Director: Trent Haaga
Writer: Adam Minarovich 
Producers: Trent Haaga, Chad Ferrin, Jeff Hamilton
Cast: Will Keenan, Timothy Muskatell, Tanishaa Mukherjee
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: online screener

Chop is a Trent Haaga movie and what’s really scary about it is that it led me to realise that it’s nearly 15 years since I interviewed Trent. Back then he was just starting out, having got his first feature writing credit on The Toxic Crusader Part IV, acting in the film too. Since then he has written another dozen or so movies (including Hell Asylum, Deadgirl and American Maniacs) and acted in about 50 including Mulva Zombie Ass Kicker, Dead and Rotting, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots, Easter Bunny Kill! Kill!, Bonnie and Clyde vs Dracula and Killjoy 2, 3 and 4. Trent Haaga is the face and the voice of cool, trashy indie US movies that ordinary people have never heard of and we salute him.

But he hasn’t directed before. This film, originally released on US DVD at the tail-end of 2011 and now picked up for exclusive UK VOD distribution by the fine folks at TheHorrorShow.tv, is his directorial debut. The screenplay isn't by Trent but was written by Adam Minarovich who has previously made four films of his own. He apparently operates at the next rung down from Trent because I have at least seen some of Trent’s films and have heard of others. But Minarovich is way off the radar: Wiseguys vs Zombies, anyone? Buy Sell Kill: A Flea Market Story? Are these actual things?

The above notwithstanding, this feels like a Trent Haaga joint. It’s gory, it’s splattery, it’s darkly comic. It’s over the top but in a restrained way. It’s this side of Citizen Toxie, that’s for sure.

Will Keenan stars as Lance Reed, an ordinary guy who gets kidnapped by a never-named stranger (Timothy Muskatell). Forced to murder his own brother for no obvious reason, Lance finds himself returned to his ordinary life with the threat of discovery hanging over him and a resentful fear that The Stranger (thus credited) will enter his life again. Which he does.

With a relentlessly psychotic determination to make Lance apologise for some unspecified wrong, The Stranger takes away first the people that Lance loves, and then Lance himself, bit by bit. Starting with a finger. Hence the title. A seemingly bottomless supply of knock-out drug syringes leaves Lance repeatedly waking up with further bits of himself missing. Eventually, The Stranger kidnaps Lance again, ties him up in a remote workshop, and sets to work on what's left.

Lance’s problem – well, apart from gradually being chopped up into bits, obviously – is that he has absolutely no idea whatsoever who The Stranger is or what he’s supposed to be apologising for. In desperation, he digs up some memories of bad things he has done but nope, those weren’t this guy. So no end to the chopping. What is even worse, this guy then tracks down the people that Lance wronged and encourages them to chop bits off him. And to be fair, Lance does turn out to be a pretty awful human being.

A picture like this stands or falls on its lead performance and Keenan (who also started out working for Uncle Lloyd– he was the male lead in Tromeo and Juliet!) is simply awesome in the role, running through a full gamut of emotions, but stepping over the screaming terror that most people would feel. At various times there’s fear and trepidation, and pleading and bargaining, but also outright defiance and belligerent abuse and deep, dark sarcasm and eventually just weariness. Muskatell (who shares several acting credits with Haaga) provides a great foil: calm, polite, respectful but clearly a sociopath.

Tanishaa Mukherjee (more used to acting alongside global superstars like Amitabh Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai in blockbusters like Sarkar Raj) lends sterling support as Lance’s wife Emily, who has some secrets of her own. Writer Minarovich and Tamil T Rhee make a nice double act as the cops investigating Lance’s brother’s disappearance. The cast also includes Elina Madison (Curse of the 49er, Butchered, Creepshow 3, John Carl Buechler’s version of Jekyll and Hyde, Charlie Band’s Petrified and a number of Creep Creepersin pictures) as a hooker, producer Chad Ferrin as Lance’s brother, Camille Keaton from I Spit on Your Grave in flashbacks as Lance’s mother, and Caleb Emerson (director of Die You Zombie Bastards!) as the proprietor of a hardware store.

Chop is joyfully violent and bloody, and very, very funny. It’s nicely structured too as Lance finds himself descending into lower and lower levels of hell, stuck on a ride he’s completely unable to leave and which he has no idea how or why he is even on it. Being honest, the ending is a bit of a let down and I would have preferred something bleaker, nastier and vague – but that doesn’t spoil what is a very enjoyable horror film laced with the absolute blackest of humour.

Haaga, who has spent enough time writing and acting (fifteen years or so, as explained above) to know his way around a movie production, directs with aplomb and confidence, helped by the cinematography of Christian Janss and the editing skills of Jahad Ferif. The special effects were provided by Tom Devlin who since 2002 has worked on dozens of cool movies including The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, Poultrygeist, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Mega Piranha, Piranhaconda, Sand Sharks, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising and – I’m not making this up – a porno called Fuckenstein. Oh Jeez, and also A Wet Dream on Elm Street. Seriously? Matt Olivo, by day sound editor on the American versions of Total Wipeout and The Apprentice, provided the score.

Chop screened over here in 2011 at Dead by Dawn but has not previously had a UK release so it’s great to see the title turning up on TheHorrorShow.tv

MJS rating: A-

Director: Russell England
Writer: Paul Raschid
Producer: Neville Raschid
Cast: Daniel Gordon, Marcus Griffiths, Will Thorp
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/unhallowedground

Unhallowed Ground is set in the extraordinarily posh and expensive (fictitious) Dhoultham School, portrayed on film by the extraordinarily posh and expensive (real) Mill Hill School, an establishment whose former pupils include Denis Thatcher, Francis Crick, Norman Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Richard Dimbleby and Chaz Jankel. One might think that this tale of six teenagers from incredibly wealthy families would therefore be an irrelevance, a slice of upper class life inaccessible, even on a TV screen, to us ordinary mortal folk.

But there you would be wrong. Unhallowed Ground is aware that its protagonists are part of an elitist minority who will never have to deal with real life, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to deal with mandatory teenage things like raging hormones, rebellious attitudes and demanding parents. They also have to deal with the savage ghosts of 17th century plague victims and a couple of ex squaddies turned burglars.

In fact there is some social commentary in the film, but it’s commendably non-didactic. “Thirty two thousand pounds a year to send your kid here,” says one of the robbers. “That’s more than I was earning when I was being shot at in Afghanistan.”

It’s the last day of term. Everyone – staff and students – has departed Dhoultham (crikey, I’ve heard of School’s Out but that’s some fast moving there). In the never mentioned let alone explained absence of any sort of caretaker, the only remaining occupants are a sextet of sixth-formers who comprise the schools Army Cadet Corp. Plus one teacher, who sets them a task after which they will receive some sort of gold medal award. Said task is to patrol the school and its grounds overnight, dressed in camo gear, toting unloaded (I hope!) assault rifles. The teacher will sit in his office, communicating with them by walkie-talkie.

Now, being a good comprehensive school lad who had to make my own way in the world, I have absolutely no idea how public school Cadet Corps work but I didn’t buy this for a second. Nevertheless it’s a reasonable set up that puts these six teenagers into an interesting location, without phones (though they do have walkies), wherein they will face both the supernatural threat and the criminal one. One big advantage that this scenario gives us is that, in a cinematic subgenre largely populated by moronic chavs whom one is often quite happy to see dismembered, Unhallowed Ground gives us a group of characters who are intelligent and (very) well educated. They may enjoy a spot of sly sex or a swig of under-age booze, but 32 grand a year teaches kids to think, learn and understand. When a character picks up a play script and says, “Ooh, Doctor Faustus– my favourite!” you can actually believe she means it.

In defiance of convention, this is an intelligent teen horror.

Let’s meet the boys first. Daniel (EastEnders’ Thomas Law) is Head Boy, a natural leader, but he has failed to get into Oxford, the first person in his family to not make the grade. Aki (Marcus Griffiths) captains the rugby team and has a confident swagger. Rishi (Paul Raschid, who wrote the screenplay) is a hardworking swot, whose acceptance into Cambridge doesn’t make up for his parents’ impending divorce.

Dhoultham being a boys’ school, the ladies attend a neighbouring academy. Verity (Poppy Drayton, Madeleine Allsop in Downton Abbey) is up for fun, especially with Daniel who has just (according to social media scuttlebutt) split up from his girlfriend. Sophie (Morgane ‘Roman’s daughter’ Polanski) is a real soldier girl, resolute and practical. Meena (Rachel Petladwala from ace kids spy-fi show MI High) is more bookish and not an integral part of the school’s inner circle of cool kids.

All six are nicely drawn characters, portrayed by a squad of talented young actors. Any one of these characters could have been a cypher or a stereotype but instead they come across as rounded, real and believable. The cast work well together and do actually all look like teenagers, despite being in their early twenties.

Casing the joint with a view to half-inching some valuable items from the school archive are former Marine Shane (Corrie/Casualty star Will Thorp – better known to discerning viewers as Toby Zed in that Doctor Who two-parter with the giant Satan thing) and former Bomb Squad trooper Jazz (EastEnders' Ameet Chana). The former is determined, organised and prepared to use violence if required; the latter is unsure, nervous but has a detailed knowledge of which wire to cut in any given situation. It’s just a shame that they didn’t wait another 24 hours. If they had burgled the school on the day after term finished, the place would have been completely empty, devoid of both the living and the undead.

Dhoultham was founded in the mid 17th century and was, we are told/shown in a prologue, spared the plague after the unexplained, ritual murder of four students. One surprisingly careless slip in what is overall a fine-looking, very professional movie, is footage of 17th century school master Richard Graystone (Richard Derrington – Professor Brelan from Jupiter Moon!) writing in his diary. Not only is the writing in large, individual, somewhat untidy letters, rather than the intricate cursive script of someone who uses a quill pen every day of his life, but also the spellings used are obviously modern (as oppof’d to fomething more in keeping w. the periode). It’s not much, but it’s a hap’orth of tar that threatens to spoil the ship.

Anyway, the teens set out in three boy-girl pairs to check various parts of the estate, including the cricket pavilion but it’s not too long before both the characters and the audience start seeing odd things. The creepy shit gets increasingly creepier as the film progresses. Lone adult Dr Carmichael (who has changed out of his academic gown into his own camo gear) had promised some surprises over the course of the night and there is some brief suggestion that this might be his doing, but that’s never really followed up and if Carmichael (Holby City’s Andrew Lewis, who was in the late Frank Scantori’s unfinished Dead Crazy) did have any pranks planned we never find out what they were. In any case, as the spookiness escalates, the possibility that it’s anything less than genuine supernatural manifestations recedes at a rate of knots.

Shane and Jazz also encounter the ghosts, and subsequently encounter the teenagers. Far from coming together in some sort of Assault on Precinct 13 style truce, the two groups remain at loggerheads, even as they try to escape the attentions of the vengeful spirits (who died exactly 350 years ago that night).

This is a well-written, well-directed, well-acted film and I found myself caring about these characters (even Shane) and wanting to see who would survive. Actions are believable, motivations are clear and credible, people get hurt and no-one is super-human. The pace is maintained throughout, leading to a final act double-twist that I certainly didn’t see coming. The only low point is some very poor flame CGI FX right at the end: another hap’orth of tar.

Documentarian Russell England (making his feature film directorial debut after 20 years of helming things like F1: Chasing the Dreams, Paul Burrell: What Really Happened and Dogs: Their Secret Lives) makes excellent use of his terrific location and commendably resists cheap Woman in Black-style cat-scares. DP Glen Warrillow does a cracking job on the photography; he also shot a couple of David Gregory-directed DVD extras and Drew Cullingham’s The Devil’s Bargain (and indeed Cullingham himself can be spotted in the credits as director of this film’s Making Of).

The special effects were provided by the ever-reliable Mike Peel, whose work we have previously seen in The Zombie Diaries, Evil Aliens, Dead Wood, The Scar Crow, Red Kingdom Rising and The Zombie King. Jonnie Hurn, usually in front of the camera in titles such as Penetration Angst, Umbrage: The First Vampire, The Zombie Diaries etc, was production manager here.

On the whole Unhallowed Ground can be a considered a success and is an impressive debut for writer Paul Raschid, whose father producer Neville Raschid has made four comedy features but not previously ventured into horror territory.

MJS rating: B+

This email interview with Jim and Neil was conducted in January 2015, just after I reviewed their terrific filmStag Hunt.

What did you set out to achieve with Stag Hunt, and to what extent do you think you were successful?
Neil: "The original concept behind Stag Hunt was simply to make something... anything. We'd just bought a camera, a computer capable of handling the editing process, had a bit of money in the bank and to be blunt we were film-makers who weren’t making films, so it was time to make something."

Jim: "Yeah, it had been a while since our last feature, which was Devil’s Harvest, and we thought it was about time we got our act together and made a new one. And why make a short film when you can make a feature and potentially sell it!"

Neil: "Really, the main aim was to get off our backsides and create again."

Jim: "Originally, Stag Hunt was a straightforward horror film, with very little if any comedy and based on a dream I’d had one night. And there were a lot more deaths in it, it was so much darker. It was still essentially a bunch of guys on a stag do on Dartmoor, but it was a very different film. Neil’s stroke of genius was to make it funny, which is when it started to really come alive, as our instincts as writers is comedy. So that’s how it became a comedy drama thriller with scary bits."

Neil: "Well, it is, after all, a stag do and by the very nature of the beast (pun may be intended) stag dos are supposed to be fun. Also the comical aspects of the film bring out the sides of the characters that we'd hope people will care for. And having characters that people actually like makes the audience root for our heroes when it all goes bad."

Jim: "Ultimately I think our main goal at the end of all this is to just entertain people for an hour and a half. We don’t have any serious messages to get across, but if we can make people laugh and hide behind their popcorn then that’s great. And judging by the reaction we’ve had so far at the screenings it seems to be working. We also, obviously, wanted to make a bit of cash too, as the film was totally self-funded, so it was our own money at stake and it’d be nice to see it back."

How did you assemble your cast?
Jim: "We got so lucky with the casting as the four actors fell into their roles completely. Mackenzie Astin and Neil Cole just hit it off on their first day, you’d think they’d been best mates for years. And they all still keep in touch, even though they’re often spread over four countries."

Neil: "We'd known Mack since 2001 when we all worked together on a film in Ibiza."

Jim: "It was called Welcome 2 Ibiza, starring both Mack and Gary Busey, but sadly never really saw the light of day. But we kept in touch with Mack as he’s just so good and the nicest guy."

Neil: "It was not necessarily something that shines out on our IMDB profiles but if nothing else we did at that time make a promise that 'one day' we'd be working together on something better."

Jim: "And Mack being so good kind of encouraged everyone else to raise their game a bit. Neil Cole and I were working on a shoot at Silverstone around about the time we were finalising the screenplay and after just five minutes with him I knew he was our Pete. So, after a short meeting between the two Neils we knew we had our best man. And he really surprised me with the emotional stuff too."

Neil: "Neil was the perfect choice."

Jim: "Donald Morrison and Chris Rogers we hadn’t worked with before and we found through good old fashioned casting and they were both perfect. Donald is completely crazy when you get to know him, and is just hilarious – miles away from the brooding and disturbed Jason you see in the film."

Neil: "We arranged to meet him in a pub, had a half hour conversation detailing who he thought the character was, where we'd written that he was coming from, and the mix of good vibes from Donald and the intensity he had for the character of Jason left no doubt that he was our man."

Jim: "We had a secret code word – Anthony Hopkins – which we could each say to each other if we thought he was the man for the job. He got two Hopkins within the first five minutes. And I’ve never met an actor who’s done so much homework as Donald, he really works his socks off, and it shows."

Neil: "Chris was cast in much the same way: online, pub, Eureka! So by the end of casting we had our four leads and a drinking problem."

Jim: "Chris was interesting because he looked the part, had a fantastic body of work and a great showreel, but, unlike Andy Bossoms who he plays, Chris is part German, part American, and has a very deep American accent. So we played around with regional British accents, cos we didn’t want to let a little thing like that stop us, and Chris pulled off such a good Yorkshire accent that people are genuinely shocked when they hear his actual voice. It helped that Terry, our sound man, is from Yorkshire too, so we had an expert on set. Of the four characters, Andy is the one people seem to root for and worry about, and that’s all down to Chris’ excellent performance."

What were the practicalities of shooting on Dartmoor like?
Neil: "We said from the very beginning that Dartmoor was going to be as much a character in the film as the four leads, and it turned out to be the most unpredictable and demanding of the lot. But in truth there was only one day when the weather got so bad we had to re-schedule and head back to base. I had created the schedule to be all day shoots in the first week and then a week of nights in the second, and as luck would have it the first week had some lovely dry, sunny weather during the day and the second week had grotty weather in the days but clear, albeit freezing, nights. Well no one said filming in Dartmoor in October would be glamorous."

Jim: "I love being outdoors and much prefer natural light to studio lighting, so I had a lovely time, especially as DoP. Dartmoor did all the hard work for me really. Most low or no-budget films are usually set in self-contained locations, pubs, living rooms, etc... I always try to use the landscape and scenery if I can, it just adds such scale and that all important production value. And we got so lucky with the weather, considering that it was late October. Spielberg had just finished shooting Warhorse when we arrived, so we share the same dramatic clouds and sunsets. Actually, several locals approached us during the time we were there asking if we were Warhorse, which considering we had a crew of seven people was quite funny. Maybe you had to be there..."

Neil: "Dartmoor was stunning and with shooting locations everywhere you looked. We went out on the day after everyone arrived, which was supposed to just be a rehearsal day, and within a couple of hours had shot one of the opening montages, including the shot that you see on the poster. There is one sequence in the film that was all shot within a 360 degree angle of the same point, but depending on which way you turn depends on the style of the landscape. Truly breathtaking."

Jim: "We rented a farmhouse just outside of Okehampton in which we all slept and ate together, Big Brother style, for the duration of the shoot. It even had an indoor heated pool, not that Neil or I had any time to use it, but the others made good use of it."

Neil: "I think the one defining factor that made filming a feature in a relatively short space of time was 'film camp', as the actors christened it. We were all living in what was basically a backpackers lodge, so at any time the actors could rehearse, talk through scenes or relax and bond together. This also meant that at all times myself and Jim were both on-hand to talk through any script issues that arose. It became a real collaborative entity."

Jim: "Yes, there was no going back to hotel rooms, we really were all in it together. But the best thing about it was that the farm had acres of land, which backed onto the moors, so we used that as our self-contained backlot for the night shoots. It meant we could leave the tents set up, not to mention the use of flame throwers and explosions because it was private land. But Neil did wonders with getting all the permits sorted for the Dartmoor stuff."

