interview: Neill Gorton

July 9, 2013, 10:35 am

Special effects on short-lied TV series Strange were the responsibility of Neill Gorton (whom I had first met on the set of Breeders). I spoke with Neill during my set visit in October 2002. This was another joint interview with David Richardson of Starburst.

What’s your brief for the show?
"Not a lot of money and make it look spectacular. It’s been a bit crash-bang-wallop because we only started the first week of September building anything. And as you can see, on the stage over there we’ve got a 14-foot high tree demon with 30-foot armspan, all moving. It’s dangerous stuff. But ‘get it done’ was mainly the brief. We did some sketches, sorted out the different things. It was trying to find a design ethic for the whole show. Because everyone’s seen Buffy and those kind of things - people are always going to make those sort of comparisons - so it was trying to do something a bit different.

“So with the tree, we started out with human-sized things and slowly built our way up and in the end said, ‘Let’s do something impressively huge that will take up a good chunk of the room.’ That’s when you go, ‘Okay, it’s got to be twelve feet tall...’ Then we just did some sketches, some models, got a quick approval and just crashed into building it. We just sculpted about half of it, fabricated the other half. It’s on the stage, on a platform there. All the arms are on big bungee cords coming down, the head’s on one big pole. There’s some mechanical stuff. The more you can just drive directly with rods and poles and things, the safer you are. The more cables and pulleys you’ve got, the more chance they’re going to snap."

Are the guys in green suits operating it?
"Yes, they’re operating all the arms. But the whole point is: what’s great about this show is we’re working with a company called No Strings Attached, which is Alan Marques. Alan and I have known each other about twelve years and we’ve worked on loads of shows together. When I came on to this, they were talking digital and I suggested they go to Alan. The good things is I know that I can build something and do it a certain way and I can just call Alan and he’ll go, ‘Yes, do this and I can get rid of those rods and poles.’ Between us, we can make this work. It’s very much a marriage of what we’re building and what Alan’s going to do to get rid of all the people and the rods and make it work. It’s good to have someone like that as back-up. There’s several things on the show where we’re just working hand in hand and it really helps."

What other things have you built?
"We’ve done a Frankenstein monster kind of thing which is an amalgam of various characters who have been chopped up and put together. That was a full body prosthetic on an amputee. His left arm at the shoulder is missing, so the idea is that the creature is unfinished. We did full-body prosthetics, but the head had to be the head of a specific character so we did a likeness prosthetic of the actor to put on the amputee, and then on the actor we did a shoulder prosthetic, so we could cut between the two. That took us five hours to glue on all the prosthetics.

“We did an animatronic hand. There’s a character with a samurai sword which grows out of his arm, so we did a mechanical hand which splits open and this samurai sword shoots out. Next week we’ve got lots of ageing make-ups on Sam Janus. She goes from her regular age to fifty-something up to eighty-something. That’s all been a challenge with the prosthetics. This is film quality, not TV, because that’s what I do, mostly film. So hopefully we’re bringing a film quality and a film look to the show. The whole production has a film mentality and a film look, so hopefully we can give it that movie quality.

"This thing, the big tree demon, it was a hell of a challenge to get that up and going in the time. We’re about halfway through our list of things and so far, touch wood, we’re doing well. I’m looking forward to the ageing make-up next week - it’s something I specialise in so it’s going to be a nice thing to do. The whole thing’s been great fun. Great scripts, great team - fingers crossed, it could be a really good show."

Is there anything where you’ve had to say ‘we can’t do this’?
"We never say, ‘we can’t do this’."

Or even where you’ve said, ‘We can do this and do it better than you want’?
"Oh yes, we do that all the time. I never say to people, ‘we can’t do that’ because there’s always a way, but there are times when we go ‘well, you want just this but look...’ I mean, this tree demon was not defined and was thought to be a little thing and we went, ‘Look, we can make it as big as the room’ and everyone’s going, ‘Can you do that?’ ‘Yeah.’ What would be nice if the show carried on to more series, now that Andrew Marshall has seen what’s possible, he could let his imagination run wild and we could have even more stuff to do.”

How do you plan the effects for each episode, in terms of what will be real and what will be done digitally?
"What’s nice about this project, working with Alan, is that we’ve known each other for 12 years, we’ve worked together loads. He knows what I can do and I’ve got a good idea what he can do. So you sit in a room, in a meeting, and it’s sort of: ‘If you can do this, I can build this.’ We know how to augment each other’s work and you just find a line. If I run into a particular problem - like if I’ve got this giant creature and I’ve got to make the arms move - either I get into mechanics and hydraulics and stuff you just don’t want to get near, especially on this schedule, or you go: well, the simplest way is a rod, and CGI can deal with that. There’s just lots of little areas where we can help each other out - and that’s the way it should be.

“Unfortunately too many CGI people go, ‘We can do everything.’ I don’t sit there claiming I can do everything - I’m not that stupid - but some people, because it’s a newer tool, will say, ‘Hey, let’s use this tool.’ No, you use it where it’s going to work. Everyone got all excited about Jurassic Park and the CGI dinosaurs; yes, but they still had Stan Winston build lots of animatronic ones - and they used them. They wouldn’t have bothered if they didn’t think it was the best way. Even by the third one they were still doing it."

It must be easier for the director and actors to actually have the tree demon there.
"Well, imagine. We had a situation when we first got it on the stage. Sam Janus came in and they’d shot a scene the day before where she walks through the door and reacts: ‘Oh my God!’ And she walked in and looked at it and went, ‘Oh my God! I’ve shot the scene before this and I just didn’t react anywhere near big enough. Wow!’ That’s the thing. If you don’t see it, you just don’t know exactly how to react. You can interact with it, it’s physically there, there’s slime dripping off it. It gives the actors something to play off against. If it was all computer-generated the actors would just be staring into space or looking the wrong way."

What happens when you’re done with something that big?
"We were hoping to burn the bloody thing! The whole thing is meant to go up in flames but because it’s all polyurethane foam and the size of it, you couldn’t actually burn it on the set. We’re going to have a lot of flame pods around it. Neil Champion is doing all the flame work and will do all that safely so we don’t burn it. Then the suggestion was: we’re going to drag it into a field somewhere and set fire to it, and film that. Then the digital guys can take elements off that, because it will burn in the right shape, and they can overlay that in. But I think they’re just having trouble finding a field to do it in. I was quite up for it. People were saying, ‘Do you really want to burn it?’ Well, I’m not going to put it in my living room!"

Until they need it again for series three.
"Oh, we’ve got the moulds. I keep some things but you just can’t do anything with something that size. These kind of things are always the favourite things to have at the end of the shoot. I did From Hell and all the directors and people had the body parts. Marilyn Manson did some of the music - he’s got one of the dead bodies in his living room, under the coffee table. People want them, but if I kept everything I wouldn’t have any room to move in my workshop. I’m quite happy to see the back of most of it."

What else have you done recently or have you got coming up?
"Currently we’re also working on Tomb Raider II, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen out in Prague with Steve Norrington, bits of TV stuff, just prosthetics here and there. Some bits and pieces for Jonathan Creek. Earlier on this year we did a movie called The Sin Eater with Brian Helgeland out in Rome. I do a lot with Steve Coogan as well. We just shot a thing of his called Cruise of the Gods, which is a thing about science fiction fans on a convention cruise; we just did some prosthetics for him. We also did Steve as a fat Alan Partridge for the new series. Before then we did Steve as Dr Terrible, so I’ve seen a lot of Steve Coogan this year. 24 Hour Party People last year. Very, very, very busy and it’s just getting busier. It’s been a non-stop year.”

website: www.gortonstudio.com
interview originally posted 17th May 2006

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interview: Luke Goss

July 21, 2013, 1:34 pm

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Luke Goss first achieved fame as the drummer in 1980s teeny-pop mega-band Bros but later switched to acting with roles in films such as Blade 2. I met Luke on the set of the Hallmark mini-series Frankenstein when it was shooting in Slovakia in August 2003. He played the creature.

How did you get this role?
"They asked me to do it for some strange reason. I was in China filming with Michele Yeoh, and I got a call. Hallmark do a lot of great projects but you’ve got to choose the one that turns you on. There’s a couple of projects I was asked to do. Then they called about Frankenstein. To be honest with you, I’d heard about it some time before and the only role I wanted to play was the creature. Because it’s the biggest challenge for me as an actor, that I would want to go through that whole process of prosthetics again because I actually hate it. We’ll get onto that I’m sure.

“I think they had one or two people in mind for that character, like they do for all these projects. For whatever reason, it found its way through till I got a phone call in China one night, saying: Frankenstein, the creature, it’s yours if you want it. So then I asked the obvious questions like who’s directing. Kevin Connor’s pedigree is quite impressive. It’s not feature credits so much as the work he has done which is still really good work. So then I asked, ‘Okay, I need to see a make-up design.’ Because I’ve never understood with Frankenstein - we’ll get into all this, I’m sure. They said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ and after many, many questions I read the script and it read so much like a film that I said, ‘Sod it, let’s do it.’"

Had you read the book?
"Yes, I had read the book. You know what, I’d never read the book in journal form. I’d always read the story and it’s always depicted differently. It’s always down to the interpretation of whoever’s writing it. The only true way for anybody to truly understand this story, to understand the metaphoric power that this story has - in 1816 or 2003, it’s irrelevant to me. This story, written by a woman, eighteen years old, 1816, is so relevant, if not more relevant, today. Then it was kind of simplistic: you’re rich or you’re not, you’re aristocratic or you’re not. Now you have people with some money, lots of money, stupid amounts of money - and no money. We have people that are fat, we have people that are thin. We have people that are deemed beautiful, stunning, incredible and downright ugly - a word I never use, I don’t approve of it.

“I think all of us, unless we’re afflicted with arrogance or an excessive amount of self-appreciation, feel moments of insecurity. Something about us is not right. We all go through moments of feeling a tiny bit imperfect. Mary Shelley's version is profoundly astute when it comes to people’s understanding of their lack of acceptance. The book is unbelievable motivating and insightful. That book affords you a huge amount of foundation for the character."

I understand that you got this without an audition.
"My last four roles, thank God, I haven’t auditioned for."

One reason must be because of Blade 2. How does this compare with your Blade 2 role?
"Strangely enough, there’s a similarity between the premises for me. When I met with Guillermo del Toro he said to me ‘Bring something to the table,’ basically. So I read the script. One thing that wasn’t in there was the ring. I don’t know if you’ve seen Blade 2. You know the ring that they all have? That’s my concept completely. They let me design it and everything. Because I said, there’s nothing that validates this character in the sense of proof of where he’s from. Nothing. It’s like: I’m Bill Gates’ son, honest. Well, show me the proof. So I said if we have something like a ring with a seal, right there we prove it. So when he gives that ring away, for the viewer who understands it, he’s giving away the deeds to his existence at that point.

“The whole premise of the character is that he has a very big beef with his father. I actually decided very clearly. I said, ‘I want to show that he’s not indiscriminate.’ I’d rather be in a film less than be in this indiscriminate thing. We had this little scene with a drug dealer. I said, ‘Let’s have people that prey upon people’s weaknesses that I kill. Other than my father.’ We had a big kind of moment where we disagreed, then we agreed. It’s like an alpha male thing. I’m a big believer that less is more, really - unless you’re talking about cash, then we all know that more is more! But other than that, less is more. I think the audience is much brighter than they’re given credit for, especially genre movie fans - probably the most astute fans on Earth. If you don’t have the answers for a genre movie fan, then get ready for a hiding, either verbally or through the internet or whatever.

