Director: Cory Turner
Writers: Cory Turner, Connie Biskamp
Producers: Cory Turner, Connie Biskamp et al
Cast: Shantel Vansanten, Russell Reynolds, Jacqueline Bergner
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD

I love this job. Well, I say job. I don’t make any money from this website, you know, but I get paid for writing for magazines and it’s all part of the same thing. Mag work leads to material on the site and stuff I find for the site sometimes leads to mag work, so it’s all part of one sort of gestalt job. Anyway, the reason I love this job - writing about movies - is that every once in a while I come across an absolute gem that no-one, or hardly anyone, has seen yet. I can feel good about helping to promote and publicise a quality movie, and I can feel smug for having seen it before any of youse bastards, ha.

Sorry, got a bit carried away there towards the end.

My point (and I do have one) is that, knowing nothing at all about this film except that it was 82 minutes long and therefore wouldn’t require me to stay up too late, I slipped it into the DVD player to have a watch. And it very rapidly became apparent that Savage Spirit is a very, very good horror film indeed. It’s unusual because it is both gory and spooky. There are spookier films than Savage Spirit, and there are gorier films. But it is rare indeed to find a spooky film this gory and even rarer to find a gory film this spooky.

After a prologue about two sisters, we jump forward a month to four young couples having a pool party in the same house. One of the couples bought it - and the entire contents - from the previous owner, desperate to sell. Could it be because this house is the famous ‘house on Bayou Court’ which is reputed to be haunted - or is that house actually in another town?

Well, it’s here of course (The Ghost of Bayou Court was the working title) and the meat of the movie is the eight beautiful young people being despatched one by one. However, the killer here is no masked loony but a pitiful, grey ghost armed with a large axe. One by one, the silent, calm ghoul despatches the men and women in a variety of interesting, but not silly, ways: barbecue, electric lead, garage door.

At first, the octet seem somewhat interchangeable - four buff guys and four hot chicks - but over time, individual characters emerge, as well as the synergies of the four different couples. Crucially, every one of the characters is sympathetic. There are no bubble-headed bimbos or leering jocks, no stereotypes at all; some may be more moral than others, some may be happier, but these come across as eight reasonably intelligent, unreasonably attractive folk.

This distinction of roles (although I did find it difficult to assign names to all the characters) is to the credit of the actors. The performances throughout - and there are others, as we shall see - are consistently good. In fact, they are much better than one would normally find in a low-budget, shot-on-video indie such as this. Stand-out among them is probably Shantel Vansanten, who plays a bikini-clad pricktease named Lori. Her flirting scenes with ‘nice guy’ Brady, with their respective other halves asleep and presumed left, are magnificently acted and are undoubtedly the non-horror highlights of the film.

Director Cory Turner fully understands that audiences aren’t interested in characters who exist merely as axe-fodder. We need to get to know these people and understand them; they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t even have to be good, but they have to be interesting and they have to be human. We must sympathise with their lives if we are to empathise with them as they die.

And die they do. Each death occurs out of sight of the others (and, we must assume, out of earshot; this requires a suspension of disbelief which I am entirely satisfied in providing, given the overall quality of both script and film). Because of this, the first two or three victims are assumed to have just gone home early in a huff or simply wandered off. The spectral killer fades into being (or is seen by us where a moment earlier she was not) and strikes with lethal, supernatural strength. When the victim is suitably incapacitated, she raises her axe to strike and - as the blade descends - killer, victim and any bloodstains simply fade from existence.

Turner’s skill lies in showing us just enough of the killer. At first we see only a fleeting glimpse of a grey, mummified hand or a handful of frames of something hideous. From the prologue on, throughout the film, more and better views of the ghost are gradually revealed to us but Turner is never tempted to indulge in a full-on, full-length shock shot. Plus, and I think this is vital to the success of the threat, this ghost is silent. Other directors might be tempted to have her cackle or even spout wisecracks, but that would be lame and simply dilute the horror of her presence and her actions. (Adding to the spookiness is a scene where one of the characters attempts to drive away from the house, only to find that he can't. This may be an homage to The Exterminating Angel...)

Intercut with this A-story, and admittedly not quite so effective, is the tale of a psychic (Jacqueline Bergner) and her husband. She has visions of the dead people from the party and must find where the killings are happening in order to stop them. The DVD sleeve copy plays her up as the main character but she is very much the B-story. What keeps us on the edge of our seats is wondering who will be next to die, and how.

The special effects by ‘Evil’ John Mays are simply excellent, treading that fine line along the border between realism and sensation. Assisted by great performances of pain and terror from the cast, the prosthetic make-up and the fake blood are suitably shocking and horrific, never looking prosthetic or fake. Turner did his own photography and, for a shot-on-video film, made an impressive job of it. Clever framing combined with sharp editing makes the ghost’s intermittent presence genuinely chilling. The biggest technical let-down, as so often on low-budget pictures, is the sound, but I think that can be forgiven when balanced against the way-above average direction, script, acting and effects.

I enjoyed Savage Spirit enormously, as you can probably tell. Then, just when you think you have a handle on the film, we are unexpectedly thrust into a sepia-tinted flashback to the ghost’s origin one hundred years earlier. Turner himself has a role in these scenes.

The rather convoluted credits seem to expand according to some sort of mathematical formula. Turner directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Connie Biskamp (who plays the ghost, under make-up by fellow cast member Krista Riley) from a story by the two of them plus Jared Briscoe (who plays a neighbour) and Angie Turner. And the four of them produced the film along with Drew Waters (who plays the psychic’s husband) and William Biskamp (also in the sepia flashback).

Also in the cast are Lucy Bannister (A Texas Tale of Terror), Patricia Campbell (The Tunnel) and Christie Courville (sideFX). Many of the cast and crew worked on Turner’s first film, They Feed, which, based on the trailer included here, looks like Tremors in a forest - which can’t be bad. In a moment of self-indulgence which we will allow, the characters in this film watch a scary movie at one point, which is presumably They Feed (which I now definitely want to watch for myself).

It’s not often that a movie grabs me, excites me and - I’ll admit it - scares me like Savage Spirit did. It’s not perfect, but most of the limitations are technical ones and overall it is far, far better than a low-budget film about young people in swimming costumes being chased with an axe has any right to be.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Jason Impey
Writer: Jason Impey
Producer: Jason Impey
Cast: Wade Radford, Kaz B
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.jasonimpey.co.uk

Well-made, thoughtful, but very economical and deeply unpleasant. That’s Lustful Desires– and none of this should be a surprise when watching a Jason Impey film.

Impey is a maverick, a man whose body of work inspires endless discussion and fascination for the small number of really serious British Horror Revival fans out there. Starting out with a video camera when he was still at school, Impey’s IMDB page currently runs to 79 titles as director, many of them feature length. Although there are a number of zombie films on that list, young Impey has always had a prevarication for the extremes of human behaviour, and that’s very much the theme here.

Wade Radford, Impey’s regular leading man in intense sexual dramas like Twink and Boys Behind Bars, is Freddi. Porn actress Kaz B is ‘Lustful’, the prostitute he hires, whose card proclaims that she can supply ‘oral, anal, BDSM’. Though used to dealing with some seriously fucked-up people, Lustful has never come across anyone like Freddi, who seems more OCD than BDSM (she mustn’t sit on the sofa). Paid in advance, Lustful’s attempts to leave whenever Freddi crosses the line become increasingly half-hearted. But when one party if paying another for the right to do what he wants with her, where does that line stand?

Lustful Desires is 20 minutes of intense sexual psychodrama, shot in a single location – a nondescript house on a modern estate in Milton Keynes. It is absolutely not the sort of film that a neophyte director would make, but Impey has been pumping these things out for 20 years, teaching himself, learning on the job. His script is written to fit the two-actors-one-set limitations, his direction is assured and confident, his choice of actors adroit.

Radford does a great job of portraying a character with multiple aspects to his personality, none of them ones you would want to introduce to your mum. No mere cypher or cartoon, this. And for an adult performer who started out in a Fiona Cooper video (they still make those?) and has posed for a range of well-known top shelf art pamphlets, Kaz B is actually a very good actress, bringing internal conflict to a character who invokes both sympathy and scorn. (On her NSFW website she says she’s “fanatical about horror, vampires and zombies” so she may well make further appearances on this site in the future. For now her principal horror credit is as ‘Vampella’ in Zombie Driftwood under her other name, Karen Bridle.)

I couldn’t say I enjoyed Lustful Desires. One doesn’t normally ‘enjoy’ a Jason Impey film, but they are never less than interesting. Where other micro-budget film-makers are often content to simply aim for the lowest common denominator of gore’n’gags, Impey is way past that point, making pictures that explore human behaviour and psychosis. It would be extraordinarily easy to write off Lustful Desires as exploitative misogyny but those of us who have followed the director’s career can see past that shallow interpretation to the deeper ideas evident in his later work.

If there's a mis-step, it's a curious choice towards the end, when some serious wounds are inflicted (I won't say by whom on whom or in what manner or for what reason). The problem is that the instrument of choice is a safety razor, which simply wouldn't be up to the job of creating the incisions depicted. It's entirely possible to nick oneself with a safety razor. (Possible? It's almost mandatory. I reckon I'm single-handedly keeping the British toilet paper industry afloat.) But the whole point, as highlighted by the name, is that one cannot cause serious injury with the thing. It seems odd that Jason didn't use an actual razor blade which, quite apart from it's visual iconography, is cheap and easy to obtain, and can be easily blunted for safety reasons (or replaced with a silver-painted bit of plastic after a couple of close-ups). Still, that's the director's choice.

For those yet to sample the oeuvre of the Milton Keynes Maverick, Lustful Desires is as good an introduction as any to the world of Jason Impey.

MJS rating: B

Director: James T Williams
Writer: James T Williams
Producer: Anthony Archambault
Cast: Rob Leetham, Iona Thonger, Chris McAleer
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.mrglassproductions.com

Waiting for Dawn is a valiant attempt to do something different. I’m not certain to what extent the film succeeds in that attempt but it makes a decent stab at it and should be applauded for what it achieves.

Rob Leetham (who was also in dodgy fanfilm The Hellraiser Chronicles: A Question of Faith but we won’t hold that against him) stars as Carl Teagarden, an ordinary sort of bloke who proposes to his girlfriend Vicki (Iona Thonger) one morning and later finds himself wondering if he has made the right choice. Carl and Vicki have just moved into a new home, returning to the town where they grew up, and they notice that a drinking establishment called The Waiting Room is still operating - and still closed.

The Waiting Room, it seems, is a bit of a local urban legend, always closed but not apparently derelict or deserted. But when Carl has to wait for Vicki, just for 20 or 30 minutes, on the corner near the pub, he decides to pop inside for a pint and a shufti. Because for the first time ever the place appears to be open - with two bouncers on the door. Inside he finds an empty bar with a misanthropic barman (Thomas Morton, who also handled the music score and sound design), two youths playing pool and a curious fellow who introduces himself as Darwin Barrett (Chris McAleer).

(A note on character names: Darwin is not a good one because it sounds too much like ‘Darling’ when spoken, even with good sound recording, raising unintentional humorous memories of Blackadder Goes Forth. The name Darwin should be restricted to talking dolphins and direct descendants of the father of evolutionary biology.)

The long and the short of it is that The Waiting Room turns out to be a place where the rules of time and space do not apply. This is first made explicit a full 25 minutes in when Carl nips into the gents and re-emerges a minute or so later to find that the place is now somehow packed with people, all of whom look like they’ve been there for some time.

He explores the pub’s back room where there is some sort of rave going on and eventually finds a way out but emerges in another town and having travelled back in time - something made evident when he goes to visit his parents. All the whole he is trying to contact Vicki and when he eventually receives a voicemail from her he returns to The Waiting Room.

It’s nice to see a British time travel film - we don’t do enough of them - and in terms of genre this sits alongside something like Groundhog Day, never actually explaining its time travel elements. The downside is that, while we certainly don’t want a pat explanation, it doesn’t feel like the movie’s premise is properly explored either. The non-resolution ending doesn’t really make much sense and really a film like this has to do one of two things: either fully explore its central premise or provide some sort of resolution which allows us to finally understand what has been going on and why. Waiting for Dawn doesn’t really do either, alas.

The various people that Carl meets in the pub are all apparently aware of what is going on and some even realise that Carl is new but no-one makes any attempt to explain things to him. People make obtuse comments - some of which the viewer understands because, having read the synopsis, we’re more clued in than Carl - but nobody actually discusses the situation in any meaningful way so neither Carl nor the audience really learns anything. What should be a journey through the human psyche becomes instead a picaresque trail past a succession of unsympathetic (and, truth be told, mostly very boring) minor characters.

Described as a ‘metaphysical love story’, Waiting for Dawn never justifies why Vicki and Carl have been parted. There’s some implication that it’s to do with Carl’s second thoughts (externalised during the first act in a too-long scene with a mate of his in a different pub) and before the film is over he has announced his absolute, certain, undying love for Vicki. All very sweet but we’re left with no indication that Carl has actually learned anything or that his realisation of his certainty will help him or Vicki in any way. In a story like this one expects some sort of moral justice but it seems that the various tossers and tits encountered by Carl are all happy to stay in The Waiting Room while our hero must suffer, possibly into eternity, for nothing more than an entirely understandable moment of doubt.

Technically, Waiting for Dawn is highly commendable. The acting is all good, especially from Leetham, and the dialogue is fine except that it doesn’t really tell us anything. We constantly expect to learn something and, well, never do. Lighting, sound and editing are all top-notch and it is especially fine to see a slice of fantastique indie cinema which eschews special effects completely (unless one counts the smoke and light in the rave scene).

This is the first feature from Mr Glass Productions, a Shrewsbury-based film-making group who have previously concentrated on shorts, including The Man of Great Stature, It Ain’t Rocket Science, Chain and a series for the Beeb called The Cold Light of Day (not to be confused with the Dennis Nilsen biopic). James T Williams pulls multiple duties as writer, director, editor and co-producer, as well as acting. Also in the cast are Joseph Ripley (who was one of the infected in 28 Weeks Later), Campbell Foster (who was also in a version of The Tell-Tale Heart and a British horror feature I had not previously encountered but want to find out more about, Newgate) and Neil Higham as Carl’s dad.

In an era when there are so many comparatively easy, lazy ways to make your debut feature, Waiting for Dawn is a valiant - and to some extent successful - attempt to do something different, challenging and original. That it doesn’t quite come off is, I think, possibly due to over-ambition. There are some interesting ideas here but they don’t really go anywhere and if we, the audience, are to be taken on a journey, we expect some sort of destination. Carl is a well-developed character and a terrific performance from Leetham; Thonger also does a great job with her comparatively limited screen time. But most of the other characters seem like cyphers - and not terribly sympathetic cyphers either. A ‘pub of the damned’ is a great concept but the lost souls inside it need to be fascinating characters; we should either want to spend time with them or dislike then but be unable to tear ourselves away.

Near-as-dammit feature-length at 68 minutes, this could easily be stretched to 70 by doing a Charles Band on the end credits and slowing them down a bit, or maybe a slight re-edit would add in another 120 seconds or so. Or maybe Mr Glass Productions should build on the experience of Waiting for Dawn and crack on with developing their next feature. I would certainly like to see more from this lot.

MJS rating: B

Director: Tonino Ricci as “Anthony Richmond”
Writer: Tito Carpi
Producers: Roberto Poggi, Marcello Romeo
Cast: Conrad Nichols, Christopher Holm, Maria Romano
Year of release: 1982
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK video (Apex)

One of the cheaper, more obscure examples of the sword’n’sorcery genre which flourished in Italy in the 1980s, Thor il Conquistatore starts with five minutes of warrior, wife and wizard walking across the hills to the strains of hugely inappropriate martial music. Eventually, the wife (Malisa Longo: Reactor) gives birth to a baby, the wizard holds it aloft to show the gods - and an arrow goes ‘thunk!’ right into it! It’s a hilarious, pythonesque scene.

Bad guy Gnut (Raf Baldassarre, who was in a whole string of pepla, spaghetti westerns and gialli from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) kills warrior and wife but wizard escapes with baby, which apparently is only wounded. Warrior’s sword turns into snake and slithers away.

Fast forward 25 years and we find the baby all grown up in the shape of Thor (Luigi Mezzanotte), destined to be the mightiest leader ever - just not in this film. He’s all rippling six-pack, fur boots and Neanderthal grunts. The wizard is apparently Etna the bird-man, who can transform himself into an owl, and who wears six-foot shoulder-pads in his human guise. Rather curiously, Etna narrates the ensuing story from within the scene, in the past tense, like a dark ages Rod Serling.

Thor goes on a quest to find his father’s sword. Along the way he fights and kills various primitive tribes, sparing only the warrior virgin Ina (Maria Romano: Women’s Prison Massacre), whom he first enslaves then falls in love with. By the end of the film, she has born him a son, he has found his father’s sword, and Gnut is dead.

One for Italophile completists only, this is neither exciting enough nor bad enough to generate any interest. Only Etna’s outrageous shoulder-pads raise a smile. The fights are limp, and the plot is barely there at all.

Writer Tito Carpi was also the man behind the ‘scripts’ of Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, Tentacles , a bunch of Sartana/Django flicks and the deliriously bizarre The Atlantis Interceptors. Cinematographer Giovanni Bergamini also lit Cannibal Ferox and was camera operator on the original Django, The Humanoid and Exterminators from the Year 3000, while make-up artist Pietro Tenoglio’s other credits include Anthropophagous, Stagefright, Frankenstein all’Italia and Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum and Castle Freak.