Neil: "As has been my experience in film, the West Country are far more obliging when it comes to filming. I worked with the Duchy of Cornwall, the Dartmoor National Parks Authority and the individual Dartmoor Rangers to secure the permits and to help deal with everything we needed during the shoot."

Jim: "I’ve spent a lot of time on Dartmoor, it’s the most gorgeous place. I’ve even organised a couple of stag dos there in the past, hence the idea. We didn’t see anything scarier than wild ponies though."

Was there a temptation to show more of the beast, given how much you’d spent on it?
Jim: "We’d always planned to not have the ‘shark jumping onto the boat’ moment and to keep the beast in the shadows. But yeah, it was a bit tempting, especially as how realistic it looked – Animated Extras had done a fantastic job, I think everyone had fun playing with it every now and again. But no, it was always designed to be used very fleetingly as, you know, that’s a lot scarier. But you see it just enough so that you can see what it is. A lot of the close ups were shot in a small studio at Shepperton but you’d never know. Neil cut those scenes beautifully."

Neil: "At the end of the day it's a head on a stick, a paw with usually my arm in it, or a bit of tail. We did shoot a lot more beast footage but I always felt that the scares or fear should come from how the guys react to the presence of the beast, seeing too much of the cat would always be likely to cheapen the effect we're aiming for. It's hard to be scared when you can see the wires or the operator in the background."

How has independent film-making changed in the two decades between Devil’s Harvest and Stag Hunt?
Neil: "Independent film has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, the arrival of the digital age has meant that we can do so much more with immediate results."

Jim: "The biggest change is just how much cheaper it is, thanks to digital. You could, if you wanted, shoot an entire feature on your phone or a GoPro and it’d look pretty good. We shot Devil’s Harvest on 35mm film, which looks lovely, but we had no monitor and often had to wait weeks to see what we’d got, which as we were mostly using short-ends and off cuts of unused film stock from Evita, you could never be sure what it would come back like. But now, it’s completely instant and looks incredible. Just be sure to make several back-ups!"

Neil: "We had an edit suite set up back at the farmhouse base, so within an hour of getting back in the evening once all the cards had been captured we'd be able to see results, even sometimes small sequences being cut together by Emma Holbrook, our local editor, who graced us with her presence whenever she could."

Jim: "Emma was cutting the scenes together while we were out on the moors, (because, you know, Neil was busy producing, building props, sorting costumes, taking stills, blowing stuff up, etc...) But that was a real confidence boost for everyone because it was looking so good. And, of course, there are no longer developing or processing costs. And you can re-use the memory cards."

Neil: "Also, the kit is now a lot smaller and lighter. This really matters when you’re transporting kit up a windy tor for hours at a time. We could not have shot Stag Hunt on any other format as digital, the timeframe didn't allow for it."

Jim: "Saying all that though, I still love film. It just wasn’t practical this time around."

And what have you been up to in the intervening period? Were there any ‘nearly’ film projects which got away? . 
Neil: "In the years between Devil's Harvest and Stag Hunt we have been plying our trade. We have been involved in a myriad of 'almost/maybe' projects that have each reached differing stages of reality."

Jim: "Oh there were several ‘nearly’ film projects, some that we can’t talk about, others that might still happen. We made some short films, one of which starred Kevin Howarth just prior to him shooting The Last Horror Movie. And of course the Ibiza film, which was great fun to shoot. We also worked with the band Hard-Fi and made their first video ‘Cash Machine’ which helped get them signed (Rich Archer and I go way back). The most annoying one was a film version of Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased which came really close and had some great cast lined up, but the BBC had the same idea and bought the rights before we could. It might still happen though, it’s an interesting take on it. And there’s also a Bigfoot movie which has been keeping us busy for a while, which could potentially be our next project."

What’s next? Will we have to wait another 20 years for another Dog Face Films feature?
Jim: "Hopefully the gap won’t be quite so long next time – we’d be in our sixties! We’ve had loads of interest from various big studios and production houses, thanks to Stag Hunt, who were all impressed with what we achieved with our budget."

Neil: "We have been fortunate with the reaction people have had to Stag Hunt. While in Cannes we had positive feedback from everyone we saw, they were all keen on our next project. We have irons in the fire the trick is to opt for the one that will be what the markets want at the time they want it."

Jim: "It’s been a great calling card. So, as soon as we have the next screenplay ready you bet we’ll be knocking on those doors. It’d be nice not to have to pay for it ourselves again too."

Neil: "The film industry can be a vicious beast. You can put your heart, soul and life into something and never know if you've done the right thing. So watch this space...."

website: www.dogfacefilms.com

Directors: Rory O’Donnell, Jason Read
Writer: Rory O’Donnell
Producer: Sabrina Catellano
Cast: Caroline Munro, Zoe Grisedale, Gina Jones
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Website: www.robofilms.co.uk
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at end of review)

The Landlady (not to be confused with The Landlord) is a bit of fun, a British horror bagatelle with an EC Comics vibe and the name value casting of Bond/Hammer hottie Caroline Munro.

Last time I saw Ms Munro was at the Festival of Fantastic Films a few years back when I spent a pleasant evening chatting with Caroline, the equally lovely Martine Beswick (who also ticks the boxes marked JB and HH) and suave, debonair filmmaker-about-town Mark Redfield. Caroline’s great: she strikes that balance of accessibility that can be so hard for those who were stars in earlier decades. She’s not reclusive yet not so ubiquitous that attendees at films fairs and horror conventions think, “Oh gawd, she’s here again.”

Plus, of course, she’s still a fine looking woman. And damn good company. And what’s more, she’s evidently prepared to help out indie film-makers by giving their projects that all important name value. In the past couple of years she has filmed roles in two Toni Jopia pictures - Crying Wolf and Cute Little Buggers– and this short for Rory O’Donnell and Jason Read of Robo Films.

Despite running a mere 25 minutes, The Landlady is an anthology: four vignettes set across four decades, in each of which a young lady takes a room in the lodgings of the unnamed title character, played with starched Victorian primness by Caroline. There’s a hippy chick in the 1960s, a punk in the ‘70s, an ‘80s babe and a present day girl. The 1990s and 2000s have been skipped over, which is reasonable because they were spectacularly bland decades devoid of anything memorable or iconic.

Each segment is structured the same way. The Landlady listens to classical music on her antique wireless, then finds another station playing some modern rubbish. A young woman arrives, suitcase in hand and is shown up to the room. There are just four rules in the house, explains CM: no smoking, no loud noises, no pets and no company after midnight.

Each new tenant makes herself at home and promptly breaks one of the rules, quite deliberately. After which, the Landlady puts one of her little magic figurines into the room which enacts supernatural revenge on the miscreant.

Without giving too much away, the first two girls are compelled to do something to excess which kills them, creating expectations that the others will suffer a similar fate but in fact girls 3 and 4 are delivered of more obviously fantastical punishments. Each death is sort of connected with the rule that was broken, but to varying degrees. There are some anachronisms, unavoidable at this micro-budget level (you certainly couldn’t get cider in ring-pull cans in the 1970s!) but that would be picky. The whole film is slightly mannered and is in no way aiming for realism.

Fun though it is, and undeniably well-made and smartly directed, the main problem with The Landlady is that there is no progression and hence no pay-off. The four segments were posted individually to YouTube over the course of a week in December 2013, with the full version following a couple of days later. At the end of Part 4, we are in exactly the same situation as we were at the end of Part 1. Nothing, decade aside, has changed. There’s no twist and no punchline. What the film really needed was a final segment which confounded our expectations by being different to the others.

What it could have done was have the 2013 lodger follow all the rules, not because she’s honest and polite and well-behaved but because young people today are so bloody boring. That would leave the Landlady herself, who never changes her appearance in 50 years and is presumably some sort of supernatural entity distributing overzealous, righteous justice to the badly behaved and inconsiderate, stuck with a lodger she can’t actually get rid of. Structurally that’s what a story like this needs: the tables turned in an unexpected, ironic way.

Well, that’s what I would have done.

Jason Read and Rory O’Donnell shared the directing gig, with the former helming Parts 1 and 2 and the latter taking over for the home stretch. O’Donnell wrote the screenplay, going halves on the story. The four tenants are, in chronological order, Marian Elizabeth, Zoe Grisedale (Bloodshot, The Thompsons), Gina Jones (who was in a DirectGov advert and a Comic Relief ident) and Sarah-Jane Howard. Their friends include Richard Ochampaugh (Three’s a Shroud) and Holly Rivers who was Drusilla in The Worst Witch.

Cinematographer (and good hand at scrabble) Zoran Veljkovic (Tales of the Fourth Dimension) shoots the picture well within the very constrained situation of basically a stairwell and a bedroom. And I was particularly impressed with the sound: recordist, Tomo Davies; editor, Alistair Lock.

Hang on, I know that name. It’s the curse of the film journo - vast swathes of minutiae washing around in my head waiting to make a connection. Alistair Lock... Alistair Lock... he had some connection with Hitchhiker’s Guide, I know. Something at the back of my mind says he’s connected with The Illustrated Hitchhhiker’s Guide.

The IMDB says he worked on a bunch of Doctor Who spin-offs including Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans directed by my mate Kevin Davies, who was also involved with the Illustrated Hitchhiker’s Guide. Plus I’ve just watched a clip on the Robo Films YouTube channel of Rory O'Donnell directing Sophie Aldred in their next film, The Sitter, and reminiscing about the time they worked together many years ago aboard HMS Belfast, which is where Shakedown was shot.

Eventually I resorted to Google where I located the answer in – oh irony – the Googlebooks cache of my own first book The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker’s Guide. Before The Illustrated Hitchhiker’s Guide was produced (it was the big silver hardback with digitally done photo stuff that was wow back then but can now be done by eight-year-olds on an iPad) a test photo was taken of Simon Jones and David Dixon, from the TV series. Except that Simon was unavailable so Kevin asked Alistair Lock to stand in. And that’s where I know him from. Bloody hell.

I also liked the music in The Landlady, which was overseen by Jason Read. I particularly enjoyed the drum solo version of In the Hall of the Mountain King.

Rory O'Donnell has a bunch of casting director credits including BHR entry The Last Man and a recent feature called Little Deaths which confusingly isn't this one. He also runs training courses for Raindance. Jason Read has directed a bunch of music videos etc. Inbetween this and The Sitter he made a horror short called Face Book.

Shot over four days in August 2013, The Landlady premiered at the Misty Moon Film Festival in London on Halloween that year. In January 2014, the film had a second big-screen outing as half of a Caroline Munro double bill, paired with 1980s daftness Slaughter High, at a one-day horror event in Bournemouth also attended by Emily Booth. Robo Films also pressed up a bunch of DVDs in February 2014 for those people who had funded the film on Indiegogo.

So: lots of fun and a nice little aside among the barrage of features which I have to plough through every month.

MJS rating: B

Director: Philip Anthony Booth
Writer: Philip Anthony Booth
Producers: Christopher Saint Booth, Phillip B Goldfine, Pejman Partiyeli
Cast: Ben Browder, Ray Wise, Elle LaMont
Country: USA
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.dead-still.blogspot.co.uk

It would be wrong of me to suggest that Dead Still is, by any reasonable set of standards, a good film. I would be a damned liar if I implied that it is in any way scary or entertaining, or that it gripped me to any measurable degree. And I would certainly be bound for Hell if I were to let you believe, for just one moment, that anything in this film makes a lick of sense.

Having said all that…

Dead Still does at least have an original premise. And it is not insultingly stupid. And you know, there are precious few SyFy original movies that can tick both those boxes.

The idea of a haunted camera is a distinctly groovy one – and surprisingly unexplored. A quick google turned up only a series of three Goosebumps paperbacks called Say Cheese – and Die! So I was intrigued to see what writer-director Philip Anthony Booth could do with it.

Apparently, what he could do with it is just knock it around with a baseball bat for a bit then throw it hard at a wall and hope that it somehow sticks in a way that creates a picture. Which it doesn’t. Dead Still clearly thinks it has some sort of narrative but really it’s just a random jumble of stuff, much of which either comes out of nowhere or goes nowhere. Or both.

Ben Browder, off of Stargate and Farscape, plays Brandon Davis, a jobbing wedding photographer who lives and works in a large, rambling shack that looks, from the inside, like a bunch of painted wooden flats in a film studio. When he was a kid, his father dropped him off somewhere and then crashed his car and died in a way that somehow traumatised Brandon, except it didn’t and that seems to have no bearing on anything at all in the story, except to explain why Brandon inherits his grandfather’s house directly.

In among the items in this creepy old mansion is an antique camera (and presumably a supply of unused glass plates – although we never see these or the large bag required to carry them around, possibly because the writer didn’t think it through). This camera – and indeed the movie - is concerned in some way with ‘death photography’.

Death photography was a real thing. There was a fashion in Victorian times to take photographs of the recently deceased, dressed and groomed and posed in a lifelike fashion. Child mortality being extremely high, even among the wealthy, this was a way in which families could preserve a memory of a dead baby or child. Often the parents or siblings would pose with the deceased, who might be arranged as if sleeping or resting, or propped up with some sort of brace. You can find some examples of death photography on the web and they are definitely very, very creepy. You can see why a horror film-maker might want to do something with this genuinely unnerving historical phenomenon.

If only Philip Anthony Booth knew what he wanted to do with it.

It seems that Brandon’s ancestor Wenton Davis (Ray Wise: Swamp Thing, original RoboCop, Twin Peaks) was a celebrated death photographer, and this has somehow cursed this antique camera, which Brandon starts using to take both professional and family snaps, starting with a random homeless guy he drags in off the street. Because you would, wouldn’t you?

The pictures, which are hung up on strings in Brandon’s dark room, despite the fact that they ought to be on heavy glass plates, show the subjects as damaged, tortured souls, although this isn’t discovered - by Brandon’s goth girlfriend/assistant Ivy Monroe (Elle LaMont: Machete Kills, From Dusk Till Dawn TV series) – until after a newlywed couple and two of their guests have died in hideous ways. As indeed does Ivy. In a particularly stupid scene, Brandon comes home to find cops in his house who simply lift up a sheet corner and ask him if he knows the deceased. Yes, that’s what happens at murder scenes.

Wenton’s soul has somehow become trapped inside the camera, as some sort of punishment for the death photographs he took. Because, for some reason, instead of using real corpses, he photographed living people who were drugged to appear dead and, as a result, died. Some of these subjects suffered further: one is shown having large, visible clamps screwed onto his head so hard that blood dribbles down his face. Another is covered in leeches.

What the hell? The whole point of death photography was to make the dead appear to be still alive. What was Wenton trying to achieve by making living people appear dead? What did he actually achieve, apart from killing them in the process, thereby rendering the whole thing moot? What the hell is going on, and why?

Brandon is separated from his wife Jenna (Carrie Lazar: Gingerdead Man 3) and they have a curiously effeminate eleven-year-old son Bobby (Gavin Casalegno: Noah) who is mute and converses in a Stephen Hawking voice via a speak’n’spell app on an iPad. When Bobby is alone with the camera, he is tricked (presumably by the ghost of Wenton, who is inside the camera) into standing in front of the lens. The camera takes a photo by itself which sucks Bobby inside it, into ‘the negative zone’. Which is not in any way, manner or respect actually negative. It’s not filmed negatively, nothing is the wrong colour or back to front or anything. Just one more random idea thrown into the mix without any thought or planning.

Meanwhile Brandon has gone back to his grandfather’s house where he finds a strange young woman (Natalie Mejer) lighting candles around a quasi-Satanic symbol on the floor. She tells him what is going on, because she knows, because she is a direct descendant of one of Wenton’s victims, who died when she was a little girl, which doesn’t make any sense or anything. Seriously, what the hell? And who is she anyway? And how did she get in? And why?

Brandon then somehow gets himself inside the negative zone where he somehow rescues Bobby from the clutches of Wenton, along with the Victorian girl (Evelyn Boyle: Sorority Horror House) who was the strange woman’s ancestor who is alive in there. Whereas the rest of Wenton’s victims are dead and are now represented by a completely random selection of admittedly nasty and creepy horror make-ups.

Seriously, absolutely not one thing in this film makes any sense at all. I haven’t even mentioned Professor McKlaren (Eric Ruff, overacting so much you wonder whether he took the role for a bet), an old tutor of Brandon’s who is writing a biography of Wenton. Ivy meets him in an antiques shop where he is also a customer, then later breaks into the shop after dark to speak with him (so, what, he owns the place now?). But he’s not there, but then he is, and later he is possessed by the camera (which he has never been within half a mile of) and starts chopping his fingers off with a cigar cutter.

What. The. Absolute. Fuck.

Let’s also chuck into the mix not one but two scenes where people open padlocks by simply sticking a straight bit of metal into the keyhole and waggling it a bit. And the camera, or possibly Wenton’s ghost, possessing Bobby’s iPad and making it say creepy things. And the movie’s obsession with the word ‘destiny’. And spooky voices everywhere saying, "Memento mori." And, and, and… oh I give up.

Dead Still takes an original, intriguing, historical, creepy concept and totally pisses it up the wall with a mishmash of random horror ideas that only intersect when they take the trouble to contradict each other.

Not helping matters is Booth’s directorial style which is jumpy and jittery and so packed with micro-flashbacks to things either before the film or previously seen that it would be almost impossible to follow what was going on even if something coherent was actually going on. Seriously, this is such a pip-packed pomegranate of flashbacks that I would estimate at least 10-15 minutes of the 85-minute running time is stuff we have already seen, jarringly inserted into the film to remind us that we already saw it about 20 minutes earlier.

Philip Adrian Booth and his identical twin brother Christopher Saint Booth are ‘the Booth Brothers’, a film-making duo who have between them crafted a dozen or so previous features including Children of the Grave, Soul Catcher, Death Tunnel, Ghouls Gone Wild, The Exorcist File, Children of the Grave 2 and a bundle more you haven’t heard of either. Posters for a couple of these are on the wall of Brandon’s apartment because, why not. Alongside writing and directing (I use both terms loosely), PA Booth handled cinematography, editing (with Adam Michael Johnson) and digital effects. CS Booth was one of three producers and was also responsible for the production design, which is pretty much painted hardboard flats throughout, even in the negative zone, some of the costume design and the music. In fact, he’s quite an experienced composer, having spent the 1990s providing soundtracks (under the pseudonym ‘Saint’) for pornos including a couple of Ginger Lynn Allen lingerie videos and a Traci Lords workout vid (!). I have actually seen at least one of the titles on his filmography, an Asia Carerra flick from 2000 called Search for the Snow Leopard. It had a wafer-thin narrative about women turning into cats when they weren’t having sex (or something), but it still made more sense than Dead Still.