“There’s huge continuity between these characters. He wasn’t accepted, he was a mistake, so it’s like Nomak on speed in the sense of depth. Frankenstein: most people think Frankenstein is the creature. So for the reader, as long as they understand that the creature is the creature and not Frankenstein. I have to be honest with you; for many years I thought Frankenstein was my role. But the creature is a much more in-depth, a much more tragic version of Nomak. He definitely has continuity of character, by coincidence."

You must have spent a long time in the make-up chair on Blade 2. Did that not put you off?
"No, it’s two different processes. Blade 2 was different, the make-up designer was Steve Johnson, I was very impressed with his work. We used foam for a start, foam latex, which is much more user-friendly from an actor’s point of view just because it’s not as heavy, it breathes a bit. It’s less claustrophobic. I had lenses and teeth in there but it’s still two hours longer to do this make-up, and a hundred times more athletic to go through because it’s silicone, and it’s pieces. Six pieces, and with the body-suit it’s seven. The body-suit weighs at least thirty pounds in weight, doesn’t breathe at all, and yesterday it was 95 degrees - that’s why I couldn’t work today. I’ve got a trailer that can only reduce the outside air temperature by six degree. And I was in make-up, as in ‘being put into it’ for eight hours.

“It’s not like, say, The Grinch where it’s a suit and fur - this is silicone. And the only way I can describe it to you: it’s like having thirty layers of cling-wrap around you. But the way they’ve designed the make-up, which is somewhat sadistic, is they’ve designed it so you put the suit on first. So you get into it fairly quickly, then they have to seal the edges, then they start the other stuff. It takes an hour and a half to do that, then another five and a half or six hours of painting and blending and matching the edges.

“To put it in very simple terms, if you sit in a chair right now for seven or eight hours, doing nothing - not having make-up, not having people put alcohol on your skin and paint and sticky fluid at five o’clock in the morning - just sit there and do nothing. Don’t speak to anybody, don’t do anything. You would get very claustrophobic in eight hours. Now do it in eight hours when you’re burning up, not talking, having alcohol fumes, airbrushes. It’s kind of strange, with two people - four hands - touching you. After eight hours four hands feel like thirty hands. You feel like you’re absolutely going out of your brain.

“But I have to tell you, this role was worth it for me. I hope I’m doing a good job of it. I feel comfortable, I’m very intense with the role. I’m approaching it like a feature. It’s being shot on film as you know, Panavision, and I’ve only done films, this is the first TV. It feels like a film because it’s being shot on film, so in essence it’s the same thing, it’s just being aired on a different medium. So I’m approaching it with the same intensity as I would a film, which is sometimes I think frustrating for the film-makers. Because you do have to get into character, you do have to get very deep, you can’t indulge in the funny jokes and the humour that’s on set when people are inbetween takes because of this character. If you pop out of this guy, then it’s very dangerous."

Some actors become a character when they put on a mask. Do you find that as the make-up is put on, you’re becoming the character?
"It kind of does sometimes, it’s really, really strange. The problem is, with this guy, it takes so long to put it on that it starts to become a genuine psychological thing that you have to get through. If I could be made up in thirty-five minutes then yes, absolutely it would help. The fact that it takes seven, eight hours for the full body-suit, I see so many stages of the make-up, I’m so conscious of the effects. So I try to zone out and I meditate because the Navy Seals who trained me for Blade taught me how to shut my body down.

“So I sleep for an hour here, an hour there and I’m not always aware. Of course it helps but wardrobe is a great thing for me and also location’s a great thing for me. But most of my way of doing things is so internal. When you’re in make-up, all you’re aware of is discomfort. With the wardrobe, all you’re aware of is weight. I had five layers, but I was given great freedom to invent wardrobe. So you’re not really aware of it, you don’t have a mirror there, it’s all in here. So it can help, because you visually know what you look like.

“But when you’re on set, like we did one scene up on the hill which was nine and a half hours of constant filming. We didn’t come back down for lunch, we just had some stuff sent up. I don’t eat lunch when I’m in character for some reason, it makes me too tired. You go past the way you look, because you don’t see how you look all day. It’s all in here, it’s all in the mind."

Have you seen many other Frankenstein films?
"I’ve seen De Niro’s film and I’ve seen Karloff’s film of course. I think Karloff was brilliant for his time. Anyone who can invoke a sympathy like that. I think the biggest dilemma I’d love to speak to these guys about - though they’re not here - I’d love to speak to De Niro about what was his biggest judgement call. It is intimidating, this role, it’s a very scary role to play because there’s so much room to get it wrong. My biggest judgement call was the language, the speaking. First, I need to say De Niro’s my idol, my all-time idol. Him, Hopkins, Steve McQueen - these are people that are truly modern legends. Not the Clark Gables and the Burt Lancasters and the Marlon Brandos. Great actors of all time.

“So De Niro is an idol, and it’s not that I didn’t like it, but I didn’t go for that approach of being somewhat mentally challenged. It didn’t make sense to me. This is obviously hypothetical but you have to embrace it as reality, otherwise it becomes so farcical that: how can you play it? You know this, you do genre movies, so you understand people’s snobbery towards genre films: fuck them. Truly. That’s not particularly eloquent but it’s simple. I can’t stand snobbery towards genre films because in a way there’s so much room to get it wrong. And a lot of people do get it wrong. Look at The Hulk. Tim Burton - fantastic."

Until he did Planet of the Apes.
"Exactly - too many sets! And the DP - I don’t know who lit that movie for him. You look at his lighting and it’s so gothic, so incredibly dark and mysterious, you can’t access his worlds. But you could access this thing. And he didn’t have a rein on the performances - they were so huge. But there is so much room to get such fantasy wrong because the only way to get it right is to bring the reality to it. When I did Nomak I got nominated for that, for a Saturn Award, hopefully because I really tried to create a reality. I got criticised by journalists in London, saying that I’d taken the role too seriously; if I relaxed a bit more maybe I’d enjoy my work more. What they didn’t realise is that I would stop enjoying it if I wasn’t so tortured by it.

“He was one of those journalists who wrote for the broadsheets and was more at home discussing Chekov or Shakespeare where there’s actually more contrived performances than you’ve ever seen. There’s that tempo with Shakespeare which is wonderful but... Speech: I decided to go with the idea that he’s never spoken because he’s never needed to, he’s been in the forest. It’s something he can do, he has the mind, I decided, of a scholar - only because I think Dr Frankenstein would have chosen an ideal brain, a perfect brain. A scholar of philosophy or medicine or something. Maybe I understand my own mechanics more than anybody. I don’t care: I like to play with those ideas, that’s up to me to enjoy, not for anyone to see necessarily but for me to think about. Maybe I’m aware of my own medical condition, maybe I’m aware of my limitations so horribly that it makes my existence even more painful. But in essence I have a brain that is obviously connected.

“I didn’t go for this lumbering thing, I decided to go for a limp, because I thought: if he can sew an artery together then I’m sure he can do the rest quite easily, he can do nerve endings at least. I went for a limp at the beginning of the film because I decided simply that one of my tendons, just like a hamstring, would be too short. It gave me a limp and it gave me a fragility that allowed me to be more in awe of things. I’m not a monster, I’m a man that has been created. I don’t speak because there’s no need to. When I see Eva speaking, I speak. Sound created these huge problems for me, because how do I begin to make a ‘guh’ sound? If I go like this and you react, it’s instinctive. But because I’ve heard it, it’s almost like: how do I do it? I touch my throat because I hear a vibration in my throat that I haven’t heard before. It’s more something that I can actually do but I haven’t accessed. Although it’s not fluid yet, I don’t think it takes too long to do it - otherwise there’s no logical reason why he can become as eloquent and articulate as he becomes in such a short period of time. It’s just impossible."

He goes from nothing to quoting Milton.
"Exactly. He’s reading Paradise Lost. I’m thinking: no, it’s impossible. So I decided to say fuck it, I’m going to do something different. I’m going to have him speaking quicker and when he says his first word it’s going to surprise him that it comes out. He’s smiling but in some ways the fact that he can do this makes his life more painful because he knows that he’s actually more capable of interacting than even he thought. It’s like having a bit in his mouth and then not having a bit in his mouth; his restraint’s off. He’s very conscious of his horrificness, it’s tragic. So that was the biggest judgement call for me of the entire character: how he could be so compos mentis so quickly.

“Yesterday when I did the dream sequence I played him, not stupid but scary - because that’s all Victor thinks he has created. In a way, he’s underestimated his own abilities. And I had this wonderful opportunity to create that. I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion, I just said, ‘I’m going to play him somewhat scary.’ Because that’s all Victor thinks he was capable of creating. When he says to me on the mountaintop, ‘You can speak,’ and I say, ‘Yes, and reason.’ He says, ‘How is that possible?’ I say that I’m endowed with perceptions, and one time I added the word ‘sir’. He said, ‘You’re a monster’ and I said, ‘Which you created.’ But I said, ‘Which you created, sir.’ I call him sir because that gives me a moment of more nobility than even he has. So I played with it. It gives more weight to those moments of wordiness that we have.

“He’s very eloquent and he’s very dignified and I had to find a way of going for him. That whole unintelligible thing, I just didn’t want to do it, I didn’t understand it, I didn’t ever get it. Same with the big, huge scars. The scar is there, but we see him twice and people know what’s underneath the costume. But I’ve never been a big fan of the idea that a man can sew an artery together, but then he gets someone with mittens on and very dark sunglasses to sew the limbs together. I’ve never understood that, and I still don’t. Yes, I have a big scar here and here but I’m not going to play it up. We know who he is. We can imagine that he’s made up of a number of pieces but I have never liked that idea of making him so stupidly constructed. We’re not sewing a sail together, we’re sewing limbs together, from a man who has such a fine hand that he can sew an artery together and nerve endings on an eyeball. So I cover myself up, not through vanity but I don’t look nice. You’ve seen me. This is my face."

It sounds like Kevin has given you a lot of freedom to find the character.
"I can’t believe how much he trusts me. He hasn’t really even given me acting lessons, it’s more blocking sometimes. He’s been very, very, very generous about trust and judgements calls. I was thinking this yesterday: let’s see what happens - and we ended up going with it. In my delivery on the mountain I go from absolute range to nothing, to real restraint and control of the conversation, just to show that he does have the power of self-control. People don’t want to see the monster and hate him. People who tune in and love the story of Frankenstein will really like it."

I think that’s a problem nowadays. People think Frankenstein's creation is Herman Munster, but you look like the book's description. Muscular but tall and thin.
"He’s meant to be very strong. I’ve just finished a movie where I’ve been fighting Michelle Yeoh and I’ve been trained by masters so I can press 200-odd pounds. I’m very strong. But the look is actually quite true to the book. This idea was mine, when you see him like this. It’s deliberate, because I’ve said - it’s not on record in the book or anywhere - it’s one of the most sacrilegious things anyone can do. This looks like a shroud; it’s deliberately unstained, there’s no blood, that’s deliberate. I didn’t want to do this [holds hands out]. One of the conceptual things; I said I don’t want that, if I want any empathy from anybody it’s never going to happen if you do that. Let’s use visual poetry to try and get that.