MJS rating: D

Director: ‘Al Bradly’ (Alfonso Brescia)
Writers: ‘Al Bradly and Alan Rawton’ (Alfonso Brescia and Aldo Crudo)
Producer: ‘Lewis Allenby’ (Luigi Alessi)
Cast: Antonio Sabato, Yanti Somer, ‘Melissa Long’ (Malisa Longo)
Year of release: 1978
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Mogul)

Reactor is unrepentant rubbish from start to finish. Even by the standards of Italian late 1970s sci-fi movies - which are not high - this is bobbins. The normally reliable Delirium magazine recommended this as so-bad-it’s-good but let me assure you, it ain’t. I laughed a few times at the sheer ineptitude, but mostly I was shouting at my TV, “For God’s sake, please make it stop!”

Some idea of how cut-price this piece of dreck is can be gleaned from the following fact: the spaceship is called the Trissi, so all the crew have the word ‘Trissi’ on their spacesuits - this is actually because the ‘spacesuits’ are ski-suits loaned by a company called Trissi Sportswear. If the producers had spent a bit more, the action could have taken place on the starship Adidas!

Professor Carr and his glamorous lab assistant Lois (‘Melissa Long’, ie. Malisa Longo: Salon Kitty, Nightmare Concert, Thor the Conqueror), who are constantly referred to as a sort of gestalt entity - ProfessorCarrandhisassistantLois - even by their closest friends, are kidnapped by aliens. “A gang of aliens has kidnapped ProfessorCarrandhisassistantLois,” says a co-worker, “I actually saw it happen.” It’s amazing how a film so laden with clunky exposition can nevertheless make not the slightest bit of sense.

The aliens all wear silver costumes and have bad gold wigs, and head off in a flying saucer. Unfortunately, the Prof’s latest experiment - something to do with creating life - involves a nuclear reactor (hence the English title) and no-one except the Prof knows how to switch it off! Unless he can be rescued, the reactor will explode, destroying the entire city in eight days, fourteen hours and three minutes (they’re very precise about this).

The spaceship Trissi sets off, commanded by Captain John Boyd (Antonio Sabato: Bronx Warriors 2) who is enamoured of ‘HisassistantLois’ and oblivious to the torch carried for him by one of his crew, Julia (Yanti Somer: Battle of the Stars). Repairing a defence satellite knocked out by the aliens, Boyd determines the location of their home planet, which is: “North Pole Earth, ninety degrees west and eight-ten North.” Whether the dialogue was as inept in the original Italian is not something I can comment on. At least, not politely.

Also on board is a chap with a blond bubble perm whose character name is never mentioned but who seems to be second in command. He is supposedly from Texas which is quite a shock as the dubbing actor has the most extraordinary accent. It’s as if a Texan accent has been written phonetically and then read out loud by someone who has never even heard of Texas.

The Trissi lands on the planet Azar where the exploratory party are attacked by some barbarian-types with gold skin and leather hoods over their heads. The hoods cover bizarre bulbous eyes, but fortunately the only barbarian with dialogue, the leader named Kuza, has a normal face and is simply a bald, gold bloke. “As you see,” he tells Boyd, “we are a race of humanoids but we are different from you.”

The humans escape and fight off a bunch of the original, gold-wigged aliens who are apparently from the planet Anthor. They have discovered the secret of eternal life but can only survive by transplanting organs from a lesser race, the inhabitants of Azar. It’s very clear that, although this film was made to cash in on Star Wars fever, the biggest influence in terms of both story and design is the TV series UFO, which was very popular in Italy.

With Kuza’s help, the Trissi heads to Anthor where they swiftly find ProfessorCarr operating a giant computer, but he summons Anthor guards who capture our heroes and parade them before the Empress, who turns out to be, unsurprisingly, HisassistantLois. There then follows lots of running down corridors and double-crossing until eventually everyone is back on board the Trissi, including ProfessorCarrandhisassistantLois, and heading for Earth. The Prof is under sedation, wakes up, kills the ship’s doctor and tries to escape, but is shot by an unseen assailant. It’s Lois, who is a bad’un after all and has somehow smuggled a whole squad of Anthorian goons on board.

Control of the ship is wrested back to Boyd and his crew but Lois escapes out the airlock to one of the pursuing fleet of Anthorian ships, commanded by a minor character called (I am not making this up) General Gonad. The last quarter of an hour or so is one of cinema’s dullest spaceship battles which culminates in Boyd having to make a choice between Lois and Julia. (Oh, the reactor - remember that? - is deactivated successfully despite the death of Prof. Carr because Kuva picked up a datachip while on Anthor which turns out to be the Prof’s notes...)

Christ, this is cut-price movie-making. And yet, the situation was such in the late 1970s, with Star Wars fever riding high and the video market exploding, that any old shit with a spaceship in it could turn a profit. Alfonso Brescia (Iron Warrior, Amazons Against Supermen) must have been making money at this sort of thing - he made five of them! Starting with Anno Zero, Guerra nello Spazio aka War in Space in 1977, then this fella (La Guerra dei Robot - oh yes, I almost forgot, the Anthorians turn out to be robots!) and Battaglie negli Spazi Stellari aka Battle of the Stars aka War of the Planets in 1978, and finishing with La Bestia nello Spazio and Sette Uomini d’Oro nello Spazio aka Captive Planet in 1979. The films weren’t sequels but some of the same cast and crew were used, along with sets, costumes, props and not-very-special effects. I have seen Battle of the Stars and, though it is rubbish, it is nowhere near as bad as Reactor. Of course the best known Italian SF film from this period is Luigi Cozzi’s Starcrash; let me assure you that, if you thought that was a bit pants, it is The Magnificent Ambersons compared to Brescia’s work.

Words cannot describe how cheaply and quickly this has been thrown together, bearing in mind that this is a professionally made motion picture, not some amateur production. Some stuff is sheer costcutting: all the characters, whether human or Anthorian, use exactly the same small, plastic, toy ray-guns; and spacewalk sequences always show the character on the far right of the screen, their feet just off screen - in other words, they eschewed wires in favour of simply turning the camera on its side. Other defects fall more under the heading of sheer carelessness: much of the film is out of focus, and during the final fight for control of the Trissi, someone forgot to add any sound effects!

Reactor is available on a Region 1 double-bill with War of the Planets under its US title, War of the Robots, a package which rather cheekily pinches an iconic illustration of Caroline Munro in her skimpy Starcrash costume. Rest assured that Hisassistantlois doesn't wear anything quite so sexy...

My full-screen British video (probably from the 1980s) has English language titles so most of the Italian names have been cunningly converted into English. Brescia is usually credited as ‘Al Bradley’ but here is ‘Al Bradly’ on screen and on the packaging. The cast includes ‘special appearances by’ Jacques Herlein (whose amazing CV includes The Whip and the Body, Goliath and the Sins of Babylon, Tower of Screaming Virgins, Shaft in Africa, Frankenstein’s Aunt, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, The Ironmaster and The Winds of War!) and ‘Mickey Pilgrim’ (presumably this is Ines Pellegrini from Salo or 120 Days of Sodom). The ‘special effects’ are by ‘Allan Forsyth’ who is actually Aldo Frollini. His earliest credit (that I can find) is a 1968 spaghetti western, he has worked with everyone from Argento to Fellini, and he now runs his own effects company in Rome, providing live video effects for plays and operas as well as some movie work.

Avoid like the plague.

MJS rating: D-

Director: Peter Watkins-Hughes
Writer:Peter Watkins-Hughes
Producers: Ruth Lewis, Paris Palmer
Cast: Sara Lloyd-Gregory, Gareth Jewell, Siwan Morris
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reiewed from: TV screening
Website:www.thedevilsvice.org.uk

The Devil has had a lot of things within the British Horror Revival. He’s had a Playground, a Harvest, a Tower, a Chair, a Bridge, a Tattoo, a Curse, some Business, a Bargain, a Backyard, an Interval, a Punch Bowl, a Primate, another Harvest and of course some Music. Not to mention a monthly helping of Porridge. Now he’s got a Vice, which should sit nicely in The Devil’s Workshop alongside The Devil’s Lathe and The Devil’s Ratchet Screwdriver.

Nah, I’m messing with ya. Actually The Devil’s Vice turns out to be a damn creepy modern ghost story which combines supernatural, psychological and social horror to impressive effect. Sara Lloyd-Gregory and Gareth Jewell give a pair of magnificent performances as Susan and Richard, a young couple living in a converted Victorian school near Abergaveny.

A terrible accident at the start of the film leaves Susan recuperating at home, where noises and moving objects very quickly demonstrate that the couple share the building with more than a few bats and mice. The evidence suggests that a former schoolmaster, noticeable in an antique photo that Richard finds in the loft, is still there. From bad dreams and self-closing doors, the manifestation of the ghost’s presence escalates to full-on physical violence against Susan. What does the ghost want? How can it be allayed? A visit by a local psychic is not only inconclusive and unhelpful, it actually makes things even more alarming.

Throughout his wife’s trials, Richard is supportive and helpful, but we can see that he has the same nagging doubts as us. Is this all in Susan’s head? Is she smashing the plates and perhaps even self-harming? Jewell’s portrayal of a supportive but confused husband perfectly complements Lloyd Gregory’s alarmingly physical and often terrifying performance, which involves several scenes of physically throwing herself around as the ghost brutally manhandles her. Then again, does Richard know more than he’s telling? Could this be a variant on the old ‘fake haunting to drive my wife mad’ schtick?

The resolution, though undeniably powerful, is, truth be told, not unexpected, even if one hasn’t read about the film’s background (I recommend saving everything except this review until after viewing). Which is not to say that (a) it’s not the correct resolution, or (b) the film is lessened in any way. The film was produced specifically to make the point made at the end. But actually what I really liked is the fact that the resolution doesn’t explain everything we've witnessed, so maybe there is more to what is happening than we can see, which may or may not be supernatural.

Writer-director Peter Watkins-Hughes expertly handles the subtleties of a traditional British ghost tale within a modern setting, creating a believable situation predicated on a fantastical notion. There is just one curious mis-step about halfway through when Susan, leaving a library, meets her friend Helen (Siwan Morris from kid-horror Wolfblood). Susan’s lack of reaction suggests that she doesn’t recognise Helen, and for several minutes the viewer is unintentionally wrongfooted, thinking there might be more to the mystery/conspiracy behind all this than there really is.

I must also confess to being distracted by wondering how a young couple could afford such an obviously very expensive home. The school house is large and has been converted into a fantastic modern home with all mod cons. We are never told what Richard and Susan each do for a living (and they have no kids) but it still seems a disproportionately extravagant location. That said, this is Wales and a quick online check shows the house (now owned by one of the film’s producers) is worth about £300,000 give or take, which is not as much as I expected, but still a lot for a young couple who otherwise display no sign of affluence..

The supporting cast includes William Thomas and Sharon Morgan, who were Gwen’s parents in Torchwood, and Boyd Clack, whom I recognised from Andrew C Tanner's Masterpiece.

Pete Watkins-Hughes has made some previous half-hour films which took a similarly oblique approach to social issues, including Loserville, a story about homelessness featuring Matt Berry and Denise Welch, and Bloody Norah which explored self-harm and featured Gareth David-Lloyd. He also directed a little-seen comedy feature called A Bit of Tom Jones about a man who believes he's buying a (very significant) part of the Welsh singer. Many of the crew from those films also worked on The Devil's Vice including DP Ezra Byrne and editor Richard Starkey.

The film was funded and commissioned by the Gwent Independent Film Trust (GIFT), with many of the crew coming from the University of South Wales. Scenes of Susan's recuperation in Nevill Hall hospital add massively to the perceived production value.

Originally set to debut on BBC One Wales in October 2014, the broadcast was for some reason bumped back by a month. Of course, there was a time when regional TV programming like this led to forgotten obscurities, only ever seen by a handful of people. But nowadays folk throughout the UK can get BBC One Wales on cable and in any case the film then reposed on iPlayer for a month, giving everyone a chance to watch it.

Ghost stories are very much in vogue at the moment in British horror and The Devil's Vice is an excellent example of the genre, in addition to having an important social message.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Alex Poray
Writer: Alex Poray
Producer: Alex Poray
Cast: 'Lexray', David Poulter, Donna Beeching
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: Viewster

The Slayers has an original and intriguing premise with lots of potential, almost all of which is squandered by a combination of poor acting, lacklustre direction, threadbare production values and a script within which both plot and characterisation could be most generously described as sparse. Above all, it is hobbled by its own desperately low ambitions, apparently believing that simply ticking the boxes marked ‘violence’, ‘drugs’ and ‘satanism’ doth an effective horror film make.

The patriarch of the eponymous clan is the Rt. Hon. Stanley Slayer (David Poulter – not the organist!), whose honorific technically means he’s a serving member of the Privy Council and therefore a Peer or a current or previous MP, although no mention is made of any political allegiance or Government position and I suspect ‘Rt. Hon.’ has been used here just to make him sound posh. He has a wife and four adult sons of whom Patrick Slayer (director Alex Poray under the nom de screen ‘Lexray’) is the black sheep.

The premise is that Patrick claims his family abducted and murdered a young woman named Anna Thompson, indulging in a spot of witchcraft and cannibalism on the side, and that there have been other (unnamed, non-specific) murders since. Stanley maintains that Patrick is a drug addict with mental health issues and is consequently delusional. Apart from anything else, the police have no record of a missing person named Anna Thompson. Patrick in return maintains that his father is such a powerful man that he has been able to impose a high-level cover-up. Patrick actually has footage which he himself shot, showing his brothers kidnapping Anna (Donna Beeching) and then his father sacrificing her to Satan. Stanley says that this is a fictional horror film which the family made for a lark, at Patrick’s suggestion.

The resultant mockumentary combines Patrick’s footage with interviews with both men (but not Mrs Slayer or any of the other sons). A film like this has the potential to be thought-provoking meta-fiction, questioning the audience’s values and morality by raising the spectre of the difference between fake footage claiming to be real and real footage claiming to be fake, all within an overall cinematic package which we know (or at least, assume) to be fake even though it presents itself as real.

I’d pay to see that. But that, sadly, is not what we get here.

The Slayers does not get off to a promising start with no fewer than eleven on-screen captions (“Reading,” as they say over on Cinema Sins). There are further captions throughout the film and at the end, including a few grammatical/punctuation errors. Most of the first half is Patrick responding to questions from an unseen interviewer while sitting in an armchair. For some reason he is wearing a pig mask (a motif seen also in White Settlers and Piggy – there’s a subgenre right there). Intercut with this are clips of Patrick and/or his family, including footage of Patrick performing, with a godawful rock band, a song with the melodic refrain “Kill the bitch.” Plus some home movie footage of Patrick as a child, and some candid shots of Patrick taking drugs between interview stints. There are also, rather randomly, some vox pops with members of the public saying whether they think the Slayer family are guilty or not. Some of these are costumed attendees at a Comic Con including a guy dressed as Deadpool and a girl in a terrific Tank Girl costume complete with missile-bra!

The problem is, there’s no reason at all to believe Patrick’s version of events. He’s clearly a drug addict, and the captions tell us he has an agent securing him a book deal. Then the second half of the film is Patrick’s footage in which he and his three brothers abduct, torture and humiliate Anna Thompson, who then suffers a drawn-out death as she is dismembered and disemboweled by Stanley Slayer, before the family settle down to a meal of her body parts.

We are supposed to question whether this is real or just a low-budget horror movie, but because this is a low-budget horror movie, the footage just looks like, well, a low-budget horror movie. If there was any doubt about its (fictional) verisimilitude, that is shot to pieces by scenes being filmed in multiple takes from different angles. All of which, within the narrative conceit, only gives added weight to Stanley Slayer’s version of events. Never for one moment do we doubt that this is all just a scam by a smack-addled idiot hungry for D-list celebrity status.

At no point do we get any real characterisation. Patrick, who talks with a weird, distorted voice for no obvious reason (it’s not like he’s trying to hide his identity) is a bland, unpleasant, greedy drug addict. His father is a somewhat more rounded character and to be fair to Poulter the actor does his best with his rather stilted dialogue, trying to convey genuine paternal concern for his mentally disturbed son, but there’s no more depth to Stanley Slayer than Patrick. And of course we never see the two together (except in the fake ‘murder’ footage) so there’s no opportunity for character conflict. Beeching does a good job of screaming and struggling but is called on to do little else. Kudos to her however for coping with a ‘burial alive’ scene which is really the one genuinely horrific and interesting moment in the film.

Julian Poulter, Marek Gruszczynski and Matt Lemon are Patrick’s brothers and there’s a hint of sibling conflict between them in a couple of shots but not enough to be interesting. Georgina Richmond as Olga Slayer does nothing except pull faces like an embarrassing, drunk auntie. And then there’s Alicia Newton as Monica Reed, the unseen interviewer. Whose. Wooden. Readings. Of. Her. Questions. Are. Painful. In. The. Ex. Treme.

It’s clear that Poray has aimed for ambiguity but he has missed it completely with a misfiring script of leaden, prosaic description and (in the second half) gratuitous cut-price nastiness that rapidly becomes boring. With what is presented to us on screen there is absolutely no reason to doubt that Slayer Jr is lying (and consequently that Slayer Sr is telling the truth). There’s no mystery, and without mystery why should we care?

The Slayers is feature length at 72 minutes and was brought in for under three grand. Shot in and around Barnstaple in April 2014, the film premiered in September that year on the Viewster website. Of passing interest is an interaction with police on the last day of the shoot. Some-one spotted Beeching being bundled into the back of the brothers’ vehicle (for no apparent reason, an old ambulance) and called the Old Bill. The cops flagged down the ambulance and apparently had a tactical firearms unit on the way. Cheekily, a brief shot of this incident, shot covertly from inside the director’s car, is included in the actual film. Sadly, this is about as meta as The Slayers gets.