Ben Browder, who was also in that Doctor Who western episode, is one of a small army of producers, variously executive, associate and co-. The cast also includes Steffie Grote (House of the Witchdoctor, American Vampire), Han Soto (Ghost Shark, Ender’s Game, Fantastic Four redux) and Corey Mendell Parker (Spider-Man, Scream 2) plus two boys credited as ‘Bully #1 and #2’, suggesting there’s a cut scene somewhere of Bobby being teased. I know characterisation is important but seriously, that’s not what this movie needed to save it….

First broadcast in October 2014, Dead Still was released to VOD in February 2015 but is not yet available on DVD anywhere. Some people might enjoy it: Ben Browder fangirls will wet their pants and undiscriminating gorehounds will relish some surprisingly gruesome deaths. But none of them will have a clue what's going on. Because neither did the writer-director.

There’s a terrific horror movie waiting to be made based around the idea of death photography. But this ain’t it.

MJS rating: C

Director: Simon Black
Writer: Simon Black
Producer: Nigel Wingrove
Cast: Hannah Short, Mark Blackwell
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener

Are you sexually aroused by launderettes, Rubik’s cubes and Alphabetti Spaghetti? Then here is the film you’ve been waiting for. An avant-garde, black and white, surreal, arty, erotic horror about one young woman’s descent into madness. (Or something.)

There was a time, many years ago, when I might have poured scorn on such a film, calling it ‘pretentious’ and mocking individual elements. But we’re all more mature than we were, and though A Girl undoubtedly does exhibit pretentions I don’t think that makes it a bad thing or worthy of mockery. It’s trying to do something new, something different, something outside of the mainstream pablum that passes for entertainment, even within the field of indie horror cinema, and I think it’s achieving what it sets out to do. With an uncritical critical eye, one can certainly judge that director Simon Black knows what he’s doing. The cinematographic conceits – monochrome imagery, extreme close-ups, lengthy sequences of inaction – are deliberate choices. The man knows how to photograph an actor on a set and how to construct a feature-length picture from that photography – and he does it very well.

But, you know, don’t come here if you’re looking for a scary thrill ride. Or indeed, if you’re looking for sexy fun time.

A Girl is bleak, highly artistic, challenging and only ‘erotic’ if you have very specialised, unconventional tastes. So welcome back to Redemption Films and the extraordinary cinematic oeuvre of Mr Nigel Wingrove!

Redemption is of course best known as a distributor. Launched in 1993, the company’s VHS (and later, DVD) sleeves used arty, black and white photographs in place of traditional, lurid, exploitation artwork, instantly marking out Redemption as a cut above its competitors. (Many of those sleeve photos featured Wingrove’s then-girlfriend, Eileen Daly, and a couple of them are actually Emily Booth.)

Less well-known are the company’s (and Wingrove’s) forays into original production. Before launching Redemption, Nigel made three arty short films in the late 1980s: Axel, Visions of Ecstacy and Faustine. The first had a soundtrack by Danielle Dax and the other two featured music by sometime Banshee Steve Severin, who later scored Nature Morte and London Voodoo and is currently working on Borley Rectory for Ashley Thorpe.  Of course, it was Visions which achieved notoriety when the BBFC banned it on the unique grounds of ‘blasphemy’ (a move which has lately been rescinded).

Ten years later, with Redemption riding high as part of the Salvation Group of companies/labels, Wingrove had a crack at a proper, feature-length horror movie and the result was Sacred Flesh. No-one (who knows such things) could deny that the film is historically interesting, perhaps even important, but it would be a stretch to call it ‘good’ or even ‘watchable’. Nigel had plans for a whole slate of features (I deal with this in some detail in Urban Terrors) but none ever happened.

In the 21st century, Nigel Wingrove’s willingness to embrace the unconventional, avant-garde and ‘not obviously commercial’ has seen him distribute some of the most interesting films of the British horror revival, including Penetration Angst, Nature Morte and Dominator, as well as overseas titles like Aquarium and The Shunned House. In 2004, being an astute entrepreneur who knows his niche market, he came up with the idea of the ‘Satanic Sluts’, a loose collective of fetish models/performers who were featured in three subsequent videos and a coffee table book (a description I use in a purely objective sense to mean ‘large, and full of glossy photos’ as I suspect most of the book’s readers are not the sort of people who own coffee tables).

With the best will in the world, I really can’t include those three original Satanic Sluts videos in the master list of the BHR because they’re not really ‘films’ as such. The first, The Black Order Cometh, is (I understand – I haven’t watched these things, dear God!) a collection of performance vignettes interspersed with short interviews with the young ladies in question. This was followed by The Black Masses which was a documentary record of live performances given by the Sluts at some goth/fetish gathering.

Then, in October 2008, Wingrove had a stroke of luck when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand managed to get themselves into trouble by telling Andrew Sachs that Brand had fucked his grand-daughter. The tabloids pretty quickly discovered that said grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie, was also known as Voluptua, a member of the Satanic Sluts (which, let’s face it, was a brand name that could only ever have been invented with a view to baiting the tabloids anyway). Suddenly far, far more people had heard of the Sluts than could ever have been reached by Redemption’s own marketing.

(As an aside, I once met Andrew Sachs at a radio show recording. A thoroughly nice and decent bloke, who I think managed to come out of ‘Sachsgate’ with his dignity intact. The closest I have been to meeting Jonathan Ross was being at the British Comics Awards when he was host. I think the SFX crew went on stage at one point to receive or present something, but that part of the evening was being compered by Paul Gambaccini.  Ross is of course a huge comics fan (as indeed is Gambaccini) and a devotee of trashy horror films, even having his own British horror credit with a cameo in Pervirella. Plus his wife Jane Goldman wrote the hugely successful (and hugely awful) The Woman in Black for NuHammer. I’ve never been in the same room as Russell Brand, have never watched, heard or read anything he has done, have no particular desire to do so, and as far as I am concerned his only genuine contribution to the world was in briefly distracting Katy Perry from singing.)

Anyway, it’s an ill wind etc and Nigel Wingrove took advantage of the free publicity to release a third Satanic Sluts video, Scandalized. Like the first, it was a loose collection of goth/fetish/S&M vignettes, linked by the concept of Voluptua dreaming about media scandals. I’m sure it appealed to its target audience. For horror completists, one of the segments features “crazed vampire witches and weird Ouija games turning girls mad” – but that’s still not enough for me to consider it as a legitimate entry in the BHR.

Well, now the Satanic Sluts are back, and Redemption have a staggering list of 19 future titles in various stages of production/development, some of which have allegedly already been released in the Netherlands. The difference is that at least some of these ‘Satanic Sluts Second Generation’ DVDs are actual feature-length narrative movies, although on the basis of A Girl the term ‘narrative’ should be interpreted loosely. Wingrove is producing the films but not directing all of them.

Volumes 4 and 5 are going to be called Sexterminate and The Sluttification of Alice, with A Girl released first but numerically postdating them as vol.6. Simon Black is also working on vol.10, The Girl with the Orange Nails, about a witch who creates magic nail varnish that turns good girls into sex-crazed nymphos, also starring Hannah Short. Before that will arrive Red Kiss, She Comes in Colours and Dawn of the Slut (which is just a three-disc repackaging of the original vids). I don’t know anything yet about those other titles and I’m not expecting them to be horror films (although I suspect Sexterminate may have some sci-fi elements…). However, some of the later titles definitely will be horror (if they get made) including Ghoul Girls, The Black House (a loose adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher) and, seriously, I was a Frankenstein Nymphomaniac Girl.

Having watched A Girl (and it is curiously, compellingly watchable – feel free to put that on the sleeve, Nige!) I’m inclined to consider it a British horror film because the story, loose though that is, concerns a descent into madness and self-destruction. Combine that with the Redemption marketing and it’s enough to meet my personal criteria (though either factor alone wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient).

Hannah Short stars as ‘Pearl’ in what is almost a solo performance. We meet her in a launderette where she is washing a single, dark item of clothing. This sequence takes up a full ten per cent of the movie’s 75 minute running time but, as evidence of Black’s directorial skill, it is more interesting (certainly less tedious) than many other opening sequences of similar length films that don’t have this one’s artistic ambitions.

Pearl favours old-fashioned, demure dresses but has a pierced septum. All we can see at this stage is the nose ring, but we shall later discover further piercings and at least three large tattoos. Oh, these modern girls. (Although curiously she doesn’t wear ear-rings, not even studs.)

After returning to her sparsely furnished but scrupulously clean flat, Pearl calls her bank on the phone, one of the few pieces of dialogue in a soundtrack which mostly consists of discordant electronica and ‘found sound’ (generally pre-war recordings, intended to contrast with the visuals, including a couple of songs in the distinctive, fabulous tones of the great Sophie Tucker).

Well, google her and learn something.

Pearl is evidently on her uppers financially, although one can’t help thinking that if money is tight she shouldn’t be going to the launderette to wash a single item. Especially as we can see she has a washing machine at home. Maybe she gets off in a launderette atmosphere, although she doesn’t lean or sit on the washing machine and let’s face it, launderette machines tend to be well bolted down and so don’t provide the same vibratory thrill.

Pearl is a good girl, although not so good that she hasn’t had the piercings and tatts done. She has no obvious source of income (hence the financial straits in which she finds herself) although we do later find out that she has in the past written and painted. She’s in the middle of doing some washing up when a voice addresses her through a small radio, claiming to be Jesus. The voice encourages her to be more assertive, more sexual and ultimately more debased and degraded. And thus begins her descent into madness. Or erotica, depending on your own perspective.

We’re about halfway through this short feature before we get the first hint of anything even vaguely raunchy, a bath scene skilfully constructed by director Black using overlapping imagery. After which a freshly charged Pearl calls back the bank manager (Or does she? We have no way of knowing if there’s anyone on the other end of the line) and tells him what she thinks he wants to do to her. And I have to say here that, whether it was written by Black or improvised by Short, one of the very best lines of dialogue I have ever heard in a movie is this: “You want to fuck me like you fucked me with your overdraft charges.” Genius, I telya.

Later on we see Pearl, with lacy blouse, PVC corset and gloves, six-inch stilletos and nipple clamps, gyrating in front of a mirror. In contrast to this formal, starched and shiny attire, we also see her on a filthy mattress in a cellar, naked and smeared in blood as she cavorts with various raw meat products (including a jaw-dropping use of an uncooked chicken which I suspect may have required the poor sod at the BBFC who got this one to hit rewind and check what they had just seen). On the other hand, we also see her, again dressed in a prim and demure manner, strolling around a park after finding a briefcase on a bandstand. To avoid spoilers, I won’t tell you what eventually turns out to be inside it.

There’s a scene of Pearl writing obscenities on her face, backwards, so that they are readable in her bathroom mirror (contrasting with an earlier shot of her in the same place, washing her face and cleaning her teeth). There’s a quite lengthy sequence in which a middle-aged man (Mark Blackwell) comes to see Pearl, expressing concern at her reclusiveness. It wasn’t clear whether he was a friend or relative and it was only when the end credits rolled that I discovered Blackwell plays ‘The Neighbour’. (Short is credited as ‘The Girl’.) Later Pearl walks past a church and by the film’s end she’s acrobatically cavorting on her kitchen floor with a wooden cross.

Or, as the Redemption marketing blurb puts it: “Includes a number of disturbing and erotically charged scenes in which the diminutive Hannah Short uses her body and sexuality to challenge and arouse the viewer in equal measure.” Personally I felt more challenged than aroused but then I’m not the target audience, am I?

There clearly is a target audience for this sort of thing. For all his work releasing good quality, complete versions of old horror movies, Wingrove has built much of his career around creating and packaging product for, well, the sort of people who buy Satanic Sluts videos. Simon Black has previously made a bunch of shorts under the banner ‘Eat Cake and Worship Satan Films’ which even from this distance I can see are targeting the same sort of folk. (Realistically, all the Christian, Satanic, Nazi and sexual imagery in these films comes across as a wee bit infantile though, doesn’t it? It’s not making any sort of socio-political or cultural point, it’s just sticking its pierced tongue out behind someone’s back. Actually, that’s probably why I found A Girl relatively satisfying, in that its artistic pretentions compensated for, and to some extent provided a rationale for, the non-shocking ‘shocking’ imagery and themes.)

Simon Black does seem to have made one previous feature, The Vampire Controller, in which a black magician uses two sexy female vampires to seduce a priest (played by Mark Blackwell). This was self-distributed via his blog in a limited edition in July 2014; you may still be able to pick up a copy from the director (ecaws93) on eBay.

I can’t find out anything about Hannah Short, and I don’t know who provides the voice of Radio Jesus, though I assume it’s either Black or Wingrove. The only other name in the credits is David Palser, who created the titles.

Originally slated for November 2014 and bearing a 2014 copyright date, Redemption released A Girl on UK DVD in January 2015, passed uncut 18 by the Beeby-Efsy. The double-sided sleeve features either a still from the lace top/PVC gloves mirror dance sequence or a shot that’s not in the finished film of Short/Pearl in a lacy black top with a white Lord Fauntleroy collar, caressing a dildo. The disc includes a stills gallery and a Black/Short short film from 2014 entitled Tar Rot, which I haven’t seen.

One final point which needs to be made is that Hannah Short is very, very good in this film. Aside from the conversation with the neighbour, she carries the whole thing on her own, largely without dialogue, monologue, narration or even diegetic sound. Yet we get a real feel for Pearl as a person. Short never seems to be ‘going through the motions’ in either the sexual or non-sexual scenes. It’s a fine showcase for her talent… just not one that you could necessarily show to a casting director.

MJS rating: B+

After I reviewedUnhallowed Ground, director Russell England kindly answered a few email questions for me in February 2015.

How did you get the job to direct Unhallowed Ground?
"Producer Neville Raschid had seen my short film Welcome to Leathermill and we’d been talking about funding the full-length feature Leathermill. He was in the middle of developing Unhallowed Ground as a low-budget horror feature, but already had a director attached.  Neville did however use my casting director recommendation, Jane Deitch. She tipped me off when the other director left the project! Neville had thought I was busy, but I changed my plans to be available for his shoot (which had to film over the summer, due to the availability of the chosen location). I had also directed four ‘true-life’ horror drama-docs for the SyFy USA series Paranormal Witness, which Neville liked, so I think that’s how I got the job..."

Why is now the right time for you to move into features, and why did you select Unhallowed Ground as your debut?
"It’s a truism that every director has a feature script in their back pocket and I certainly have mine. I’ve been trying to get Leathermill off the ground for a couple of years, but as everyone knows, it is really tough getting funding, especially as a first-time director. I really liked Paul Raschid's script and Neville’s project was fully-funded, with a locked-down shooting schedule, ready to go. I jumped at the opportunity."

How much directorial independence did you have, given that the writer was one of the actors and his dad was the producer?
"We discussed this a lot. There were certainly healthy creative tensions. I impressed upon Paul that he would need to fully commit to his acting when he was on set, and put aside the writing role. He did this admirably - really throwing himself into the role of Rishi. I felt they both gave me the independence I needed during the shoot."

How important was the location to the film?
"Very important - it was a stunning location. I was keen to make it another character in the film. It has 350 years of history weighing heavily upon its shoulder, so every part of the school needs to give off this vibe. It was quite tough at times, as there are added-on steel and new glass bits, but I managed to mostly avoid these - the dark is quite useful! Mill Hill School in North London is set in 28 acres, with the junior school opposite (which became the girls’ school) - it’s just vast. Paul actually added scenes after seeing certain locations at the school - it just gave us so much scope."

What are you most proud of on the finished film, and what would you change if you could?
"I’m really proud of the cast. Everyone really came together, bonded and delivered. Hopefully the audience will also enjoy the look and pace of the film, and buy-in to the fantasy. As to what would I change? You’ll just have to wait for Unhallowed Ground - The Director’s Cut!"

What other projects do you have lined up?
"Something completely different. I’m currently making a television documentary for BBC2 about an unsung code-breaking hero of Bletchley Park, who fell-foul of GCHQ and the NSA and died in ignominy. I’m also developing three feature scripts: Leathermill and two more horror films, one based on a true story."

Director: Scott Michell
Writer: Scott Michell
Producer: Michael Riley
Cast: Danny Horn, Charity Wakefield, Imogen Bain
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.scartissuethemovie.com

Scar Tissue is a stylish, well-made movie based around an intriguing, clever premise, with a bunch of notable, talented names in the credits, which spends an hour building up mystery and atmosphere – then throws it all away in a final act which could charitably be called ‘unsatisfying’. As such, it’s one of those films which raises an interesting artistic question: should I be extra-disappointed because I was sold a dummy, or should I be thankful that I at least got 60 minutes of entertainment out of the disc?

Danny Horn - who was in episodes of Doctor Who and MI High - stars as Luke, a young man (I’m not sure we ever find out what he does) who gets mixed up in a murder case after he finds a female friend in his bathtub, her corpse brutally disfigured. Quickly going on the lam (and the police don’t really seem to put much effort into tracking him down, to be honest), Danny teams up with Sam, a suspended WPC whom he locates via mysterious footage on his mobile phone.

With her scruffy bob of dyed blonde hair, permanent angry pout and determination to stick her nose in where she’s not wanted, Sam (played by Charity Wakefield, who was a maid in the John Cusack The Raven and Anne Boleyn’s sister in Wolf Hall) is inescapably reminiscent of Elfie Hopkins. She is on suspension for being ‘unstable’ but really doesn’t come across as the sort of person who would ever have passed out of Police Training College. No matter. That’s not the film’s problem.

The set-up is this. Twenty years ago, when Sam was five, her older sister was brutally murdered by serial killer Edward Jansen (Pete Lee-Wilson in flashbacks; his eclectic CV includes Blade II and Tibor Takacs’ Spiders 3D) who was subsequently cornered and shot dead by police. Now the killer is back: not just the same MO but DNA samples from the girl in the bath tub confirm it’s him. But how could that be when Edward Jansen has been dead these past two decades? Sam’s former colleagues DI Hackman (a gritty performance from Mark Cameron, who was also a copper in a run of Corrie episodes back in 2007) and his nemesis forensic pathologist Mo (Imogen Bain – formerly Dame Edna’s daughter! – having a whale of a time) respectively pumped the killer full of lead and sliced him up on a table. Just like Jacob Marley, Jansen was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

This gripping premise is, the astute among you may have spotted, not dissimilar to the plot of Nature Morte and in fact a reference to the Marseilles Police made me wonder whether writer-director Scott Michell was tipping his hat to Paul Burrows’ film, though it may just be coincidence of course. One thing that both Scar Tissue and Nature Morte do have in common is a clear stylistic homage to giallo movies. I found myself speculating that, although parts of the film seemed to make little sense, any film using this plot which had been made in Italy in the late 1970s would be considered a minor masterpiece. Alas, horror fans tend to operate on nostalgic double standards and are often less forgiving of films which don’t tick the box marked ‘rosy glow of adolescent memories’.