“So I suggested an idea in the scene where I’m holding Elizabeth. She’s limp so she’s obviously dead, but I’m looking at her with a look of longing. That’s not just: he can’t have her because she’s no longer animated in life. He couldn’t have her anyway. A lot of us have seen a woman across a room that you would want, in a dream, to have but she’s, in that horrible modern-day expression, out of your league. I have experienced people saying: bullshit, you’re an actor, you used to be a musician. But without wearing a name-tag and without going over there and introducing myself and giving her my resume; if I went over there, just a scruffy guy in a pair of jeans and she didn’t recognise me, then she might not have the time of day for me either. Without knowing my resume and seeing my account book!

“I see people all the time who are painfully shy and don’t have any way to bypass that. I wanted to show what he couldn’t have. There are very poetical moments in this story and there’s almost a kind of religious connotation to it. I’m such a bloody fan now. I liked it before, like everybody else did, but now I’m genuinely amazed at how profound the writing is, how relevant it is. As I said before, it’s more relevant now than probably when it was written."

Let’s go back to the start of your acting career, on stage in Plan Nine from Outer Space: The Musical. How did you land that?
"I was asked to do that. I’d been asked to do West End before. I said to my management, this is kind of a big leap. I’m being asked to do this because of who I am, not because of what I’m capable of doing. I’d just written a book at that point which was a bestseller and got great, great reviews. I said, sure writing a book can’t be compared to the fame I had but it’s still me. I’m very proud of that first little contribution that I’ve individually made without my brother being involved or Craig or anybody; it was just me. I’m proud of it.

“It’s somewhat academic because I involved myself somewhat cerebrally on a very honest, candid level. I didn’t put any vanities in there. I employed censorship on other people’s behalf because I didn’t think it was right to mention names, but I still told the story without being specific with names. I put the censorship in after I wrote it. In the end I decided not to censor the book. I decided to take the names out and show myself as vulnerable as I was at the time.

“So then when I did theatre, Marina Caldoni, the resident director at the time of the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, said to me, ‘You’ll be right for this.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ve not done it before. It’s a great experience but I don’t know whether I’d be able to do it.’ So she said let’s just talk, let’s try out a few things. So we tried a few lines, we tried a few scenes. She really liked it and I had a few private coaches. I continued that for many years, one on one. But then I did an interview, strangely enough, the only person I’ve ever interviewed in my life. Sitting in the same position as you but the other way round. And that was Michael Caine. Because they asked me would I do this interview and I said there’s only two people I want to interview, and that’s Clint Eastwood or Michael Caine. They said okay, and an hour later they called back and said, ‘Michael has agreed to do it.’ I was like, ‘Oh shit...’"

For TV?
"Yes. So I interviewed him. I asked him, I said can we have a talk before, because I’ve not done this, so he said, ‘Sure, come to the office.’ The office being his bar, the bar in the restaurant that he owns. So we went there and he was everything that I’d dreamed he would be. He said to me, ‘You know what? If you want to do it, and you’re curious, then jump in. Away you go.’ No snobbery, no aloof kudos. My acting coach, Jenny McCracken, gave me the best direction ever. She said, ‘You’re a natural actor. Trust your instincts because your instincts are honest. Every time you question them, you’re off. So trust your instincts.’ That was the best advice I’ve ever been given. So I did Plan Nine through an offer, again. I was asked to do it."

Were you familiar with the film?
"Yes. Ed Wood, with Johnny Depp. I’d watched the movie Ed Wood, strangely enough, a few weeks before. Such a stupid amount of time before. I watched the movie as a result of doing the show. I became very, very familiar with Ed Wood and all his work. I can’t help digressing, I’m so enthusiastic about things. But I think Ed Wood was the Tarantino of his day, though he didn’t have the budget. People say, ‘Don’t you think he was a crap actor?’ No, he was a great actor. He made films for nothing, and you can’t actually make a film for free. You can’t do it. It’s physically impossible.

“People say, ‘What about continuity? Day and night?’ Well, absolutely, but it was either that or not make the movie. The man was not going to be compromised: ‘I am a movie director.’ I actually got tearful watching the movie at times because his resolve was so incredibly motivating. God bless Ed Wood because he was going to make that movie regardless of anything put in front of him. Even, who knows if his ability was not worthy of being a movie director."

He believed in himself.
"We’re still sitting here right now, talking about the guy. Kudos to that. You’ve got to take your hat off to that. Because he had a great idea about these mad films. He didn’t have the technology at his disposal, he didn't have the budget, he had nothing. He didn’t even have actors. He had to resort to the church to get funding. So I think he was like the Tarantino of his day, or I optimistically think of him in that way. I don’t know whether he ever would be, but maybe with the budget and some belief he could have made a great movie."

You were doing stage work, Plan Nine and Grease, then you made this huge leap to Blade 2.
"I did an independent English film first. I did Two Days, Nine Lives, which was a big, big learning curve for me because I was filming during the day and then doing theatre at night. That movie was written and directed by a guy called Simon Monjack who was a big workshop fan. He would put us into the scene and he would walk around. If we weren’t saying anything specific, we would sit around in group therapy on the set. He would say, ‘So, Saul’ - I was playing the lead in this film - ‘What do you think of Star?’ ‘I think she’s an arrogant bitch,’ - and she would be all, ‘Fuck off, Saul.’ ‘He would say, ‘Why does he think that?’ She would say, ‘I don’t care.’ He would evoke questions and it would perpetuate and perpetuate, very heavy. People would say stuff and we would all be in the zone. Cameras at the ready, and then, ‘Okay, let’s shoot this scene.’

“A great benefit of low-budget films - this was about a million quid - is that you have that luxury of spending that kind of time before a big scene. Which you don’t in Hollywood with studio pictures,because you’ve got producers and line producers breathing down your neck, trying to bring things in on budget. We didn’t have a fucking budget! It’s like a glider: what have you got to worry about? The engine’s not going to foul. The wings could fall off - it’s unlikely - but there is no engine. You start flying without an engine."

From there you went to Blade 2 and now this.
"Well, ZigZag was first. I’d filmed ZigZag before Blade 2. That was John Leguizamo, I’m a massive Leguizamo fan, Oliver Platt, who I love, Natasha Leone, Wesley Snipes and myself. I did ZigZag in Hollywood first, which was filmed in Hollywood on location. So that was my Hollywood break. That was written and directed by David Goyer, and he called Guillermo. I had been given the script for Blade 2 the day before, by coincidence. I had read for David Goyer and a few people from Franchise, and they called me after an hour and a half and offered me the role, from the audition.

“I actually auditioned for that. It was written for a Hispanic character and I did it in American. I walked in and said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ He said, ‘You have a great voice.’ I said, ‘Thank you, I got it for free.’ Afterwards, he said, ‘Could I hear it in English? Do you mind?’ I went, ‘Er, okay.’ To most people that sounds easy, but I’d never done it in English. There’s this one line in the film where I say, ‘You know what it’s like running this. You need a goddam computer to schedule round these fucking menstrual cycles.’ I just went heavy on the phrase ‘fucking menstrual cycles’ and I came back down and I composed myself. He said, ‘Have you finished yet?’ I’d completely zoned out, and he loved this. It was in English but he loved it, and an hour and a half later they offered me the movie.

“Working with those people was like: oh man! Then I had a phone call saying that David Goyer had said, ‘I think we’ve found our Nomak.’ They’d been trying to find it for a long time, to find someone who could stand up to Snipes visually and with the dialogue. I was asked to come in, but I didn’t technically audition for that role. I met with Guillermo. We talked very, very candidly about the character, with loads of enthusiasm, like two kids in a candy store. I love Guillermo’s work, I love his ways and I love him as a man. He’s a very generous man which makes him an incredibly generous director. And his enthusiasm, his childlike manner, combined with his ability to control a ship, as in a hundred million dollar movie, without even blinking - it’s just incredible.

“He said, ‘I think you could be fucking great for this movie.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It’s not my decision, but I think you’d be fucking good for this movie.’ A lot of people had cast approval on that character, including Wesley. But I got the role. I got the phone call that said, ‘It’s yours’ and I was one happy motherfucker! Because I was a big fan of the first one. So I just got that through meeting. I obviously had to read for the casting people because there’s a political thing there, and a respect because they’re good at what they do. I had to read for them, and I got offered the role."

Is there any sort of plan to your acting career? Blade 2, films with Michelle Yeoh...
"There’s Charlie as well, which I think is going to be put out by Warner Bothers. No-one knows that yet, but Warner Brothers want the movie badly. A couple of big companies, the people who took Blade, want it. You know Peter Yates, the director of Bullitt? He’s gone on record as saying it’s the most honest gangster movie he’s ever seen. It was reviewed recently, saying, ‘Forget The Krays, this is going to be the one English classic gangster cult movie.’ It’s got the most glowing reaction. the movie’s called Charlie and in a 94-minute movie I’m in about 89 minutes of the film.

“There is no good guy or bad guy. I play Charlie Richardson who’s still alive. It’s about Charlie Richardson, it’s set in the 1960s. It’s the true story of his life: the trial, everything. He had business in London and Africa; it’s shot in London and Africa. A sixties period piece. A full-on gangster movie. And Peter Yates’ son edited the movie. It’s just been received with open bloody arms, man. I saw it at a private screening about three weeks ago, and I’m in every scene. But it’s just a bloody good gangster film. If you like The Long Good Friday... I’ve just been offered The Long Good Friday 2 as well, they’re making another one. I don’t know if people know that. But I’ve just been offered that as a result of doing Charlie. I’ve been offered a film called Cold and Dark because of Charlie. There’s another movie that’s filming in Egypt with Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer who did Full Metal Jacket; they’ve just offered me that film. And another movie called Shadow Dragon, an amazing script, another genre film. The lead guy is, not like Blade but that kind of role, a stoic superhero. Very, very powerful, very cool. They want me to do that."

Are you actually aiming your career anywhere, or just holding onto it as it hurtles along?
"It is actually gathering speed, I do notice. I’m top-billed on this and that’s not easy. To be honest, I think the creature deserves it, but Victor’s in it a lot but people think of the creature so realistically I think anyone who plays this character should get that. But now that Donald Sutherland’s doing it, William Hurt, it’s like a blessing. Then I’ve got Cold and Dark; Tim Roth I think has said he wants to do the movie. He’s only got a nine-day shoot on the film; he plays my partner in the film. It’s another lead role, a starring role. It’s called Cold and Dark, and I play John Dark.

“The thing about movies is: you can only read them and hope they come out how they read. There’s as much chance of that happening as moving your own tail, which you don’t have. But you can be responsible for reading it and enjoying it and hoping the directors and the DPs and the editors and the set designers and everything bring it all together, bring it to fruition. Look at Daredevil. I was going to do that, I was going to be Bullseye. Obviously they had an option on Farrell, 20th Century Fox, and they optioned that, but I was going to do that role. Of course Colin Farrell has got more of a name.

“I had a different slant on it; that didn’t turn out how I imagined. The conceptual art was bloody fantastic: dark, like Batman, the first one. It was so gothic. I watched Daredevil and there’s loads with the kids. I don’t want to see the kid for too long, maybe a couple of minutes to establish, but then let’s get back into the darkness of this character. I would just enjoy the loneliness of that character so much. I think you have to try and choose roles that test you, put things on the line a little bit, when you get an opportunity, like with this one. And like with Nomak.