MJS rating: D

Director: Lance Lindsay
Writer: Lance Lindsay
Producer: Eric Woster
Cast: C Jutson Campbell, Faye Bolt, John W Smith
Country: USA
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Words cannot begin to describe how awful Star Crystal is. Not hilariously bad, not shoddily amateur, just compulsively, mindblowingly terrible at every level and in almost every respect. It beggars belief that a large number of people could have worked on this film without realising what they were making or that the people ultimately responsible could have had any attitude except complete and utter cynicism, a belief (apparently justified) that in the mid-1980s anything more than 80 minutes long with a spaceship in it would sell to video distributors around the world and turn a profit.

In a way, this reminds me of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. No, wait, hear me out on this one. Stravinsky wrote that piece as an attempt at jazz music - except that, living in Russia as he did, he had never heard any jazz. He had met people who had heard jazz, he had read descriptions of it, so he had a go at emulating what he thought jazz was - and he ended up with something that is nothing at all like jazz. Well, Star Crystal is what one might get if people who had never, ever seen a sci-fi movie set out to make a sci-fi movie, based only on what they had heard and read about sci-fi movies. It has some of the recognisable iconography - spaceship, alien, talking computer - but none of it fits together the right way. More to the point, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and despite that it still manages to contradict itself at every opportunity.

Oh, I should just point out the one big difference between The Rite of Spring and Star Crystal. Stravinsky’s work is good, Star Crystal is shit. I wouldn’t want anyone to labour under a misapprehension.

We open with a couple of guys in spacesuits wandering across the surface of Mars in the year 2032 (not 2035 as the sleeve claims). This is shot using a red filter, the spacesuits aren’t too bad, it’s even slightly overcranked to make them move slowly. It’s a promising start. For no apparent reason, they dig at a particular spot and excavate a rock about the size of a beachball, which they take away with them.

As the shuttlecraft SC-37 blasts away from the Red Planet, the two unnamed guys show the rock to the ship’s doctor (for some reason) and assure him that their equipment indicates that it’s full of electronic circuitry. When the three men leave the room, the rock cracks open to reveal a large crystal and a small amount of goop which drips onto the floor and starts to move slightly.

So no circuitry at all then.

Next thing we know, the ship’s computer is announcing that the oxygen supply has run out and we have a panning shot of various dead crew members.

Two months later the drifting ship is somehow picked up and docked with the L-5 space station (I assume it’s just a snappy name and not an indication that the station is orbiting the L5 Lagrange point). There’s a tall ‘Colonel’ - a youngish chap with a moustache, a bouffant hairdo and an eye for the ladies - who has to attend a meeting which, we are told from a computer read-out, is to discuss why the ‘nuetron reactors’ are malfunctioning. I would expect spelling mistakes in the I’ve-got-an-Amstrad-and-I’m-gonna-use-it computer displays if this had been made in Japan or Italy, but this is an American movie. That’s just monstrously sloppy.

Oh, and a secondary reason for the meeting is to consider why the entire crew of the SC-37 died. But that’s just an aside, really.

This meeting, between four men, is held in a dark room, around a small illuminated table. In other words, the production has saved money on a set by simply not having one. Meanwhile a computer operator named Campbell (C Jutson Campbell, usually misspelt ‘Juston’ in listings and just called ‘Jutson Campbell’ on the UK VHS sleeve) is trying to get the shuttlecraft’s computer to work while trading banter with a black guy (John Smith, credited as ‘John W Smith’ on the original poster but nowhere else) whose name - Cal - is mentioned I think once in the entire movie. Suddenly, the station and the ship are both rocked by an (unseen) explosion and there are a few shots of people running around, several of which are rather obviously in an office building rather than a space station. Two young women run onto the bridge of SC-37 and Campbell talks on the intercom to Billy, a previously unmentioned frizzy-haired, acerbic, female engineer in the ship’s engine room who successfully blasts the shuttlecraft away from L-5.

The two fellas and the two ladies in the control room sit and watch on the screen as L5 - eventually - blows up in possibly the worst thing-blowing-up-in-space model shot I have ever witnessed.

So now we have our main cast: Campbell, who assumes command of the ship; classy brunette Dr Adrienne Kimberley (Faye Bolt) whose antipathetic attitude towards Campbell ensures that they will eventually get together; blonde Sherrie Stevens (Taylor Kingsley), constantly referred to as Debbie despite the name-patch on her loosely buttoned jumpsuit, which incidentally identifies her as a nutritionist - so she is assigned to cooking duties; misanthropic Billy (Marcia Linn), who seems to be loosely modelled on Carla in Cheers; and funky, hip Cal, who has his eye on Sherrie. More to the point, we are only ten minutes into the film and we have already killed off two complete sets of characters.

There’s no attempt to explain why SC-37 was fuelled up and ready to leave at the drop of a hat, or why these two women ran on board (and nobody else did) or why L-5 blew up (those pesky ‘nuetron reactors’ I suppose). We also have to accept that since SC-37 was recovered, nobody has actually bothered having a look round to see if there is anything odd on board. You know, like a large crystal or some alien goop which is gradually growing into a sort of monster thing.

A word now about the layout and design of the SC-37, which from outside is a fairly straightforward, square-ish, roughly hammer-shaped vessel. In the fairly large control room, along with lots of control panels, a few computer screens and some chairs, is a device for showing where everyone is on the ship. Given that there are only five rooms and they’re all linked, plus they all have wall-mounted intercom telephone things, you do wonder why this machine is necessary.

The map of the ship on the screen shows four corridors fanning out from the bridge to four smaller rooms, which are labelled (using sticky tape!) as ‘Science lab’, ‘Sleeping quarters’, ‘Supply room’ and ‘Engine room.’ Halfway along each corridor is a junction with a fifth corridor, connecting them. Despite the map showing these corridors as short, straight and with a junction halfway along, the corridors that we see on screen are long, curving and junctionless. But the biggest problem is that they are not proper corridors at all (I slightly misled you, dear reader), they are dimly lit cylindrical tubes about three feet in diameter. So anyone passing along them has to go on hands and knees on a curved floor.

Remember: these are not ventilation ducts, they’re not emergency access tunnels, they are the main corridors linking the only five rooms on the ship. Unfortunately, the design of each room has a door which is rectangular, albeit about four feet high so still requiring even the relatively petite Sherrie/Debbie to stoop. This means that at the end of each tunnel is some sort of weird, pointless vestibule where the tiny round ‘corridor’ ends before the not-so-tiny rectangular entrance to the room.

Opening and closing the sliding door on the four-foot entrance in each room seems to be automatic but it can be locked, from inside only, by pressing some large, coloured buttons and turning a small wheel. This is clearly modeled on the wheels used to lock hatches in seafaring ships, except that it is on the wall, not the door itself. No-one ever turns it more than about ten degrees and when the crew want to be completely safe, keeping out any beastie that might be aboard, they tie the wheel up with a bit of string.

Are you starting to comprehend quite how mindboggling this film is now? Buckle up, because it gets worse.

The five survivors of the L-5 disaster make no attempt to call for help or investigate whether any other ships escaped the explosion or anything like that. They just swiftly calculate that it will take a year (or 18 months, depending on which character is talking) to reach Earth. This is because SC-37 is just a short-range shuttle-craft, not a long-range ship. Unfortunately they only have five months (or possibly two weeks) of food on board. However, there are two supply depots between their present position (presumably somewhere near Mars) and Earth, the nearest being Alpha 7 which can be reached in five days. So away they go. With an alien onboard.

To the film’s credit, for most of the movie we never get a good look at the alien. Instead we get close-ups of gelatinous stuff, close-ups of a large, blinking eye or shots of very long, snake-thin tendrils whizzing across the floor, occasionally ending in a three-fingered claw but usually not.

The first person to encounter the alien is Billy, down in the engine room (the ‘engine’ seems to consist of two laser beams, between two small devices about a metre apart). Billy finds some goop on the floor, goes behind the ‘engine’ to investigate and... well, that’s where it all gets confusing. We get a close-up of Billy’s arm, raising a spanner then whacking it down on something unseen, then there’s a shot of blood splattering up the wall, then the alien’s tendrils winding round Billy’s feet and hands (presumably shot in reverse). Billy is seen lying down but making no attempt to struggle, with tendrils around her head and body, then she is dragged away.

Was she hitting the alien with a spanner? Whose blood was that? I actually replayed the sequence to see if it made any sense but nope.

Sherrie/Debbie discovers Billy’s body, which is now a shriveled corpse and she runs off to Adrienne in the ship’s science lab. Or at least, she runs as far as the engine room door, climbs through it, runs a couple more steps to the tube and then crawls along it until she reaches the science lab.

Campbell and Cal, up on the bridge, have been drinking - and who can blame them? If I was on a spaceship that I had never flown before, trying to reach one small supply depot floating in the vastness of space somewhere between Martian and Earth orbits, with very limited amounts of food and drink on board, I think I would hit the bottle too. This drinking has no bearing on the characters or the plot and is forgotten pretty quickly. Like most things in this embarrassingly pisspoor movie, it’s an idea that somebody had which was never developed or followed up.

At this point I should mention Bernice, the computer. Like all computers in crappy sci-fi movies, this one talks. It also has a read-out screen although this is only ever seen in close-ups and there’s no actual sign of it on the set. The screen is mostly used for transmitting warnings about things like dangerously low oxygen which would seem to be more helpful if transmitted verbally. Oh, and Campbell has programmed the computer to only respond to his voice. There is no reason for him to have done this and there is every reason for him, given their current parlous situation, to reprogram Bernice to respond to his four colleagues (well, three now that Billy’s dead). But he doesn’t.

Adrienne also has a computer terminal in her lab (this one does have a screen, in fact it looks remarkably like an Amstrad PCW) into which she puts a sample of the goop from the engine room, which she removes from Sherrie/Debbie’s clothes. Bernice announces that the goop comes from an “unknown life form - its molecular structure does not require oxygen to live.” Wow, just from this slug trail-like discharge, the computer can say conclusively that the organism that produced the goop respires anaerobically. Nothing else can be determined, just the method of respiration. Intriguing.

Cal and Debbie die next although I can’t recall in what order. The map-of-the-ship doodad is used to show each of the victims being stalked by the alien, which shows up as a different coloured spot because it has a different heat signature, apparently. Odd how nobody noticed that there were originally six lifeforms on board. Debbie tips a beaker of acid on the alien before it gets her, a gloriously unmatched pair of shots showing the tentacles around her feet as she lies on her back, then dragging her away as she lies on her front. As with Billy’s death, the tentacles do not in any way match the goopy alien seen in close-up.

That leaves Campbell and Adrienne alone on the bridge, where they have slowly, one by one, closed the four doors. For the rest of the film they completely fail to generate any sexual tension despite being all alone together. They spend the night in a sleeping compartment leading directly off the bridge, which leaves one wondering what the previously identified ‘sleeping quarters’ were for. When the oxygen supply to the ship is cut off, Bernice does her usual trick of announcing this vital warning silently on a computer screen somewhere.

Having restored the supply, the two survivors find a ‘video laser’ recording of what happened when SC-37 visited Mars. This turns out to be footage of the two spacemen from the start of the film. I mean, it’s actual footage of them on the desolate surface of the Red Planet - so who filmed this? When Adrienne notices that there is 25 hours of this stuff to sit through, they speed up the tape and the resulting high-speed footage is accompanied, incredibly, by comedy ‘silent movie’ piano music!

While trying to get my head around how any film-maker could expect any viewer to watch this nonsensical farrago... another shuttle-craft appears. That’s right. Although they’re stranded out in deep space in a slow-moving short-range shuttle with no human constructions in range except the Alpha-7 supply depot and the smoking remains of the L-5 space station, nevertheless they are briefly accompanied on their journey by the SC-45 (which of course looks exactly like the SC-37, although I suppose that’s fair). Just as the ‘video laser’ recording of the Martian surface was footage that could not possibly exist unless a third person was present, so we now see on the SC-37’s screen footage of both shuttle-craft flying together - which obviously could not exist unless a third craft was present.

We’re not told where SC-45 is going or where it has come from. It’s just there because it’s expedient. Inconveniently, the SC-37’s radio can receive but not transmit so they can’t tell SC-45 their situation. The pilot of the other shuttle, realising that there may be communication problems, asks them to make a 30 degree turn if they’re okay. By now, that sneaky alien - whose crystal, Campbell and Adrienne decide, is both a computer and a power supply - is controlling the ship and executes this manoeuvre, so SC-45 goes off on its merry way.

And then it comes back, just long enough to warn SC-37 that there is “a meteor storm at twelve o’clock”. I tried to work out whether this meant time or direction and then realised that either concept was meaningless in space so it was equally stupid either way. But wait, the alien creates a force field around SC-37 and the meteors just bounce off. Maybe it’s not so bad after all.

‘Two days later’ says a caption but Campbell still only has about twelve hours of stubble so either beards grow slowly in outer space or he’s finding the time to shave regularly. Adrienne’s hair, of course, still looks gorgeous.

What happens next is, even by the plungingly low standards of this film, spectacularly stupid. Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen, because you will not believe this bit.

The alien starts accessing the computer, leading to numerous close-ups of that Amstrad screen. ‘Evolution of the Human Race, Parts 1-20’ is the name of the series of files it investigates, starting (as one does) with ‘Part 5 - 15,000BC to 500AD’. Hmm, I don’t believe there has actually been much evolution in homo sapiens within the last 17,000 years. Really, this is more the history of the human race then, isn’t it? Within this time frame, the file has a menu (as we would now call it) of several directories (as we would now call them), each covering a different part of the globe. Quite brilliantly, one of these is ‘Antarctica’ because of course there was just so much human activity in Antarctica between those dates.

Working through the menus ( as we would now call them), the alien selects ‘Middle East’, then ‘Beliefs and Religions’ then ‘Christianity’. And then the computer reads out two specific verses from the New Testament, about doing unto others and so on. Yes, it’s true, I’m not making this up. The alien reads The Bible! The alien discovers religion!

Maybe, just maybe, if the alien had somehow absorbed the entirety of human knowledge (or at least as much as is routinely stored in the databanks of short-range shuttlecraft) and had noticed the teachings of Jesus in among all the other stuff, there might be some sense in this. But no, the extraterrestrial beastie which somehow has control of this computer zooms straight in to the New Testament.

I wracked my brains at this point (and indeed, after the movie - thankfully - finished), looking for any other element of religion within this motion picture. And I found none. This one solitary moment seems like it would fit neatly into a film with an intended Christian subtext - but it’s an isolated incident which sits so uncomfortably among the rest of this cut-price, sub-Alien rip-off that I’m amazed it doesn’t just stand up and walk away. Was this just an idea in passing which was never developed (like most of the film) or was it the intention of the picture, except that it took this long to appear and then is instantly forgotten? It’s just one of the weirdest, most out-of-context things I have ever come across in the plot of a piece-of-crap, third-rate, amateur hour sci-fi movie.

For some reason, Campbell now goes to the engine room, crawling through the tubes with a home-made flame thrower held dangerously in front of him. Adrienne stays on the bridge and urges caution, apparently able to be heard through some previously unmentioned communications system which doesn’t require the wall-mounted handsets previously used for this purpose. And ultimately, somehow, Campell befriends the alien, which looks like a slug with the head of ET, is about the size of a large dog and has No Tentacles Whatsoever! (It is also completely devoid of teeth, despite what the poster shows.)

A lengthy montage shows the two humans and the alien - which can now talk and is called ‘Gar’ - living together and having fun. Eventually they make it to the supply depot which Gar says he can convert into a spaceship to get him home. And that, apart from an insipid song called ‘Crystal of a Star’, is pretty much it. Just to put the final nail of unbelievability into this film’s coffin, the singer/lyricist, credited as ‘Stefani Christopherson (aka Indira)’ was the original voice of Daphne in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?!

Dear Christ in Heaven, I have seen some shit. I have sat through The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical, Incubus, Belcebu - Take Me, I’m Your Whore from Hell, Hellgate, The Pumpkin Karver and two CampBlood films. But I’ve never seen anything like Star Crystal.

So come on, own up. Where did this rubbish come from? Writer-director Lance Lindsay has one other credit, a few years later - an action picture called Real Bullets about a group of stuntmen who take on a criminal gang. Marcia Linn and C Jutson Campbell were both in that too, along with - good gravy! - Martin Landau. Apart from that, I can find nothing on the guy whatsoever. Producer Eric Woster, who shares a story credit with Lindsay - as well as directing the second unit, editing the picture and doing some of the make-up effects - was also far from prolific, although he has an excuse. According to the Inaccurate Movie Database (and believe me, I’ve looked everywhere else) he wrote, directed and starred in a 1992 horror film called Sandman, with Dedee Pfeiffer in the cast. He seems to have been a pal of Tommy Chong, working as a production assistant on three early ‘80s Cheech and Chong movies and as DP on Far Out Man. He also allegedly lit another ultra-cheapie scifi embarrassment, Space Chase. According to some non-IMDB sources, Woster died on the set of Sandman, just before completing the film, from a congenital heart condition. He was in his early thirties. Poor bastard.

There are three Associate Producers and two Executive Producers. Apart from one who produced Sandman and another who worked on Far Out Man, none of them seem to have bothered with the film industry before or since.

Of the cast, none of whom were ever going to trouble the Oscars and most of whom never stepped in front of a camera before or after this (at least, not using these names), the only one with credits is somebody called Emily Longstreth. There’s no credited cast list on screen so she’s either the voice of Bernice or a female officer who has one line in the prologue. She was in Hardbodies, Pretty in Pink, The Big Picture and Booby Trap. Our five main actors are all bad but, as so often, the worst ones play the survivors. Billy, Debbie/Sherrie and Cal at least had some degree of characterisation - angry chick, bimbo and skirt-chaser respectively - but Campbell and Adrienne are bland non-characters, a situation exacerbated by the wooden acting of C Jutson Campbell and Faye Bolt. For a leading man, Campbell has no charisma or discernible personality whatsoever - and it’s fortunate that actor and character share the same name so I don’t have to type that twice, it being equally applicable to both of ‘em.

