as so often, is in the script. Drew Cullingham was writer, director, producer (with Falconer) and editor. When a single individual has that much input into a film, there’s potential for a pure, unsullied, personal vision to shine through - but there’s equal potential for major problems to be glossed over or ignored.

The threat here is ill-defined, and that’s a serious problem in a horror movie. It’s never clear what sort of danger our characters are in or why, so it’s difficult to feel any tension or indeed empathy. The threat is vampiric, but the vampire’s motivation is not clear and, in fact, that’s the greater problem right there. None of the characters have a clear motivation for their actions and as a result their actions don’t make sense.

Everything that every character does in a film has to be for a reason. It has to serve a purpose. Actually two purposes. It has to serve a narrative purpose, either progressing the plot or revealing the character (or both) but it must also serve a purpose within the reality of the story. It has to be exactly the sort of thing which that character would do in that situation. And if it’s strange or odd or unlikely or very different to what most people would do in a similar situation, then that difference must be justified and explained, whether at the time or retrospectively.

For example, imagine that you are a husband with a heavily pregnant wife expecting your first child. Would you, only days before the baby is due, in the middle of winter, move into an isolated 17th century farmhouse 20 miles from the nearest town which has no telephone connection and no mobile signal?

Or perhaps you’re going camping in the woods with your mate. (Actually, does anyone outside of horror films realy go camping in the woods? Everyone I’ve ever known who likes camping pitches their tent in fields, or maybe on moorland, or maybe (if they’ve got any sense) on a campsite. Or if they’ve really got sense, they stay in a hotel. But who camps in a wood?)

Anyway, you and your mate have pitched your tent amid the trees and necked a bottle or two of wine when a softly-spoken, attractive young woman appears, not wearing any sort of outdoor gear, claiming to be a birdwatcher looking for owls. After a few minutes, she leads your horny friend off into the darkness and shortly afterwards you hear him scream in terror. You find him, trouserless, face and crotch both full of blood, his dismembered member a few feet away. The girl, who is calm and bloodless and gives every impression of being on drugs, tells you that “the shadows came alive.”

Would you leave your critically injured mate there to die, not even bothering to offer him any comfort, and leg it through the trees with the apparently stoned girl? Really? Why would you do that when the most likely explanation is that your friend was attacked by either her or an accomplice?

Now go back to pretending you’re the expectant father. In the middle of the night, two strangers bang on your farmhouse door. One is in a panic and has obviously been drinking heavily, the other appears to be blissed out. The panicky one reckons that the silent, smily one told him that “the shadows came alive” and that’s why you must let them in because they’re in terrible danger.

I realise that you, in this role-play, cannot call the cops because you have no phone (though you do at least own a shotgun). Nevertheless, would you just invite this drunkard and his junkie girlfriend into your house to sit down next to your already stressed, heavily pregnant wife?

Do you see what I’m getting at here? One more for good luck. Our dad-to-be (played, did I mention, by Doug Bradley) is an antiques dealer and he has come into possession, somehow, of a large Babylonian obsidian mirror (obsidian is a kind of black, volcanic glass). I’m not sure the Babylonians made mirrors from obsidian (though the Aztecs did). Anyway, this thing is absolutely priceless, the oldest known example, in perfect condition - so why would you have it delivered by courier to an uninhabited farmhouse with instructions to just leave it in the barn? And why, having taken it out of its rather rudimentary packaging, would you be careful to remove the cardboard and paper from the barn but leave this 5,000-year-old, irreplaceable artefact propped up on a hay-bale where it could easily get scratched, knocked or broken?

All of these actions (and others) serve a purpose in progressing the plot but serve no purpose within the reality of the film. Time after time, characters behave in a way which is illogical, inexplicable or just downright nonsensical - but expedient. These are all the sorts of problems which should have been sorted out before the film got anywhere near even pre-production. This is why you do multiple drafts of scripts. And at every stage, the writer (or the director or producer - except here they’re all the same guy) should ask the questions that viewers and reviewers will ask. Why is he doing that? Why did she go there? What is the reason behind this decision that nobody in their right mind would make?

Let me give you a practical example, to prove that I’m not just blowing smoke rings here. I was recently doing some writing-for-hire on a script about a Victorian dentist whose schtick is that he makes the best dentures in London. He manufactures false teeth that are better and more realistic than even the finest porcelain, so that none of his competitors can work out how he does it. The dentist’s secret is that he steals teeth from orphans (the rotter!) and then has them polished to perfection by a colony of captive tooth fairies (the swine!).