“You know, I can photograph quite well. You can take a picture and I can look half-decent; I don’t always look like a bullfrog. But if the role means I have to look like one, I sometimes in this perverse way like doing it. I’ve played a couple of roles, like when I played a drug addict, when I looked like shit. With Nomak, I looked like shit. And in this film, I don’t look like a pretty boy, to say the least! But he has great presence. And that’s what it’s about. So I enjoy going against type, I like that, which is bizarre considering I started in Bros. I’ve been acting longer than I was ever a musician. I was in Bros for five years and in three months I’ll have been acting for ten years. But I’m playing character roles, which is a blessing for me.

“Because when I started acting I was offered all these ‘eyebrow’ roles, and now I’m being offered these parts. I get excited, and not in an immodest way, it’s not an arrogant thing. I get excited when I hear people say they want an actor who can do this role, so they call me. I guess intensity has paid off. I need roles that I feel: I would want to watch them. They don’t have to be safe bets; not all of them are. I don’t know who said it, it may have been Anthony Hopkins because he says many wonderful thing, like, ‘We get paid to wait and we act for free.’ It’s so bloody true, somebody said this, maybe it was Malkovich. He said something like, ‘At the beginning of your career, your roles choose you. And then you get in the wonderful position where you choose your roles.’ It’s just so true. If you’re in that wonderful position of having more than one option - and I am at the moment - you can make a choice of, say, the best of three options. But you’re going to work.

“I don’t believe in any actor who says, well, I’d rather not do that. Don’t be stupid: work. Don’t do shit - I agree with that. But work if you can, because you’re learning. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning. But I’m praying for that day when I’ve got these wonderful things on the table. Imagine the ideal situation: to have five great scripts on the table and I want to do all of them. To say to the producers, well, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do all of them. But can you wait two years for me to get round to this one because we have to do this? And they say, yes, if you can sign a contract now saying you’ll do it, we’ll do it. And I want that, that’s the dream: to be in that position."

Tell me about Silver Hawk. I am so impressed at making a film with Michelle Yeoh.

"It was one of those wonderful things again. I had just been offered The Crow, another Crow sequel. I said no to it, and they said, ‘What could we do?’ I said, ‘You’d have to rewrite 80 per cent of it.’ They said, ‘Can we?’ I said sure. So I came up with this whole idea about: the boy needs to see his father killed, and so on. I think they’ve used all that now, so if they like it, great. Lance Mungia, the director, is a really great guy, I really like him.

“We were in the middle of negotiations for The Crow and I got a call from Thomas Chung, the film’s producer and Michelle’s partner, as in not husband but partner. And partner in business too, because Michelle’s also a producer on this movie. He called me and said, ‘Would you be interested in playing the male lead in this movie Silver Hawk with Michelle?’ And I’m like: with Michelle Yeoh? Are you serious? I said, ‘Send the script round.’ I got it on very funky new, 17-inch, Superdrive Powerbook - which I’m completely buzzed about. I read and it and said, I love it. Two weeks later the deal was done, including every part of the negotiations - and I flew to China.

“I play this part of Alexander Wolfe and she plays a kind of vigilante in a way, a modern-day kind of Batman. It’s near-future, stretched and sometimes not stretched, due to both the director and the budget. I play a character that wants to take over the world but I immediately decided not to play him like this. People don’t walk around thinking they’re villains and Alexander Wolfe doesn’t walk around thinking he wants to take over the world. He walks around thinking he wants to make the world a better place. In his delusion, he’s actually a dictator and an evil guy, and through his actions he’s someone not to be fucked with. She has every right - you’ve got to get rid of him. But he doesn’t walk around like that, he intuitively believes he’s doing the right thing.

“So in my back story I invented this thing that was not on the page: his father died young, he inherited a few billion dollars. Through his trust fund and people looking after him, he’s kind of buffering. He has never really made any mistakes, and he sees people make mistakes daily, which is the wonderful thing about life. I decided to play him like that, really. He looks at life and sees people make these mistakes, and through this subliminal suggestion that he’s in - in other words, complete dictatorship - he can save people from making these mistakes. And put himself in a position of power; he has to be in power to implement that kind of control. But he doesn’t feel like he’s doing anything wrong. It’s almost like he prefers any idea of utopia. Whether it’s communistic or complete dictatorship, that can’t exist without taking people’s freedom away. Unfortunately he doesn’t see that. But I don’t play him like this at all.

“There’s this thing where he’s in an explosion and he’s lost his arms from the elbows down, So he has these metal gloves that are handmade; he doesn’t always show them. He has his underground lair with all these computers, he operates his empire from them. She takes care of business. A couple of cool things in the middle of the movie, and I haven’t told anyone about this because I went straight from China - a 26-hour day - I got on a plane and flew straight here. Three months in China, no days off, through SARS and everything. Straight to here, not one day off. Reading a 300-page script.

“There’s this panda, a real panda they let them use. Because it’s a co-production between Hong Kong and America, they let them use a panda. These people are trying to steal a panda, and she’s on a bike, on this souped-up BMW, hurtling along. She’s doing her thing, wire-work as you would expect. She stops the truck and you actually see her with the panda. You can’t use pandas, they’re an endangered species. But Michelle Yeoh is in the cage with this panda biting her arm!

“And another great thing, another great vibe, is that they actually jump the Great Wall of China on a bike. It wasn’t CG, it wasn’t a set, they were actually given permission and they did jump the Great Wall of China for the movie. It’s so extravagant, for a few seconds of slow motion in the film, and then back into action - they go to the great expense of jumping the Great Wall of China. I don’t know how the whole movie’s going to turn out. Michelle is wonderful, generous, incredibly talented. I think Thomas is a very lucky man and he knows it. I also have to say credit to him on the record. He’s a wonderful guy. i think of them both as personal friends."

How did you find the Hong Kong production compared with Britain or Hollywood?
"Incredibly, incredibly lonely. Incredibly isolated. Being in China for three months without hearing your native tongue is very hard to explain. Being on a movie set where nobody speaks English, not even ‘good morning’, not even ‘hello’. On that level it was very isolated. Through the SARS thing, which was a bit unnerving at times. Every twenty minutes you had to disinfect your hands. Wearing masks inbetween takes. Having temperature checks three times a day. Thermal imaging camera just before you go into stores or your hotel. Having temperature check before you go into anywhere. My driver got the flu so I had to go to hospital and have X-rays on my lungs to make sure I wasn’t contaminated, like everybody did. If you had flu, just normal flu, you had to be quarantined for 14 days. I didn’t get flu or a cold once, thank God. You had to be quarantined for 14 days and you’d get six, seven, eight calls a day to check you’re in your room. It’s very, very tense.

“But the only difference is that you have to be able to do stuff. Luckily, I’d trained to be in Blade. For Silver Hawk I did two weeks’ training with the ex British champion in wing chung, and I did four weeks’ training with one of their guys from Hong Kong in Shanghai. You have to be able to fight because they don’t do three- or four-move combinations, they do 15-move combinations. There’s a scene where Michelle’s on a wire and it’s simulated to be like a bungee, and she does go up a hundred feet on a wire. Sure, her double does some of the dangerous bits where she crashes through window, but she does do the hundred feet up in the air.

“When you do stunts, when you break glass, when you turn from explosions, you do that stuff. Hong Kong teams, they do stuff that would literally make a producer’s nuts fall off in America. It’s true. And rightfully. Unless you’re as capable as some of these guys, who have been fighting since they were six, a producer in America would be right to be scared. Because you shouldn’t do it on a movie set. As Wesley once said to me: it’s just a movie, don’t ever put your life in danger. But those guys, they’re as hard as nails.”

website: www.lukegossforum.com
interview originally posted 1st December 2007

↧

interview: Steve Gough

July 21, 2013, 1:51 pm

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≪ Previous: interview: Luke Goss

Steve Gough directed Oilman, one of the three short films on the curious anthology videoNightmares. After reviewing that video, I tracked down Steve, who now teaches screenwriting at the University of Westminster, and was delighted when he agreed to a short e-mail interview.

How and why was Oilman made?
“Cobbled together, really, with money from Welsh Arts Council, Channel Four development finance and some private sponsoring, my first film after film school (NFS graduate).”

How did you get Martin Shaw involved?
“He liked the script and wanted to be involved!”

The video sleeve says ‘A macabre story about a contract killer whose life is turned upside-down after an assassination.’ - is that an accurate summary of the plot?
“Not really as the Shaw character is more of a ruthless business man who uses murder threats in act one to secure a shady oil business business deal - the denouement is in the form of a kind of moral punishment for his sins ... He is equally cold and calculating as a father to his son who reacts by seeking to disrupt his life... Does he actually lead his father to his death...? That is the question you will have to answer.”

Why did you make a film with virtually no dialogue?
“It was partly the challenge of it, partly the idea of showing human life as a sort of animal behaviour...”

Where was the film shown and what sort of reaction did it get?
“Got to some festivals, with mixed responses. I think a few were confused and I do regard it now as a somewhat perverse experiment - though I have an affection for its eccentricities and think it has its moments as a drama.”

How did Oilman end up with two other films on a 1992 video called Nightmares?
“No comment. Try the producers?”

Would you classify the film as a horror movie? (‘Three nightmarish stories’ says the video...)
“Allegorical horror fantasy????”

Where did your film-making career go after this?
“Went on to write Heartland for BBC in 1989, then wrote/directed Elenya for Ch4, BFI & ZDF in 1989, then wrote Thin Line for Ch4 in 1992, then Washed Up for BBC in 1999... Now writing novels, two published so far!”

interview originally posted 22nd January 2005

↧

interview: Ben Grass

July 21, 2013, 2:10 pm

≫ Next: interview: Kristyn Green

≪ Previous: interview: Steve Gough

When Pure Grass Films went into partnership with the reborn Hammer Films to make online vampire tale Beyond the Rave, Ben Grass became the producer of the first new Hammer horror production since, ooh, ages. I interviewed him about the project for Fangoria in November 2007.

Explain how precisely Beyond the Rave will be made available to people?
"What we will do is launch it on the internet, probably with an individual partner, either a social network or a portal. It’s looking like we’re going to do it with a social network in fact. We haven’t quite closed the deal yet. And they will probably release episodes - one or two a week - and make them available that way over a period of eight to ten weeks. Then you’ll be able to access the archive episodes that you may have missed online. I don’t know yet whether they will all be available at a certain time or not. What will happen then is that, after the online release, we’ll probably make it available on DVD as a compilation and in addition the goal is to try and make shorter versions of each episode available on mobiles,"

Will people pay per episode to watch it?
"I don’t know yet. It will probably depend on a case by case basis. Some of them might be supported with advertising, others may be paid downloads. We need to get into those discussions. But the main focus is on an internet release followed by a DVD."

I assume you’re resigned to the fact that as soon as you’ve made it available, somebody will stick it on YouTube.
"What we’ll probably do is we’ll give our chosen partner a little bit of exclusivity - that might be a couple of days - and then it will be able to go on the broader internet."