One thing that really stands out when watching Star Crystal is the number of reaction shots. Every time something happens - like a space station exploding or a dead body being discovered - the people in question just stare blankly while the cruel, cruel camera refuses to cut away. I’ve never seen so many reaction shots featuring actors who either don’t know how to react or weren’t told what they were reacting to (or both).

On the technical side - dear Lord, this just gets better and better - cinematographer Robert Carameco worked on Spawn of the Slithis, Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, Blackenstein, Octaman, Journey to the Centre of Time, The Cremators, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, Boss Nigga and Orgy of the Dead! He passed away in 1997 aged 64 but boy, what a career. (Oh, and his surname was Camarico so this film manages to spell his name wrong...)

A special mention now for composer Doug Katsaros who gets himself an ‘All sound effects programmed and synthesized by’ credit. He’s a big name on Broadway (or possibly just off it) having orchestrated The Rocky Horror Show, arranged Footloose and written shows based on Moby Dick and Great Expectations. He also wrote the music for the animated version of The Tick. Unfortunately Star Crystal seems to have been one of his early credits and it must be said that his tuneless, electronic doodlings never bloody stop. Action scenes, tense moments, effects shots, over dialogue - it sounds like the man is tuning up his synthesiser for 90 minutes. (Trivia fans should note that Katsaros and the Daphne-voice woman were both members of an improv comedy troupe in the late 1980s called Noo Yawk Tawk.)

Production designer Steve Sardanis (who is also dead - what, is there a ‘Curse of Star Crystal’?) was assistant art director on The Towering Inferno and art director on Snowbeast. Costume designer MaryAnn Bozek seems to have gone into hiding after this film but recently resurfaced on Reno 911! and Balls of Fury. Script supervisor Nancy Hansen worked on Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Toolbox Murders, Airplane!, Back to the Future, Turner and Hooch and Lethal Weapon 2. Sound mixer Clyde Sorensen did his schtick on episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.

Okay, what of the ‘special visual effects’? Step forward one Lewis Abernathy who also - get this - directed House IV, wrote DeepStar Six (and one of the many unproduced versions of Freddy vs Jason) and acted in Titanic. Apparently, Abernathy is a Titanic nut who met Cameron on a diving expedition and suggested to him that he should make a film about the ship. Abernathy inspired the character of Lewis Bodine, the guy in the prologue who shows the computer simulation of how the ship sank, and when Cameron couldn’t find anyone to play the part - he gave it to Abernathy. But wait, there’s more. Abernathy is also a jobbing inventor and he inspired the characters of Walter (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski and Agent Abernathy in Jason Goes to Hell. Next time you watch Titanic, just pause the DVD at that point near the start and think: ‘Twelve years earlier, that man was in charge of special effects on Star Crystal.”

There are a lot of people credited with effects on this film, considering those effects are pretty much limited to shots of the SC-37/45 flying through space and a quick look at the L-5 blowing up. I suppose there’s the crystal itself and the goop, but ‘Gar’ has his own crew with no fewer than 21 people involved in building and operating him/it. To be fair, they did have to do not only the giant slug-thing but also the tendrils that the slug-thing doesn’t have and the three-finger tendril claws that aren’t on the end of the tendrils. But 21 people? And that’s not including ‘The Gling’ who is credited with providing the creature‘s voice.

Harry Hathorne and T Lindsay built the model spacecraft; Hathorne later co-wrote a fantastic and extensive article on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Cinefantastique magazine. Model construction supervisor John Coats coincidentally worked on William Mesa’s 1995 Brigitte Nielsen-starrer Terminal Force which was released in Japan as... Star Crystal. He followed this picture with visual effects work on UHF, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Talos the Mummy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and a whole load of other movies of distinctly variable quality. Construction of the L-5 space station is specifically credited to young Mr Abernathy and Justin Segal. Could he be the LA-based illustrator/designer and author of The American Sign Language Puzzle Book? On this movie, anything is possible.

There are five visual effects assistants including Greg Huebner (now a location manager) and the distinctively named Tazzilo Baur who, as Tassilo Baur (and we have already seen how untrustworthy the spellings in these credits are) also worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street, House, Witchboard, DeepStar Six and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Annette Buehre (now Annette Buehre-Nickerson) was in charge of ‘OPTICAM motion control photography’. Opticam was a company founded by Buehre and her husband in 1976 which provided both animation camera and optical printer services. Over the years she worked on innumerable commercials as well as TV projects such as Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos.

I can’t claim to know precisely what ‘animation touch-up’ involves but it was done by Dan Kuenster who went on to co-direct Rock-a-Doodle and All Dogs Go to Heaven and also worked on An American Tail and The Land Before Time. I’m guessing he was related to Luke Kuenster (Delta Force II) who handled second unit cinematography. Matte paintings (not that I noticed any, but there must have been at least one) were provided by Dave Goetz, later art director for Disney on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis: The Lost Continent. Vince Prentice (Piranha, The Capture of Bigfoot, Total Recall, Legend) gets the glorious credit ‘special effects make-up (dead bodies)’. His other claim to fame is making up Keanu Reeves for his uncredited role as Ortiz the Dogboy in Freaked.

Lou Lazzara - ‘make-up/hair’ - has worked on various instalments of the Friday, Elm Street and Halloween franchises as well as such titles as Mutant, Teen Wolf Too, Face/Off and Terminator 3, plus episodes of Angel and seaQuest and two Weird Al videos! Also credited with make-up and hair are Blake Shephard (probably the Blake Shepard who later worked on Buffy) and Kathy Tessalone, who worked in make-up for 15 years before moving into real estate and teaching; she was last heard of trying to get an animated series called The Welbys off the ground.

Overseeing all this was ‘visual effects consultant’ Chuck Comisky - yes, the same guy who wrote and directed The Evil Beneath Loch Ness. His other effects credits include Battle Beyond the Stars, Strange Invaders, The Addams Family, The Crow, Dungeons and Dragons and Blade.

Apologies if this is turning into a list of credits (hey, how do you think I feel having to italicise all these titles?) but there were just so many extraordinary people working on this, ahem, unique movie. Do we think that 1st AD Eric Weston could be the guy who, five years earlier, wrote, directed and produced Evilspeak? I wouldn’t be surprised.

When critiquing a film this bad overall it’s very easy to get carried away and claim that everything about it is The Worst Ever. But let’s give it its due. The spacecraft models aren’t bad and the motion control used to photograph them works well. The acting is poor, that’s no doubt, but I’ve seen far, far worse. The alien is actually an imaginative design (or rather, two or three imaginative designs which don’t match). What plunges this film to the bottom of the cinematic barrel where even scraping for it seems thankless is the sheer haphazard nonsense that passes for a plot, the absolutely paper-thin characterisation (although it’s still not as bad as Incubus) and the jaw-droppingly pisspoor production design.

Above all, I think it’s those tunnels that will haunt me to my grave. I know that cast and crew often refrain from criticising shoddy productions like this because, hey, it’s work. But can’t you just imagine them, in the evenings, when Lance Lindsay and Eric Woster weren’t around, saying to each other: “What’s with those tunnels, man? I mean, who would design a spaceship where you had to go from one room to another on your hands and knees? Was the ship design to be crewed by three-year-olds? Or just designed by three-year-olds? Sh! Sh! Here they come. Hi Lance, hi Eric!”

There is so much insanity and inanity in Star Crystal that I can’t do justice to it all, even in a review of more than 5,000 words. A quick google will reveal other reviews around the net, some of them based on a 2003 R1 DVD release by Anchor Bay and many of them dwelling on different details to me. It’s worth reading them all as they vie with each other to find new superlatives for how awful the movie is. Given time, I would not be surprised to find this film established as an icon of awfulness, if not to Plan 9 levels of infamy, at least up there with Troll 2. (Or, for an example of how tolerant some people can be of even the worst shite, check out some of the user comments on the IMDB.)

MJS rating: D

After reviewing Richard Mansfield's shadow animationWolfskinand his live action featureThe Secret Path, I approached him for an interview in November 2014 and he kindly supplied these answers.

Daniel (L) and Richard (R)

What films or stories have influenced your work?
"So many, but one of the most influential is Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas. Fantasy and fairy tales have played a big part in the silhouette films and for my live-action work I’ve been inspired by ghost-story authors like EF Benson and MR James."

Can you describe the process you use to make your shadow puppet films?
"The puppets are all created with black card; they can be jointed with moving parts and moved with wires and levers. The puppets are filmed against a shadow screen with a projected backdrop. I also add more foreground cut-outs between the screen and camera to enhance the illusion of depth."

Why did you decide to progress from shorts to a feature, and what challenges did Wolfskin present?
"I’d had a silhouette feature film in mind for ages before I started Wolfskin. I wanted to explore the more abstract aspects of storytelling to create a more dreamlike experience rather than having to wrap a story up in ten minutes. After years of making shorts I also wanted a change and a feature seemed the natural thing to do. I felt a loose anthology would suit the fairy tales I was adapting, meaning I could give them a classic aesthetic in a modern setting."

What were your aims when making The Secret Path, and to what extent do you feel you achieved them?
"I wanted to create something in LGBT cinema that I felt didn’t exist; rather than wait for someone else to do it, I thought I’d like to give it a go. I love period drama and ghost stories. I wanted to create a minimalist snapshot of what it could be like for a couple to find themselves alone in their own world. A lot of LGBT films I have seen over the years I haven’t felt they spoke about my experience about being gay. They focused often on negative attitudes of others, shame or focused on youth, beauty and taking drugs.

"Throughout history there are recorded instances of gay couples able to live together and have fulfilling relationships, I felt that the solitude of the forest would be the setting where Frank and Theo are able to fully be themselves away from the dangers of their former lives. Any problems that they would face would be external and have nothing to do with their sexuality. That was my main objective and I felt I achieved it.

"I didn’t want to over-discuss what being gay meant or give it a context, only that in that moment they were free to live as they chose. If I were to do something similar again I would do it differently, I like to try something different with every film and improve my ways of working."

In your opinion, is ‘gay horror’ a subgenre or are films like The Secret Path just horror films that happen to feature gay relationships?
"I think there is definitely a Gay-horror sub-genre but I’m not sure if The Secret Path falls into that category. The film is much more experimental than I realised at the time. I think of it more as a vérité period-drama romance with some horror thrown in."

What can you tell me about The Mothman Curse and Drink Me? When can we see them?
"Technically The Mothman Curse is my first live-action feature; it’s just taken longer to get a release. The film is coming out in the US around March in 2015 from Wild Eye Releasing. It’s about a couple of friends working on a temp job at The Cinema Museum in South London. One of the friends accidentally unleashed the Mothman whilst on holiday in the Lakes and it has followed her back to the museum where it haunts them both. I filmed on a small pinhole black and white CCTV camera. It gives really low-resolution but dreamlike images. I had no monitor for the camera so a lot of it is filmed ‘blind’.

"Drink Me is my husband Daniel’s film. It’s about a couple who take in a sinister vampire lodger when one of them loses his job and it breaks their family apart. Drink Me has been picked up for distribution by TLA for release in early 2015. I also have another horror feature in production VHS: Killer about a series of haunted tapes. I’m hoping to release this late 2015/early 2016. Other than that I’m keen to make some more short silhouette films and experiment some more. I’d love to adapt some of MR James’ ghost stories and do an anthology film but that could take years. Daniel is also planning Drink Me 2."

website: www.mansfielddark.com

Director: Frank Agrama
Writer: Frank Agrama, Ron Dobrin
Producer: Keith Cavele
Cast: Robin Askwith, Rula Lenska, Valerie Leon
Year of release: 1976, no 1977, well 2001 actually
Country: UK/Italy
Reviewed from: R1 DVD (Retromedia)

Lost films. There’s always the danger that they won’t live up to expectations. For example, those few people who ever saw London After Midnight reckon that it’s not as good as the stills promise. It therefore gives me enormous pleasure to announce that Queen Kong, resurfaced after a quarter of a century on the shelf, is everything we’d hoped for. This is a consistently hilarious film: sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes unintentionally amusing, but never, ever boring.

This is, very simply, a spoof of King Kong with the sex roles reversed. Robin Askwith is drippy hippy Ray Fay, picked by stern film director Luce Habit (Rula Lenska) to star in her new film. (Bruce Cabot - Luce Habit - oh, please yourselves...) In a nice nod to the source material, Habit spots Fay stealing an apple - a toffee apple. But the theft he actually gets in trouble for is nicking an ‘original reproduction’ poster of the 1933 King Kong. You know, just in case you hadn’t twigged yet...

Habit has a crew of saucy young ladies, all kitted out in bikinis or in halter-tops and hot pants, who stow equipment aboard their ship, the Liberated Lady (one of them is future Allo Allo star Vicki Michelle, also in Virgin Witch). In one of several genuinely witty gags, the first four crates are stencilled ‘guns’, ‘gas’, ‘and’ and ‘tranquillisers’! Eventually they reach their location - Lazanga Where They Do The Konga - and explore the jungle, which switches constantly from deciduous woodland to lush tropics due to the use of extensive and obvious stock footage. On the way they pass a bundle of sub-Carry On sight gags like a billboard exhorting ‘Drink Konga Kola’ (the uncredited girl on the board is Marianne Morris from Vampyres).

In a clearing they find a matriarchal tribe, ruled over by a bikini-clad high priestess (Hammer chick Valerie Leon, whose lines are all of the “Unga bunga wonga” variety), who grab Fay and stick him inside a birthday cake atop a giant picnic table. Queen Kong appears - a woman in a suit no worse than the one Rick Baker won an Oscar for, and mixed in via some reasonable CSO and back projection - and takes Fay back into the jungle. Along the way, this ‘liberated female gorilla’ battles a tyrannosaur which is daft-looking but, to be fair, better than the dinos in many 1950s movies, and subsequently fights an equally silly pterodactyl. Habit and her girls rescue Fay, are chased by Kong, and subdue her with gas bombs.

The giant gorilla is shipped back to London (actually a ‘model village’ tourist attraction in Hampshire!) amid a montage of newspaper headlines and sound snippets; you can clearly hear a voice say “Godzilla” at one point. She is put on display at a grand fete, in front of HM the Queen (Jeanette Charles of course!) but forced to cover herself up with a chain-mail bikini. Irritated by this, and jealous of Luce Habit’s dancing with Ray Fay, the giant ape breaks loose and goes on the rampage.

After taking Fay away from the unwelcome gropings of Habit, Queen Kong climbs Big Ben (not the Post Office Tower as usually reported; incredibly, even the normally reliable Ten Years of Terror makes this mistake) where she is attacked by the RAF. In an astonishing display of cheap film-making (or is this deliberate?) the planes are Vulcan bombers in the stock footage of them taking off and the Red Arrows in the stock footage of them in flight! By the time they reach Big Ben, they’re model helicopters!

As a bungling Chief Constable (Stanley Platts: The Womaneater) calls for Queen Kong’s destruction, Fay uses a helicopter’s PA system to call for the female population to rise up and liberate themselves, and to take Queen Kong as their inspiration. Scores of women march through the streets carrying banners saying ‘QK rules OK’ and ‘Queen Kong is groovy’, and eventually the Chief Constable gives in and orders the gorilla to be shipped back home safely, where she lives in jungle happiness with Ray Fay - and Luce Habit ponders, “I wonder if they’d consider a threesome...”!

What a gloriously silly film this is. Askwith plays the whole thing like a Christmas panto and it will certainly appeal to fans of The Benny Hill Show or the Confessions of... films. It’s self-consciously cheap, even indulging in Holy Grail-esque gags like Askwith wondering what strange land the boat is nearing and Lenska commenting, “Brighton.” There are visual jokes about Jaws, The Exorcist and Airport, with Linda Hayden (Blood on Satan’s Claw) as a singing nun on a 747 knocked out of the sky by the gorilla. (“I wish that nun would shut up,” comments one passenger. “She even sang through the in-flight movie.”) There are also some astounding shots which are real Ed Wood-style, one-take-will-do corner-cutters, as actors trip over their lines: one minor character - played by 73-year-old comedy veteran Harold Berens (What a Whopper!, Straight on till Morning) - consistently says “sixty foot four gorilla” instead of “sixty-four foot gorilla.” Everyone involved seems to know this is awful and deliberately cheesy but even they can’t have imagined how cheesy it would turn out.

So why was this a lost film? Well, it was made in 1976 to take advantage of the publicity surrounding Dino De Laurentiis’ awful remake. De Laurentiis and RKO, as makers of the remake and the original King Kong, claimed copyright infringement and eventually settled out of court with Agrama (director of Dawn of the Mummy, often cited as an Italian but actually an Egyptian Jew). Agrama agreed not to distribute the film and it remained unseen until bootleg tapes started circulating in 2001. (One thing that is probably completely lost by now is a dream sequence, mentioned in Askwith’s autobiography, in which Queen Kong wishes she was the same size as Ray Fay and performs a dance routine around a house and garden.)

Queen Kong was released in Japan (theatrically!) in 2001 and is now available on R1 DVD from Fred Olen Ray’s releasing outfit Retromedia, including a trailer and a commentary of Ray interviewing Agrama. While the trailer is interesting and the widescreen transfer is better than an nth generation, full-screen bootleg tape, sad to report that the commentary is one of the worst I’ve heard. Agrama hasn’t seen the film in over 25 years and can recall little - which is understandable - but Ray hasn’t done his homework on the film and so is unable to prompt him. There are no anecdotes from shooting, and Agrama’s discussion of the film’s legal problems is swift and shallow, though he does claim - and this seems to be accurate - that the film was theatrically released in Italy in 1977.