So anyway, I was very much enjoying Scar Tissue. Sam and Mark discover a shared connection to a canal bridge which deepens the mystery further. DI Hackman grows more exasperated. Mo dispenses sardonic, pitch-black bon-mots. A shady figure in a hat hangs around in the background. And a severed hand turns up in a lap-dancing club, adding further layers to the mystery by carrying DNA traces of another murderer who is still in the same prison she was sent to 20 years ago.

These killers can’t possibly be operating again – one’s incarcerated, one’s dead – and yet the forensic evidence leaves no doubt that they are. It’s the sort of explanation-defying impossible mystery that wouldn’t disgrace Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple (if either had still been detecting when DNA fingerprinting was invented, about 200 yards from my current office, in 1985). If Hackman was the central character, this would be a police procedural; instead he provides a counterpoint to Sam and Mark’s investigations. Sam’s connection with all this is clear: the bastard murdered her sister so she has a personal interest in bringing him to justice (again). But what is Mark’s connection? Who put that footage onto his phone? Who is that behatted guy in the background? What the jiminy is going on?

Unfortunately, in the third act Michell explains and shows us what’s going on. The explanations are dispensed through tedious, static dialogue, interrupted occasionally by scenes that would show us stuff if it wasn’t too dark to make out who we’re looking at, what they’re doing and where they are. This latter problem particularly irked me because up to that point I had been really impressed with the cinematography by Alan Dunlop (who also lit lost 2001 British horror anthology Dead Room.)

The actual solution to the riddle turns out to be a bit of loopy sci-fi hokum that jars with the horror-thriller we’ve spent the last hour watching. Sam and three other people (whom we don’t really know or care about) are kidnapped and forced to relay messages from the killer through video links to a screen in an old hospital where they are witnessed by Mark and two other people we don’t really know or care about. The revelation of the killer’s identity is a squib so damp you could wash your face with it: basically it’s someone else we don’t really know or care about. He pulls off his mask as Mark says his name – and this viewer, for one, just stared at the screen and said, “Who?”

It’s a double whammy of disappointment: a revelation that doesn’t support the big, mysterious build-up, delivered in a way that alternates between laboriously clunky and murkily indistinct. It’s also dragged out way too long after the mask comes off whoever that is, with too many scenes of people shooting at each other in the gloom that mean nothing to the viewer because we can’t see who everyone is and in some cases still wouldn’t know who they were if the lights were on. In particular, I still have absolutely no idea whatsoever who that guy in the hat was. Seriously. Was he a cop? Who was he working with/for? What did he know? Who did he know? Where did he come from? What was he trying to do? Did he succeeed? What happened to him? It was fine when he was just another level of giallo-esque mystery, but if there was any explanation, I missed it. Was there even a guy in a hat? Did I dream that bit?

While we’re at it, the decision to cast two (possibly more?) supporting characters with actors who look superficially like the lead – same age, same build, same haircut – adds just another layer of unintentional confusion to a story which is already full of deliberate contradictions and red herrings and really doesn’t need any more. Would it have killed ya to cast a Token Black Guy? Plus… okay I’m spoiler-protecting the next paragraph.

[spoilers on] Okay, so Danny, who has just turned 21, is a clone of Edward Jansen. But if Jansen was killed 20 years ago, how did they get hold of his DNA before that? To be fair, the film's original poster design refers to Jansen being killed 22 years ago. Mind you, the website synopsis says he died 25 years ago and that Luke has just turned 22, which raises the original problem that somehow the cloning scientists got hold of Jansen before the police did. Also, the plot depends on Sam and Hackman, who both have a long-term interest in the Jansen case, failing to spot that Danny is a dead ringer for Hansen as a young man. NB. While I refer to Matthew as the unmasked killer up there (and below), that is for spoiler protection purposes. I’m aware (at least, I think I am) that Mark killed Caz. But why? How? Was he drunk at the time? Does he have blackouts? Is this a Jekyll and Hyde thing? Beats the hell out of me. And presumably therefore the severed hand discovered by the lapdancer was from someone actually killed by the lapdancer, who is also a clone (as is the assistant pathologist). Or were there two different lapdancers? Who the hell knows? [spoilers off]

I can see what Scott Michell has tried to do with Scar Tissue, and he demonstrates a solid ability to put a guy in a tree and have him fall out of it in a way that is worth watching. But when we go to see if the guy is alive or dead in act three, the film just crumbles. Michell has created a plot so complex, with so many characters on the periphery who then turn out to have some significance, that wrapping it all up just creates a tangled bird’s nest when we are looking for, if not a neat bow, at least a reasonable granny knot.

Yeah, I think I’m stretching that metaphor a bit far. Moving on.

If the third act had been kept simple, with a bleak, shocking revelation of the killer’s identity, I think the viewer would be more accepting of the frankly daft solution to the mystery. But by throwing far too much into the final 40 minutes (which really should have been about 20-25) Michell leaves the viewer confused and unsatisfied and grasping for whatever bits of plot they can actually work out, chief among which is the bonkers key revelation, standing out in stark relief against what has up till then been a dark, brooding, twisty-turny thriller.

The above notwithstanding, the leads all turn in fine performances, as do the rest of the cast which includes Daniel Fraser (from under-appreciated sitcom Lab Rats), Shaun Dingwall (Rose’s dad in Doctor Who, also in The Forgotten and Hush), Steve Campbell (The Planet), Nathalie Cox (Clash of the Titans, Exam), Tim Faraday (the cloned cleaner in Primeval, also in Harvest of the Dead), Helen George (Call the Midwife’s Trixie), Lisa McAllister (Pumpkinhead 3), Sarah Strong (Colin) and Chris Cowlin (who has played at least 40 different policemen in the last three years, including in EastEnders, Silent Witness, Lewis and Muppets Most Wanted) plus child actors Ceyda Mustafa (Tower Block), Flynn Allen (The Eschatrilogy) and Lois Ellington in a particularly challenging role. Admiral Piett (Kenneth Colley) provides a certain amount of name value for cult movie fanboys.

This is Scott Michell’s second feature following (at a considerable distance) his 1996 thriller The Innocent Sleep (which he produced but didn’t write). A number of key personnel worked on both films. Scar Tissue was produced by Michael Riley of Sterling Pictures who previously brought us Vampire Diary and The Seasoning House, two tentpoles of the British Horror Revival which Scar Tissue is sadly unable to match. Another behind-the-scenes stalwart of British horror, Tim Dennison (Lighthouse, Silent Cry, Evil Aliens, Room 36) is credited as co-producer.

The ever-reliable Paul Hyett, currently busy in post on his werewolf-on-a-train picture Howl, designed the make-up effects, which are suitably bloody and nasty. The excellent score was composed by Doctor Who alumnus Mark Ayres – whom I recall once showing me the original reel of 1960s audio tape containing the actual Who theme in its earliest format (I know I try not to be a fanboy, but some things just resonate…). Production designer John-Paul Frazer, who does a cracking job on the murder scenes, was art director on The Seasoning House and Airborne, and also designed Hollow and My Name is Sarah Hayward. Matthew Strange (Kill List, The Reverend, Strippers vs Werewolves, Truth or Dare,The Zombie King) is credited with special effects, and Jason de Vyea (various gigs on Hollow, Kill Keith, Stalker, Dead Cert and Just for the Record) with the visual effects.

Shot in October/November 2011 and carrying a 2012 copyright date, Scar Tissue premiered at the Oldenburg International Film Festival in September 2013 then seemed to disappear off the radar for a bit and I can't find any other festival dates. It was announced for a UK theatrical release in July 2014 with DVD/VOD a week or two later. In the event, the brief theatrical outing was bumped slightly to August and the small screen release to February 2015 (the disc includes a trailer and a Making Of).

A fine cast and crew plus good production values, alas, will never overcome a muddled and unfocused screenplay, even when directed with undeniable skill and panache. If the illumination in the third act had been more literal and less expositional (in short: less yacking, more lighting) and if the story and characters had been pared back to basics, Scar Tissue could have been as good as the promise made by its first two acts. This is a decent film which frustrates, rather than a poor one which disappoints. But that’s still not a good thing.

MJS rating: B-

Directors: Jake Hawkins, Andy Phelps
Writers: Jake Hawkins, Andy Phelps
Producers: Jake Hawkins, Andy Phelps
Cast: Jim Sweeney, Joe Rainbow, Rachel Nottingham
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.charmed-apocalypse.com

Every week there’s a new zombie film. Many of them are pretty much identical. Some of them are completely new and take the subgenre in different directions. Others are the standard zombie picture but with one distinct selling point. Zombie Resurrection falls into the third category, in that the bulk of the film is yet another motley collection of survivors trying to continue surviving, who then discover something new, but what they discover is something original that you won’t have seen in any previous zombie film (I think).

In any movie like this, the strength of the picture is the characters and the relationships between them. Zombie Resurrection does a great job here, somehow managing to introduce us to eight characters at the start of the film without leaving us confused. (There is a pre-credits sequence but it’s kind of dark and what I could see didn’t seem to relate to the main story so I’d skip over that if I were you.)

So: roll call. The nominal leader of the group is Major Gibson (Joe Rainbow: Stag Night of the Dead, Sisters Grimm, Night Junkies), a young officer in the TA (or whatever the Terriers are called now) who is, not to beat about the bush, an officious little twat. Outranked, but far more practical and pragmatic is foul-mouthed Glaswegian brick shit-house Sergeant MacTavish (Jim Sweeney: Idol of Evil).

Beaumont (Danny Brown) is a respectable middle-class family man with taped spectacles and a handy golf club, who keeps a protective eye on his teenage daughter Becca (Rachel Nottingham). As well he should because opportunist wet blanket Gandhi (Simon Burbage: Extinction, Tear Me Apart, Torn: A Shock Youmentary) has his eye on Becca too. Harden (Jade Colucci aka Jade Gatrell) is a potty-mouthed chav with a positive attitude who has formed an unlikely alliance with Beaumont and is therefore a sort of surrogate mother to Becca.

Then there’s Esther (diminutive, Zimbabwean Shamiso Mushambi), a heavily pregnant evangelical Christian given to explaining the apocalypse by spouting scripture (which, you know, almost makes sense). Finally there is Dr Sykes (Eric Colvin: ‘The Man’ in Adam Mason’s Broken), one of the scientists who created the virus that caused the zombies in the first place. He is being transported as a prisoner, in orange jumpsuit and chains.

This group of unlikely bedfellows are making their way across Britain on foot, heading for ‘Imperium’, the largest of the protected settlements which have been built up since the zombie virus destroyed civilisation about 15 months ago. Gibson is convinced that once they get there, Sykes will hang.

The zombies themselves are pathetic, in a literal sense. Emaciated, shuffling things which can be fairly easily destroyed with a well-aimed blow to the head, they don’t present much problem to the team and are colloquially referred to as ‘shitsacks’. A bite from one is still fatal, but is pretty easy to avoid that bite under most circumstances.

When one of the group sustains a serious injury, they take temporary refuge in an abandoned school, which is where they encounter the first ‘fresh’ zombie – fast-moving and deadly – that they have seen for a long time. Sykes estimates it was turned less than a day ago. Further investigation reveals a large crowd of zombies, milling around a single male zombie who is some sort of zombie Jesus (Rupert Phelps), capable of bringing people back from the undead.

Now, truth be told this whole ‘zombie resurrection’ schtick (hence the title, which you might otherwise assume was just a generic phrase) is explained much more clearly in the synopsis on the film’s website than it ever is in the movie itself. I could get that the special zombie was special, and that some of the team witness a zombie turning back into a person, but the details are a bit vague. A female survivor located within the school (Georgina Winters, who had a bit part in Jupiter Ascending) is, I guess, supposed to fill us in on what’s happening but, again, what I learned about her from the online publicity was significantly more than I got from the actual film.

It’s clear that Jake Hawkins and Andy Phelps have worked out something clever and original here, but they’ve been a little too obtuse in showing that to the audience. Not to worry, because Zombie Resurrection is nevertheless a tremendously entertaining picture. The first half is darkly comic with some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. Later on, as members of the team start to fall away, things get a bit more serious, but the transition is smooth and effective.

Solid acting from all concerned makes us care about these people (even Gibson) and skilful direction keeps the story flowing as the character development, ah, develops. We are told enough about the post-apocalyptic world to understand what is going on, but not so much that we get laden down with back story.

Zombie Resurrection is the debut of Phelps and Hawkins who share ‘directed, produced and written by’ although Phelps alone is credited with ‘screenplay’. Hawkins was the DP, a role he previously handled on a micro-short called Zombeez. Robbie Drake (The Seasoning House, Cockneys vs Zombies, Evil Calls) provided the prosthetic make-up effects of bites, wounds and general zombie nastiness. The cast also includes Kate Korbel (File Box, Piggy) and Ian McIntyre (who was in an episode of Red Dwarf) plus P&H themselves among the zombies. Several BHR names get thanked in the credits including Johannes Roberts and Jim Eaves.

Filmed back in September 2011, Zombie Resurrection had a brace of cast and crew screenings in November 2012. The movie emerged onto DVD in October of 2013 – but only in Japan. It took until March 2015 to find a UK release through Left Films. (Confusingly, a film called Zombie Resurrection has already been released in Germany, which is actually the 2010 Danish picture Opstandelsen. That was released in the USA as A Zombie Exorcism and in the Netherlands as The Resurrection. There is also an unrelated online game called Zombie Resurrection)

I can honestly say that I really enjoyed Zombie Resurrection. In this day and age one tends to have low expectations for zombie pictures, especially if they have such seemingly generic titles. Consequently, when one encounters a well-written, well-directed, well-produced feature with some original ideas, interesting characters and a solid mixture of fun and thrills, it’s a pleasant surprise.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Robert Florence
Writer: Robert Florence
Producer: Joanne Daly
Cast: Richard Rankin, Louise Stewart, Kirsty Strain
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: thehouseofhim.com

The House of Him is probably the best horror film you will see all year. A blistering combination of psychological, supernatural, social and violent horror motifs which not only works brilliantly but which constantly transcends itself to become more than you think it can be. Time and again, writer-director Robert Florence trips us up with something unexpected that makes us recontextualise all we have seen and heard so far. But The House of Him isn’t clever for its own sake, and it’s not just some continually unfolding mystery. This is a powerful, serious, thought-provoking film which really uses the horror genre in a way that few films do. Most horror movies play with the genre: its tropes and its themes and its iconography. But not The House of Him.

There are no easy answers here. This is a difficult film. There are a lot of answers certainly, but none of them are easy and most of them contradict at least some of the other answers. You will come away from this film with a head full of thoughts and doubts and imagery and concerns. This film will change you, at least in the short term. It will upset you, it will confuse you, it will frighten you. It will kneel on your chest and stroke your hair and tell you everything is alright in a voice that you don’t want to either trust or believe.

And yet, the whole thing is basically a two-hander, shot in a single location for under a thousand quid. Richard Rankin is magnificent as killer Croal, performing through a mask for more than half the film yet still letting us see what the character is thinking. Louise Stewart as the victim Anna gives a performance that, in any just world, where films are judged on their absolute quality rather than their budget, marketing or star value, would be laden with major awards. I’m sure all the actors nominated for tonight’s Oscars are very good, but their world of personal assistants and Winnebagos and magazine interviews is light years away from the real film industry where real actors turn in stunning performances in fiver-and-change productions. Even those film-makers who think they are ‘independent’ and ‘low budget’ are just another facet of the multi-million dollar, self-serving commercial clique which monopolises the media and pats itself on the back in Versace gowns.

Fuck the Academy Awards. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck the so-called ‘British film industry’ with its funding aparatchiks and luvvy-darling poseurs. Fuck the British Film Institute. Fuck Empire magazine and the press releases it calls features. Fuck the Baftas. Fuck everyone on Wardour Street. Fuck Netflix and LoveFilm and HMV. Fuck the Odeon and the Vue and the Showcase. Fuck the whole lot of them as they suck each other’s cocks and pretend they matter. Fuck the sheep who pay to see that shit and read about that shit and enjoy that shit. If you want to see real film-making, as raw and important and potentially life-changing as the first time you heard a single by the Clash, or realising there was one newsagent in your home town that stocked a comic called Viz, or Alexei Sayle throwing chairs at hecklers in the original Comedy Store at Raymond’s Revue Bar – if you want that sort of experience, then you need to watch The House of Him and other films like this. Give your Oscars and your Baftas to Robert Florence and Richard Rankin and Louise Stewart. Turn the world upside-down. Change your values. Change other people’s values. It will never happen, and it’s precisely because it will never happen that it should happen.

Angry? You bet your sweet bippy I’m angry. And confused. And bothered by all the ideas competing for attention in my wee cranium. That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s what we’re dealing with, folks.

That’s what we’re dealing with.

At this point, I should probably calm down and describe the film, though it’s not easy because this is several films in one. At first, it appears to be a simple slasher movie, the opening scene giving us a glimpse of bloody, sharp violence as a masked man stabs a woman to death in a kitchen, witnessed by her friend. A single line of dialogue has already told us all we need to know about who these people are and where they are and why. The setting may be domestic but this isn’t domestic violence, and although The House of Him is on one important level a polemic against domestic abuse (positioning this film within the same subgenre as the recent The Devil’s Vice), it’s much, much more than that. It’s so much more.

Seeing her friend slain, Anna tries to effect an escape but the door is locked and all the windows are boarded up (with chipboard shelves from flatpack furniture). Croal’s pursuit of Anna through the house – the sort of bland, suburban semi that provides the setting for many of the better British horrors of recent years – resolves into a stand-off in which all the power is his. “I’m still going to kill you,” he assures her in his calm, Scottish burr. “But not right now.”

Throughout the second act, the balance of power gradually shifts, flowing back and forth but inexorably away from Croal and towards Anna. Much of this occurs through static conversations which Florence nevertheless manages to make gripping and dynamic through his (largely hand-held) camera-work. All of which leads into a nightmare-ish third act that sometimes teeters on the edge of abstract surrealism without ever toppling over. In less ambitious hands, this film could have been a simple revenge-thriller, but Florence has a grander view.

We never leave the house, but what we learn of the outside world, through a radio and occasional voices outside, suggests that something is happening globally, some form of mass hysteria turning people into crazed killers, attacking their loved ones. And for a while we think perhaps we’re watching the most blackly ironic of horror films: a woman trapped in a house with a psycho on the night when the world is suddenly full of psychos, her hopes of salvation crushed as surely as his hopes of infamy.

But, like the man in the suit says when he waves the £25,000 cheque in your face, we don’t want to give you that.

Because there is another layer to this film. This isn't the first murder committed by Croal in this house, and there are ghosts behind the walls and under the floor. Or at least, ‘ghosts’. Or maybe Ghosts. Or maybe things pretending to be ghosts, or things we would call ghosts, or maybe nothing at all. Or maybe they’re in his head. Or maybe they’re in her head. Or maybe they’re in all our heads.