How does that affect the structure? Does it have ten acts with little mini-climaxes every few minutes?
"Yes, we’ve definitely written it as a serial rather than as a film. So we’ve been very conscious of wanting to give the audience some excitement and some cliff-hangers and some payoffs in each episode to keep them hooked. In the internet world, obviously you can click away so easily from stuff, we need to keep it going and keep it suspenseful and exciting. So that’s been at the forefront of our minds - and that’s actually been one of the tricker things to do because it’s a new medium."

Will it still work as a feature?
"I hope so. We may have to adjust the edit a little bit to make it work on the DVD. There is an overarching narrative arc so, fingers crossed, it will work there too."

You did this before with When Evil Calls, directed by Johannes Roberts - was that successful?
"Yes, it was very successful. We launched that on mobile, rather than on the internet, and I think it’s up in about ten countries at the moment, and in the UK it was available on three different operators: O2, T-Mobile and Orange. We’ve also just closed a DVD deal in the UK so it will be coming out on DVD in the next six months probably."

Have you any idea how many people watched that on their mobiles?
"I don’t have exact figures but I think it’s somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand watched it. I think in the emerging world of video-on-mobile, it’s a good result. We were pleased because that series was a finalist in the Broadcast Awards for best mobile TV show last year. It was a good experience."

On a purely practical level, how is the direction and cinematography affected, shooting something which most people will see at the size of a credit card?
"We’ve tried to shoot it at the kind of quality level that will work on DVD. Mainly what we’re going to do is adjust for the fact that people will see it on mobiles by compressing the quality of the video. We didn’t so much make a conscious decision only to do close-ups. We’ve got quite ambitious shots with lots of people in them. So we focussed on making sure this would really work on the highest possible, biggest screen size, best quality resolution.

“If you do look now at the better mobile phones these days, and certainly the iPhone, the screen’s pretty good quality, isn’t it? So hopefully, more and more over time, these things will be able to be watched well. The difficulty is when stuff’s downloaded over the air on mobile. If you’ve got anything over two minutes, it becomes an enormous file and it’s not really practical. That’s why we’re cutting down the length of the episodes but we haven’t really adjusted what we shot, with mobiles in mind."

It’s a bit like the old 8mm copies of films where you would get the whole film in 15 minutes.
"Yes, exactly like that."

The reason why this is getting so much interest is purely and simply the word Hammer. How and why did you get hold of the right to call this a Hammer film?
"As I’m sure you know, Hammer was taken over six months ago by two entrepreneurs, Simon Oakes and Mark Schipper. They not only acquired the library but they also raised a lot of money with which to make new Hammer productions. I had met Simon nine months ago because he used to be at Liberty Global, which is the parent company of Third Media who financed When Evil Calls. So when the Hammer financing came through, we had a chat about some of the projects we had in development.

“I think what appealed about Beyond the Rave, as well as the story and what we were trying to do dramatically, was the idea that, because we can release it on-line - it’s designed to be released on-line and on mobile - it could be very useful in helping Hammer to reconnect with a younger audience on those new platforms. I think it’s hopefully a mixture of: they liked the content and also the delivery is neat in terms of helping the marketing exercise which they need to do to make people aware that Hammer’s back."

Why do you think they’ve managed to get something into production within six months of buying Hammer, when everybody who has owned it before has not got anything made?
"I don’t know what the Hammer of old was like well enough really to answer that question but I do know that Simon and Mark have made sure that they have enough money to be able to greenlight productions themselves. They’ve obviously got a good track record in the content business, both of them, and so far I’m incredibly impressed with them both. They’re incredibly ambitious, focussed and capable people and they’ve been incredible to work with. Very supportive. So I’m really encouraged."

Realistically, would Beyond the Rave have happened anyway, even without the Hammer connection?
"Well, we feel that it’s an incredibly exciting project because it mixes horror and vampires with music and a kick-arse soundtrack so we felt very excited commercially that it was something we’d be able to get financed. But there’s no doubt about it it, the addition of the Hammer name has given it a real edge and a level of profile that we would have struggled to reach otherwise."

Apart from Ingrid Pitt’s cameo, has the Hammer connection directly affected the production in any way?
"I think one of the most significant inputs that they have had is in terms of script development. Hammer have got a wonderful guy called Nic Ransome who played an important role as we were writing the script this summer. He’s continued to play a role in the editing process which has been incredibly useful. He’s got a big, encyclopaedic knowledge which has really been of value. I think otherwise we would all have wanted to make this as good as we could get it.

“Our choice of director was instrumental in the look and feel of the series. He’s a guy called Matthias Hoene who’s a commercials director, a music video director. He brings a really nice sensibility about how to pack a punch in a short burst of time and how to make all these scenes at the rave look wonderful. We felt the weight of responsibility because we were bringing out the first Hammer production in a while but we would always have wanted to make this good, if you see what I mean."

Are you prepared for the inevitable nay-sayers for whom anything that isn’t a Victorian gothic romp with Peter Cushing in it isn’t real Hammer?
"I think everyone is attached to their own vision of what Hammer might be, but our view is that it’s right and exciting to make Hammer something new and to keep it evolving to bring it to fresh audiences - and that’s what we’re trying to do. If not everyone likes it, then at least we’ll know we’ll have tried our best."

You’re a young chap, you’re not old enough to have seen Hammer films at the cinema. What’s your knowledge of Hammer in coming to this?
"It’s largely shaped by the iconic images of Christopher Lee and the notion that it was instrumental in bringing Dracula to a mass audience. The classic movies like Quatermass and Frankenstein, and Ingrid Pitt. I’ve probably seen half a dozen but I can’t pretend to be a massive expert by any means in all of the Hammer catalogue. I think the horror films that shaped my sensibility are more Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining and The Ring, those sort of things. Those are the films that I’ve enjoyed more perhaps than the traditional Hammer films."

Speaking as somebody who has never been to a rave, is this going to be accessible to the older generation?
"I hope so. At the end of the day, a rave is just a party in many respects. People want to have a good time and dance to music. What we’ve put at the core of this series is a focus on character and motivation and drama. In that regard it should be interesting to anyone that likes horror and likes a fast-paced narrative. We’ve certainly not intended it to be isolating. The story’s a good story and that’s what should captivate people, I think."

How did you go about assembling your cast and crew?
"We have a large cast and crew. I think there are about forty actors overall with speaking parts and a pretty sizeable crew. So it took us a long time to put the cast together. I met Jamie Dornan, who plays our lead character Ed, at a wedding this summer. I’d enjoyed Marie Antoinette very much which he did for Sofia Coppola a few years back and I was aware that he wanted to do more acting."

It wasn’t Neil Marshall’s wedding, was it? I couldn’t help noticing that your PR girl is the new Mrs Marshall.
"Axelle, that’s right. She’s fantastic. She got married to Neil, I think it was a couple of weeks ago. But no, it wasn’t that one. Jamie I think has a wonderful ability to connected with young audiences. He’s got a real following as a model but also now as an actor, and he blew us away at the audition. Nora-Jane Noone has got a good horror following, as you know, from The Descent and she’s in Doomsday, Neil’s new film.

“And then Sadie Frost, of course with the Dracula connection, we were excited about casting her. We were aware that she was doing trapeze and there was a part where a vampire comes down, upside-down in the rave and gets someone. So we were excited about combining Sadie’s horror connection and her interest in trapeze. Tamer Hassan, we loved The Business and Football Factory and the role that he plays is the head of this drug gang, the Crockers. He’s the perfect guy to do nasty violence and give the vampires some of their own medicine.

“Then we have a host of other great people, some of whom have been in bands to work the music connection. We have the lead singer of the Kazals in this. And we have Jackson Scott who in fact is Christopher Lee’s great-nephew. Ingrid of course, we’re very privileged to have her in this. She plays Tooley’s mother; Tooley’s played by this guy Steve Sweeney that was in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. So we’ve tried to get a lot of great people that will be recognisable. A lot of online serials have got talented people but not name actors and we’ve tried to get a few recognisable people in there. They’ve really brought a lot of quality to the screen."

What about behind the camera?
"The director I talked about, Matthias Hoene. The director of photography is Ben Moulden who’s really done a wonderful job. He really has. Great guy. Tristan Versluis has done wonderful work on the make-up effect. Our editor is a guy called Lucas Roche, who did Dead Man’s Shoes, the Shane Meadows film which we all really enjoyed. I think when my brother Tom was writing this, it was a big influence, Dead Man’s Shoes. So the writer is my bother Tom Grass and it’s co-written by Jon Wright; script editor Nic Ransome from Hammer. So it’s a very good group of people."

What’s your own background?
"Well, I’m a relatively new producer. I was at Sony Pictures for four years. I was looking after their digital division so doing distribution of movies and TV shows on internet and mobile. That’s how I got interested in the opportunity to create content specifically for those platforms. So I started Pure Grass Films in 2005. We’ve produced three series now. The first one was a martial arts series we shot in Los Angeles, then When Evil Calls last year and now this one. I’d always wanted to be more creative and I’m having a lot of fun doing this now."

It was noticeable that news on this didn’t leak out until principal photography had pretty much finished. Was that a deliberate plan to avoid raised expectations?
"I don’t think it was particularly a conscious decision. The decision to finance this was taken at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and at that time we didn’t have a fully fleshed-out script. So our focus as the production company was just to get on with our job and make it. We spent about six weeks to two months with the script then moved into production and I just felt we had more than enough going on. Word trickled out but it’s only in the last six weeks or so that we’ve made more of a conscious effort to market this and get it up on IMDB and so on. I felt we had more than enough to do, just getting the production done."

Is this a one-off deal between Pure Grass Films and Hammer or will you be doing more with them?
"I hope that what we can do, if we get a good reaction with Beyond the Rave, is develop it as a property and maybe make a sequel or a prequel. And also we do have another idea which we’re discussing with them which is a werewolf project. So I hope we’ll certainly do more things. It’s been very good so far.”

website: www.puregrassfilms.com
interview originally posted 30th October 2009

↧

interview: Kristyn Green

August 5, 2013, 5:16 pm

≫ Next: interview: David Gregory and Jake Shaw

≪ Previous: interview: Ben Grass

Kristyn Green is an up and coming actress who played Olivia inDoll Graveyard. She very kindly answered one of my e-mail mini-interviews in November 2005. NB. That is a real Emmy in the picture, although Krystin hasn't actually won one (yet).

How did you find out about this movie and what attracted you to this role?
“I read about the project on a casting website and submitted myself for the role of Terri. I was called in to read for Terri, and about 30 seconds into my audition I was asked to read for Olivia. I immediately fell in love with the role because Olivia is so different than me, and those are always the most fun characters to play.”

Before making this movie, how familiar were you with low budget horror movies in general and the work of Charles Band in particular?
“I had a few favourites before filming Doll Graveyard, but I now have a much greater appreciation for low budget horror films. I had definitely heard about Charles Band and knew some of his work, but had no concept of how accomplished he was. He seriously has the longest IMDB I have ever seen!”

For you, what was the toughest part of making this movie?
“Wearing those damn shoes! The heels were so tall, and I was constantly falling down. My first day on set I had to run into the bedroom to see what ‘DeeDee’ was screaming about. I ran in, slipped, grabbed Gabby (DeeDee) and we both fell on the bed. I guess it was a great way to break the ice!”

What is Charlie Band like as a director?
“I don't know any way to describe him but simply amazing. He is so encouraging to everyone on set and really knows how to bring the best out of each actor's performance. He has a very clear cut vision of what he wants, and manages to achieve it within an incredibly short amount of time.”