Neither Ray nor Agrama can identify any of the actors apart from Askwith, Lenska and Leon, and neither of them knows what any of them did before or since. Agrama even makes the ludicrous claim that Lenska, a jobbing actor on stage and screen since the early 1970s and star of the 1976 smash hit series Rock Follies, was “basically a fashion model” when he cast her! Ray misidentifies Linda Hayden as Scars of Dracula’s Jenny Hanley and this mistake is repeated on the packaging which also cites Askwith as a Hammer star - though he never made a Hammer film in his life.

It’s disappointing to find that there is absolutely no background information on cast and crew and almost no information on the film, with most of the comments simply describing what is happening on screen, what is about to happen or what has just happened (the track seems to be lagging about a second behind the picture). And after about halfway the two men simply run out of things to say and very large sections of the film have no commentary at all; worse still the soundtrack level is not raised in these sections so one is left effectively watching the film with the sound turned down (though some might argue that’s the best way).

The only interesting points made are: the woman in the seat in front of Linda Hayden is Agrama’s wife; for some audience shots at ‘The Queen Kong Show’ the numbers were doubled by shooting split screen, with the same people on both sides (this is just about visible when it’s pointed out); and Agrama - who is, frankly, full of it - believes the film was shot in 1970-72. Ray sounds surprised but accepts this until ten minutes later when the film reaches the Jaws spoof and he tactfully points out that that film wasn’t released until 1975.

Disappointing commentary aside, the R1 DVD is the only legitimate way to see this amazing film (unless you can get your hands on the Japanese disc of course) and is therefore indispensable. Full marks to Fred Olen Ray for releasing this, but could-do-better on the commentary.

And I haven’t even mentioned the songs: “Burn your bra, burn your panties! Call your ma, call your aunties! Step aboard - the Liberated Lady!” Unbelievable...

MJS rating: A-

Directors: Kel Dolen, David Allen
Writers: Kel Dolen, David Allen
Producers: Kel Dolen, David Allen
Cast: Kel Dolen, David Allen, David No
Country: Australia
Year of release: 2002
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Screen Entertainment)

You may have heard the phrase 'Show, don’t tell.' If you have, you’re probably not David W Allen or Kel Dolen, the guys who made this dull Australian vampire film, set (for no apparent reason) in South Africa. That’s the bit of South Africa where everyone has a strong Aussie accent, apparently.

Kel Dolen himself stars as Michael Dorn (an homage to the Star Trek actor?) who is part of a “small team of molecular biologists” researching a possible cure for HIV. In fact there are only two biologists in this team: Dorn and Scottie (Scott Tyack), plus one bureaucrat, Alex (co-writer, co-director David Allen who has subsequently added his middle initial to his screen name, presumably to distinguish himself from the legendary special effects artist who directed Puppet Master II) and a gun-toting heavy called Lance (Chris Kerrison) who has a Southern United States accent and sometimes wears a Confederate flag bandana. Because, you know, molecular biology research programmes often require firepower.

Reign in Darkness has three big problems (well, four if you count the fact that it all takes place in bright sunshine). It’s boring, it’s packed with inconsistencies and stuff that just doesn’t fit together in any conceivable way - and it’s narrated to death. For most of the movie, wooden actor Dolen drones on in a flat, lifeless monotone, explaining what his character is feeling, what he’s thinking, what he has just done, what he plans to do next and occasionally what he is actually doing while we’re watching him doing it. This is not some sort of film noir-style narration that a (good) film might get away with, it’s just somebody reading out a (fairly rubbish) story while we see it acted.

Dorn and his three colleagues are studying a virus called K-17 (which an opening caption tells us is believed to genuinely exist...) only their version is called RVK-17 for some reason. They’re not sure who they’re working for and their test subjects are tramps and hobos, whom they inject with the latest batch of RVK-17 to see what happens.

Dorn and Lance drag a tramp out of his cardboard home and inject him, instantly turning the ‘gentleman of the road’ into a maniac who attacks Dorn. Meanwhile narrator-Dorn tells us that these people are “like lab rats”. Well, no, not really. Lab rats are usually found in the controlled environment of, you know, a lab. They’re not just wild rats picked up on the street and injected with stuff. As Dorn tries to fight off the tramp, Lance saves him by blasting several shots from his automatic pistol into the man - while he is lying on top of the struggling Dorn!

Now here’s a tricky one: which of these is dumber? The idea that you can shoot someone (at point blank range) and the bullets will not continue through their body into the poor sod lying directly underneath them. Or the experimental procedure of Dorn’s team which is to find a homeless person, inject them with a virus which causes them to turn into a maniac (this is already known, it’s no surprise), do so without any way of restraining the person and then shoot them before they can be studied, thus rendering the whole thing pointless. This scene is typical of the film in having ideas that might sound good, might even work in isolation, but simply don’t make anything approaching sense when put together.

Despite miraculously escaping Lance’s bullets, Dorn has been stabbed by his own hypodermic needle which apparently still contained some RVK-17 and this turns him into a vampire. For some reason and in some way. Not a maniacal vampire who wants to kill and eat the first person he sees, but a haemavore nonetheless. Why the virus should affect him differently to the tramp is never explained. But he runs off, uses his new vampire superstrength to kill some anonymous goons sent to catch him and resigns himself to life as a fugitive. Oh, and there’s some back story about how one of the earlier test subjects went renegade and killed Dorn’s wife, back at the start of the project.

Now, Lance has some unseen masters with whom he converses while standing in a fuzzy spotlight surrounded by darkness (they call him ‘bounty hunter’ although we have already established that he is no such thing). These masters (actually it’s just one voice which not only is even more flat and lifeless than the narration but which constantly fades in and out of audibility) tell Lance that he must track down Dorn, helped by someone called Gage.

This turns out to be a tall guy with short hair died a sort of greenish-yellow and it must be said that Korean-Australian David No stands out not so much by his distinctive barnet, more by virtue of being the only person in the cast who can act. Lance and Gage can’t stand each other but have to work together to hunt Dorn. Gage is called a ‘half-breed’ but this is never explained and makes no sense if this form of vampirism is caused by a virus (not that the film-makers seem to have much clue what a virus actually is...) No’s other work includes Subterano, The Matrix Reloaded and Mr Nice Guy, in which he fought one-on-one with Jackie Chan.

Much of the film then consists of these two tracking down Dorn who returns to his flat (which has a Metropolis poster on the wall - the sure sign of a film-maker using his own home) where everything has been turned over by someone searching for something. They didn’t find his gun because he cleverly hid it under his CD player but they have taken his sword. Dorn also retrieves a photo of himself and the late Mrs Dorn. He sets himself up in some shed or room or building or I don’t know, it’s never explained, where he makes himself some kevlar body armour and a long trench coat lined with kevlar. Again, we have a choice. Is the dumbest thing here the idea that one person, without any specialist knowledge or equipment, could run up state of the art bullet-proof clothing in a dingy room virtually overnight? Or is it that bullet-proof body armour is completely superfluous for a character who has already discovered that he has amazing healing powers. Make him able to survive being shot or give him bullet-proof clothes, but why do both?

While rarely bad enough to be entertaining (or even interesting), Reign in Darkness does occasionally provide some unintentional laughs, mostly in scenes where someone blasts away at someone else at point blank range while the other person simply runs away unscathed. There is also the world’s least exciting car-chase in which two expensive sports cars are driven at reasonable speeds because they must be returned unscratched to the dealer who lent them after filming wraps. Although credit where credit is due, the film-makers do make the red car look like it has crashed by tilting it to one side, popping the bonnet open and sticking a smoke machine under it.


There are good moments in this film - there is for example an almost Kubrickian shot of a guy blasted in the head while framed in a doorway - but they are few and far between and fail to compensate for the ludicrous plot, terrible dialogue, lousy acting and relentless bloody narration. It all ends with a confrontation between Dorn and a sort of master vampire called Raphael Ravenscroft, one of the people who were commanding Lance. Apparently there indeed are real vampires and the development of RVK-17 really was an attempt to cure AIDS but only to ensure a plentiful supply of uncontaminated blood for the vampires. Or something. This goes on forever. I mean, I didn’t time it but I would estimate 10-15 minutes of just two people talking. The whole structure of the film is out of whack with what seems like a climax about halfway through. It’s only 90 minutes but it drags and drags and drags. It took me three evenings to sit through it all because I kept falling asleep.

Anyway, Dorn despatches Ravenscroft and his shadowy, hooded cohorts with a gun that they initially scorn until he announces that it is loaded with silver bullets.

Silver bullets? Dude, that’s werewolves not vampires.

Dorn then blows up some building and drives off.

On their website, Dolen and Allen explain that they had no training or experience in film-making when they shot Reign in Darkness. They’re actually marketing executives who decided that the tricky part of film-making is selling the thing so they applied themselves to raising the money and then, it seems, made the film itself almost as an afterthought. It shows, it really does. Despite their claims to have read some books on the subject, this is what a film looks like when it’s made by people whose only knowledge of films comes from watching the things. I mean, all credit to them for creating something from nothing, for getting up off their backsides and actually making a feature-length film. But it didn’t have to be this poor.

At heart, Reign in Darkness is a very cheap Blade knock-off and its emphasis on ‘genetically created vampires’ puts it in the same sub-subgenre as The Witches Hammer but the Aussie film has none of the charm of the British one, none of the fun, none of the excitement. It’s just a heavy slog through illogical, over-narrated drama, devoid of anything that could reasonably be called thrills, horror or action. It doesn’t help that, aside from David No, pretty much nobody in the cast has any acting experience. In fact the only other person with any sort of credits to speak of is stunt co-ordinator George Novak whose career goes right back to Mad Max. He is credited as ‘Bum’ so he may be the guy who gets shot while lying on top of Dorn, but somebody else is credited as ‘Homeless man’ so who knows (or indeed, cares)?

Actually there is one funny thing in the credits (two if you include the misspelling of ‘criminal’ in the copyright notice). There are separate credits for the people who animated the thoroughly over-the-top ‘RapidFire Productions’ logo - even though this is only used on the trailer, not the film itself.

Also on the R2 Screen Entertainment DVD are original trailers for I Spit on Your Grave and Don’t Mess with My Sister, both more interesting than the main feature. There is also a trailer for Andreas Schnaas’ Demonium, a very short teaser trailer for Nutbag and a trailer for Bangkok Hell which is in Thai and unsubtitled!

According to the RapidFire website, Reign in Darkness was shot for A$49,000, sold to 27 territories and “won numerous awards.” Dolen and Allen have also made The Industry, a black comedy about the Australian film industry plus two short films, Snap and Time II Die. Their most recent work is a Star Wars fan film called Wrath of the Mandalorian (dear Lord...) and they have a feature called The Gates of Hell in post-production. Perhaps they have learned about film-making since they made Reign in Darkness. Hopefully, they have at least learned the principle of ‘Show, don’t tell.’

I know I’m being very down on this film and really it’s not terrible, I’ll admit that, but it is massively Not Very Good.

MJS rating: D+

Director: “Martin Tate”
Writer: "Benjamin Carr"
Producer: Kirk Edward Hansen
Cast: Marissa Tait, Jason Faunt, Tyler Anderson
Year of release: 1999
Country: USA
Reviewed from: R1 DVD

Totem has three sets: the inside of a cabin, the outside of a cabin and a very tiny cemetery. It has six young, largely unknown actors. And it runs a grand total of 57 minutes (or 68 if you include the opening and closing credits). This is a small film in every sense.

The basic premise is brilliantly simple and surprisingly reminiscent of The Exterminating Angel in places. Six youngsters who don’t know each other find themselves in an isolated cabin. Each has the same story to tell: they felt a sudden, inexplicable compulsion to stop whatever they were doing (lunch, sex, automobile repairs) and get to the cabin by any means possible. None of them know where they are, none of them have told anyone where they were going (because they didn’t know, obviously) and each of them knew that there would be six people in total.

Alma (The Bold and the Beautiful star Marissa Tait) is the last to arrive. Paul (Jason Faunt, a sort of low-rent Brad Pitt who was the Red Ranger in Power Rangers Time Force) takes it upon himself to introduce the others: Len (Eric W Edwards), Robert (Tyler Anderson: Microscopic Boy), Tina (Alicia Lagano: All About Us) and Roz (Sacha Spencer: Spy High). Len makes sexist comments about the girls and Robert is brooding and mysterious but that’s about as far as the detailed characterisation goes.

The five kids already present have each made an attempt to leave the cabin and found that they can’t - they just can’t get further than about a hundred feet before grinding to a halt. This is described as a ”magical, invisible wall” but it’s not like a force field, it’s just that their movements slow down and stop, like walking through mud. Alma has a try anyway and discovers that there is one path away from the cabin, down through the woods to a mysterious (and very small) cemetery, replete with mysterious (and very small) gravestones and wooden crosses.

And here they find the ‘totem’ of the title, except that it’s not like any totem pole that I, or they, (or anyone) has ever seen. It’s basically a stone column, square in cross section and about two meters high. In one side are three box-like recesses which house three very European-looking statues, each about 18 inches to two feet in height. The four-minute opening title sequence included numerous shots of these things moving slightly or their eyes glowing so it should come as no surprise that they somehow become animated later in the picture.

After all, this is a Full Moon movie, executive produced by Charles Band, and what would a Charlie Band film be without some killer dolls?

Tina is the first of the group to die, killed by something mysterious while she and Paul are alone in the fog-enshrouded cemetery. When her corpse, laid out on a table back at the cabin, starts spouting some ancient Native American language, Robert is somehow able to translate it - he can’t explain how - and from this the nature of the curse which has fallen on the youngsters is decoded. (Robert is supposedly Native American, and recognisably so, giving rise to an argument with Paul in which he makes it clear that, despite his heritage, he knows nothing about any tribe other than his own and he knows almost nothing about that one. It’s an interesting angle on a stereotypical situation which is let down by only a couple of points: Tyler Anderson looks about as Native American as I do, and he plays this role with an accent which most closely resembles Swedish...)

The basic premise of Totem, as here presented, is actually a pretty neat set-up: three of these people are destined to kill the other three but there is no indication of who may be victim or (unwitting) killer and the only way to ensure one does not become the former is to take action and become the latter. That’s a really interesting psychological/supernatural concept which could be milked for real tension on a low budget, especially as the cabin where the sextet are imprisoned is devoid of food (although it does have a 19th century Bible which holds some clues).

Unfortunately, this subplot gets mixed up with the other one that we were all expecting as the three mini-statues come to life and attack. It’s never entirely clear - not to the characters and certainly not to the audience - whether the statues are implicit in the murders or whether the murders are bringing the statues to life after the fact. There is a curious couple of minutes late in the film when an uncredited male voice recites a load of vague and incomprehensible stuff about the origin of the totem, playing over a montage of clips from old Viking movies (no one film in particular, the footage all comes from a compilation of public domain trailers). This does rather look like padding, suggesting the original cut of the film was even shorter than this one.

Then, shortly before the end of the movie, there is a surprisingly clever bit of plotting which turns the whole story (the curse one, not the killer dolls one) on its head. Unfortunately, this is followed by the inexplicable and unnecessary appearance of a couple of dodgy-looking zombies which rather deflate things.

I really, really don’t know what to make of Totem. The movie is competently directed by a pseudonymous David DeCoteau and photographed by the prolific Howard Wexler (a DeCoteau regular whose lengthy CV includes Phoenix 2, Legend of the Mummy 2, Voodoo Academy, Leather Jacket Love Story and second unit on Puppet Master II, Spiders II and Revenant). But the script by Neal Marshall Stevens (Hellraiser: Deader, Thir13en Ghosts) under his regular Full Moon pseudonym 'Benjamin Carr' (Frankenstein Reborn!, Zarkorr! The Invader, Kraa! The Sea Monster, Hideous! - and a number of films without exclamation marks in their titles) from a story by Band just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Some of the individual scenes are actually pretty good and effective, including those exploring the mysterious inability of the occupants to depart which could so easily have been a laughably transparent piece of convenient plotting, but they never begin to gel into a cohesive plot. And with less than an hour of actual running time, they are never given the chance.

The cast all perform adequately. Tait and Faunt seem to be the nominal leads; they are the only two of the six with more than a handful of ultra-obscure credits and had previously worked together for DeCoteau on the first Witchouse film. Producer Kirk Edward Hansen has made about three dozen pictures for Band, from 1992’s Seed People through to 2001’s Train Quest (The Dead Hate the Living was, curiously, dedicated to his memory the year before). He seems to have started out as assistant to Band’s own gloriously named assistant, Bennah Burton-Burtt, and progressed through production assistant, production manager, co-producer and line-producer until eventually becoming a full-blown producer. Most of his credits seem to overlap with Benjamin Carr’s, including Frankenstein Reborn! and Voodoo Academy.

The music is provided by Richard Kosinski whose genre credits include vampire pictures (the Subspecies series), Celtic kid-fantasy (Leapin’ Leprechauns! I and II), Italian shorts (Langliena) and sasquatch movies (erm, Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw). Production design is by Helen Harwell (Hybrid, The Dentist 2) and the costume designer - not that there are too many costumes to design - is Edward Hibbs (The Brotherhood I and II, Final Stab, Leeches!). The most notable monicker in the credits however is post-production supervisor Eric Cartman (also credited as accountant on Hell Asylum) who is either an unsubtle pseudonym or a very unfortunately named individual who probably loathes South Park with a vengeance.

Special effects duties are shared between Christopher Bergschneider (Vampire Journals, The Halfway House, Decadent Evil) and Jeffrey S Farley (Scanner Cop II, Babylon 5, Deep Freeze). The usual 15-minute Videozone ‘making of’ (directed, I believe, by an uncredited Dave Parker) shows some behind-the-scenes shots which give much clearer views of the three killer statues than there are in the film. This is our only chance to see that the puppets had some limited degree of movement (rod and cable controlled) as their attacks in the film are so frenetically edited as to eradicate any chance of seeing the inanimate become animate. Such editing may well be to disguise the puppets’ limitations, I suspect.