A voice here, a movement there, a shadow there. Shadows really matter in this film. Florence’s lighting and camerawork (and editing) make what is in focus and out of focus, the foreground and the background and the light and the dark all part of a moving painting. Every shot is composed with a masterful hand. How literal are these ghosts? We don’t know. Does it matter? No, it does not. Just as it doesn’t matter whether the radio is telling us the truth, whether the global situation is something imagined or real or distorted. Is Croal imagining the ghosts? Is Anna imagining them? Are they imagining each other? Is this even a real house? Is there even a real outside?

Lots of questions. Questions tumbling over each other like pebbles in the surf, forming possible, potential answers just long enough for us to start to rationalise what we are seeing and hearing – before another wave sweeps it all away again.

The House of Him may be only 85 minutes long, but you need a lot more than 85 minutes set aside to watch it. The film needs to be seen in its entirety, undisturbed. Then you need to allow plenty of time afterwards to let the ideas sink in. To discuss them with the other members of the audience. Or, if you watched it alone, why not write a review, analysing what you have witnessed? Exorcise your demons. Change your values. Change other people’s values. Change other people. Throw the chairs. Buy the comic. Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls.

Living south of the border, Robert Florence is a new name to me but apparently he is well known in Scotland as a comedy writer (sitcoms and sketches) and TV/online presenter, particularly in matters concerning video and board games. But it’s also clear that he knows and understands the horror genre, and this comes through abundantly in his debut feature, filmed in his mum’s house for £900.

Rankin and Stewart have worked with Florence on various projects as has Kirsty Strain who plays Sophie, stabbed in the opening scene. Strain was recently in Rachel Maclean’s horror short The Weepers, and Stewart was in Al Campbell’s 2011 zombie short Dead Wood. The supporting cast of voices and apparitions includes Amy E Watson who was also in a zombie short: Paul Michael Egan’s Pursuit of the Dead. That’s pretty much the extent of the players’ experience within this genre.

All the above plaudits notwithstanding, a significant part of the film’s success is the Carpenter-esque soundtrack by David Simpson (no relation) and Iain Cook, the latter of whom also scored a 2010 ‘audio movie’ production of The Dunwich Horror. Michelle Watson (Starcache) provided the FX make-up, some of which is very bloody when it needs to be.

A magnificent achievement by all concerned, The House of Him is absolutely, exactly everything that a horror film could (and should) be. It is also solidly 21st century and, in its suburban social realism, defiantly British and hence a perfect example of everything I have been banging on about all these years. Will it be seen for what it is, or will it be a forgotten gem, perhaps discovered in years to come when nostalgia for the British horror revival makes film fans realise what they lived through and missed? All I know is that this is a stunning horror movie that you absolutely must see.

Premiering to great acclaim at the Glasgow Film Fest in February 2014, The House of Him was released to Vimeo on Demand on Halloween that year (in a tighter edit, shorn of six minutes), with 10% of profits donated to women’s aid charities. In February 2015 it was picked up for VOD distribution by the canny folks at TheHorrorShow.tv who kindly provided this screener, reinforcing their position as the go-to site for the very best in contemporary horror.

I struggled, I really did, throughout the writing of this review, over whether I should rate The House of Him as an A or an A+. I reserve the rare A rating for films that are perfect, which could not possibly be improved. The even rarer A+ is for films which seem to be perfect but actually, in defiance of all logic, go beyond that. Films which transcend themselves. I said at the top of the review that this film transcends itself, and I stand by that. And if I’m prepared to consider giving a film A+, and I can’t see any reason not to give it my highest rating, than I have to be true to my word. Bravo Robert and Richard and Louise and your colleagues. You have made one of the defining British horror movies of the modern era.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Guy Soulsby
Writer: Guy Soulsby
Producer: Pete Ryan
Cast: Shaun Dooley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.devilmakeswork.com

If you have ever sent me a screener and then waited for ever while I got round to reviewing it… well, that’s my life. Guy Soulsby sent me a copy of his short film Devil Makes Work, which is precisely seven minutes and ten seconds long. And it still took me more than two weeks to get a review written.

Partly it’s finding the time. I work all day, spend a lot of time looking after TF Simpson, have other writing commitments (not least my monthly Devil’s Porridge blog for Hemlock Books) and always have a backlog of screeners waiting to be viewed. More than the overall pressures of work, it is literally ‘finding the time’, which sometimes means the middle of the night when The Wife and The Boy have both gone to bed but I’m too tired to think straight.

Case in point: two weeks after receiving the screener, I sat down in my office to watch Guy’s film. Just seven minutes and ten seconds. And less than two minutes in there was a voice at the door. “Da-a-ad!”

God damn. I love you. I love you more than life itself, but leave me a-freaking-lone once in a while. Just for seven minutes and ten goddamn seconds, can’t you?

And so, quite late at night, I tried again. And the next morning, sat down to write the review.

Devil Makes Work is an astounding short film. A lot of time, effort and money has gone into making it look like even more time, effort and money has gone into this. In an age when feature-length films often have credit rolls so minimalist that you could hold the cast and crew screening in the front room of a terraced house, about a hundred people contributed to this production. The effects, the make-up, the design, the sound, the whole shebang. It’s a tremendous showcase for everyone’s work.

But it is essentially a showcase, which makes it hard for me to review, because what the hell can I say about it? Basically it’s Shaun Dooley playing Old Nick as a sort of Satanic geezer gangster, sat on a throne of old tyres, pontificating on the nature of good and evil while we see a succession of figures: Sisyphus pushing his rock uphill, Jesus carrying his cross, a demon, a witch, a voodoo priestess, a rioter, a pimp and a prostitute. Shorn of the opening titles and closing credits, the whole thing lasts less than five minutes.

Visually, it’s hugely impressive. There’s no denying that. There’s a bunch of stuff on the website showing designs and inspiration and props and behind-the-scenes stuff and VFX and grading and whathaveyou and whatnot. The punishing four-day schedule of the actual shoot included one ‘day’ that last for 35 hours. Seriously, you cannot fault the hard work and dedication (and skill and talent) that has gone into this little picture, from Soulsby and everyone else. And all that hard work and dedication (and skill and talent) is evident on screen.

Devil Makes Work has screened at several high-profile festivals and will no doubt show at more. If you’re at a festival and it’s showing, take the trouble to see it. It looked great on my laptop so I expect it will look awesome on the big screen. Or, if you’re reading this review in the future, after the film has gone online, have a quick google and be impressed.

Soulsby is an experienced director of commercials and has worked for many leading international brands. Devil Makes Work is sort of a commercial for himself. But the thing is this. He says he set out to make Devil Makes Work look like a feature film, and … here’s where I pull my honesty trousers on … I’m not sure that it does. What it looks like is a music video. Only without a song.

It’s a great showcase for the director and, frankly, if I was looking for someone to direct a big budget music video, I’d be knocking on his door. We can see that Soulsby has a very strong visual sense, that he has a masterful camera eye, that he has a strong worth ethic and that he has the organisational skills to lead a team of a hundred people and craft something amazing. But can’t we see that from some of the big-name commercials on his own website?

A feature film is more than a succession of stylish images. At least, a good one is. There is certainly a trend in Hollywood to make awful, empty movies that are rammed to the gills with vast amounts of special effects: all style and no substance, all sizzle and no sausage. Films that jump from one set piece explosion or alien spaceship or car chase to the next without any concern for making sense or appealing to anything but the most visceral emotions. Films that are like watching somebody else play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. Films which cost obscene amounts of money and, let’s face it, sometimes make obscene amounts of money back. Maybe that’s the gig that Guy Soulsby is pitching for here.

But films – good films – are about stories. And characters. And relationships. Devil Makes Work is a beautifully shot and edited sequence of vignettes but it’s not a narrative piece. And neither is a 60-second commercial for Nike or whoever.

My advice – not that anyone ever listens to me, and God help your career if you do – would be for Guy Soulsby to now make a second film which bears no relation or comparison whatsoever to Devil Makes Work. A simple film: one or two locations, handful of characters, no fancy-dancy effects, no bombastic, cod-Biblical motifs or themes. Just a simple story, told through the interaction of believable, sympathetic characters. A film that shows Soulsby can tell a narrative, that he can define a character, that he understands the importance of character relationships.

We need to see a man climb a tree, the same man fall out of the tree, and then, well, it’s up to Soulsby whether the guy is alive (comedy) or dead (drama). That’s the three-act structure, and it’s what defines a story. It’s something we can’t get from seven minutes and ten seconds of what is effectively just a tree on fire.

Watching Devil Makes Work, I was reminded of a story I heard many years ago about a wannabe comics artist who sent a portfolio of drawings to Marvel or 2000AD or whoever and was offered some work. When the lad asked why, out of all the submissions the publisher must receive, his had stood out and been chosen, this is what he was told. Ninety-nine per cent of the artwork submitted was muscular superheroes clad in spandex flying and fighting. But this particular artist had submitted drawings of real people in real poses, showing that he understood the basics of comic artwork; that it’s about people, not superhero caricatures.

In crafting Devil Makes Work, Guy Soulsby has shown that he can draw superheroes. But can he draw real people? If he can make a simple narrative film that is as impressive in its own way as this one, but for entirely different reasons, then potentially Hollywood is his.

Of course, he didn’t do this alone, as noted above. The film was produced by Pete Ryan who started out as a video operator and projectionist before moving into production as a lowly runner nine years ago – and now has his own production facility where high-end stuff like this can be shot. The cinematographer was Nicholas Bennett, the editor Nick Armstrong, both highly experienced in commercials. Production designer Noam Piper has designed a couple of drama features I haven’t heard of and was stand-by art director on Paddington. Robbie Drake (Evil Calls, Zombie Resurrection etc) designed the demon make-up. Other make-up was provided by Rebecca Hall (The Eschatrilogy, The Sleeping Room, Ibiza Undead, Soldiers of the Damned) and Paula Maxwell. Seb Juviler composed the music.

Shaun Dooley, who makes an effective and charismatic Satan, isn’t a name that springs to mind in terms of British horror but a perusal of the IMDB shows he has actually amassed a considerable number of genre credits including Eden Lake, Salvage, The Awakening, The Woman in Black and as yet unreleased werewolf western Blood Moon– plus extensive TV work in things like Wolfblood, Red Riding, Broadchurch, Misfits etc. Of the other actors, only Duncan Meadows (Sisyphus) has more than the odd credit. His muscles have had bit parts in Dark Shadows, Merlin and Skyfall, and he’s in upcoming British horror K-Shop.

It’s really, really difficult reviewing something like Devil Makes Work, because it doesn’t have any of the things I look for in a movie, If this was actually a feature film I would trash it for having no characters and no plot. If it was even a narrative short film, I would level the same accusations. But it’s not intended to have characters or plot, it’s intended to be an impressive succession of images that conveys or promotes a feeling. As such it has more in common with a music video or a commercial.

Technically and artistically this is awesome. It does what it sets out to do, with what it has available, to an extraordinarily successful degree. But is it a film? Make us a film now, Mr Soulsby. Make us a movie.

MJS rating: A

Director: Paul Ziller
Writers: Paul Ziller, Brad Abraham
Producer: John Prince
Cast: Misha Collins, Peter Wingfield, Torri Higginson
Country: Canada
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener (Anchor Bay)

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man's a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan

It is impossible to watch this film without thinking of that classic Spinal Tap song. Not just the obvious thematic connection but because Stonehenge Apocalypse is like that song turned into a feature-length movie. It is unbelievably crass and stupid, utterly without any sense of its own ridiculousness and completely divorced from any notion of what Stonehenge actually is.

The difference of course is that, with the song, all of that was done deliberately for laughs. With the movie, it’s serious.

Nevertheless Stonehenge Apocalypse does have one other thing in common with This is Spinal Tap. It is laugh-out-loud funny. This is one of the funniest films I have seen for quite some time, all the more so because it is not in any way or at any point intended to be funny. There’s not a shred of humour here, which just makes it funnier, right down to the pretentious, stupid title which wouldn’t have been out of place on a Tap B-side.

Here is a film with a script by an eight-year-old, directed by someone whose knowledge of science fiction cinema inexplicably ends in about 1956 and starring a cast of nobodies who are, without exception, the most embarrassed-looking actors ever to appear on screen. Is it ‘so bad it’s good’? Well, it really is unremittingly terrible. And the level and manner of its badness is such that it ends up being entertaining despite itself. Let me assure you, I wasn’t laughing with this film, I was laughing at it.

We start with a radio presenter telling his listeners that he is interested in ‘the strange’. The camera pans across a bunch of fake newspaper clippings, one of which manages to spell the word ‘calendar’ wrong in its headline. Then suddenly we’re in an archaeological dig ‘10,000 feet’ below Maine. Hang about - that’s nearly two miles. Whoever heard of archaeologists working at that depth (and in a very clean and well-lit tunnel to boot)?

There’s a young black guy in charge and his team have found a wall covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Because not only did the Ancient Egyptians often construct tombs 1.8 miles below ground level, they also did it in North America. In the centre of the hieroglyphics, which are carved rather than painted, is an ankh symbol. Our lead archaeologist measures this and it’s exactly the right size for something which proves his point. From a padded case he removes a golden ankh which magically flies out of his hand and attaches itself to the wall where the ankh-shape is carved.

Meanwhile, over at ‘Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, South West England’ (which is accurate, to be fair) a tour guide is showing half a dozen tourists around Stonehenge, which as everyone knows has been inaccessible to the public for many years. Mind you, ‘Salisbury Plain’ is, in this context, a quite large field. And Stonehenge is variously represented by very artificial-looking polystyrene rocks or even worse-looking CGI.

Suddenly the group is startled by an Earth tremor (which we do get quite regularly here in England) and then - the circle of stones rotates! The giant stones, many of which are only upright because they have been set into cement bases at various times over previous decades, somehow circle around each other without tipping over and without any of the balanced cross-stones even wobbling. Blue CGI lightning flickers between the circle stones and the ‘altar stone’ in the middle. Only then do the tourists and their guide think to run away but some sort of something zaps them and they fizzle into into nothingness.

We are less than five minutes into the film and already it is seriously stupid. And very funny.

Our hero is that radio presenter whom we now finally get to see properly. He is Jacob Glaser (Misha Collins: Supernatural) and the film-makers don’t seem to have got much beyond the idea that he’s a radio presenter, like actually thinking how that might work. Glaser evidently broadcasts from his basement, taking questions from callers, which suggests he’s live on air, but when he wants to do something else he just says, “We’ll leave it there for a moment.” Way to lose your listeners, dude.

Is he meant to be a professional? An amateur? Is he broadcasting over the internet? If so, why does he use really archaic-looking equipment which seems to be only a few years past the valve era? In fact, the internet is kind of funny in this film because it is completely ignored apart from this one brief scene in Glaser’s basement studio. Everything that subsequently happens and is somehow kept hush-hush by the authorities would be impossible to keep hush-hush, it would be all over the web within seconds. This could have been set in some sort of alternative universe where the net doesn’t exist. But it isn’t.

Because when Glaser announces that he has picked up an ‘energy burst’ moving on ‘the Earth’s electromagnetic grid’ between Maine and England, a caller rings in to tell him that “Stonehenge moved!”. Glaser checks some websites - badly designed and poorly written, so actually very accurate for conspiracy theory sites - and finds stuff about how Stonehenge is now sealed off and under quarantine.

Glaser has a map on his wall showing this ‘electromagnetic grid’ with lines connecting various places, although the node in Britain where lines connect is conspicuously nowhere near ‘Salisbury Plain, South West England’ but somewhere in the vicinity of Cumberland.

Realising that this is ‘the strange’ that he’s interested in, Glaser takes a plane to the UK and arrives at Salisbury Plain in a London taxi! But by then the whole area has been cordoned off. Nevertheless, Glaser is able to sneak through the cordon by the clever trick of, er, just walking straight up to Stonehenge because there’s no actual cordon.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A military-scientific command base has been set up in ‘Salisbury Plain Primary School’ which suggests that the bozos who made this think Salisbury Plain is some sort of town. This functional building is made to look like a school by having a few pictures on one wall. Butting heads in the team are straight, by-the-book Dr Trousdale (Cardiff-born Peter Wingfield: Highlander: Endgame, Catwoman, Baby Geniuses 2, Holby City, Highlander: The Source - my god, the poor man’s been in some shite, hasn’t he?) and the more intuitive and open-minded Dr Kaycee Leeds (Torri Higginson: Stargate: Atlantis, Tekwar). They are supported by various low-rent boffins in lab coats and assorted squaddies because, even though this is a Canadian film, it’s set in Britain and is therefore legally required to feature squaddies.

It’s in this school-turned-command base where much of the great dialogue occurs. Here’s a typical exchange:

“Looks like radio waves.”
“They are - and those particular waves are only between the stones.”
“They’re not part of the electromagnetic interference?”
“No, those wavelengths are structured.”

See how the writers are using words that they have heard on television without actually bothering to look them up in a dictionary - or even on Wikipedia. Throughout this film there is a massive over-reliance on the concept of electromagnetism as if it is something strange or fantastical rather than just, you know, ordinary electricity and ordinary magnetism. The writers have no idea what ‘electromagnetism’ actually means but it’s the longest word they know how to spell. There’s a great drinking game to be had here, every time anyone says ‘electromagnetic’ or ‘electromagnetism’. Trouble is, it’s difficult to drink while you’re writing down jaw-droppingly crappy dialogue and even harder to do it while you’re laughing so much.

From these amazing radio waves, represented by a simple, regular, unannotated sine wave on a computer screen, the techies somehow extract a digital read-out, starting at 37:01:56 - fortunately the audience don’t have to sit through another 37 hours of this crap.

Shortly before this. About two hours, 58 minutes and four seconds before this, the Stonehenge stones rearrange themselves again, there’s more blue lightning and, over on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, an Aztec pyramid erupts like a volcano.

There follows a whole load of malarkey which must taken seven hours by the clock, although no-one gets tired, stops to eat or changes their clothes. The malarkey includes a helicopter lowering some sort of radar into the centre of the stone circle but the chopper goes the same way that the tourists did. Then when the readout reaches 30:00:00 there’s more movement of the stones and another pyramid erupts, this one in Java.

By now US General Forshaw (Michael Kopsa: Watchmen, Hollow Man 2, Fantastic Four, Carrie remake and the voice of Dr X in the Action Man cartoon) is on site and he is a no-nonsense guy, as shown in this response to a concerned lab coat:

“Oh my God, Indonesia has been flattened.”
“This ends the debate about whether or not Stonehenge is causing disasters.”