What were the puppets like to work with?
“I'm not gonna lie... those dolls could be a bit tricky to work with at times. Luckily we had an amazing ‘puppetmaster’, Chris Bergshneider, who truly brought the puppets to life. He made our job so much easier than it should have been.”

What are your hopes and plans for your career beyond Doll Graveyard?
“All I can say for sure is that this is just the beginning for me. Expect to see my name a lot more in the future!"

website: www.Kristyn-Green.com
interview originally posted 11th November 2005

↧

interview: David Gregory and Jake Shaw

August 5, 2013, 5:35 pm

≫ Next: interview: Caroline Greville-Morris

≪ Previous: interview: Kristyn Green

The two-disc ‘Ultimate Edition’ of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre includes David Gregory’s feature-length documentary The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth (originally released on British VHS by Gregory’s company Exploited Films). In June 2000, I sat down with Gregory and his associate Jake Shaw (later director of the political documentaryRyan for Congress) in a pub in Nottingham to discuss the film. Part of this was used for a short feature in Fangoria.

Why have you made a documentary on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?
David Gregory: "We originally wanted to bring the film out in England but we were told by the censors that it would never get passed. So we scrapped that idea, and then six months later it got passed for another company. So we thought: well, it’s one of my all-time favourite films and we wanted to have something to do with it. We were thinking about bringing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait, which is a previous documentary, out on the Exploited label, but for one reason or another we couldn’t finalise anything there. We’d already got an interview with Gunnar Hansen so we thought: ‘Why don’t we just go and see if we can track some of the other people down?’

“One thing led to another. Gunnar gave us a lot of names and contacts. This guy called Tim Harden who has a website about Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave us loads of contacts. We basically were able to get in touch with everybody, with the exception of Tobe Hooper. We went and did the shoot in Texas, came back, started editing, and then Tobe Hooper got in touch and said that he would be willing to be interviewed as well. So we went back to Los Angeles for two days to do the interview with Tobe. Because Tobe hasn’t really done that much interview material on this film, but he was very good when I went out to interview him."

Am I right that you have no clips from the actual film?
DG: "There are no clips from the actual film, but that might change. That is true for our UK video release; it’s a tool to keep it exempt from certification. There’s a lot of rare stills in there, and there’s a lot of recreated footage that we shot on the road, like a freshly killed armadillo and things like that."

Which of course you found on the road.
DG: "By the roadside. We were told by Texas locals that you don’t see dead armadillos any more in Texas. We were driving to Houston to meet Jim Siedow and Marilyn Burns. I was driving but telling all the passengers to look out for armadillos at the side of the road. We just saw this squished pile at the side of the road, driving down at about 80, and everyone screamed ‘Armadillo!’ So I swung the car round back and was lying at the side of the road, filming this armadillo which I must say was a lot more disgusting and squished than the one that’s in the movie.”

Jake Shaw: "It was also incredibly dangerous. Because, as per usual, we had an intrepid cameraman. We had two cameras - a film camera and a video camera - and I was operating the video camera. And Nathan, our intrepid cameraman, who sees life only through his lens, had his head basically out just about where the 18-wheelers’ inside wheel goes. I’m saying, ‘Nathan, get out the road.’ ‘No, I’ll just get this shot.’ ‘Nathan, get out the road. Dave, just watch Nathan, will you?’ The postscript of the whole armadillo thing is that Dave, being the thorough director that he is, decided that perhaps on the way home we should try and just get a safety shot of another armadillo. After we’d seen the first armadillo, we were going down the road and we kept seeing... let’s say ‘lumps of biomass’ on the side of the road. Then, on the way back, they’d all gone!”

DG: "It seems like the Texas roadkill cleaners had been by in the time that we drove to and from Houston.”

JS: "Although I did find some beef jerky called ‘Texas Roadkill - we kill it, you grill it.’ So I have a suspicion it might end up there."

How many interviews did you do in total?
DG: "We interviewed... let’s see: Marilyn Burns, Paul Partain - Franklin, Allen Danziger - Jerry, William Vail - who played Kirk, Gunnar Hansen obviously, Jim Siedow - the cook, Tobe Hooper - director, Kim Henkel - writer, Bob Burns - art director, Wayne Bell - composer, Ted Nicolaou - unit sound recordist, Jeff Burr - director of TCM3, Caroline Williams from TCM2, and Bob Keen - the guy who ‘deals with the money.’ All of whom gave us really good, in-depth interviews. Sadly, we didn’t get Ed Neal or Terry Mominn, the girl who is hung on the meat hook.”

JS: "We tried to get Danny Pearl, the DP, but he was very busy with Mariah Carey videos.

DG: ”He was very keen, he wanted to do it. He kept calling us, saying, ‘Can we do this?’ but sadly by the time we got back to LA he was in Toronto doing a Mariah Carey video. So we didn’t get him either."

What was the cut-off point where you said, ‘We’ll go with what we’ve got’?
JS: "About $4,000.”

DG: “There wasn’t a cut-off point because we’d already started editing when Tobe called us and said he was willing to be involved. Obviously Tobe is the most important interviewee in the whole programme. We knew with Ed Neal before we even went out there that he wasn’t going to be involved. With Tobe it wasn’t the case. With Tobe we were still leaving messages, trying to get through to him, and he was very busy on post-production on Crocodile. So it was just very difficult to get hold of him. And Terry Mominn, everyone just told us that she doesn’t talk about it any more. Although she runs a flower shop apparently in Austin and has a photo of herself impaled on the meat hook on the wall! So it’s still there."

How did you structure the thing? Did you have a rough script before you went out?
DG: "I had actually written the voice-over narration which changed a bit as the production went on, but yes, basically I’d written the outline before we went out there. We conceptualised it a bit, talked about how horror films were changing after Night of the Living Dead, then led through the early drive-in movies and how Chainsaw was basically connected with all of that. Then we did the whole bit about the making of the film. Essentially, it’s done chronologically through the film, with a big section devoted to the 26-hour shoot, the dinner scene, which was just fascinating, how they got through that.

“Twenty-six hours non-stop, in blazing heat. They had to put black over the windows because it was shot predominantly during the day and it was suppose-cheese and bones around the place; everyone was sweating disgustingly and being sick. They had dead dogs on the set at one point which they wanted to decorate the set with. They just looked too grim apparently, so somebody took them all out back, made a big pile and set fire to them. And they didn’t actually burn away as they thought they would. The person was delirious and probably thought they’d just disappear, but apparently they just smouldered and all this smoke from the dead dogs was coming into the set. And you can see that in the movie - that is a very intense scene in the film and the story behind it is just very fitting.

“Then we just go into the distribution thing; major hassles they had with distribution. After cutting a good deal in the first place, it turned out that a less than reputable company did the distribution, and it was a whole mess. It was made for $120,000 I think but it must have made $100 million worldwide, according to Bob Burns the art director, and nobody saw any of that because the distributors ran away with it unfortunately.

“And then we go into the sequels as well. We do bits on Chainsaw 2 - we’ve got some behind-the-scenes footage of Chainsaw 2. Chainsaw 3 - Jeff Burr. All these films sound like they were just as nightmarish getting to the screen as the first one. Bit of a cursed title. We did Part 4 as well; we got Kim Henkel and Bob Keen talking about that. We talked about Renee Zellwegger and Matthew McConnaughy and we’ve got some behind-the-scenes footage of that. It’s funny to watch Renee and Matthew just doing their thing when they were in the little movie, and now of course they’re huge stars."

With it being nearly 30 years ago, did people still remember it clearly?
DG: "I was amazed how well people did remember it. But of course, nobody was particularly old when they were making it, because they were all just out of film school, they were all students. So people remembered it pretty vividly. Ted Nicolaou, who now directs the Subspecies movies, he was the unit sound recordist and he just remembered everything. He was amazing.”

JS: "There was a little bit - not much - but a little bit of that quote from Shakespeare: ‘Old men remember with advantage.’ We’ve got a sequence where people are talking about this 26-hour shoot and it goes: ‘24 hours...’, ‘28 hours...’, ‘32 hours...’! Wayne Bell said, ‘I’m sure Tobe’s got it up to 42 by now.’ But it was amazing the clarity that people were remembering. There were one or two pieces that we didn’t put in for various reasons, but for the 75-minute documentary that it is, it doesn’t leave anything out as such. It’s quite in-depth and everybody seems to remember quite a lot."

Were you able to dig up any startling new information?
DG: "The problem with Chainsaw in my experience is that there haven’t been many interviews with all the people together. They’ve been very few and far between. Ed Neal’s done a fair bit of talking about it. Gunnar of course now goes on tour and talks about it. But to actually have all the different sides of the same story going on, where you can cut inbetween the way people remember it. I think a lot of the stuff we got on the 26-hour shoot, a lot of that’s quite new, the amount of detail it goes into. And of course all the stuff about the distribution. It’s quite famous that the film had troubled distribution but I think everyone going into what happened to the finances and what went on, that’s all fascinating stuff."

Do you have oversees distribution for the film?
DG: "We don’t have any oversees distribution for it at the moment. We’re going to see how well it does in the UK. At the moment there’s been a lot of interest in it, particularly as the film itself has just come out on retail video for the first time ever - and on DVD. So there’s a lot of coverage on this film at the moment; it’s having a real revival over here. It is a film that’s unlike any other. We were trying to think, if we did a follow-up to this, what other film could we possibly do that has such a following and there really aren’t that many films. They’ve done The Exorcist, they’ve done Night of the Living Dead, they’ve done Dawn of the Dead. If you look at websites devoted to Chainsaw, there are so many. And of course everybody knows Texas Chainsaw Massacre by title, even if they haven’t seen the film. So hopefully there will be potential for it to be distributed elsewhere as well."

When did you start planning this?
DG: "It was when it was re-released theatrically. We did the interview with Gunnar last year, with a view to doing something Chainsaw-related; we didn’t know what at the time. As we started doing a bit of research on it and realised that everybody was basically contactable and based in either Austin or Los Angeles, we thought we could do a nice little guerrilla shoot, where three of us fly over there with a video camera and a Bolex and just roadtrip around and meet up with everybody and talk to them.”

JS: "Ironically, we actually had film stock for the cine camera that was as old as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The sum result is that it actually looks like it has the spirit of the film. To think what we shot, I’m really pleased that we took the cine camera because it really makes the whole thing look a lot better.”

DG: "It’s not overbearing in the programme but it’s nice to have those general shots of Texas and cattle and the armadillo obviously and things like that. It really adds to the feel of the programme.”

interview originally posted 3rd August 2006

↧

interview: Caroline Greville-Morris

August 10, 2013, 1:05 pm

≫ Next: interview: Al and Jean Guest

≪ Previous: interview: David Gregory and Jake Shaw

Caroline Greville-Morris was production designer on Mutant Chronicles and I had a very enjoyable talk with her when I visited the set in June 2006.

I imagine for a production designer this is either a dream or a nightmare.
"It’s a dream, of course, To create an entire future that has never been seen before - it’s a dream come true."