Totem is available on its own and also on a double-bill disc paired with Jigsaw, which is the version that I watched. There is also a trailer for the film on this disc, including a full-frontal shot of a zombie which we never see clearly in the actual film. The Videozone featurette kicks off with Charles Band plugging Retro Puppet Master and promising that the following year (2000) would bring not only Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (eventually produced by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2004 with Band unattached and receiving only a courtesy credit) but also Subspecies V (still unproduced).

MJS rating: C

Director: Jason Croot
Producer: Jason Croot
Cast: Kyri Saphiris, Seye Adelekan, Hadrian Mekki
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Website: www.facebook.com/Lesequel
Reviewed from: online screener

Le Fear 2: Le Sequel is, not unexpectedly, a sequel to Jason Croot’s previous feature Le Fear, but it functions as a stand-alone film, being merely the next attempt by woebegotten indie film-maker Carlos Rivalos to direct a horror film. (The fictional) Le Fear was his 21st film; (the fictional) Le Sequel is his 22nd. Rivalos is the only shared character in both films.

Now here comes the bad news. At a micro-budget level, the hardest genre to make is comedy (well, possibly musical would be harder – I’m not sure anyone’s ever tried that). Most of the low-budget indie comedies I’ve been sent have failed to generate a single laugh in this office – and sadly, Le Fear 2: Le Sequel maintains that tradition. I could see it was trying to be funny. A lot of the situations could, on paper, be described as ‘wacky’ or ‘zany’. But not a single smile cracked my face throughout the entire 90 minutes. And I’m not some sourpuss grumpypants; I really wanted to enjoy the film. But it just doesn’t work.

I have previously identified the subgenre of the ‘recursive mockumentary’: real films about the making of fake films. Examples include Mark Withers’ Bare Naked Talent aka Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice, Keith Wright’s Take Me to Your Leader and Steve Lawson’s Just for the Record. I’m sure there are many others. Le Sequel sits on the border of that subgenre because although it’s shot in a handheld, fly-on-the-wall, shaky-cam style, it’s not actually presented as a documentary. Rather like The Thick of It or Arrested Development or any number of modern sitcoms, the visual impression given is that there is a camera crew documenting these people’s lives, but there very obviously isn’t an actual camera crew within the reality of the show.

That’s not a problem. The problem largely lies with Croot’s decision to work without a script. Improvisation, whether on screen or on stage, often sounds like a good idea. We don’t need to write a script, we don’t need to learn a script, we can just wing it. The problem is that, unless you are an absolute top-level comedy genius, or prepared to work incredibly hard, improvised films tend to be, frankly, a bit shit. Hardcore (which was good) and Just for the Record (which was dire, despite the presence of talented, experienced actors) were both scripted, so not directly comparable.

Take Me to Your Leader however was completely improvised by the cast around Keith Wright’s basic plot structure, and that works. But it only works because Wright shot 80 hours of footage and distilled it down to 80 minutes of film. That’s the sort of ratio you need to work with in order for a film like this to succeed. That’s not 78 hours and 40 minutes of alternative takes, that’s vast quantities of hard work simply junked: entire scenes, entire subplots, whole characters. Making an improvised film is vastly more labour-intensive for the cast, crew (especially the editor!) and director, and requires a ruthlessness unequalled in the artistic sphere: a willingness to kill one’s own babies that makes Sophie’s Choice look like picking a starter in Pizza Hut.

It’s clear that some of Croot’s cast have developed characters and can effectively improvise them in the situations they’re given. That doesn’t mean what they say or do is funny of course. As explained above, improvisation has a high signal to noise ratio and only a very small amount of what is filmed will ever be good enough to keep. I found an interview with Croot wherein he says that he shot 24 hours of footage (over six days). And that’s simply not enough to fashion a watchable film of this type. And it shows.

Carlos Rivalos himself is played by Kyri Saphiris (Eva’s Diamond). It’s not clear why the character has a Spanish name; Saphiris himself is a Londoner with a Cypriot Greek background and as such Rivalos neither looks nor sounds Spanish. Now I’m frankly confused by Saphiris’ performance. He’s clearly a decent actor, but on the face of it he seems to be terrible at improvising. His dialogue is full of erms and ers and simply repeating what the other person has just said. All hesitation and repetition. He’d be utterly useless on Just a Minute. But given the quality of the actor’s performance (in terms of maintaining a character and delivering his ‘lines’) and his experience, I’m left wondering whether this is how he has chosen to play Rivalos (chosen, presumably, in the previous film).

Whatever, the effect is the same. The central character’s dialogue doesn’t sound natural, it sounds like the actor is stalling for time while trying to think of something to say. It’s exactly what you don’t want in a film like this. Some of the other actors also display this tendency and the scenes they share can be painful, along the lines of: “Er, it’s the wrong size.” “It’s the wrong size?” “Er, yeah. It’s sort of…” “So it’s the wrong size?” “Erm, yeah.” “Right. Yeah. It needs to be, what, er, smaller?” “Yeah, erm. Smaller.” (Not actual dialogue, but you get the idea.)

Let’s turn our attention now to the actual story, a word I choose carefully because I think it would be misleading to use ‘plot’. Rivalos approaches South African investor Dirk Heinz (Andrew Tiernan: The Bunker, Quatermas Experiment remake, Man Who Sold the World, Dead Cert) who offers him $10 million to make the film, provided that Rivalos puts in £500,000 of his own money, to which end the director remortgages his house. Right from the off we’re in trouble because Croot gives us an establishing shot of a modern office block, all steel and glass, then sets the actual scene in an ‘office’ which is a windowless room with breeze-block walls. If you can’t find/afford an expensive office location … don’t set a scene in a venture capitalist’s office. Have the two men meet at Rivalos’ home, or in a restaurant, or shoot a telephone conversation with tight close-ups. But don’t expect us to believe that a millionaire investor spends his days in what is rather obviously someone’s garage, especially after an establishing shot of a 15-storey glass tower.

When Rivalos gets to his ‘film set’, he finds that it is in fact a small touring caravan parked on an industrial estate next to a busy road. And this is where the story’s reality falls apart. His various cast and crew turn up, none of whom he has met before, and they start shooting what they believe is a ‘£10 million production’ inside a cramped caravan. This just doesn’t make any sense, or reflect in any way the reality of film production at any budget level, and as such the various reactions of the characters don’t make much sense either, and hence there is no credibility in most of the characters or situations.

Rivalos’ principal nemesis is producer Efi, a young Nigerian chap who constantly promises that everything will be okay and then utterly fails to deliver what the director wants. (Nigerian-born Seye Adelekan, making his feature debut, is a singer-guitarist who has played with Paloma Faith and Ellie Goulding and whose own Afrobeat songs have received a lot of acclaim – add another name to the list of ‘pop stars in British horror films'.) Faced with Efi's ineptitude, Rivalos swiftly descends into simply repeating variations on the theme of “This is all shit!” which very rapidly becomes tiresome. On paper, the characters probably sounded hilarious, but on screen they’re not funny at all.

Jason Croot himself (a jobbing actor with credits back to 2000, including Umbrage: The First Vampire) plays a Frenchman who doesn’t speak English, Chafarafa, variously referred to as either ‘script editor’ or ‘script supervisor’ (despite those being two completely separate and unrelated jobs). Efi brings along two Nigerian women: production designer Africa (Roxy Sternberg, who had a recurring role in Law and Order: UK) and runner Femu (Scherrikar Bell), who claims to be a big name singer in her home country.

Africa gives the caravan a ‘horror’ feel by sellotaping up some pound shop Halloween decorations. The ‘special effects’ are an inflatable alien taped to a remote control toy car. And so on and so on. Everyone seems to be bad at their job, but for the most part that’s all we get. They’re shit, and the production is shit, and Carlos Rivalos stares blankly ahead and says “What the hell’s going on?” and “It’s all, erm, sort of, shit, isn’t it?” Yes it is, but it’s not entertaining.

Among all this are a few recognisable faces. Erika Spawn herself, Victoria Hopkins (Doghouse, Zombie Women of Satan) - never less than awesome - gives the production a massive shot in the arm with her scenes as make-up artist/sexual predator Queenie. Elegant Eleanor James (Colour from the Dark, Hellbride) turns up later on as Vanessa, an actress hired to play a vampire (which shows how long this has been in post; Ella retired from acting in 2012) who refuses to do any ‘stunts’ or indeed anything more strenuous than sinuously winding her body and arms in a vaguely spooky way. This will sound really base but the only scene in the entire film I really enjoyed was Queenie’s (fully clothed) lesbian seduction of Vanessa. Not, I must stress, because of any perv value but because it was two very talented actors working together in a self-contained scene away from any nonsense about caravans, inflatable aliens or breezeblock offices.

Ever-suave Julian Lamoral-Roberts (Nightscape: Dark Reign of Thanatos, Bordello Death Tales - also credited as co-producer/executive producer) lends his rich tones to another vampire actor who plays in the scene that Vanessa shoots. Except that JLR is also in some scenes as an unnamed driver and it’s entirely unclear whether that’s supposed to be the same character…

To return to the whole story/plot dichotomy, the problem here – and I think it may be the biggest of the film’s many problems – is that there is absolutely no development or structure. The whole film is just things going repeatedly wrong around Carlos Rivalos as he tries to make a film. Narrative development is completely absent, and the various scenes could have been assembled in pretty much any order, as long as they were topped and tailed with the bits in Dirk Heinz’s luxury office/lock-up. There’s an old saying about the three act-structure: in the first act, a man climbs a tree; in the second act, he falls out of the tree; in the third act we examine him and if he’s alive it’s a comedy, if he’s dead it’s a drama. Le Fear 2 doesn’t work because it is just a succession of people repeatedly falling out of trees for the best part of 90 minutes.

The problematic absence of plot is not helped by the paucity of characterisation. There are so many characters that few have the chance to make any impression and those who do need to be fairly clear-cut and single-minded, like Queenie. At the heart of this is Carlos Rivalos himself who is just the dullest, least interesting, least dynamic lead character that I’ve seen since I suffered though Zorg and Andy. Granted, he’s not an arsehole like Harlan Noble in Just for the Record, but he’s also not an ambitious, naïve debutante like Jack Innov in Hardcore or a likeable optimist like Corbin West in Take Me to Your Leader. Rivalos is just a miserable sod who looks bored even when he’s angry, and we’re given no chance to judge his talent because we’re neither told about nor shown any of his previous work.

Here’s what Jason Croot has missed, and it’s crucial. In any story about somebody struggling to achieve something against overwhelming odds, we the audience have to be really rooting for that person. We have to really want them to succeed. We have to care about them. That person needs an indomitable confidence and self-assurance, however misplaced, however unwarranted. That way, when they come close to jacking the whole thing in (which should, of course, be at the start of act three), we feel their pain – and then we cheer and applaud when whatever it is that turns them back to the task, turns them back to the task. The hell with it. Everything might be against us. We might have no budget, no talent, no support and no prospects, but damn it we’ve got hope and heart and each other and we can make this work. And if it doesn’t work, nobody will be able to say we didn’t try our damnedest and we can hold our heads high and be proud of what we have achieved. Even if no-one else ever sees it, even if people do see it and everyone who sees it hates it, we will have made this film. It will be ours. Our film, our achievement, created through our teamwork and our hard graft, and no-one can take that away from us. Go team!

Which is not what you get when the director of the fake film simply sits around complaining about how shit everything is.

Truth be told, I felt much more sympathy for producer Efi than director Carlos. Efi and Africa and Femu are potentially great characters and, although they are presumably meant to be seen as part of Rivalos’ problems, I had a lot more interest in, and empathy with, them than I did with him. Efi is whatever the Lagos equivalent is of a Cockney wide boy (but with a much less ghastly accent). His response to everything is basically “My friend, this will all be taken care of. I have it all in hand. You should not worry. Look at me. I am not worrying. And neither should you, my friend.” Africa is almost scarily cheerful, just one step short of breaking into a chorus of ‘Oh Happy Day’. Where Efi is full of charm and bullshit, Africa is full of joy and warmth. He knows what’s going wrong but sees no need to admit it, even to himself; she knows what’s happening and is absolutely certain that it’s all okay. Meanwhile Femu is also confident but her confidence is slightly (and credibly) undermined by her frustration at being deployed in a low-level, unskilled role when she should really be a star.

Crucially, Efi, Africa and Femu all want the film they are making to succeed and are busy coming up with ideas (many of them admittedly bad) which adapt to the situation they’re in. I was rooting for them. I wasn’t rooting for Carlos Rivalos, a boring, sad, ineffectual little man whose life is one long self-pitying shrug. It’s not like he’s even got an alcohol problem or some other redeeming characteristic. He’s just a grumpy fucker. There’s your problem, right there. Nothing at all about this film makes me care about the lead character. I don’t want him to succeed and if he fails it’s his own miserable fault.

This is not a formula for a successful motion picture, real or fake.

As mentioned, Efi, Africa and Femu are all Nigerian and the film makes numerous references to ‘Nollywood’, the little-known but hugely successful cinema of that country, often cited as the fourth biggest national cinema industry in the world after Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong. Efi and friends bring a Nollywood sensibility to the movie that they are trying to make, which includes such unlikely occurrences as a random witch doctor showing up on set during a take, brandishing an advert for an international phone card.

Now, I’ve watched a little bit of Nollywood. It’s an extraordinary brand of cut-price cinema completely unlike anything else you’ve ever seen, and they do make a lot of horror movies over there (though I’ve never got round to actually reviewing any on this site). However, most people who watch a film like Le Fear 2: Le Sequel will never, ever have seen a Nigerian film and I suspect many will be completely ignorant that an indigenous, culturally distinctive African popular film culture even exists. Consequently audiences won’t have the ‘mental real estate’ to grasp the nature of what Efi, Africa and Femu are trying to do and there’s a danger that the film might be considered patronising, imperialist or even racist. In my opinion, adding the Nollywood angle to the story adds an unnecessary layer of complexity for very little reward. Those three characters are interesting and fun enough in themselves. Though they could have benefited, like everything else in the film, from a bit more actual comedy.

Underpinning all of this is the fundamental question, articulated by Carlos Rivalos on numerous occasions: “What the, sort of, erm, bloody hell, is, erm, erm, going on?”

Very clearly, the film being made is not costing £500,000, let alone 10 million US dollars. But it’s not clear what those figures refer to, or what Dirk Heinz’s intentions are.  We have to assume he’s scamming Rivalos, if only because he’s Sewth Effreecarn and, as the song says, “I’ve met the King of China and the working Yorkshire miner but I’ve never met a nice South African.” Heinz turns up ‘on set’ towards the end of the film (and that’s another oddity – it’s not a set, it’s a location) where he threatens ready-to-quit Rivalos with violence because he ‘has ten million invested in this film’. But he doesn’t. Does he? Is Heinz meant to be an idiot who has thrown ten million dollars at a useless film? Or is he a crook who has conned half a million quid out of Carlos Rivalos? Is the whole thing some version of the classic email hoax of ‘you’ve won/inherited this huge amount, send a smaller amount to get it’? That’s known of course as ‘the Nigerian scam’, but is that relevant? Right at the end, Rivalos returns to Heinz’s shed to show him the footage he has managed to cobble together and the executive producer proclaims himself delighted. Is that meant to show he has no fucking clue about films, or does it mean his scam has worked? Did he want Rivalos to make the worst film in the world as some sort of tax scam? Is this a 21st century cinematic equivalent of The Producers. I have literally no idea.

On top of which, just as an aside, how the jiminy is an unsuccessful indie film director living in a house worth half a million pounds, and indeed what sort of bank would advance a mortgage of that size to someone with no fixed income.

Also in a large (and surprisingly name-heavy) cast are Aiko Horiuchi (The Grudge 3) as a Japanese actress who doesn’t speak English and Ian Cullen (who was in a 1964 Doctor Who adventure and a 2014 Doctor Who online story!) as the caravan’s unhappy owner, plus Catherine Balvage (Puritan, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife), Tom Bonnington (The Wrong Floor, A Haunting at the Rectory), Leila Reid (When Evil Calls, Patrol Men), Shona McWilliams (When Evil Calls), Sean Earl McPherson (I am Cursed) and 1st AD Natalie Ames (an extra in The Seasoning House). Many of the cast were also in Croot’s second feature Demons and Doors which, despite the title, isn’t a horror film. Matthew Taylor (camera on World War Z and Daddy’s Girl) is credited with cinematography on Le Sequel; Danielle Farrington with make-up effects.

Le Fear 2: Le Sequel is yet another of those films which I really wanted to like but which repeatedly felt flat, failing in numerous ways for numerous reasons. And normally, I wouldn’t have posted a review because in general, when a film-maker sends me a screener of a new, unreleased movie, it does neither of us any favours if I take it to pieces, however constructively. No-one wants their first review to be a negative one, or their only external review on the IMDB page to be a demolition. And I honestly don’t derive pleasure from tearing things to pieces. I do however enjoy carefully taking things to pieces, exploring and explaining in what ways (in my opinion) they have been, as it were, ‘misconstructed’.

So I wasn’t going to review Le Sequel until I looked at the IMDB External Reviews page and was surprised to find nearly 40 reviews already on there, which means my views aren’t going to be all that people read about this and my negativity will not be so damaging as it might have been. But what’s really curious is that when I started reading those reviews, every single one was positive, many of them lavish in their praise. Really, really positive. "It's truly uniquely hilarious. Odd and strange and yet over the top bliss. In simple terms a great comedy that stands out above most of the comedies today!" trumpets one hagiographic review. Another says: "I also adored how natural the dialogue in the script flowed, and some of the lines are just hilarious!”