Their one hope, if only they realised, is Glaser, who has by now been captured by squaddies and imprisoned in a corridor of the primary school along with some never-explained other people. He knows what’s going on - and it’s all connected with the Antikythera Mechanism. As you probably know, this is a rusty lump of metal, about 2,000 years old, which appears to be a remnant of a sophisticated mechanical device. It resides in a museum in Greece although for the purposes of this film it’s in a museum in New York called the American Foundation for Archaeology.

Dr Leeds manages to smuggle Glaser out of the school, past all the guards, off to Heathrow, onto a transatlantic flight and before you know it they’re at this museum, which is represented by a large dark room with assorted, unlabelled statues scattered randomly about. It is, without a doubt, the least believable museum ever represented on film. It seems that the people who made this film had not only never been to Stonehenge but had never actually been in an archaeology museum either.

In the ‘museum’ there’s a gun-battle with the black archaeologist from the prologue who is an old mate of Glaser’s named Joseph Leshem (Hill Harper: CSI: New York, The Breed, The Skulls, Pumpkinhead 2). Leshem escapes with the Antikythera Mechanism which he needs to activate the ‘lost pyramid’ which he has discovered nearly two miles below Maine.

Glaser knows what’s really going on: the planet Earth is being terraformed. Erm, wouldn’t that leave it exactly as it is? Well no, it would cause the thing to start again from scratch. All these pyramids and other monuments, built at vastly different times by entirely unconnected civilisations, are part of some vast reset mechanism which will destroy humanity - except Leshem’s cult followers who will be safe within the buried pyramid.

Meanwhile, back at Salisbury Plain Primary School, General Forshaw explains his plans to Dr Trousdale:

“Stonehenge has become a destructive force. It is a security threat and must be treated as such.”
“General, we need to be certain of the properties of this anomaly before we take any further action.”
“I’ve spoken with world leaders who think otherwise. We’re going to demolish it.”

That’s right, they’re going to save the world by dropping a nuclear bomb on Stonehenge, but all the squaddies and lab coats will be safe because they’re going to retreat to a safe distance, the way you do.

Meanwhile, over in Maine, Dr Leeds and Glaser are driving around in a Humvee with a couple of random special ops guys trying to find the buried pyramid. To do this, Glaser uses his standard device - a simple meter measuring milligauss. Well, to be fair, that is the unit of electromagnetic flux, so the writers got one correct thing off Wikipedia. Quite how it will help you to detect a stone pyramid buried two miles underground I don’t know but apparently for it to function at all you need to lean right out of the window of a speeding Humvee.

Anyway, don’t worry because the buried pyramid now rises to the surface, blasting through the green grass of Maine and causing huge cracks in the roads which chase after Glaser’s Humvee but don’t quite catch it. The special ops guys then approach a very convenient door in the pyramid, armed with a riot shield, and go in, followed by the unarmed and unshielded Glaser and Leeds.

It all ends up somehow back at Stonehenge (after another conveniently unmentioned transatlantic flight) with a desperate battle between Glaser and a rogue lab coat who was actually, for some reason and in some way, working for Leshem. It’s a last-second struggle to place the Antikythera Mechanism on the Stonehenge altar stone and thereby somehow switch the whole thing off, although by then it’s too late for North Africa as the Pyramids of Giza have erupted (“Oh my God, the Mediterranean Sea is flooding into Egypt.”)

Good gravy, I’ve seen some bollocks in my life but this really takes the biscuit. It is, in every sense you can imagine, monumentally bad. The plot is insultingly stupid, the characters are paper-thin and the special effects seems to have been done using something with about the same computing power as my wristwatch.

There’s a long history of crappy SF/fantasy films about conspiracy theories but this seems more influenced by the National Treasure-style sub/post-Indiana Jones bollocks than all those awful 1970s TV movies about the Bermuda Triangle. It really seems like the film-makers cobbled some ideas together randomly and then called it a plot. Nothing makes a shred of sense, not one single character ever acts believably and the whole thing is presented with a po-faced sincerity which utterly belies the absolutely insulting stupidity of the whole thing.

Given how cheap transatlantic flights can be, you would have thought that at least one of the people involved would have come over to Stonehenge to take a look but no-one mentions this in the half-hour Making Of so we must assume that the nearest they came to Salisbury Plain was the Eastern side of Toronto. No, this whole thing has been cobbled together from some vague notion of what they think Stonehenge is, unfettered by any hint of reality. Little things like the fact that half the stones are now lying down and/or broken, like the additional rings of four-tonne ‘bluestones’ within the main ring of 50-tonne ‘sarsens’, like the circular earthworks around the monument.

Also, let me note here without contradiction that the stones in this version of Stonehenge (about 60% polystyrene, about 40% CGI according to the Making Of) are hopeless, weedy things that are utterly, utterly different from the massive , robust sarsens at the real monument.

That Making Of does in fact offer additional guffaws. For example, director Paul Ziller offers the traditional moron’s validation of a stupid story, which is: I’m either not clever enough or too lazy to do the absolutely minimal, simple research required to understand this so I think nobody understands it. Or as he puts it:

“It’s very possible that we’re not the first civilisation to occupy this planet. The planet’s been here for billions of years. That’s a really long time. We don’t know what happened billions of years ago. I’ve always been open to any plausible theory about what may have happened before we were here. This planet has gone through a lot of changes, a lot of geological transformations. I think we just don’t know who was here, and when, before us.”

Yes we do, Paul. We do know who was here before us. A combination of archaeology and Darwinian genetics enables us to know precisely who was here before us. And it wasn’t ocean-hopping Ancient Egyptians with a penchant for electromagnetism.

My other favourite comment in the Making Of comes from Peter Wingfield who gamely tries to make the script sound better than it is, or possibly he’s trying to apologise for the general shittiness of the film, by claiming that it’s full of technobabble. Except it very plainly isn’t.

“As an actor, the thing that I’m finding most challenging in this movie is the incredible amount of technical stuff. ‘The electromagnetic shockwave that a nuclear bomb creates is the only weapon we have capable enough (sic) of disrupting the magnetic forcefield protecting Stonehenge.’ And you’ve got to say that like it’s just tripping off your tongue because they’re words you just use every day.”

You know, Pete mate, pretty much all of those are words that lots of people do use on a regular basis. It’s hardly the sort of technobabble that we find in Doctor Who or Star Trek TNG, is it? Stop trying to pretend that this crap is some sort of intricately crafted slice of sci-fi, it’s just primary-school level make-it-up-as-we-go-along nonsense based on a script that is clearly slightly easier to read than a Mr Men book.

Among the actors trying desperately to get this job finished so they can go back to making real films which they can include on their resume are Lauro Chartrand (who was in the Michelangelo costume in the late 1990s TMNT series), Adrian Holmes (White Noise 2, Smallville), Nimet Kanji (Blood Ties), Colin Lawrence (Battlestar Galactica redux, Watchmen, Hollow Man 2, House of the Dead, Ripper 2), David Lewis (Wyvern, Day the Earth Stood Still remake, Beyond Loch Ness, Halloween: Resurrection, Lake Placid), Shaw Madson (Tron: Legacy, A-Team movie, The Skulls), Aaron Pearl (White Noise 2, Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon, Black Christmas remake), Brent Stait (Omen IV, Andromeda, Troglodyte and Guy of Gisborne in a 2009 Robin Hood film) as a major who gets shot in the museum and Dolores Drake (Sanctimony) as the tour guide. I feel for all these people, I really do. Their pain and their shame is all very evident on screen. What were their agents thinking? It’s not like there’s no acting work in Canada, virtually everyone in the cast has been in assorted episodes of Highlander, Outer Limits redux, Stargate this or that and in a few cases Police Academy: The Series.

The principal blame for this atrocity must lie with Paul Ziller, a man who has made a good career out of this sort of Sci-Fi Channel DTV rubbish: Android Apocalypse, Snakehead Terror, Swarmed and several of the dodgier titles mentioned in the previous paragraph such as Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon and Beyond Loch Ness. Good grief, if he can make a film like this without visiting Stonehenge it’s quite likely that he’s never been near Loch Ness either. On this evidence, he might have represented it as a large circular pond.

The thing is: there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this sort of Sci-Fi Channel DTV rubbish. Some of it is very entertaining. I’m not belittling Stonehenge Apocalypse because of the type of movie it is, I’m belittling it because it’s infantile bollocks. The other credited writer is Brad Abraham who co-wrote the RoboCop: Prime Directives mini-series and also did an abandoned draft of the Black Christmas remake.

You might well be thinking: but Mike, you give good ratings and positive reviews to all sorts of shite. Why does Stonehenge Apocalypse get a kicking when you rave over rubbish like Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus? Here’s the point: there’s a difference between silly and stupid. A big difference. They’re both versions of dumb but they’re very different types of dumbness. I’ve got nothing against dumb movies that are silly-dumb. Heck, I could watch them all day, but those are movies where people have at least made an effort.

Stonehenge Apocalypse is stupid-dumb. It could only be as bad as it is if the principal people behind it - writers, producers, director - really didn’t give a tinker’s cuss. It treats the audience like idiots. Silly-dumb is ‘this makes no sense and we don’t care because it’s fun’. Stupid-dumb is ‘this may or may not make sense and we neither know nor care’. It’s cynical, lazy film-making.

Let’s put it another way. Stonehenge Apocalypse turned up in the same package of screener discs as Sharktopus. This is a film which is more insultingly stupid than a story about hybridising a cartilaginous fish with a cephalopod. I don’t think I can make it any clearer than that.

That’s about it. I’m not going to list the various production crew heads; some of them have interesting credits but it wouldn’t be fair to link them to this crap. Instead, I’ll just leave you with another gem from a script which consists almost entirely of eminently quotable bad dialogue:

“General, I have to be honest. Nuking Stonehenge - there’s a chance it may backfire on us.”

MJS rating: D

Director: Steve Balderson
Writer: Frankie Krainz
Producer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Starina Johnson, Pleasant Gehman, Mink Stole
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.dikenga.com

I know some people think that my reviews are overlong so, for folks with short attention spans, here’s a capsule review of Steve Balderson’s women-in-prison flick Stuck!:


Now some more detail for those who want it.

Regular visitors to my site will know the name of Steve Balderson (who is actually a distant relative of 1930s Universal creature feature scripter John L Balderston). Steve has directed three previous narrative features: the impressive and darkly wry Pep Squad, the visually and narratively jaw-dropping small town epic Firecracker and the truly extraordinary, provocatively transgressive adaptation Watch Out. He has also directed four documentaries and one non-narrative film.

Steve Balderson is the best-kept secret in American independent cinema. He makes his own films - which are unfailingly brilliant - and the rest of the world very, very gradually catches up with him. Those of us who have discovered his work are a privileged few, though our numbers grow with each new film and through word of mouth.

One thing that distinguishes Steve’s work is variety; every new film is completely different to what has gone before (the Wamego documentary trilogy notwithstanding). With Steve, we can expect the unexpected but even I was surprised when he announced he was making a WIP film.

That’s Women In Prison. Here’s the Wikipedia entry in case your familiarity with the genre extends no further than Prisoner: Cell Block H. Note the line about obligatory elements - because Stuck! proves that none of those are obligatory.

They said it couldn’t be done but Steve Balderson has proved them wrong: he has made a non-exploitation WIP movie. It’s a drama, it’s a love story, it may even be a social polemic. But it’s not trash. It’s not even particularly camp, although it is played with an archness, a structured, measured hyper-reality which is one of the distinctive features of Steve’s work. There’s not even any nudity apart from one brief flash of Pleasant Gehman’s tits.

The very cute Starina Johnson (the pony-tailed babysitter in Watch Out) is Daisy, a never-been-kissed shop assistant whose life is dominated by caring for her ill mother (September Carter). When Mama, depressed, decides to take her own life, Daisy tries desperately to stop her - but fails. What is more, she is accused of matricide, found guilty and sentenced to hang.

On Death Row, she has four companions. Balderson regular Gehman is Dutch, Daisy’s new neighbour: a bisexual prostitute in fishnets, convicted of murdering the bent cop who was her John. Dutch’s cellmate is Bible-thumping evangelist Esther (John Waters alumnus Mink Stole whose many other credits include David DeCoteau’s Ring of Fire, Don Glut’s The Vampire Hunters Club and the 1995 Bucket of Blood remake) who gunned down several government agents in the name of the Lord when they came to arrest her for tax evasion. In the far cell are Meme (Susan Traylor: Firecracker, Lord of Illusions), a professional widow who poisoned four husbands before she got caught, and mentally retarded Princess (elfin pop goddess Jane Wiedlin, unchallenged as the official Coolest Woman in North America for yet another year) who drowned her baby and only ever speaks by repeating what Meme says. Meme and Princess have a weird, quasi-sexual, quasi-maternal relationship. Esther considers the three dykes around her to be blaspheming sinners and prays for their souls on a regular basis.

In a strong cast, the stand-out performance is Stacy Cunningham (Earthling, The Locker) as the Guard, nicknamed ‘Amazon’ by the inmates. She is fantastic, making the character both unrelentingly brutal and human at the same time. It would have been very easy for Amazon to have been a one-note role - heck, it would be easy to make any of these characters one-note. In fact, within the WIP genre, one-note roles are almost obligatory. It’s a tradition or an old charter or something. But there is a reality to ‘The Guard’, even as she torments and abuses the prisoners, that belies the character’s apparent sadistic monomania. Cunningham never goes over the top, never loses the reality of the character. She’s a very human monster.

It’s a corking cast, isn’t it? Six actresses who, despite limiting almost all their scenes to one set of three cells and a corridor, create a whole world on screen populated by characters we grow to appreciate, understand, maybe even care for. With superb precision, Balderson gives the five inmates one solitary, brief fantasy sequence in which the two couples dance - in beautiful dresses, in a beautiful room - to Esther’s charmingly empathetic piano. This is incidentally pretty much the only chance that Jane Wiedlin has to break away from her character’s naive intensity (and bad hair day) and it is obvious from this scene (and some behind the scenes footage - check out the unplugged version of ‘Our Lips are Sealed’) that she hasn’t aged a day since her scene-stealing role as the Communications Officer in Star Trek IV. Painting in the attic - that’s the only explanation.

At first, Daisy has difficulty adjusting to her new surroundings: the amorous attentions of Dutch, the holy fanaticism of Esther and the weird relationship in the end cage - not to mention the abusive swaggering of the Guard. But halfway through the 93-minute film an unexpected event shakes Daisy up and from then on things get heavier for all concerned, not least in the increasing camaraderie between the imprisoned quintet.

There’s violence, there’s tenderness, there’s powerful tension. There’s an incredible lesbian love scene between Daisy and Dutch which, against all known conventions, consists of nothing but two clothed women talking and eventually holding hands. Yet it manages to be not just passionate but borderline erotic: an astounding feat achieved through a combination of great dialogue, masterfully restrained direction and two stunningly powerful performances. It could be the best, most moving love scene you’ll see all year.

Contrasting with the prison scenes is a subplot about Daisy’s neighbour (Karen Black - don’t even try to pretend that you need me to tell you who Karen Black is, don’t make me come down there...) whose curtain-twitching testimony was integral to the young woman’s false conviction. This unnamed neighbour knows what she saw but, with what is presumably a nod to Dario Argento, did she actually see what she thought she saw? We know the truth but she is gradually worn down by stomach-twisting doubt. Has she inadvertently sentenced an innocent girl to death? Will her story cross with Daisy’s before the credits roll? Black drags every ounce of torture and tragedy out of this situation.

We never see any other inmates at this unnamed prison but we do see the warden, played by Betti O, who is the only performer to have appeared in all four of Steve Balderson’s narrative films. She sits in her dark office, watching events unfold on CCTV, and though she occasionally barks orders down the phone, we never hear her voice. It’s a typically Balderson-esque quirk which enhances, rather than limits, the actress’ fine performance. Jeff Dylan Graham (Watch Out, Beyond the Dunwich Horror, Dorm of the Dead) and voluptuous burlesque babe Lady Monster round out the principal cast.

The script was written by Frankie Krainz, unforgettable as the Desk Clerk in Watch Out. He was also in Rich Ambler’s serial killer biopic Raising Jeffrey Dahmer but he doesn’t appear on-screen in Stuck! (unless he’s an uncredited extra) because he’s primarily a writer. Krainz and Balderson met in Kansas City in 2007, got talking about WIP films and two weeks later Frankie presented Steve with a screenplay which, with relatively little modification, is what is on screen. And it must be said that the matching of Steve’s direction and Frankie’s words works perfectly.

One point that I have not yet mentioned - although it might be obvious from the stills on this page - is that Stuck! has been filmed in black and white, which makes an interesting contrast to the almost saturated colour of Firecracker (the non-monochrome parts of it, anyway). That said, although the photography is crisp and clean it seems to lack something. It felt more like watching a colour film on a black and white TV, unlike the monochrome richness that Firecracker DP John Torreano was able to wring from the non-carnival scenes in that film. This was an advance screener however and there may be more post-production tweaks up Steve Balderson’s sleeve.

Trying to put my finger on my dissatisfaction with the photography - which is an unbelievably minor matter but with films this good there only needs to be one fly in the ointment - I think the problem is that it is too crisp and clean. It needs roughing up in some indefinable way to reflect the subject matter. This is a grubby, scuzzy story about grubby, scuzzy people (in a slightly glam sort of way!) and the image doesn’t match the narrative ambience.

I’m not saying that the film-look needs ageing, because one unanswered question is when this is set. (In a more enlightened country, like this one, we could at least say well, it is definitely pre-1964. But this is the USA.) There’s a sort of late-1950s/early 1960s vibe to the clothes and the hairstyles but since most of the characters spend the entire film in prison duds or uniform, that’s not so helpful. The phones are bakelite; you can often date a film’s setting by the phones. But things like CCTV cameras and TV remote controls suggest later. It’s a timeless time in a placeless place, a when that is no more important than the where.

A quartet of co-producers include Beth and Elliott Dunwoody of Macon GA-based Bright Blue Sky Productions, Tony Long Jr (a massive Karen Black fan who runs the Macon GA Film Festival with his dad) and Steve’s Wamego neighbour, website designer Dan Holmgren. Although Frankie Krainz has the main screenplay credit, Steve and Jon Niccum are credited with ‘contributions’. Niccum played Mr Barrows in Watch Out, was one of the callers in Phone Sex and has written several short horror films for another Kansan director, Patrick Rea. Composer Rob Kleiner also did the score for Watch Out (and was also a Phone Sex caller) while another returnee from Steve’s last film is brilliantly named sound guy Tyrell Johnsrud.

Stuck! is an unexpectedly powerful, skilfully managed slice of women-in-prison drama that never teeters into camp even while it threatens to put its tongue in its cheek (or someone’s cheek at any rate). A slew of excellent performances embellish an absolutely terrific script and Steve B pulls it all together with the magnificently, practised touch of a film auteur who is secure in his environment.