All well and good, but if I was reviewing a film like that I would ask three pertinent questions (as, I’m sure, would you). (1) Why don’t the other dentists just assume that these perfect false teeth are made from real teeth? That’s kind of the obvious explanation, isn’t it? (2) How would this work, given that children’s teeth are significantly smaller than adult teeth? And would get even smaller if you polished them? (3) Why does he need the tooth fairies? Any fool with a magnifying glass can polish a tooth.

One Sunday morning I was lying in bed, turning things over in my mind, and came up with the following.

The only way to make false adult teeth from children’s teeth is to use three or four child teeth for each adult one, carefully cut and shaped into perfect building blocks. Such precision dental engineering, and the polishing of cracks between blocks to the point of invisibility, is the sort of thing that would be virtually impossible for even the most careful person - but not for tooth fairies. And because small children’s milk teeth have a different structure and slightly different chemical composition to adult teeth, when the other dentists examine these gnashers they can see that they are plainly not just polished human teeth, but they can’t work out what they are.

All three problems solved in one fell swoop. If that film gets made (and if they use anything from my draft) we won’t have audiences asking those three obvious questions.

So, Umbrage-makers, this is what should have been done here. A coherent, credible reason needed to be found for the antiques dealer to cut his family off from civilisation just before the baby is due; for the camper to abandon his gruesomely injured, dying friend without so much as a backwards glance; for the obsidian mirror to be in the barn; and all the rest of the script’s improbable unlikelihoods.

Jacob (Bradley) and his wife Lauren (Grace Vallorani: The Last Seven) are accompanied by Rachel (Rita Ramnani: Jack Says, Just for the Record, Strippers vs Werewolves), his resentful 18-year-old goth stepdaughter from a previous marriage which ended with Rachel’s mother’s suicide just a year ago. So crikey, he wasted no time, did he? Jacob and Rachel share a secret which, when we learn it towards the end of the film, actually shows that they are both terrible people, but at about the same time their characters clumsily change, especially Rachel’s, so that we are apparently supposed to like them and empathise with them even more.

Camping pals Stanley (James Fisher: Hellbride, The Devil’s Music) and Travis (Scott Thomas, also in The Devil’s Music) would seem to be significant among this small cast and we spend quite a lot of time with them but, in retrospect, it can be seen that they are entirely irrelevant to the actual plot. There is no indication of why the girl Lilith (Natalie Celino, who was in unreleased 2008 action-horror pic Furor: Rage of the Innocent) kills Travis, nor of why she doesn’t kill Stanley.

Lilith is, of course, a vampire. She’s actually the mother of all vampires, the woman who, according to some ancient Jewish legends, was Adam’s first wife before Eve was created from one of his ribs, who was later seduced by the archangel Sammael, an analog of Satan. A prologue set in the old west has tall, fit cowboy Phelan (Jonnie Hurn, who was the wheelchair-bound stepfather in Penetration Angst and also in both Zombie Diaries pictures) hunting down stout cowboy Sammaelson (AJ Williams or, as the IMDB has it, Aj Williams) but being attacked by Lilith who bites a chunk from his neck. This, I suppose, is how he becomes The First Vampire.

Sammaelson is, therefore, either the devil or the son of the devil, but this sort of thing can only be gleaned from the Making Of, not the feature itself, where it is explained by ‘AJ Williams’ under his real name of Drew Cullingham.

This prologue and a subsequent, largely incomprehensible flashback, were shot on 35mm in the fake western town of Laredo, Kent, which I think is where a certain 3D comedy horror western musical was filmed. Everything else was shot on the Red camera. Thing is, the 35mm wild west scenes have then been tinted sepia, thus completely negating James Friend’s cinematographic skills. What’s the point of that?

Phelan turns up in Jacob’s barn 120 years later, still wearing a stetson but otherwise dressed in 21st century cowboy casual. He has been searching for Lilith all that time to take his revenge. I’m not sure what part the obsidian mirror plays in all this but at the end the two supernatural beings somehow disappear into the stygian reflector and reappear in Chiselhurst Caves.

Just in case we weren’t sure that this is the quasi-Biblical Lilith, there is also a flashback to, good grief, the Garden of Eden. Wait, is this a creationist horror film? Lilith is naked and so is Adam (Jason Croot, writer-director of horror mockumentary Le Fear) who is portrayed as a sort of Cro-Magnon caveman so maybe it’s not creationist after all.