Now, film appreciation is subjective, comedy films even more so. I’ve written many reviews over the years which many people have disagreed with. Fine and dandy. But I thought the effusive, sometimes extravagantly over-the-top praise lavished on Le Fear 2 was interesting, because it says a lot about how online film criticism works. I’m going to sound like a ghastly snob here, and I don’t mean it that way, but it’s unavoidable.

Democratisation, yes it’s a Good Thing. Nowadays, absolutely anyone can set up a blog, starting writing their opinions of movies they have seen – and bang, they’re a film reviewer. But only in the same sense that anyone can get up on stage at the pub’s karaoke night and bang, they’re a singer. But that’s fine. Everyone has to start somewhere. I look at some of the reviews I wrote in the early days of this blog, back in 1998/9, and I cringe. I’m sure the stuff I was writing in fanzines in the 1980s was even worse. Film criticism, like any other form of writing, is something that you can only get better at by doing it.

So there are a lot of people out there writing their views of the films they watch at the cinema or on DVD or Netflix or whatever. This is one of the reasons why I never bother reviewing mainstream movies. When there’s 200 External Reviews on the IMDB, including Variety, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Sun-Times etc – who the hell is going to notice or care what I have to say? But if you think that the world will benefit from your opinion of Guardians of the Galaxy, knock yourself out.

Two things I have noticed about such amateur reviewers over the years. One is that they tend to see everything as black and white. Films are absolutely great except the ones that suck. I used to see that back in the 1990s when wannabe reviewers would send sample pieces to SFX. Aspiring critics have a tendency to review their favourite films, and I always used to caution people: when submitting sample reviews, pick something that has both good and bad points and explain what they are. That advice still holds today, by the way.

The other thing I have noticed is that amateur film reviewers get very excited when someone sends them a freebie. I’m old and cynical and I’ve been doing this for two decades and in my glory days I sat in Soho screening rooms with wine and nibbles and got paid for the privilege so I’m unfazed when a screener pops through my letterbox (or increasingly, when a Vimeo link and password pops into my email inbox). But imagine that you’re some teenage kid, writing a blog about movies you like, and you get an email out of the blue from an indie film-maker inviting you to watch their unreleased film. Wow, that’s the big time. Suddenly you’re Ain’t It Cool News.

Again, I’ve been there. I can still recall the shiver of amazement I felt when a publisher actually sent free copies of some unpublished books to our crappy little sci-fi society for review. Holy cow. It’s nerd Christmas.

The upshot of all this is that if you dig around on the web for film reviewers and film sites that no-one has ever heard of (and I certainly have never heard of most of the reviewers linked from the Le Fear 2 IMDB page, despite spending a considerable portion of my life on IMDB External Reviews pages) you are going to (a) make someone’s day and (b) get an effusive, glowing review. To what extent that review is useful or helpful, as opposed to a middling review from me or Fangoria or Dread Central or Bloody Disgusting or AICN or whoever, that’s a matter for debate. But that’s what I see with Le Fear 2. I may be out of step with most other reviewers (though I did find one or two whose views matched mine) but I think that’s because I’m about 18 years out of step with them. And I’m wondering whether aiming those Vimeo links - a screener costs nothing at all now – at amateur reviewers was actually part of Jason Croot’s marketing strategy. If so it’s as good as any, I guess.

None of which, sadly, alters my own critical opinion of Le Fear 2: Le Sequel. There is no real plot. The set-up and motivation don’t make sense. The central character is unsympathetic. The improvisation doesn’t work. And it never achieves its principal aim, which is making me laugh. Sorry.

Le Fear 2 was shot in 2012, around the same time that the first film was made freely available on Vimeo, and spent a couple of years in post before screener links were sent out. Croot has announced plans for two more sequels and a prequel, which seems a wee bit ambitious. Personally, I’ve spent enough time with Carlos Rivalos, the miserable sod, although I would potentially be interested in a film about the further adventures of Efi Womonbongo, provided it had a proper script.

MJS rating: D+

Director: John Carl Buechler
Writer: Ed Naha
Producer: Albert Band
Cast: Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Jenny Beck, June Lockhart
Year of release: 1985
Country: USA/Italy
Reviewed from: UK rental tape (Entertainment in Video, 1986)

I can’t believe that this incredible movie has been sitting in my to-be-watched pile for years (despite my having interviewed both writer and director back in my SFX days).

SEE! Sonny Bono mutate into a giant maggot! COUNT! The stars from Battlestar Galactica, Lost in Space, Charlie’s Angels and V! HEAR! One of Hollywood’s top short actors recite The Faerie Queen! OGLE! A pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfus running around clad only in a few vine leaves! WATCH! A woman turn into her own daughter! STARE! At a short, fat, ugly, hairy monster reading Fangoria!

And to give it that extra sheen of retrospective surrealism, the young boy who saves the world from the powers of darkness is called... Harry Potter! Extraordinary!

The story starts with the Potter family moving into a San Francisco apartment building. Michael Moriarty (from the superb Q the Winged Serpent, and later in Law and Order and Psi Factor) is book-reviewer dad Harry Sr; sometime Angel Shelley Hack is mum Anne; 14-year-old Noah Hathaway (yes, Boxey from Battlestar) is son Harry Jr; and eleven-year-old Jenny Beck (young Elizabeth in V) is daughter Wendy, who wanders into the building’s basement, where she is zapped by a troll with a magic ring.

The troll is played by little person Phil Fondacaro (who has been in everything - Ghoulies II, Return of the Jedi, Decadent Evil - but whose most memorable role was possibly the tiny Dracula in The Creeps) in a full-body suit with a range of replaceable animatronic heads, each with a basic expression (smile, roar, etc) and a lot of additional movement. This was all created by director (and legendary special effects man) John Carl Buechler (it’s interesting to spot Howard Berger’s name in the credits too, years before he became the B in KNB FX). However, the troll transforms into a clone of Wendy which gives Beck full license to scream, growl, throw stuff around and contrast the mayhem nicely with the sweet, blonde thing she’s supposed to be. (There are many far worse child actors than Beck, who seems to have disappeared after about 1991 - wonder where she is now?)

Also in the building are lounge lizard Peter Dickinson (Sonny Bono: post-singer, pre-mayor), wannabe hunter Barry Taybor (daytime soap star Gary Sandy), actress Jeanette Cooper (Louis-Dreyfus, looking exactly like she did in Seinfeld), bone cancer-suffering literature professor Malcolm Malory (Fondacaro again, out of costume) and spooky old landlady Eunice St Clair (Lost in Space’s Lockhart). The troll, disguised as Wendy, infiltrates their apartments and takes them over: Dickinson becomes a disgusting giant maggot which then cracks open to reveal a dozen or so smaller troll-like beasties (vocalised by voice legend Frank Welker), Cooper becomes a wood-nymph, etc.

Young Harry Potter befriends Miss St Clair, who turns out to be a witch, protecting the world from the global domination plans of the fairies, as led by her former lover Tauroc, transformed into the troll. Unfortunately, the Potters moved into the building on Walpurgis Night, thereby setting Tauroc free. (St Clair has a strange mushroom-with-a-face called Galwyn and a painting of John Carl Buechler on her wall!) Transforming into a younger version of herself (played, in a simple yet brilliant bit of casting, by Lockhart’s daughter Anne), Miss St Clair goes up against Tauroc but is turned into a talking tree-stump. It’s up to Harry Potter to defeat the troll, rescue his sister and return the world to normal.

Troll was an original idea by Buechler, but the script was rewritten by former Fangoria editor Naha who receives sole credit. Harry has a poster for Buechler’s The Dungeonmaster on his wall and the troll/Wendy reads Fango in bed! The movie was made (over five and a half weeks, in Rome) by Empire Pictures, the straight-to-video company run by Albert and Charles Band before Charlie (credited here as executive producer) set up Full Moon. Watch for Band Jr and Sr in a couple of spoof clips from Pod People from the Planet Mars which Harry watches on TV.

This certainly isn’t the terrible picture that some people paint it, and if you’re a fan of prosthetic effects it’s a veritable smorgasbord - the troll costume itself is excellent. It’s good fun for kids, has some nice touches for adults, but mostly, it’s just bizarre, with the story giving the impression of having been pulled in various directions by different hands. It’s also a relic of a bygone era (17 or 18 years ago!) when this sort of movie could get made. If this is in your to-be-watched pile, slap it into your VCR tonight! (But beware the dire Italian rip-off Troll 2 which has no connection with this film.)

MJS rating: B

(This UK rental copy, incidentally, has barnstorming trailers for the utterly bonkers Eliminators, the deeply silly TerrorVision and the gobsmacking Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. Starchaser was of course the only feature-length animation ever released in true 3D - I saw a stereoscopic print at the NFT once and it was great! This trailer quotes a review which calls the film “better than Rainbow Brite and The Black Cauldron combined”!)

Director: xian vassie
Writer: xian vassie
Producer: Mark Collins-Cope, Joumana Jeffers, xian vassie
Cast: Manu Monade, Ellie Fairman, Antona Mirto
Year: 1997
Country: UK
Reviewed from: preview tape

Here’s something a bit odd - a review of a film that was never finished.

I have had this tape sitting my shelf for six years. I assume that it was sent through to me when I was working on SFX, possibly when I was also writing my ‘Independents Day’ column in the early days of Total Film. So one day I decided to sit down and see what I’d got.

What I’d got turned out to be about 30 minutes of disjointed scenes which promised a terrific little film. A search through the MJS archives also turned up a publicity brochure - which was handy as there were no credits on the film at all.

Here’s what I could work out. Snooty, wealthy Lizbeth Falahoun (Antona Mirto) has Professor Lipton (Bill Neenan, unseen) prisoner while she tries to track down the remaining pieces of the Talisman of Set, a powerful ancient Egyptian artefact. She sends two less-than-bright blokes, middle-aged Alf and young Fisty (sorry, don’t know the actors) to search the Professor’s house, where they come across French chef Jules (Manu Monade, a genuine chef who was hailed by The Sunday Times as baker of the best bread in London!) also looking for the Prof.

Jules has one of the pieces of the talisman, found in the soup of a restaurant customer who died at his table. Kidnapped by Alf and Fisty, Jules is nowhere to be seen when waitress Brigitte (Ellie Fairman), who has a crush on him, calls at his loft-flat. She assumes he has run away, consumed with guilt about the dead customer, and enlists the help of fat, jovial Porsche (Paul Tripp - not the one who composed Tubby the Tuba!) to search for him.

Meanwhile, Falahoun, served dinner by her manservant Petr (David Love), is visited by tall, supercilious Sir Luke Homers (Sean Brosnan) and his nervous lawyer Sophie (Carol Kentish). Homers has another piece of the talisman and offers Falahoun a contract which would give them joint control of the magical artefact (Homers’ company is named on the contract as Clearview Occult Investments, Trading and Unexplained Sciences - which gives it an interesting acronym!).

Handling the talisman fragment gives Jules hallucinations: he sees his carpet moving slightly and discovers underneath it a trapdoor, below which is a red-lit Egyptian temple. We also see him on a tube train, where he finds himself the only passenger, the train not stopping at any stations, and visited by ghostly twins (Rose and Sarah Kendall) whom we have seen in a painting, together with the talisman, in the Professor’s house. There is also a very effective scene when Jules opens the door to his flat to find all his furniture dancing around the room, a smashing stop-motion shot which would not have shamed Jiri Trnka.

And then the tape stopped. Some of the scenes had no soundtrack, and a shot of Jules rescuing Sophie from Falahoun’s mansion seemed oddly out of place, but I thought it was all just a dream sequence. It wasn’t - well, some of it might have been - it was a collection of disparate footage from various points in the story.

Basically, Jules is a chef who dreams of being a swashbuckling hero. There’s a still in the brochure from a scene not on the tape: Jules in a swordfight with a pirate named Ripper (Don Fearney), presumably a Walter Mitty-type daydream. He gets caught up in the situation after approaching phoney supernatural investigator Homers about the mysterious object found in the dead customer’s soup. Falahoun is apparently High Priestess of the Cult of Nephythys, who will have power over the ghosts of everyone who ever lived if she can piece the talisman back together...

On the evidence of this disjointed half-hour of footage, this would have been an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek romp. The brochure says that “shooting started in April 1997 and is scheduled to end in October ... post-production is due to be completed at the end of the year.” Just how far did this film get? Does it exist in any sort of finished form? I want to see more!

Apart from chef Monade (who was picked to add authenticity to the cooking scenes!), all the cast were professional actors. Ellie Fairman for example was a voice in the 2001 computer game Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive and also starred in an award-winning audiobook adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Antona Mirta has since appeared in another low-budget British film, the action thriller Red Mercury. Don Fearney now organises Hammer Horror fan events. Sean Brosnan is not, despite what the brochure claims, Pierce’s brother.

Carol Kentish, it turns out, I might actually have met! She was one of the actors who provided voices for the British dub of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, a dubbing session which I visited on behalf of SFX. She was also in The Devil’s Harvest, another unreleased British fantasy movie [Eventually released in 2005 - MJS], starring Brian Blessed and Julie T Wallace (of which I saw some footage when I was visiting that same Gamera dubbing session). Her other films - which may or may not have been completed - are Instant Karma (Slice Films), Inciting Murder (Equator Films) and Living Down Here (We Should Be Ltd). She performs in a topical comedy revue in Brighton called The Treason Show which is actually available on CD from Doctor Who audio producers Big Finish!

Scouring the web reveals that cinematographer Roger Eaton shot an acclaimed documentary on the Spanish architect Gaudi; editor Bill Sneddon went on to work on comedy shows like Jam and Smack the Pony; and costume designer Sam Dightam fulfilled the same role on the Richard Alston Dance Company’s production of The Rite of Spring for the BBC TV series Masterworks in 2002.

And then there’s the writer/director/producer (and composer), the defiantly lower-case xian vassie. Being an adept journalist it took me no time at all to identify him as Christian Vassie, a composer of music for more than sixty film and TV productions including a number of wildlife documentaries and the 2001 BBC Raffles pilot starring Nigel Havers. Born in York, where he still lives, he was once Head Chorister in York Minster Choir. And what is Mr Vassie doing now? He’s representing the Lib-Dems on York City Council!

How far into production did Talisman get? Why was it never finished? Does Christian Vassie still have all the footage? Will any film starring the lovely Carol Kentish ever actually get shown anywhere? To answer these questions I contacted the director himself and received this reply.

MJS rating: It wouldn’t be fare to give this one a grade.

The following e-mail was received in August 2003 from xian (Christian) vassie, director of uncompleted British indie horrorTalisman. My thanks to xian for taking the time to reply to my out-of-the-blue enquiry.

Hi Mike

I have just found the letter you sent me in July. I have also nosey-parkered your article on Talisman. Good detective work!

I suppose you are principally interested in knowing more about Talisman. To be honest I think you have more or less covered all the bases already. It is the tale of another underfunded British film failing to find completion funding. As we did the cap-in-hand rounds, the most frustrating refusal we received was from one of the main funding bodies (I forget which) who turned us down on the basis that the project was too commercial! At that point I confess I became a little confused as to what the British film industry was all about.

I think your analysis, based on what you saw, is probably accurate - the film would have made an entertaining low budget horror romp. We shall never know. Two fifths of it was in the can when shooting stopped.

You have already found out that my principal work is as a composer. I have just finished a major series about the Medici that will be shown in about 30 countries early next year. Justin Hardy (director of Gentleman Thief) and I have worked on seven or eight productions including The Great Plague, which won Best History at the Royal Television Society Awards last year, and Invitation to a Hanging, which was shown last May and got rave reviews in all the papers. On Invitation to a Hanging I not only composed the score (a jazz/blues/reggae score for an eighteenth century film) I also did most of the sound design.

It is a shame we did not get to finish Talisman. From a creative point of view I was looking forward to using my background in sound to create an original movie. I am mindful of the way in which Blair Witch turned the rules of film making upside down, whereby the soundtrack is the narrative and the picture is an impressionistic collage. It had been planned to use sound to tell the story as well as to support it.

You have obviously found out a great deal about many of the cast/crew. Roger Eaton is indeed making a success with several good projects on TV in the last year.

Do I have any other directing projects on the go? Yes. Justin Hardy and I are planning a short film based on a story by Chekhov which we will co-direct. Justin is also well on the way with plans to shoot a horror film, for which I will in all likelihood be acting as composer. He is a great director to work with because he gives everyone involved in a production the freedom to break rules and to do their best work.

I hope the above is of some interest.

regards

xian vassie

When Jeffrey Uhlmann contacted me to ask if I would like to review his film Mil Mascaras: Resurrection, he described the movie but I replied, “You had me at ‘Mil Mascaras’.” Having thoroughly enjoyed the film, but heard from other (reliable) sources about its somewhat complex creation, I was naturally delighted when Jeff agreed to an e-mail interview in December 2008.

How, when and why did you become interested in Mexican wrestling movies?
“I’ve been a connoisseur of genre and cult films for as long as I remember. I find lucha films particularly fascinating because they combine the aesthetic of the classic Universal horror films with comic book-style superheroes. Better still is the fact that the masked heroes actually exist in the real world. It’s that interface between the real and the surreal that I find most interesting.”

What was the impetus for a group of computer science professors in Missouri to revive this dormant and very culturally specific genre?
“I came to the University of Missouri with a plan to make this film and establish an emphasis area in something I called entertainment engineering. Pre-production activities began back in 2000 right after I arrived but things really started coming together when my colleague, Kannappan Palaniappan (Pal), became involved in 2003. We crossed the interface between the real and the surreal when filming began in late 2004 with Mil in an Aztec tomb constructed in an engineering building at a major university. And of course real-life dining at restaurants in Columbia, MO, with Mil and officials from the university was much like scenes we were shooting for the film. In other words, the world we were filming became the world we were in.”