Are you using any existing designs from the game or are you starting from scratch?
"No, I started as a game virgin. I didn’t know anything about the game. So I’ve come to it completely free-minded and with a list of things not to look at from Simon the director, films not to see. Influences that he didn’t want to see in it - which I won’t mention. His line of inspiration was: ‘We’re looking backwards to look forwards. we’re basing our future on a past.’ The first thing he told me was that the war was going to be reminiscent of the First World War, that was a look he liked. There was trench warfare, great big, super giant ‘Big Bertha’ sort of guns. So it was working back like that, thinking of a world where everything’s made of steel, everything’s run by coal. It’s filthy, it’s not electric, it’s gas-powered. That determines what the buildings look like, which are here on the wall.

“The buildings, the city, the vehicles, the flying vehicles, the kind of tank-esque crawlers: they all come from that, from this sort of premise. And I think costume also and props, the way the guns work, all comes from that. They were about the second thing I designed, as they were what the actors were interacting with from the minute we see them, they’ve got these guns. And guns are so iconic: the way you hold your gun and carry it and fire it. It says a lot about you; an extension of your personal style. The way Clint Eastwood holds his gun is obviously very different from how somebody else would. I was inspired by how guitarists hold their guitars. I was looking at footage of Johnny Cash with his guitar upside-down on his back, thinking of how unique a silhouette that makes, compared with someone like Paul McCartney or Oasis or whoever who hold their guitars very straight to their bodies and don’t move it around or sling it around. So thinking about how various different characters in the film would hold and play with and manipulate their gun.

“And their guns are big, ugly, steam-powered: some of them have got like a motorbike kickstart on them and carbon pellets to fire them up. So that was the next thing I designed, and once the guns were there, the vehicles need to look a bit like the guns, the transit system in the city needed to look like the vehicles, and it sort of grew from that. It was quite an organic process really - but at a thousand miles an hour because we had a very short run-up time."

How did you get the gig on this film?
"How did I get the gig? I killed the previous person who was working on it. I got a call, went to a meeting. I think it was very brave of this production to hire a woman to do this job. When I first went for the meeting, I came away thinking: ‘That was a really good meeting. It felt really good. I really liked them. They were full of ideas.’ I read the script and brought a few photo references and stuff, but I said, ‘I think they’d be very brave to hire me to do it and not some burly geezer with a background of games and sci-fi.’ But they didn’t. I think I was brought in to give a kind of odd, sideways look at this genre."

Have you had complete freedom or were there sketches from concept artists?
"Oh, I had the concept artists killed as well. Concept artists had been at work for a long time when I came on board, but we pretty much started from scratch. I had seen where they were coming from. It was all slightly derivative. Pretty much everything - except maybe the uniforms - we started from scratch. I went right back to the source and instead of looking at weapons, I looked at steam engines and I looked at car engines and I looked at objects inside museums, rather than looking at intermediate things like weapons that already existed and trying to make them look more futuristic or make them look more steampunky.

“I do love a bit of research and a bit of digging about. We‘ve been inspired by some of the oddest things; I can’t think what right now. The walls are covered in bits of train and that there is the diesel engine of the Titanic, upside-down. You find a picture and you’re not sure what it is but ‘we love it!’ and you turn it upside-down or blow it up or use half of it. Or the inside of a hair-dryer or whatever."

Were you constrained by the practicalities of actually building these things?
"I tried not to be. The fact that quite a lot of what we’re designing is either extended or fully created in CG gave me really bonkers free rein. We’re building quite a lot of the big set pieces, we’re building little sections of the set. The Corporate Council Room for instance is a hundred-foot high room with a domed roof and a bonkers painting on it and self-opening windows - and it can be anything I want because that's a CG extension. So I only had to build a little section that the actors are closely up against, and then working closely with the post guys, designing the rest of it. So there haven’t really been those kind of constraints. It’s always worth starting something by saying, ‘If I had all the money in the world, what would I do?’ Rather than thinking, ‘I’ve got ten pence. What mustn’t I do?’"

Are you building things from scratch or are you modifying found objects?
"Building everything from scratch, from junk that we’ve found, from bits of old aircraft. That’s been the most fun really."

What has been the biggest challenge?
"Doing it for the money! Time - we’ve had only eight weeks’ prep to do this. It focuses your mind like you wouldn’t believe. We’ve all been living, breathing, sleeping, dreaming about these things. It’s quite inspiring; you can’t dawdle about, you have to make those 400 decisions a day. Yes, I think time has been the biggest challenge."

Is there anything you’ve designed where you’ve thought: I want a small one of those on my desk? Anything that looks marketable?
"Well, when the guys from the game company came in, they went bonkers looking at the things on the wall and squealing with delight. Some of the vehicle designs, they instantly went: ‘Oh my God, it’s a toy!’ The crawler, the six-wheeled tank. The minute they said that, I thought, ‘Actually yes, that could be. I wouldn’t mind a six-wheeled tank on my desk.’ Or the vertical take-off steam spaceship transporter, which looks slightly Zeppelin-like and rather funky, that would be a thing. I think the first couple of guns that came out of the model shop, we thought, ‘Ooh, that is actually quite fun. That would be rather nice in plastic.’ So yes, it’s all boys’ toys really."

Before this you did a few other SF and fantasy things like Spirit Trap.
"Spirit Trap was a ghost story in beautiful Romania. That was more of a suspense thing, all very physical, the atmosphere was the scary thing in that. And Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with John Hannah. Which was quite odd. His Jekyll was better than his Hyde! But again, because we were in Lithuania doing it, I couldn’t recreate Victorian Scotland at all with what was there.

“I went to production with my set decorator and said, ‘We’ve got this mad plan. Why don’t we set it in Buenos Aires or Vienna or somewhere in the 1860s because that way we can use all the fantastic stuff that’s there but put it within the context of the story.’ And thank God they said yes okay. So instead of busy wallpaper and Victoriana, little stuffed birds, we’ve gone for murals and friezes and odd Russian furniture of the period. I’ve got quite good at convincing directors to go on some very offbeat tack. Because if it’s a question of having something mediocre but right or something fantabulous but a little unique, then that’s the way to go - for the fantabulous.”

interview originally posted 8th October 2008

↧

interview: Al and Jean Guest

August 10, 2013, 2:41 pm

≫ Next: interview: James Gunn

≪ Previous: interview: Caroline Greville-Morris

Al and Jean Guest, the animation producers behind such popular shows as The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo and Rocket Robin Hood, contacted me in June 2006 after I reviewedBrer Rabbit’s Christmas Carol. They very kindly agreed to answer some questions by e-mail about just a few of their many projects.

How on earth did you come up with the idea to combine the Uncle Remus characters with Charles Dickens?
“We know this seems weird. We had just come off years of writing and producing adaptations of a number of classic books including three Dickens novels and one on the original Joel Chandler Harris' 'Brer Rabbit' stories. For every classic we produced we had to read many more which weren't produced (including War and Peace!). They all still careen around in our heads.”

How and where was Brer Rabbit's Christmas Carol broadcast/distributed? What sort of response did it get?
“The broadcast history was quite convoluted. It was broadcast in most of Europe and Latin America before we were aware of it. It has subsequently found new life as a DVD.”

There are a lot of 50-minute animated adaptations of public domain stories out there. What was the market for this sort of thing like at the time, and what is it like now?
“When we produced the bulk (10 shows) of our ‘classic’ specials (1985-1989) the market was already waning. We produced them in partnership with Don Taffner who had produced 16 others, some years earlier, and had actually created the market. As an aside: interestingly enough, Don had at one time had an inquiry from a US network which was considering producing a version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an American TV series. We advised him on the necessary special effects needed.”

What would you consider to be the distinguishing traits of a Guest/Mathieson animation?
“We have always insisted the physical settings be meticulously researched and artistically reproduced, but beyond a doubt, the writing is our main contribution to the genre. Animation production is a group effort and as with all groups, some are better than others. Money is also a factor. More money, better people, better shows.”

What was the special that you made for/about the band Klaatu?
“The Klaatu special grew out of one of the first music videos ever produced. We made this for their record label about 1975. When Canada opened the tax door to investment, we were able to raise enough money to add to it to make the final half-hour film.”

How did The Hilarious House of Frightenstein come about and what was Vincent Price like?
“The Frightenstein we talk about was animated. This was a commissioned series and we lost track of it. We did some writing for it (particularly the Librarian segments), produced the titles, credits and animated inserts for the live action series. We put the producer in touch with Forry Ackerman, his agent, but we never met Vincent Price. He came in for several days, shot his stuff and left.”

Wikipedia mentions a couple of things of which I can find no mention elsewhere: an animation called Mighty Bigfoot and a live-action horror film called House of Darkness. What are/were these?
“Mighty Bigfoot was commissioned by PM Productions as a follow up to their live action feature, Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter. We delivered it several years ago, but have heard nothing of it since. House of Darkness has been retitled The Vessel and is stuck in post until the producer can raise some additional funds.”

How much of your vast output of shows, commercials, specials etc do you have copies of? Do you maintain records on everything that you have done?
“We have copies of some stuff, less than half of what we produced. Although we've kept a record of the shows we produced, we have few records and few copies of our commercials, other than a number of awards on our wall.”

What projects are you currently working on?
“We have an updated Captain Nemo series, titled Nemo 3000, in presentation form making the rounds, and in development a pre-school television series for which we have a pilot commitment. Al is writing a supernatural-themed book, and Jean, in addition to working on our productions, is working as the Controller for a video games company in which our daughter is partnered.”

Is there a dream project that you have never got round to doing?
“Our dream project is any one that has enough money and time to give it our best shot. This has never happened in our careers. Maybe, one day...”

interview originally posted 6th July 2006

↧

interview: James Gunn

August 22, 2013, 12:48 pm

≫ Next: Exhumed

≪ Previous: interview: Al and Jean Guest

I interviewed screenwriter James Gunn way back in April 2000, when he was working on the script for the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie. Since then, he has of course written not only the sequel to that but also the remake of Dawn of the Dead, which I thought was great and which, brilliantly, was released at exactly the same time as Scooby-Doo 2! James, who started out by co-writing Tromeo and Juliet with and for Lloyd Kaufman, made his directorial debut in 2006 with Slither. (There is a science fiction author named James Gunn - but that's another fellow.)

Is it true that you are currently working on a live-action Scooby-Doo film?
“I am indeed writing Scooby-Doo. I just finished the first draft, and it has been an absolute blast. It has just been put into fast track over at Warner Bros, and we're looking for a director.”

Is your script based on an earlier story or outline, or is it all your own work?
“It's all my own work. Warner Bros and the producer, Chuck Rovin, have been great in letting me go nuts. It's a twenty-four hour Scooby-Doo party over here, and I'm sloshed on Scooby Snacks.”

Is Mike Myers still attached to the project in any way?
“Not currently, though he's at this point still Warners' leading choice to play Shaggy.”

According to current internet scuttlebutt, the film may involve the anachronism of the gang still being like they've always been despite the world having changed over the past 30 years (very much like The Brady Bunch Movie). Sounds a great idea to me: any comments on this?
“No, we're not really doing this. The Brady Bunch Movie did it just fine. But it would be difficult to argue that Fred doesn't have some problem with style, considering his ascot and all. (Actually, though, the other day I bought a pair of boot-cut powder blue slacks that look exactly like Fred's. Not to be too much of an egomaniac or anything, but they make my ass look fine. That's why Fred gets the chicks.)”