NB. All my knowledge of Lilith was gained from her entry in Wikipedia and it’s quite possible that this was where Cullingham did his research too, as her appearance in the caves is obviously modelled on the 1892 John Collier painting at the top of her Wiki-page (complete with very large, very real snake draped around Ms Ramnani’s curvaceous, naked frame).

As for the shadows, I’m really not sure what’s going on there. At one point Stanley and Rachel are both attacked, quite savagely, by something invisible while they’re outside but Lilith sits placidly indoors. What are these ‘shadows’? What connection do they have to Lilith? And why did anyone think it would be scary in any way to have characters attacked by invisible things in the dark?

Umbrage is a mishmash of ideas that hasn’t been properly worked out. I’m all for horror westerns: Cowboys and Zombies was terrific. I’ve nothing against British westerns, not that’s there’s many to choose from. But trying to combine vampirism with the wild west and ancient Talmadic myths, all in a contemporary rural setting, centred on a dysfunctional family is a step too far, especially when there’s no real thought given to coherent motivation for any of the characters.

I feel a bit bad knocking the film like this because clearly Cullingham and his cast and crew worked very hard. The Making Of reveals a host of problems from malfunctioning generators on night shoots to Celino suffering an injury during a fight. A massive snow-fall halfway through production had to be incorporated into continuity and some of the shooting days lasted for more than 24 hours solid.

But this Making Of fails even more than the feature, skirting around what sounds like a real struggle against the odds to concentrate on amateurish shaky-cam interviews with clearly distracted cast and crew, of the sadly traditional “What are you doing now?”/”Can you describe your character?” type. Special sympathy for Scott Orr who graciously tries to answer the single most inane question ever included in a Making Of featurette: “So what’s it like being a Scottish special effects artist?”

Interwoven with these uninformative, uninteresting soundbites is a pretentiously black and white sit-down interview, post-completion, with Cullingham in what looks like a fancy restaurant or bar. While he is able to offer some insight into aspects of the film that don’t come across, he sounds smug, self-satisfied and complacent. Extraordinarily, the on-screen interviewer, ‘Making-of documentary director Ian Manson’, captions himself not just once but three times - in a film which is only about 20 minutes long! No offence, mate, but not only did we see the caption the first time, but also: we really don’t care.

Given the troubles and travails of the production, this Making Of is a huge missed opportunity for a sort of low-rent Lost in La Mancha. Consider what Anthony Pedone managed with Camp Casserole despite the film under scrutiny running smoothly without a single problem, what could a really good director have made of The Making of Umbrage? In fact, this could have been one of those rare situations where a DVD is recommended on the basis of an okay film accompanied by excellent extras, But instead we just get 20 minutes of dad-can-I-borrow-the-camcorder interview clips with bored, tired cast and crew who have nothing to say, plus the black and white Ian Manson show.

I was disappointed with Umbrage because it wasn’t the film I was looking forward to, but I was really disappointed with the Making Of because it wasn’t the film it so obviously could have been. Also on the disc are a trailer, a music video (for the song in the trailer) and the full version of the Doug Bradley interview from the Making Of, in which he starts by patiently explaining that he’s best known for playing Pinhead in Hellraiser. Doug’s a pro and he’s used to this sort of thing by now. Since I last saw him on the set of Pumpkinhead 3, he has appeared in (or provided a voice for) a range of UK and US features including The Cottage, Ten Dead Men, Jack Falls, The Infliction and most recently The Reverend.

Mention should be made of the Umbrage soundtrack which features a range of interesting ‘new country’ tracks that give the film a very unusual feel. In many ways, the music is the best part: strikingly original, well-chosen, integrated with the action but never dominating. And often toe-tappingly good - yeeha! The actual music credit is ‘Captain Bliss and Huskie Jack’, two musos who have, very impressively, toured as part of John Mayall’s band!

On the aural downside, whenever character voices are distorted in spooky, demonic ways, they become nigh on impossible to understand. Victoria Broom (Zombie Women of Satan, Dead Cert, Forest of the Damned 2) is credited with ‘special FX voices’.