How did you get Mil Mascaras involved and what was he like to work with? (Did you ever see him without a mask?)
“I met him at a technical conference many years ago but we really never worked together closely until around 2002. He’s a great guy and as professional as anyone I’ve ever met. He is very protective of his image, so he understandably has strong standards for his films and requires that they be realistic and respectful of the traditions of the mask. I will always be respectful of those traditions.”

Can you give me your take on why Jeff Burr and his LA colleagues dropped off the film, and how did this affect the production?
“I hired Jeff Burr only a few weeks before filming was scheduled to begin and he hooked us up with some great people who contributed a lot to the project, including cinematographer Tom Callaway and the multi-talented Gary Ambrosia. Our first shoot in December of 2004 had some problems but the second shoot in the spring of 2005 was a fiasco from the beginning. We realised by the third day that Jeff didn’t want to shoot the kind of film that we wanted to make and things went downhill from there. At the end of that shoot we had a total of over 50 hours of footage from the two shoots but nothing documenting what had been shot and what was still needed.

“Jeff Burr is a good guy and on a personal level I like him a lot but it was clear that he just wasn’t really into making this kind of film. He naturally wasn’t happy about our decision not to have him back as director for the last shoot but he understood why we weren’t happy with certain things (and certain of his associates). We informed him that whomever we hired for the last shoot would be listed as a co-director and he accepted that.

“However, when we later informed him that he wouldn’t be involved in the editing process or any other aspect of post-production he asked us to replace his name with a pseudonym and we accommodated. At that point the official relationship with Jeff Burr was severed. However, we continued to work with Tom Callaway - eg. for colour correction - and I’m still very grateful to Jeff Burr for getting Tom involved. They’re both good guys and I look forward to seeing them whenever I’m in Los Angeles.

“As for that third shoot, we were originally planning to hire Rene Cardona III, whose father and grandfather were legendary Mexican genre film directors. In the meantime, however, plans were underway to shoot another Mil Mascaras film Academy of Doom at the university. I had brought in Chip Gubera and Bob Swope as instructors in our Information Technology program based on their work on a film called Song of the Dead and I invited them to be a part of Academy. I realised that if we combined the last shoot of Resurrection with the last shoot of Academy we could reduce costs significantly which was critical because Academy’s budget was already very low. That turned out to be a good plan and in the spring of 2006 we shot Academy and then proceeded to finally complete Resurrection.

“I should point out that Chip and the entire Academy crew did an amazing job in pulling off the two shoots because after Academy wrapped everyone had to switch gears and start on what Pal and I had planned out for finishing Resurrection. That was rough because they had been immersed for weeks in Academy and were now having to hit the ground running on what we needed for Resurrection. For a lot of it they were flying blind as to how each shot would fit into this other film that they knew little about. I know that was especially challenging for Chip but he’s a guy who is always ready to take on any challenge.”

What aspect of the film do you think works best and is there anything that you think could have been improved?
“After the second shoot we didn’t have the car stunt or even the final battle with the mummy and we knew that many other scenes were incomplete or would have to be re-shot for quality reasons, so Pal and I had to log all 50+ hours to determine specifically what we had. I then re-wrote parts of the script to allow us to piece together as much as possible so that we could complete the film in one more shoot.

“That last shoot was more complicated than the previous two because we were filling in pieces of scenes that were shot over a year earlier. In a couple of cases shots in the same scene were filmed a year and a half apart. (In one scene the change in age and voice between shots of the Professor turned out rather jarring.)

“Although it took an inordinate amount of time and effort (and money) to piece everything together, I think the final film captures what was originally intended: an alternative universe in which luchadores and resurrected Aztec mummies are as mundane as cops and robbers. Whatever small issues there are don’t really bother me because I view films like impressionist paintings: the focus should be on immersion into the world that’s depicted rather than on the details of the brush strokes.

“However, if I had to point to something that could be improved it would have to be the scene in which the twins seduce Mil. We just didn’t have the coverage to make that work right, so we ended up piecing together a bunch of disparate elements to make something reasonably coherent.”

How has the film been received and what are the current plans for release?
“The film has played at film festivals around the world to enthusiastic audiences. The reviews have all been extremely positive (except, ironically, for a couple of local reviews in Missouri, where the film was produced). A Spanish review after the Cinema Fantastico festival in Estepona described it as the best lucha film ever made but audience feedback reveals a much broader appeal than what one might expect for a typical lucha film.

“As for distribution, we have had queries from many distributors around the world since 2004, including one very exciting opportunity with one of the majors, but the plan right now is to let the film complete the international festival circuit before making any commitments. I think the last of festivals will be in South America sometime in the spring or summer of 2009.”

Website: www.mmvsam.com

Director: Higuchinsky
Writer: Takao Nitta
Producer: Sumiji Miyake
Cast: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Keiko Takehashi, Ren Osugi
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Artsmagic)

Uzumaki - The Vortex (as Artsmagic’s video sleeve calls it) should not be confused with Rasen(also available from Artsmagic), even though both titles have been translated into English as ‘spiral’ by various sources.

The first feature from Ukrainian-born Japanese director Higuchinsky (who previously worked on the popular fantasy TV series Eko Eko Azarak) Uzumaki is a deliberately enigmatic film which bases it story around a shape - spirals - rather than characters, relationships or events. It’s very different - which is good - but not quite as outré as I was expecting. Perhaps my appetite for Japanese lunacy was spoiled by watching the utterly bonkers Wild Zero only a week or so earlier.

It’s difficult to say precisely what Uzumaki is about (except it’s about spirals). The central character is Kirie (Eriko Hatsune) whose boyfriend Shuichi (former model Fhi Fan) has an odd father, Toshio (Ren Osugi: Audition, Exte: Hair Extensions, Hypnosis, Full Metal Gokudo), first seen videotaping a snail. Shuichi’s father is obsessed with spirals and helices, collecting anything in that shape (even if it means stealing) and eating spiral food; he also commissions Kirie’s father, a potter (Taro Suwa: Another Heaven), to make him some spiral-based pottery.

Eventually Shuichi’s mother tires of all this and throws out her husband’s entire spiral collection, so he commits suicide in a spiral way - by climbing inside a top-loading washing machine!

But other weird, spiral-related things are happening at Kirie and Shuichi’s high school. A boy commits suicide by throwing himself down the well of a spiral staircase, a girl named Kyoko (Hinako Saeki: Misa the Dark Angel, Rasen) has curly hair which grows out of all proportion until she has enormous (CGI) spirals growing out of her head. And a geeky boy comes to school covered in slime, eventually mutating into a human snail.

Higuchinsky inserts spirals everywhere he can - keep an eye on the clouds and on patches of sand - but does it all actually mean anything? It seems to be symbolism for its own sake and there’s no truth revealed at the end about life or the world. There’s no doubt that Higuchinsky has a distinctive style, which he has apparently repeated with symetrical butterfly shapes in his second feature Tokyo 10+01, but weirdness for the sake of weirdness rapidly pails and he will need to concentrate more on story if he is to achieve anything other than novelty value for his films.

Nevertheless, Uzumaki is well worth seeing. It’s unique and bizarre and quite scary/gruesome in places too. Artsmagic’s disc includes 21 stills, one piece of promo artwork and trailers for this film, Evil Dead Trap and Junk. There are also bio/filmographies for the director and some of the cast from Yours Truly; if the choice of cast members featured seems odd or eclectic, please remember that I write these DVD notes before I see the film, so I have to take an educated guess (based on printed or on-line reviews, if there are any) as to which characters are the main ones.

Finally there is Uzumaki Q, a short ‘making of’ featurette incorporating a not-terribly-informative interview with Hatsune. There are some interesting behind the scenes shots and design sketches seen very, very briefly - but that’s what the ‘still’ button on your DVD remote is for.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ivan Zuccon
Writer: Enrico Saletti
Producer: Valerio Zuccon
Cast: Emanuele Cerman, Giorgia Bassano, Robert Marrelli
Year of release: 2001
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: VHS screener
Official website: www.ivanzuccon.com

Italian horror cinema has a long and proud history. In no other country has horror been such an intrinsic part of national cinema. Not fantasy (there’s plenty of that too but it’s best left alone) or science fiction (again, best avoided) but genuine, scary, bloody horror. Italian horror movies date back to the silent era but really came of age in the 1950s, just as horror was also coming to the fore in the UK and on the seedier side of Hollywood. Argento, Fulci, Bava pere et fils, Michele Soavi, even trash barons like Ruggero Deodato or good old Joe D’Amato - what other country has produced so many iconic scare merchants over the years?

I say let’s add Ivan Zuccon to that list. And let’s add him up there at the better end with Fulci, Argento (when he was good) et al. Because Unknown Beyond confirms that The Darkness Beyond was no flash in the pan. Zuccon is a major horror talent and he’s here to stay (for further proof, check out his third feature, The Shunned House).

Darkness was written by Ivan himself but this semi-sequel was scripted by Enrico Saletti so there’s something of a change in tone, though it’s still unashamedly Lovecraft-ian. It’s a more complex story, with more characters - there’s more action and more interaction. Also a whole heap of religious iconography, stirring up that whole Catholic guilt thing that underlines some of the best Italian horror. The opening sequence is amazing as a stumbling soldier comes across a crucified man and, at his feet, a pram containing a crying baby which, on inspection, turns out to be a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Blood drips from the sky, then rises back to Heaven. What the jiminy is going on?

One thing which Unknown Beyond definitely shares with its predecessor is a dreamlike structure which plays fast and loose with causality and the sequence of events, indeed with reality itself. The Old Ones-engineered supernatural apocalypse that we glimpsed in the first film has enveloped the world, but now we are a generation on and Captain Ian Hicks (the ever reliable Emanuele Cerman) leads a small band of survivors hiding out in some catacombs.

Cerman was Private Randolph Carter in The Darkness Beyond - and Hicks is having dreams in which he is called by that name. Is he the same character? Who knows? Locked up in a cell in the catacombs is a painted-face witch, Keziah (Roberta Marrelli, who was Elena in the first film), who serves the Old Ones and seeks to seduce Hicks. Meanwhile two members of the group, Valerie (Liliana Letterese) and Pickman (Alessio Pascuti - Private Walker in Darkness) have gone missing.

Walker turns up, transformed into a mad demon but roped and held by two of the soldiers. For a moment the film looks remarkably like the scene with the captive zombie in 28 Days Later but I’m sure that’s coincidental as it’s unlikely that Alex Garland or Danny Boyle would have seen Ivan’s film. Walker is locked up in another cell.

Valerie, wandering across the desert at night, is gripped by hands from under the sand and raped by something unseen. She subsequently slakes her thirst at a river of blood, from which she fills her canteen. A day or so later she is back with the main group.

Hicks has translated some surviving parchments (possibly the ones created by Al-Caleb in the first film’s prologue) and knows that the only way to defeat the Old Ones is to find the Necronomicon. He sets out with two comrades, Alan (Piergiorgio Schiona) and Boris (Francesco Malaspina - Darkness Beyond’s Sgt Clark). Back in the catacombs, the swiftly pregnant Valerie gives birth to an ultra-fast growing cocoon from which emerges, only minutes later, a full-grown man. Played by Michael Segal, the first film’s Lieutenant Salgari, this character is credited as ‘il figlio dell’Altrove’ - ‘son of the beyond.’ Indeed, the Italian title of this film is Maelstrom: Il Figlio dell’Altrove (the working English title was Call of the Beyond). He proceeds to bloodily slaughter his way through the cast.

What the film is leading up to, via some quite startling imagery, is a three-way battle between Segal’s character and the unborn children carried by sole survivor Anouk (Giorgia Bassano - that’s not a spoiler by the way as she’s not identified by name until late in the film) and Keziah. Three will be conceived, the prophecy states, but only one will survive to become heir to the Old Ones...

With an extra twenty minutes’ running time over the first film, Unknown Beyond can cram more in and that may be why it seems slightly less languorous (or more hurried, depending on how you look at it). The main characters are well-defined and we care about what happens to them - although I’m still not certain about Keziah the witch. Marrelli comes close to overacting sometimes in a role which is, I think, a difficult one for foreign audiences to grasp.

There are some amazing setpieces, including a whole field of tortured souls on cross-frames, and also more action with some well-choreographed fight sequences. This film is more obviously shot on video than Ivan’s first movie, and is almost entirely set at night: a couple of scenes about 50-60 minutes in are the only daylight exteriors in the whole film. Sometimes initially confusing, the plot does unravel well, revealing hidden motivations: “Deception has always been evil’s stock-in-trade,” says one character, observantly. Although this film shares numerous cast and crew with The Darkness Beyond the actual plot connections are tangential and watching the first film is not necessary to enjoy this one. Though I would of course heartily recommend watching both just because they’re so good! (A tip of the hat also to Nicola Morali whose music perfectly creates the spooky, unnerving mood that the film requires. Nicola kindly sent me a CD of the Unknown Beyond soundtrack a while back and it’s a truly excellent piece of work.)

There was a time when Italian horror cinema was the finest in the world. But the last spaghetti scarer to really achieve international acclaim with critics and audiences was Michele Soavi’s superb Dellamorte Dellamore and that was nine years ago. Since then, what have we had? Pupi Avati’s obscure The Arcane Sorcerer, Sergio Stivalleti subbing for the late Fulci on Wax Mask, Massimiliano Cerchi’s laughably inept Creatures from the Abyss and Satan Claus, Argento treading water with The Stendhal Syndrome, Phantom of the Opera and Nonhosonno - and let’s not even mention the justifiably derided Fatal Frames. The genre needs a shot in the arm - and here it is.

Unknown Beyond confirms the arrival of a startling new talent. Ivan Zuccon is the best thing to happen to Italian horror, arguably to horror cinema in general, in a long, long time.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Dave Campfield
Writer: Dave Campfield
Producer: Dave Campfield
Cast: Eric Conley, David Rigg, Felissa Rose
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Official website: www.davecampfield.com

Justin Besler (Eric Conley) is a young man who has been living with his mother for several years but now returns to the old family home to live with his father Kurt (David Rigg), a cop with, shall we say, old-fashioned values. Justin is studying for a law degree; he is a practising Christian and has a much more liberal attitude than his dad although he gets on well with Kurt, which is more than his mother does.

Justin meets up with an old friend, Scott (Fred DeReau), and Scott’s college roommate Rick (director Dave Campfield himself) who makes extra bucks by selling beer to under-age students. He also meets and befriends a mysterious local girl, Kayla (Alexandra Eitel), whom he meets outside his house.

Since getting divorced, Justin’s dad has converted the family home to include three apartments which he rents out. In Apartment 1 are ‘masseuse’ Heidi Broonen (Felissa Rose: Sleepaway Camp, Nikos the Impaler, Zombiegeddon) and her autistic younger sister Sonja (Brenda Abbandandolo, who was also in Nikos); Apartment 2 is home to Robert Krol (Chris Cooke, who was the voice of the Colonel in Bill Plympton’s marvellous I Married a Strange Person), a large man with a penchant for prostitutes; Apartment 3 houses garbage collector and aspiring actor Vincent Calabrese (Mark Love) and his abused East European wife Larisa (Sara Baker Bahr).

When Kayla is found murdered, the blame is pinned on a local cult, the Black Circle, which Kurt has been trying to track down for some time in connection with earlier crimes. Justin is convinced that the killer lives in his own house and lets Rick persuade him to install hidden cameras in the three apartments. Rick, Justin and Scott then spend their nights watching monitors in a Ford Transit parked across the road.

Half an hour in, the film promises to turn into one of those films built out of digetic camera footage, like Hell Asylum or My Little Eye. Although we do sometimes see what the trio see, Campfield doesn’t quite have the confidence to work with the restrictions of high-angle, fixed cameras and instead the ‘monitor footage’ is simply black and white, but retaining close-ups, multiple angles, reverse shots and other directorial/editing touches that simply couldn’t exist in genuine surveillance footage, along with perfect sound. This is a shame as it distances the viewer from the action, making us no more than a normal TV/film audience, rather than placing us into the position of the voyeurs in the van. A few shots do flirt with realistic monitor images but it’s not consistent enough to work. This seems odd. Why build a story around captured TV footage and then not show us that captured TV footage?

Despite the above caveat, the story becomes engrossing and even tense. Justin and Scott are sucked into Rick’s enthusiasm for spying but find that what happens in the apartments is affecting them, even as they are affecting what happens in the apartments. At one point they slip an accusatory note under each door to see if anyone will give themselves away by their reaction, but the results are not what they expect. The watchers’ intrusion into the three homes, physically in a couple of instances when they want to check something out, has unforeseen effects, creating tension between the Broonen sisters, between the Calabreses and between Krol and his succession of hookers.

At the same time there is tension in the van (they later move the monitors into Justin’s bedroom, which seems more sensible) as Justin and Rick find that their agendas are very different. Can Rick be trusted? Is Justin being completely honest about his relationship with the murdered girl? And meanwhile, Kurt is on the trail of the Black Circle, unaware that it may lead him to his own home.

Under Surveillance (later retitled Dark Chamber) is a gripping and original thriller which confidently twists its protagonists (and antagonists) around what could have been a relatively straightforward plot. The large cast of characters, many of whom never interact outside their own immediate relationship, are well-drawn and believable. Campfield directs with a slick professionalism while DPs Xavier Rodriguez and Andrew Seltz make the film look more expensive than it presumably was with great camerawork, especially within the confines of the van. The Black Circle, who favour half-black masks and pentagram tattoos, are mysterious, threatening and not overplayed and there are some really quite scary moments when they appear.

This is an impressive debut feature which displays Campfield’s obvious cinematic talents to the full.

MJS rating: B+