It’s another belter. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

MJS rating: A

Director: Miles Richardson
Writer: Rob Tizzard
Producer: Rob Tizzard
Cast: Thom Hutchinson, Rachel Powell, James Daniel Noble
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: YouTube (see link at end of review)

Everything turns up eventually. Everything. This amateur vampire feature was shot in 2004 and for the past 10 years has sat on my list of ‘unreleased British horror films.’ In March 2015, I came across an online version, posted onto YouTube in October 2014. I ticked it off my list. Well, to be accurate, I moved it from that list to the British Horror Revival master-list. The effect is the same.

This online version has been cut down to 60 minutes from the original 80 and carries a dual 2004/2014 copyright date, which doesn’t seem unreasonable. It was the only directorial credit for actor Miles ‘Son of Sir Ian’ Richardson, who provides the voice of a ‘vampire god’ portrayed as a shadow.

Just because something turns up after a decade, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was worth the wait. I was interested in watching this because I’m a BHR completest. If you’re a vampire film completest, you may also want to take a gander. For anyone else, it’s probably not worth your time. Sorry.

Our central trio of teenagers are Luke (Thom Hutchinson), his sister Deanna (Rachel Powell) and his best mate Ben (James Daniel Noble) who is enamoured of Deanna but stuck in what would later become known as the friend zone. Luke works at a cellar bar called The Dark Artery run by blousy Rebecca (assistant producer Jennie Rich); scenes of people smoking inside date the film instantly.

Ben purchases some drugs from a dealer who then injects him for some reason. This turns out to be vampire blood, which turns Ben sufficiently that he attacks a girl on the way home but the assault is interrupted pre-bite by a priest (Richard Foxon). Wearing a ‘dog collar’ which looks more like a white turtle neck sweater, Father Frosti injects Ben with some sort of antidote and explains what has happened.

Meanwhile, Luke is taken by Rebecca to the secret science lab she keeps at the back of her establishment, a set dressed with ‘equipment’ that looks like it came from a box labelled ‘My First Chemistry Set’. She injects Luke with vampire blood so now Ben is okay but Luke is a vampire. Or something.

The protagonist behind all this is a vampire named Matthew (writer/producer Rob Tizzard) who kidnaps Deanna at one point but then lets her go. Father Frosti then narrates a lengthy flashback about some weird ceremony 40 years earlier which involved him and Rebecca (they both have some sort of anti-ageing faculty somehow) plus Matthew and his love Leanne. This was Deanna and Luke’s grandmother, and a dead ringer for the former (hence also played by Powell). It all ends with some sort of ceremony at the same location (an old ruin which is surprisingly well lit) but I would be lying through my teeth if I suggested it is possible to work out what the jiminy heck is actually going on.

As happens depressingly often, an indie film-maker has created their own mythology and expected the audience to pick it up as we go along, which instead leaves us scratching our head. What's a 'vampire god'? What does Rebecca do in her secret lab? Why are people injecting other people with vampire blood? Damdifino. It’s possible that the excision of 20 minutes doesn’t help matters: possible but unlikely. Frankly Blood Relative is an absolute chore to sit through and another 20 minutes would only make it even worse.

Tizzard’s script is, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody awful: full of stilted dialogue that does not have any contractions within it. It is perhaps intended to sound portentous but in truth it is more pretentious. A situation which is not helped by a largely amateur cast whose thespian talents range from agonisingly bad all the way up to mediocre. Most never troubled the IMDB again (or beforehand).

Probably the best actor here is Gordon Ridout who has a small role as a homeless guy. It’s clear he can act and in fact he is a proper ac-tor with a bunch of theatre credits plus the title role(s) in a 2009 audio version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Felicity Duncan as Ben’s mum is also easily identifiable as a real actor; she now does voices for kiddie cartoons like Florrie’s Dragons and The Small Giant. Finally there is Christian Serrtiello, who has a couple of lines as a punter in the cellar bar and has since had a busy career in assorted stuff I have mostly never heard of.

Tizzard is now a Document Controller (whatever that is?) at Crossrail, though he keeps his hand in, filming local theatre shows. As for Richardson, he started out as a child actor with the RSC and made his screen debut in a 1981 telecast of Benjamin Britten’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream then built up credits in episodes of Bulman, ‘Allo ‘Allo and (bizarrely) Highlander: The Raven. TV work since Blood Relative has included The Colour of Magic and Dirk Gently. Mostly though he’s a stage actor with an impressive roll-call of West End and rep credits. In fact, when he made this nonsense he was actually a serving member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in All’s Well That Ends Well with Judi Dench!

To genre fans, or at least hardcore Whovians, Miles Richardson will be a familiar name (and voice) as he was in some of those unofficial DTV spin-offs that people made in the 1990s and was also in some of the Big Finish audio dramas. Blood Relative is described on YouTube as a "follow on project to a Doctor Who acting Workshop Holiday by Next Stage Drama" which I'm not sure exactly what it means but there's some sort of Who connection there for those who bother about such things.

Joe Sowrey composed and produced the score, and is part of a band called Black Orchid who perform a number halfway through the film. As ‘Joseph Sowrey’ he’s still composing and you can find his stuff on SoundCloud, iTunes etc. Tizzard (whose brother plays a mugger) is additionally credited with ‘editing, sound design and fx’. The four executive producers are Richardson, his wife Beverley Cressman, Sarah Jane Olsen (who plays a fortune teller) and Robin Prichard. But the most interesting name is the cinematographer. It was Neil Oseman, shortly before he directed Soul Searcher! He does a good job considering the limitations, but the limitations are that this is a micro-budget production made in 2004 so it looks pretty flat, despite valiant use of coloured gels.

Director: Frazer Lee
Writer: Frazer Lee
Producer: Joseph Alberti
Cast: Doug Bradley, Kirsty Levett, Leone Hanman
Year of release: 2003
Country: UK
Reviewed from: VHS
Official website: www.robber-baron.co.uk

From Robber Baron Productions, the team that brought us the highly acclaimed, award-winning short On Edge, comes a new six-minute horror short. Once again it stars Doug Bradley, he of Pinhead fame (and author of Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor), who shot this in London just before jetting off to shoot - Lord help us - Hellraiser VII.

Bradley is a teacher, newcomer Kirsty Levett his miscreant pupil, caught running in the hallways and sentenced to detention: lines. “I want to see that pad half-full by the time I come back,” says Sir. “The sooner you start, the sooner you finish.” Which is sort of contradictory, but if you think about it is the sort of inconsistency that characterises creepy, control-freak teachers.

With such a short film, it wouldn’t be fair to describe the story, so I’ll just say that it’s bleak, creepy, nasty and supernatural. Levett is very good in a role without dialogue, looking genuinely frightened. Bradley underplays his role to excellent effect. It’s simple but original and tightly written and directed by Frazer Lee. Though shot on digital video - for urbanchillers.com - the cinematography by Alan Stewart (Band of Brothers, On Edge) is top notch and adds to the atmosphere.

While it doesn’t hurt to have an actor as good and as well-known as Bradley in a film like this, this is much more than just a star vehicle. It’s an excellent slice of British horror, well-crafted and genuinely unsettling.

MJS rating: A

Review originally posted 13th January 2005

Dave Parker directed The Dead Hate the Living, one of the most critically acclaimed films to come out of the Full Moon film factory in recent years. He was a guest at a Fangoria convention in New York on 16th January 2000, which is where I interviewed him. This interview has never been published.

Tell me how Full Moon works.
“Well, all the titles come from Charlie Band. He usually, at the beginning of every year, comes up with a title and he’ll have a sketch or a poster. And from that point he develops the script. He’ll show the poster art to a writer and they’ll come up with some story. So that’s how it usually works.”

How many films does Full Moon make each year?
“They have various labels, from erotic fantasy movies to kids’ movies to the horror/sci-fi stuff. Overall they average about 20 films a year.”

How did you become involved with them?
“I moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and worked on a bunch of low-budget films. Then I met and became friends with a guy who was Head of Promotions at Full Moon. And he was looking for an assistant, so that’s how I started. I worked my way up, working on trailers and Making of featurettes. When he left I became Head of Promotions and did that for a couple of years. During that time I was also bugging Charlie Band to let me direct a movie. A couple of projects we talked about came and went, then this one came, and another director talked to him and said, ‘If anyone should do it, you should have Dave direct this movie, because he’s totally into this.’”

Is this the first film you’ve directed?
“It’s the first feature I’ve directed. I’ve directed a couple of music videos for small bands. The main one was for this band called Penis Flytrap which is a horror punk band. We did a nine-minute mini-movie music video for a song they did called ‘Tears of Blood’. It was all based on Lucio Fulci: the song, and the music video. It was as many classic moments as we could find, and we tried to give it that sort of feel.”

Full Moon and Lucio Fulci are pretty different…
“I think Charlie knew pretty early on that I was not going to direct a typical Full Moon movie, that I was going to pick things that were much more of an influence on me. Charlie is not one to really impose a style; he’s happy as long as the movie turns out well. So I was really lucky: I came up with the story, wrote the script and directed the movie, and he really just let me go and do what I wanted to do. I think I was a rare case because I’d been with the company for so many years. So he knew me and could judge that even though it was my first time I wasn’t going to screw up. I think that’s how we managed.

"I don’t know if people will even look at it as a Full Moon movie if they just watch it. To me, it doesn’t have any of the trademark things that Full Moon movies have. It’s comic-book-ish in a way, which I guess is what Charlie wants, but there’s no little creatures in there, no lesbian shower scenes, no nudity at all. There wasn’t any nudity in the story and luckily they didn’t impose it on me, because it would have cheapened the movie. I don’t have any problem with nudity, as long as there’s a point to it.”

The Dead Hate the Living is about people making a horror movie. Does that mean it’s part of the post-modern, Scream-esque genre?
“I don’t know. I wrote what I knew and what I knew is my background, where I came from. I thought it would be kind of fun because it would allow me to do certain things. It was easier this time to write characters that I knew. The movie’s very autobiographical as far as certain situations. Not zombies or anything like that, but the lead character’s named David, the special effects guy is named Paul. Paul is a friend of mine who co-wrote the story part of it with me, and does special effects. So there’s a bunch of that sort of thing. I don’t know if it’s post-modern, or a lot of people have used the word ‘revisionist’... The way I work, I don’t usually get that cerebral with it. My whole thing was really trying to concentrate on a good story and involving characters.”

Other than the title, what instructions did Charles Band give you?
“He really didn’t give me any instructions. I just had to shoot it in ten days.”

Was it a case of: ‘Give me a movie, don’t care what it is as long as it’s called The Dead Hate the Living’?
“Yes, kind of. Originally there was a script; someone else had already written a screenplay for it. He said, ‘You should take a look at this, read it.’ I didn’t like the script at all. There were several problems. One was that it was a very by-the-numbers standard sort of thing. The second thing was that it was written more for shooting in Romania where Full Moon shoot a lot of their movies. That wasn’t going to happen; it was going to be made in LA. And it moved around a lot, to a lot of locations. We only had ten days to do it, so I had to have only one location. I came up with a new treatment, Charlie read it and said, ‘It’s good. I like it. Go for it.’

“Charlie knows horror movies - he knows who Lucio Fulci was - but not to the extent that I do. So I think some of the in-jokes might have gone over his head. Certain things we’ve done as homages to horror movies are shots, not written into the screenplay. I took a lot of influence not just from Fulci but Argento - his lighting style - and Romero. Creepshow was always a big influence on me as a kid. Return of the Living Dead was a huge influence on the movie - it’s my favourite zombie movie. I like the feel of it and the energy. And Phantasm too. The whole movie is in some ways a Valentine card to horror films. It’s made by horror fans about horror fans in a situation where there’s a lot of references to horror movies. Hopefully that’s what makes the movie enjoyable to watch.

"Does it have a huge crossover potential with the regular Joe in the audience? I don’t know. I think horror fans will definitely appreciate the movie and probably get more enjoyment out of it. Hopefully, if we’ve done our job right, we’ve made a movie that you can still enjoy without getting all the references. But I was conscious of that too because I put a character in there who doesn’t get any of the references, so the audience will feel, ‘Well, at least I’m not alone here. There's someone in the movie who doesn’t understand what they are either.’”

To shoot this in ten days, did you have to work long hours?
“We were in Los Angeles and so we were limited to 14 hours. And we went to 14 hours pretty much every single day.”

Were you limited in how many takes you could do?
“I wasn’t limited. Although in a way you are; you’re always limited because of time. A lot of the special effects shots, a lot of the make-up effects, we really had one take and that was it. Because we really didn’t have the time to clean up the set. So a lot of those were one-takers. Given the schedule and everything else, we got the best we could. There were a few times when it was really late at night, the end of the day and everyone was tired and you’re just not really getting it, and you have to settle for ‘It’s good enough’. Which is always frustrating, but you have to move on. We never got behind schedule.”

Are Full Moon pleased with the result?
“They seem very happy with it, and with me, because I’m still involved. I edited the movie, I did all the post-production. It was great because they let me cast all the actors, I got to write the movie, I directed it, I got to pick my director of photography and my special effects guy. Then they let me edit the movie; this is my cut of the movie. I picked the composer. Then I did a lot of the press. Full Moon’s been really behind it. The fact that they’re flying me out here for this convention shows that they’re supporting this one a little more than normal. They realise that they’ve got something which, even for a Full Moon movie, stands out a little. I think it’s more of a return to earlier Full Moon, when we were doing Dr Mordred and stuff like that, when we seemed to have a little more slickness in the stories and the acting was a little better. So yes, I think they are pleased with it.”

Will they let you direct another one?
“They’re talking about it. I don’t know if I will though, because I don’t want to direct another one in ten days! You do it once, and you get really lucky and the thing comes out well. The more times you keep trying to do it in that situation, the more times you leave yourself open to not getting lucky. I think I got incredibly lucky with this. I’m working on other projects; another script and things like that. It’s a little out of Full Moon’s range but hopefully it will be the next step up. It all depends. If they come to me with a situation and a story idea that I really like, there’s always that possibility. But at this point I don’t know.”

My first interview with Marc Price was on 23rd October 2008. Exactly one year later, to the day,Colinwas given a limited theatrical release in the UK after a barrage of media coverage. Neither of these things were things that anyone was expecting back in 2008. So, just before the film’s release, I asked Marc a few questions about what had happened since we last spoke.

The whole '£45 film' thing: to what extent has this been a blessing and to what extent has it been a curse?
“I'm thankful there's a platform we can use to discuss the film. We really made the movie using what we had rather than what we spent the money on, so it's a good thing for the most part.

“I do get concerned when I see ‘The £45 Zombie Movie!’ on the posters and DVD artwork, but it's the hook our distributor feels will connect to potential sales. I can understand their perspective and they've even agreed to take it off the two-disc edition of the film, which is a remarkable show of faith on their part.

“We've had more control in the way the film is presented than most low budget film makers get with their first film. In all fairness they're trying to sell a low budget zombie movie without the word ‘zombie’ in the title and letting us use an unknown actor's face to fill the poster. Once the film is released I'm sure the focus will be on whether it's any good or not.”

Where did the £45 angle come from? Whose idea was it?
“It came up after a discussion in Cannes with Helen Grace (our sales agent) and a producer friend of hers. A publication accidentally printed our budget at £800,000 which started a little chuckle. The producer-friend asked how much we actually spent on the film. Our sales agent didn't really know and guessed at a couple of hundred pounds. I said it was much less than that, more like £40-£45.

“The producer-friend said it was something of an achievement and that we should let people know about it. Helen, being a shrewd sales agent, knew that it would be detrimental to selling the film if a potential distributor knew how much it cost to make. I always felt we should be very open about the low cost of producing the film as it would put an audience in the right frame of mind in terms of expectation.

“After some discussion the decision was made to be fairly open about it. The next day I had an interview with ITN, mentioned the film's cost and left it at that. Later in the day ITN got back in touch asking to re-shoot the interview focusing entirely on the £45 answer. The press association contacted us as a result of the ITN interview and it took off from there, I guess.”

What sort of distribution deals has Colin got around the world and how is it faring in festivals?
“We've had a lot of luck with festivals. We're due to appear in the Sao Paulo International Film Festival and Sitges among others. We've also screened twice at Raindance (and have been nominated for Best Low Budget Feature) and had two sell out screenings at this year's FrightFest.

“It all started at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Aberystwyth, around the time of our last interview. The curator of the festival, Gaz Bailey, was great to us and gave the film a great slot. It was Gaz who brought the film to the attention of Helen Grace who's very much responsible for everything that's happened. It was Helen who decided to take the film to Cannes.

“She's been working very hard with a number of foreign distributors and doesn't tell me much because I have a tendency to blab about it to anyone who asks and this can lead to undoing all her hard work. Otherwise I'd tell you everything.”

What has been the most extraordinary thing to happen to you and/or the film in the last 12 months?
“It's difficult to say. Because of the film I was invited to New York as part of a panel for Viacom to talk about how the movie was made. Whilst there I was invited to visit the Fangoria offices!

“A time that was exceptionally special was when Saatchi & Saatchi invited me to introduce their annual director's showcase, which was easily the most terrifying experience of my life. I had the opportunity to talk about how we made Colin in front of a thousand people. Richard Myers and Norma Clarke were incredibly generous and it was great to be back in Cannes with them.

“The most exciting moment of that particular experience was during the talk, watching the entire crowd jump out of their seats during one of the clips.”

Is there anything you would have done differently if you had known that the film would receive this much attention?
“We finished the film well over a year ago now and the entire experience was such a massive learning curve. Technically I would probably approach a few scenes slightly differently, but the tone of the film would remain the same. That was the one area I refused to compromise.

“I was lucky to have actors like Alastair Kirton, Daisy Aitkens, Kate Alderman, Leanne Pammen and Tat Whalley to name just a few who took a huge risk and played it with the right level of humour, irony and, above all, sombreness.“

What are your plans for your next film and how have they been affected by the fuss around Colin?
“The next film takes place entirely on a Handley Page Halifax bomber returning from a mission over Europe towards the end of World War II. The battle-damaged plane struggles to remain in the air as a multi-limbed creature starts to eat one of the gunners alive.

“It sounds a bit silly when I compress what we plan to do into a brief paragraph, but I think it's possible to make an exciting, tense movie for genre fans.

“Thanks to Colin we're in a very fortunate position when it comes to acquiring funding, though we're still determined to hang onto our low budget ethics. The theory being that we're hoping to retain total creative control in regards to how we want to tell our story.”

website: www.nowherefast.tv

Mark Stirton, writer/director of Scottish SF featureThe Planet, kindly answered a short e-mail interview in October 2007.