James Friend’s other recent credits include Stalker, Dead Cert, Jack Falls and Ghosted. Scott Orr worked on Evil Aliens and A Day of Violence while make-up artist Pippa Woods has a CV that includes The Reeds, Stalker, Doghouse and Elfie Hopkins. Cullingham and Falconer have also worked (as DP/co-writer and production designer) on Tim Biddiscombe’s thriller NightDragon (also with Fisher and Thomas in the cast). A significant number of the cast and crew worked on The Zombie Diaries or its sequel and that film’s Michael Bartlett gets a curious credit here as ‘guest director’.

If you want a British vampire western, this is probably the best you can pick. Doug Bradley buckles down to his usual reliable performance, some of the other acting is also good (some less so) and there are some clever moments. But Umbrage - which was retitled A Vampire's Tale in the States -  could have been so much better and its problems stem not from any unexpected snowfall or malfunctioning generator but from a poor script which was nowhere near ready to shoot.

MJS rating: C+

Director: Mark L Lester
Writer: 'Sue Donem'
Producer: Alfredo Leone
Cast: Bo Svenson, Anita Ekberg, Donald Pleasence
Year of release: 1979
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Scan Euro Video, 1987)

In today’s media world, there is no stigma to being a TV movie. Telemovies are often better than the films we see in the cinema, with top stars, excellent scripts, big budgets and talented directors. But there was a time, not so long ago, when telemovies were almost guaranteed to be pisspoor with slumming has-beens, hopeless wannabes and non-existent budgets.

One such is this late 1970s piece of nonsense, the quality of which can be accurately judged by the way that the writer has disguised his/her name with a staggeringly lame nom-de-plume. It seems that even Alan Smithee wouldn’t own up to Quest for the Seven Cities.

Originally released as Gold of the Amazon Women, the movie stars Bo Svenson (Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Curse II, Kill Bill Vol.2 and the monster in the faithful but dull Victor Frankenstein), who looks like a sort of cut-price Rutger Hauer, as explorer Tom Jensen. On his way to the ‘Discoverers Club’ in New York, he is watched from the rooftops by two young women dressed in animal skins and carrying bows and arrows. A staggeringly wooden receptionist tells him that a man has been calling for him and this turns out to be elderly explorer Frederick Reynolds (Carl Low), believed dead in the jungles of South America. Reynolds has discovered the legendary seven cities of El Dorado but a man named Blasko plans to steal all the gold and use it to dominate the world drugs market. Or something.

Reynolds gives Jensen a map before being hit by two arrows from the young ladies, who then shoot each other as a form of double suicide.

At Reynolds’ wake, Jensen finds himself chatting with Luis Escobar (Richard Romanus: The Couch Trip and a recurring role in The Sopranos), a camping supplies store-owner who has never been further then upstate New York. “Was he really that famous?” asks Escobar, to which Jensen replies, “If Frederick Reynolds had lived in the 16th century they probably would have named a country after him. But he didn’t.” When their dining companion is poisoned by a man disguised as a waiter, Tom decides to go to South America to find the cities and Luis decides to go with him. It is never explained who the pseudo-waiter was or why he killed their companion, but then lots of things in this film are not explained.

Watching from a passing limo is Clarence Blasko, played by Donald Pleasence, who didn’t half make some crap films in among the good ones.

After the first ad break, Tom and Luis are in Brazil where a monk gives them a copy of a map because the original was stolen a few weeks ago. This suggests that Blasko stole it but then why is he (as we will discover) desperate to get Tom’s map? And why does Tom need the monk’s map when he has the one that Reynolds gave him? Never mind because in their hotel room Tom finds a ridiculously rubber snake in his suitcase, which is all that is needed for him and Luis to jump off their balcony into the shrubbery, climb into their landrover and drive off as Blasko and two leggy lovelies shoot at them.

The rest of the film takes place in the Amazon jungle although no attempt is made at continuity as the amount and type of vegetation varies from one shot to the next and it all looks about as lush and tropical as my back garden in Leicester. And for unexplored jungle, it doesn’t half have some parts that are easy to drive along.

In a native village (populated by people with remarkably varied skin colour for one isolated tribe) they dine on monkey stew and Tom dances with a fur bikini-clad young lady before getting into a fight with her strapping black boyfriend. The next morning, as they prepare to drive off, the big chap from last night climbs into the jeep to go with them. His name is Noboro, he is played by stuntman Robert Minor, and he gets killed off about ten minutes later. Specifically what happens is:

• Blasko and his girls shoot at the jeep from a helicopter;
• The three men jump from the jeep which then blows up;
• They trek through the ‘jungle’ for a bit;
• Luis gets bitten by some poisonous ants;
• Noboro gets bitten by a deadly snake while finding an ant-antidote for Luis.

The Noboro character serves no purpose whatsoever except to fill a bit of time and it really wasn’t worth the actor turning up, especially when one considers Bob Minor’s amazing list of credits. These include a stack of blaxploitation classics - Blacula, Coffy, Cleopatra Jones, Foxy Brown - as well as Live and Let Die, Rollerball, Escape from New York, Maniac Cop 2 and 3, National Treasure and, um, Team Knight Rider.

The next day, Tom and Luis are captured by a small tribe of ‘Amazon women’. In actual fact all the women are lovely young things in their twenties who are about as Amazonian as children’s TV presenters. They wear a variety of skimpy animal skin costumes, they carry spears and bows, they have fair skin, they speak English, they’re played by a couple of stuntwomen and a whole load of ‘actresses’ who were never in anything else - and some of them have crimped hair, which must be tricky to achieve in the jungle. The only exception to this is their Queen, 48-year-old Anita Ekberg who is the only member of the tribe to have ever visited the seven cities and who is mutton dressed as lamb in this movie, no mistake. The star of La Dolce Vita was at a real high point in her career in 1979, having recently completed that sensitive exploration of religion and mortality Killer Nun...

Tom and Luis are put in a wooden cage with an English guy, a German guy and an old man who is, we are assured, only 35. They are held prisoner by the Amazons purely to provide the tribe with (female) babies, a theory which doesn’t really hold up as the Englishman claims to have been there six years and there are clearly no children under six - or any children at all - running around the small village (which is obviously the previously seen native village redressed to save money).

Two girls fight over the new arrivals on a raft in a shallow river and when one falls in Tom rescues her from a rubber alligator, then he and Luis spend the night with the two young ladies, (Maggie Jean Smith and Bond Gideon). Blasko and his girls (who are renegade Amazons and, being both over six feet, actually look the part) arrive in their helicopter, drop gas bombs on the village, steal the map from Tom’s pocket and then torch the huts. The queen then leads her girls (and boys) through the ‘jungle’ to one of the seven cities, which fortunately is the one that Blasko is heading for too (along with a servant carrying his table, chair and picnic basket).

The ‘city’ turns out to be a really badly done forced perspective model where Blasko and the girls are warned away by a miniature man who says, “I was once normal size but I was shrunk alive by the...” - it sounds like ‘hebiles’. The three baddies are captured by a tribe of primitive men who also attack the women when they arrive. But Tom shows that the wee guy is an optical illusion (or as we sometimes call them, a bad special effect) and the men are repulsed by the women, who then take Blasko and his girls to the nearest town (it’s only 60 miles away!) to hand them over to the authorities.

Tom and Luis say goodbye to the ladies - who are apparently returning to the jungle (a) despite having no village left and (b) by bus - and fly off in a plane. There are no end credits on this video version (so nothing to tell us that the music is by Gil Melle who also composed for Night Gallery, Frankenstein: The True Story, The Ultimate Warrior, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and masses of other films and TV shows).

Quest for the Seven Cities is dreadful in every respect. It was clearly shot for about twenty dollars and no thought has been given towards how the tribes might exist in reality, yet this isn’t funny enough to be a spoof, surely? It’s light-hearted but it’s hardly a comedy. Among the cast only Pleasence stands out, but then his cultured criminal is about the only role with even a hint of characterisation.

The ‘Sue Donem’-ous script is the work of executive producer Stanley Ralph Ross, a major force behind the Wonder Woman TV series and also a writer on Batman, The Man from UNCLE and The Monkees. It’s full of bits that sound like they might work - Amazons prowling New York rooftops, a bite from a deadly snake, etc - but which are ineptly handled and which certainly don’t make a cohesive whole. There’s no reasoning behind anything, no clear plan of what any of the characters are ultimately aiming to do or how they will do it.

Director Mark L Lester scored a few hits in the early ‘80s - Commando, Firestarter, Class of 1984 - before returning to a career helming things you’ve never heard of. Italian producer Alfredo Leone had previously written, produced and directed Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism. And cinematographer David Quaid had actually worked on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and was a camera operator on Exorcist II, so this is only the third worst film he ever made.

MJS rating: D