Why did you set out to make such an ambitious project?
“Why not? If you're going to spend a significant amount of time doing something, you might as well do something big! It was also a reaction against the type of films being made in Scotland. Dull, junkie, kitchen sink dramas. If we want to build a real Scottish industry we should at least attempt genre films. Conventional wisdom says that a first time director should never do sci-fi, fine. But the trouble with conventional wisdom is that one ends up with conventional films. Well The Planet isn't that.”

How did you assemble your cast?
“With glue and bits of old actors.”

How much development did the script go through?
“Quite a bit. We knew it was going to be in an accent that isn't heard in space very often, so we tried to break all the other rules as well. Pick up any Empire and you'll find a reviewer upset with an American film spoon-feeding the audience every explanation available. It's dull. What we did was to remove those explanations. The troops in the film were a pretty thick bunch, how could they comprehend the things they are seeing? So they don't try to. They just react to it. If the viewer has a theory about what's going on, that’s fine and just as valid as mine. When the planet explodes at the end, is this a bad thing or a good thing? I don't know, have a think about it and figure it out for yourself.

“So the idea that we 'just forgot' to explain things is nonsense. We never had that intention. Besides, it's all dribble anyway isn't it? If I'd written in the smart and sexy female scientist/historian and she'd said, 'Ah, the sword of Cangar, from the system of Woop.' Well it's meaningless, isn't it? So my guys just witness these events from a purely visual level, they don't really have an intellectual level and indeed why would they? Maybe the smarter troops have an idea or a theory, but they keep it to themselves.“

How closely does the finished film resemble what you set out to make?
“Exactly. The film is the script really. It was only filmed in ten days, so what I could do with that footage was pretty limited. It would only have changed if we'd wimped out and not done the opening battle for example. So for better or worse, that's pretty much the film I aimed for. Plenty of things I'd do differently now, but I didn't. And I'm not into the George Lucas thing of changing my films, it remains an example of what I was capable of doing in 2006, end of story.”

What aspect of the film are you most pleased with?
“Getting it finished. Always the hardest part, plenty of British sci-fi didn't get that far. Remember Legionnaires?“

What are your plans for future films?
“Well The Planet attracted a lot of attention and with it, a bit of funding. So I'm making a Scottish comedy for about £100k. We're still selling The Planet really, I was just signed by an American agent and he is selling the film right now. Japan is the first country to buy it. So I had to make a new, English-free version for dubbing into Japanese. Looking forward to seeing that actually. How has a Scottish film created for less than eight grand made it all the way to Japan? Cos we put some effort in. People like that.”

Website: www.stirtonproductions.com

Ellen Softley played the female lead in Andrew Parkinson’s first film, I Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (and small roles in Parkinson’s next two films, Dead Creatures and Venus Drowning). I interviewed Ellen by phone in April 1999.

How did you get involved with I, Zombie?
"I was a member of the BBC Ariel Theatre Group. We did a play and Andy was doing the lighting on that, helping out with the play. He evidently enjoyed the performance, he really liked it, and he asked me afterwards if I’d be interested in being in this film. So I said, ‘Yes, I’ll give it a go.’"

Did he explain much about the film or the character?
"I think that developed as we went along! He said what it was about: about the isolation and loneliness of some guy who becomes a zombie, and his slow decay. He said a little bit about it, that I would be part of the subplot, and it just built up as we went along really. There was no set plot ot it, no set script to it; it’s just something that developed."

How long did it take to make the film?
"All together, it was about four years. But that’s what happens when you start depending on people having free time, spare time. It’s not something that we’d allotted a set amount of time to. We just had to make the best of it when we were free. So that’s how we got round it. Then afterwards, when he got the first cut of it and he wasn’t happy with it, we played around with it a little bit more and added a few scenes. So yes, four years."

Had you done any other acting?
"I’d done amateur theatre mostly, but I’d just applied to drama school, pretty much at the same time. The film in fact started just before I went to drama school."

And presumably finished just after you left?
"Yes, really! So we carried on filming through my time at drama school and just after my time at drama school."

How were you able to keep track of the character?
"A very good question. I think it was because we kept in touch with the plot and what was going on, as far as we could. It was just finding out: ‘This happens... and after that... then develops from there... blah blah blah.’ So it was always discussed beforehand how it was connected. So we managed to keep tabs on it, and the rest of it we just made up as we went along, I suppose! But he made an effort to try and tie in everything."

You’re not in the same scenes as the main character for most of the film.
"Yes, that’s the beauty of it: just to have my life juxtaposing against that of Giles/Mark. And I think the whole idea is to intensify the loneliness which he’s going through as you see me developing my own attempts to try and get on without him. It intensifies the loss."

Andy said a lot of people have thought this was very romantic and a lot of women can relate to it.
"Yes, that’s true really. I think because it’s not a regular zombie film. It focuses more on how the character’s feeling; how the character is feeling isolated and the loneliness behind it. It’s not just a zombie-horror-look-I’m-eating-raw-human-flesh kind of thing. Although of course it involves that! But it’s focussing on the character and his loneliness, and for that reason the romantic side of things seems to be intensified."

When you’d been making it for a while and you shot another scene, did Andy explain whereabouts in the story it was?
"It depended, because there’s so many dream sequences in it as well. The dream sequences weren’t so well explained - curiously enough! We just went through them. He said a little bit about the character hallucinating and that these dream sequences would flash into his mind. Whereabouts that happened in the film, at the time wasn’t that clear. But as we went on, for the scenes that were fairly integral to the plot, he would explain: ‘The character has disappeared, he’s managed to set up his own home, you’ve now met David, blah blah blah.’ So it was kind of explained, but there was also a certain amount of improvisation as well."

What about the direct-to-camera shots?
"Entirely improvised. We talked about the character a little bit beforehand and just chatted and imagined that you were in that kind of situation, being that kind of character, as if you’ve lost somebody who’s important to you. Then we just started filming almost straight away from having just gone through it. The whole thing was improvised."

When did you first see the completed film?
"The completed film? The thing is, there have been a number of completed films. The very, very final completed film I didn’t see myself until we went up to Manchester. I’d seen the earlier cuts of it. There was a showing about two years back now when we saw the first cut. It changed completely since then because the talking heads were added at a later stage. The final cut was shown at the BBC. Andy hired one of the studios there and we saw it. It was really quite impressive, it was very moving to actually see the whole thing having fallen into place and to actually see it having taken shape. Because after a while of working on it, you began to wonder how these pieces would slot together and how it would actually work. And when you see it, it’s really quite moving."

What do you think about the American release on the Fangoria label?
"It’s so exciting! Brilliant news! Unbelievable. I don’t think any of us expected it to have the kind of success that it has. Okay, success is relative, but it is pretty good. We’re really pleased about it - it’s very, very good news."

Are you hoping to expand your acting now?
"Oh yes. I’ve been acting for the past year or so. I’ve done a couple of other low budget films and a lot of theatre work. That’s what I want to do with my life now. One of the film’s is called Buried, it’s a student film, and one was called Think of England. There’s another one as well in the pipeline. I wouldn’t mind doing some more film work actually."

If this does well, are you prepared for a cult following?
"That could be going too far at the moment! But I would love to do more. I have really enjoyed it. It’s been excellent fun as well because the people have been very good to work with. It helps when you know them, you’re surrounded by friends. It’s done seriously but it’s done as a laugh as well. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and it’s something I want to repeat, definitely."

Would you do another one with Andy?
"I would. Andy’s brilliant. I’ve known him for quite a while now and I’ll be happy to work with him again."

Even if it takes four years?
"Ah good point! Let me think about that one. Yes, even if it takes four years. Why not?”

In May 1999 I spent a couple of days in Luxembourg on the set of The New Adventures of Pinocchio. Among the interviews I collected was producer Jeffrey Sneller who talked about both Pinocchio movies, Kingdom of the Spiders and a whole lot more besides.

There are several producers and executive producers on this film. Where do you fit in?
“The other producers, basically: there’s a couple that are my financial partners that actually brought money into the project and are credited as producer; then there’s some local people who provided services here in Luxembourg. One is credited as a line producer - that’s Tom Reeve - and Romain Schroeder, his partner, shares an executive producer credit with others. Myself and my partner Raju Patel developed the Pinocchio franchise from its inception, beginning with The Adventures of Pinocchio which we did originally with New Line Cinema. That was with Martin Landau and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, released in 1996.

"Then as an outgrowth from that, because of the success of that film, we decided we wanted to make the leap into a new adventure, which New Line supported entirely. But we wanted to do it with an entirely different spin. Something that was filled with a lot of surprises, keeping the theme of the original but yet putting a twist on the storyline so that we were offering audiences something new and unexpected. This one is filled with a lot more fantasy, it’s a lot more fun, in effect a much more ambitious picture than the original.”

Is it called The New Adventures of Pinocchio or The Adventures of Pinocchio II?
“Well, actually we haven’t really decided what it’s going to be called. At the end of the day, New Line Cinema’s going to make that decision. We’ve sort of been going along with the idea of The New Adventures of Pinocchio, only because when you add a II or a III or a IV after something it immediately makes a statement that ‘this is a sequel’. Even though we want this to be a sequel, we want it to be conceived in the same way that, say, Batman Returns is a sequel to the Batman picture, rather than putting the II after it. So for the purposes of the production we’re using The New Adventures of Pinocchio.”

Do you see this as a franchise that could go on into other films or TV?
“In fact we’re currently preparing a television series which will be an outgrowth from the first two films, and hopefully with future sequels and spin-offs, the same way as the Star Trek franchise continued both as a series and as big-screen format as well. So that’s what our future plans entail.”

What attracted you to the Pinocchio story when you made the first one?
“It’s a wonderful fable. It’s a wonderful moral fable which worldwide audiences or readers know. In fact Pinocchio is probably the most widely read book next to The Bible. Every schoolchild knows the fable. It was an opportunity to tell moral lessons without preaching, as entertainment rather than as a teaching tool. And there’s the fantasy aspects which I think go back to my science fiction days. I felt that, even though there’s no science fiction involved in these adventures, there’s certainly the element of fantasy which is always appealing.”

Presumably Pinocchio is public domain. Do you have any contact with the Collodi estate?
“No, not at all. Collodi, as I recall, wrote his original story in around 1870 so it’s long since been in the public domain.”

How important was it get Martin Landau and Udo Kier back into the sequel?
“I felt that they were both essential elements because it keeps the continuity and it immediately says ‘this is a continuation of the series’. Udo Kier because we decided we wanted to do something very special with Udo’s abilities and talents. I won’t disclose what they are because Udo plays an entirely different role in this picture; in fact he plays multiple roles. So it was a challenge for him as an actor and it was, I felt, a unique idea for the film in the different characters that he plays. That was our reason. Jonathan Taylor Thomas of course, who was a wonderful Pinocchio, played a very limited role in the original as a live person. But he’s since grown up and we now have a wonderful, very talented young man by the name of Gabriel Thomson who’s replaced him in that role. Gabriel’s background was in Great Expectations: a marvellous actor.”

Why have you chosen to shoot in Luxembourg?
“Early on, our search really took us all over the world. Partly because it is such an ambitious project and we had such limited financing available, we needed the contribution of various subsidies that are offered throughout European countries to help complete the financing that we needed. So we looked at countries such as Romania, Lithuania, the UK - very early on in Canada - and as various co-productions between the countries. And that goes back to your question about why are there so many producers. Well, traditionally in co-production arrangements there is a co-producer for the territory in which you’re co-producing the film, which could involve two or three different territories. My partner produced The Jungle Book for Disney and when we did the continuing franchise of that series, The Jungle Book II, it was the same sort of arrangement: where you put together a treaty of different co-producing countries in order to create your financing. Today financing, as you may know, becomes as creative as film-making itself.”

Is the Jungle Book franchise continuing?
“I don’t think so. I think we’ve probably done as much there as we possibly can. We dropped the ball there and somebody else picked it up and went in to do the Jungle Book TV series. I think it was a very limited run - I think they only did maybe 13 episodes - it was through Fox. And as much as my partner, Raju Patel, loved the first two pictures that were done, he felt that there was nothing more to offer in that series. Whereas with Pinocchio, it’s a fable: you can bring in new and unique characters for each of the franchise episodes, tell different stories and completely be entertaining. You’ve got a lot of different places you can go with it. Whereas with Jungle Book you’re a little bit limited with what and where you can go.”

Are you hoping to keep Martin in the TV series?
“I don’t think so. I think Martin is a feature film actor, even though he came from television. He is very selective in the roles that he plays. I don’t think he wants the gruelling regimen of a television series now; I think he’s very comfortable doing what he’s doing. Although I do hope Martin will come back in future feature film sequels, and I’m sure he will. But as far as the television series, what’s interesting for us is it gives us an opportunity to explore the same roles but with other talent.”

Will you be shooting that in America or Europe?
“It will be somewhere in Europe, that I’m certain. Where, I have no idea.”

Are you finding that advances in special effects are allowing you to make a film you couldn't have made a few years ago?
“Yes. In two different areas. One, there’s the area of the animatronic puppetry. In Pinocchio I we had one puppet which was the Pinocchio puppet developed by the Hensons, which was really a bit ahead of its time. It was sort of a milestone in creature effects. But that was a few years ago, and in those few years it’s developed even further. Now Bob Keen and Image Effects, who have now taken it to the threshold of new animatronic engineering, have given us something even more wonderful. We’re dealing with multiple puppets in this one. And the same with the visual effects. The visual effects give us the ability to do things a little bit differently here with our puppetry and with our creature effects overall. So it plays a very important part in the film. Though it’s a story-driven film and not an effects-driven film, it does provide the tools that we need to pull it off.”

You mentioned your previous science fiction work.
“The one that I’m most proud of and that I talk of most frequently because it was nominated for many awards including the science fiction award - and we lost the award only to Star Wars, but that made me very proud - that was called Kingdom of the Spiders, which I did with William Shatner. There have been others, but that’s the one that I talk about. That was 1977, it was released.”

Did you cast William Shatner because of his association with the SF genre?
“No, actually it was... I say yes and no, because Kingdom of the Spiders was more a sci-fi adventure than science fiction fantasy and it was a completely different role for Bill Shatner. He played something that was a counterpoint to the characters he’s associated with, and that was what attracted him to the role and what attracted us to him.”

Did you use effects spiders or did you have a spider wrangler?
“You know, in those days effects weren’t nearly as developed as they are today. It was done through the old process of generation of film after film, and creating those visual effects; it was done the old-fashioned way. So we actually imported I think 5,000 live tarantulas from Honduras, Guatemala, all over the world. Today of course we could have worked with maybe 50 and generated the rest through computer-generated animation, and had as good, if not better, results. It would have been more controllable than having 5,000 spiders crawling all over the country! So we relied on live tarantulas in that one, as well as background models to fill in space in the background. That’s the way that one was done.”

Kingdom of the Spiders was playing in London when Star Wars opened. When you first saw Star Wars, how did you react as a maker of SF/fantasy films?
“I was blown away. George Lucas was so far ahead of his time - as he has continued to be - that it was overwhelming. So I was really very proud when the Science Fiction Academy nominated us for best science fiction film of that year. And I didn’t feel too bad losing to Star Wars! But there was also a difference: Star Wars was a $9 million - today I think it’s $90 million - Twentieth Century Fox production, and ours was a $500,000 independent production, so I felt that it was in good company.”

What other SF films have you worked on?
“Oh, many many many. There was The Devil’s Toy Factory that I did with Orson Welles which preceded Kingdom of the Spiders; there was an adventure film which I shot in Russia in 1992 called The Ice Runner; good Lord, I can’t even remember. Followed by The Adventures of Pinocchio and then this one. Then there was Jungle Book, Jungle Book II and so on and so on.”

How long have you been working in films?
“Since 1968.”

How did you get into the industry?
“My interest started with watching early 1950s sci-fi films. My mother was an avid sci-fi watcher on television. Things like Creature from the Black Lagoon, which was directed by Jack Arnold who later became an associate of mine in a picture called The Black Eye for Warner Brothers. They were more story-driven back then, sci-fi adventures. They didn’t have a lot of money to rely on; they didn’t have the same kind of effects to rely on; they just told very good stories. And that’s what captured my imagination. And of course my father’s 8mm movie camera was the way to achieve it. My first sci-fi adventure, was The Odyssey from Homer’s book, which I did as a school project.”

That’s a bit ambitious!
“It was very ambitious! Of course, my sister still remembers to this day that I took her favourite doll and I cut its eyes out to make the Cyclops to do my stop-motion animation. She hasn’t let me forget it and that was 35 years ago!”

What level did you start at in films?
“I started out as a producer, actually. I did have some flirtations with acting. My home base was Tucson, Arizona; that’s where I grew up. And we got a lot of the wonderful westerns - John Wayne westerns and so forth - that would come to shoot there. I would frequently get cast as an extra and occasionally some small speaking roles, so I thought I wanted to be an actor. But then somebody, a friend of mine, convinced me that the way to go is to start at the top and be a producer, so that’s how I started.”

Getting back to Pinocchio II, why did you choose Michael Anderson to direct?
“For a lot of reasons. Michael has a lot of experience in fantasy film-making. Michael Anderson has a wonderful, rich history of film-making going all the way back to pictures like Around the World in 80 Days. He’s a seasoned professional that knows every trick in the book, who has probably forgotten what most people haven’t even learned yet. And with a film like this one, on a limited budget and an ambitious schedule, in an attempt to create much more than we have in Pinocchio I with less resources, it really took somebody of Michael’s experience. Not to mention that Michael is a wonderful ‘people director’: he knows how to get performances out of actors; he knows how to tell a good story. And I’m very pleased to say that our judgement wasn’t wrong because Michael is wonderful. He’s got some terrific sequences for this picture. Neither myself nor my partner Raju could have been more thrilled with the way this picture’s turning out.”

When do you expect the film to premiere?
“Our delivery date to New Line is November 1st and they’re hoping to have it released for the Christmas holidays. I must also say that Sherry, who happens to be my wife and the writer of the first one and the writer of this one, is also a member of our little team and continues to develop new and exciting projects.”

Is this going theatrical?
“Yes.”

Have you sold it in any foreign territories?
“It’s been licensed to most of the European territories where the first one was very successful, like Germany, Italy, Spain, many of the Latin American countries. We will probably have licensed it soon to the UK. And Scandinavia and so forth - throughout the world.”

What’s the next film after his?
“Good question. Certainly the Pinocchio television series which is in the final stages of development and will go into production this Fall. The results of this one have been so good in terms of the way it’s going from page to screen that we’ve already started developing the third in the series of feature pictures of Pinocchio. We have another one that is in development called The Enchanted Castle, based on the Edith Nesbitt book, which will go into production sometime during the Fall. So we’ve got a busy schedule. And my partner and I are also doing Thumb, which is the Tom Thumb fable, and that is scheduled to shoot here in Luxembourg in the Fall as well.”