Recent Scooby-Doo DTV features have been well-received because they've had a certain knowing post-modern attitude (Christ, that sounds pretentious!). Will the movie go the same way (ie. based on people's memories of the show, not just aimed at kids)?
“Absolutely. The movie is aimed equally at thirty-five year olds as well as five year olds. I'm a huge fan of Scooby-Doo, and I'm committed to turning every convention of the show in upon itself.”

Has it been determined yet how Scooby himself will be portrayed: CGI, animatronics or a combination of the two?
“No comment!”

Does the film involve any of the ghosts/monsters from the original series?
“I will say that many of our old favourites will receive their short, tender moment in the sun.”

Does Scrappy Doo appear? (Hint: a lot of folks will be really happy if the answer is "no" or "yes but he gets killed off really quickly".)
“I'm firmly in the anti-Scrappy camp myself, and I promise not to let anyone down. However, I don't know if Warner Bros will let me retain the scene where I personally strangle him to death. Whatever the case, the little son-of-a-bitch's future is not bright.”

Obviously the film hasn't been cast yet, but do you have any personal ideas, from the current crop of hot stars and starlets, as to who should play Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy?
“I know I'm alone on this, but I'd like Buddy Hackett to play every role. Either that or Craig T. Nelson - you know, ‘Coach.’ I hear he does an excellent Daphne. Oh, and if Benny Hill were still alive...! Seriously, though, I think a lot of actors would be great for the roles, but that's another thing I can't really say at the present moment...”

This is actually quite a serious one (though it doesn't sound it): how have you managed to keep any tension in the story when everyone knows it's really Old Man Smithers from the amusement park?
“Who said it's Old Man Smithers? This is a movie, not a twenty-two minute show, and the stakes have been upped accordingly. Our gang is going to have to save the world, or die trying. It's serious, man. It's deadly, deadly serious. Shaggy will be lucky not to get his face ripped off.”

In a best case scenario, when do you think this film could hit our screens?
“Being a moron, it'd be difficult for me to have my guess mean anything more than anyone else's. Next year. And, yes, because I may very well get my ass kicked for the above answers, there are other projects I'd like to publicise:

“My first novel, entitled The Toy Collector is being released here in the States May 22 by Bloomsbury Publishing. It concerns a drunken young fellow named James Gunn who works in a Hell's Kitchen hospital, where he steals pharmaceuticals and sells them to finance his toy collection habit. This is intercut with fantasy sequences from his childhood that are, more than anything else, like a sex and violence version of Toy Story. Strangely, there are a few Scooby-Doo references in the book, which was written long before I was hired to write Scooby.

“Also, I have a film being released in the States next September entitled The Specials. It stars myself, Rob Lowe, Jamie Kennedy from the Scream movies, and my brother Sean, and it was written by me. It's the story of a group of superheroes on their day off - we focus not at all on bashing supervillains, but instead on the interpersonal relations between the group members. If you asked me to describe it with one hyphenated word I'd say ‘laff-riot.’ I play Minute Man (pronounced ‘My-noot’) who is able to turn small, and I'm insecure because my superpower kind of sucks.

“In addition, we're also finishing up Spy vs Spy for Warner Bros and director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers movies).”

website: www.jamesgunn.com
interview originally posted 19th March 2006

[NB. Although Spy vs Spy never appeared, The Specials is one of my favourite films and highly recommended. - MJS]

↧

Exhumed

August 22, 2013, 1:06 pm

≫ Next: interview: Paul Gunson

≪ Previous: interview: James Gunn

Director: Richard Griffin
Writer: Guy Benoit
Producers: Kristin Kayala, Ted Marr
Cast: Debbie Rochon, Michael Thurber, Sara Nicklin
Country: USA
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: DVD (Wild Eye Releasing)
Website: https://en-gb.facebook.com/ExhumedTheMovie

I enjoyed Exhumed a lot, and I think you will too. It’s an intriguing, engrossing character study of a dysfunctional ‘family’ finally collapsing. It reminded me a little bit of The Addams Family (but without the comedy), a little bit of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (but without the songs or the fishnets) and a little bit of one of my favourite novels of all time, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Not that it closely resembles any of these (especially not Rocky Horror!) but if you were to plot those three stories on some sort of graph (Christ knows what the x and y axes would be...), somewhere within the resulting triangle is Exhumed.

None of the preceding paragraph was very helpful, was it? Let’s start again.

The household in Exhumed isn’t strictly a family but they act as a pastiche of a family unit, with the matriarchal role taken by Debbie Rochon as an unnamed character credited as ‘The Governess’. I have commented before on how Rochon, though she is best known for her many roles in Troma (and sub-Troma) silliness, is actually a fine actress when given the right part. And here she has been given the right part.

The very lack of background information on the Governess, and indeed the other characters, allows Rochon and her fellow cast members to imbue these performances with layers of subtlety that might not be available within a more prescriptive scenario. Rochon rises to this challenge and delivers one of the finest performances of her career, The Governess is manipulative, authoritative, even cruel, but convinced that what she is doing is right for the group.

Alongside (or opposite) her is a character credited as (and indeed, dressed as) ‘The Butler’, played by tall, bald Michael Thurber (Murder University). He also is working to keep the group together but in a calmer, more sedate way. Don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s ‘normal’ however: normal people don’t keep shop dummy facsimiles of their housemates in the basement.

Sarah Nicklin (Zombie Allegiance, The Black Dahlia Haunting) is Laura, a virgin who has never known any life outside of this little commune since her parents died when she was very small. Her attempts to understand and reach out to whatever is outside start a process which will eventually lead to this small, curious world collapsing. The Governess and the Butler act in loco parentis to Laura while the other two inhabitants are more like lodgers: good-time girl Rocki (Evalena Marie: Remains, Beg) want to help Laura find a man; fat slob Lance (Rich Tretheway: Erebus) seems to have little interest in anything.

All five housemates sit down for dinner together, a take-away received without letting the delivery guy see anyone. The whole household shuns the light, keeping curtains drawn, although we do see an early scene where the Governess, the Butler and Laura venture out in daylight, swathed in coats and sunglasses.

A sixth member of the household has died, or possibly run away, so a room becomes vacant. The new tenant is good-looking college kid Chris (Michael Reed: VAmL), a normal guy who becomes the object of Laura’s verge-of-maturity teen-crush attentions, much to the Governess’ displeasure. Once Chris enters the house, the die is cast. Something will happen. And it does.

But this is not a film about stuff happening, it’s about the people that it happens to, and the relationships between those people. And for those of you wondering well, is it a horror movie, yes, it’s a horror movie. And it does get quite nasty near the end but that’s not the point. The point is the people that it gets nasty to and around, and the relationships between those people which lead inexorably, step by step, towards that nasty situation. That’s the horror, right there, not the limited amount of blood. And no, nobody gets exhumed. It’s a metaphor.

Several of the actors have worked together before and since on various productions including some directed by Richard Griffin who helms Exhumed with a subtle, sympathetic and stylish hand from a finely crafted script by Guy Benoit. Which comes as a surprise if you check the filmographies of these two guys’ because their previous movies were called things like Atomic Brain Invasion, The Disco Exorcist and Frankenstein in a Women’s Prison. Griffin’s latest movie, according to the IMDB, is Dr Frankenstein’s Wax Museum of the Hungry Dead of which the user comment “Jesus Franco would be proud” tells us, I think, all we need to know. Benoit (who in his early days helped to shift things on the sets of Danny Draven’s films Deathbed and Hell Asylum) has recently written The Last Halloween for Christopher L Ferreira, an actor who was in several Griffin pictures.

It is clear from Exhumed that Griffin is capable, like Rochon, of handling both serious, character-based horror and OTT hoopla (he previously directed Debs in Splatter Disco and Nun of That). On this film he was greatly assisted by the terrific monochrome cinematography of Ken Willinger, who has DP-ed a lot of documentaries and been a camera operator on a range of TV stuff including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. There are a few brief colour flashbacks and it becomes evident when the credits roll that these relate to a time when the ‘cult’ was larger and more established.

Thing is, up to then I hadn’t really thought of this household as a cult, or even the remnants of a cult. It had crossed my mind, but there’s no evidence of worship or ritual or belief. I can let this go. The film works equally well whether you view the pseudo-family as the last remnants of a depleted cult or just a bunch of agoraphobic weirdos.

Thought-provoking, imaginative and original, Exhumed is a terrific film and I was really glad to get a chance to watch it.

Not to be confused with Brian Clement’s 2005 zombie anthology Exhumed.

MJS rating: A-

↧

interview: Paul Gunson

August 23, 2013, 11:08 am

≫ Next: interview: Amanda Gusack

≪ Previous: Exhumed

Animator Paul Gunson contacted me when he spotted my review of the little known British animated feature filmBeauty and the Beastproduced by a company called Bevanfield. In February 2007, Paul very kindly responded to some e-mailed questions about his work on that film and other shows. He also found some character designs from Beauty and the Beast which he has very kindly allowed me to include here.

What sort of company was Bevanfield, from a business point of view and as somewhere to work?
“Bevanfield was, to say the least, an interesting place to work. I think that the best thing about it was the opportunity it gave every member of staff to try their hand at different things. Secretaries would become writers or producers of different projects, and people such as I would do everything graphic wise. The drawback to this is that there were no permanent senior members of staff to learn from, no-one with greater experience, so it was hard to gain good habits. This situation carried on for the life of the company.

“In addition, in the time when projects were shot onto film, no rushes were ever viewed before the final print was made, so errors crept through, unseen until the final product. In the case of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, the animation was post-synched, that is the mouth movements were ‘guessed’ by the director and the actors came in later, trying their best to match up.

“Several of the better character designs didn’t get through for various reasons. In one case, I found out that my design for the main villain in Beauty and the Beast bore more than a passing resemblance to our financier. The designs didn’t come out as well as we’d hoped. This was partly due to the vast range of abilities our outside animators had, the lack of line testing, and indeed our own inexperience. We aimed for Disney, but got King of the Hill instead!

“Budgets were tight, and in a way, this was a self perpetuating problem. Because there was no line tester, the quality and consistency of the animation would not be good. This in turn lead to Bevanfield getting projects with lower and lower budgets.

“After a couple of years, Bevanfield acquired computers, and slimmed down their staff. Drawn animation was still mostly done on the outside, and line tested only when traced onto the computers by hand. The computers helped a great deal as far as the quality of the image and the timing of the animation, although the actual quality of the drawing and lack of in-betweens couldn’t be improved without further members of staff.

“In the mid-’90s, Bevanfield undertook several adaptations of children’s books such as The Owl and the Pussycat and Handa’s Surprise for the BBC. These were very successful, because the animation was simple and so a lot of care could be taken replicating the water colour illustrations. They also made a wonderful infomercial about fire safety for the COI called Moonlighters about two aliens who find a human lighter and burn down their Moon city. We had a terrific animator called Peter Dodd, who put everything into his work, and as a result the finished product was excellent.

“As mentioned earlier, good employers were hard to find. Bevanfield had a good relationship with the BBC for quite a while, and two series were done while I was there. The big problem seemed to be that the lack of money spent on the series meant a huge amount of animation re-use. This was especially jarring when different animators’ work was inter-cut, and often the very good work in an episode was overshadowed by it.

“There were always plenty of bad employers - people who appeared when work was in short supply. They had never been involved in animation before and rarely paid on time. Towards the end, Bevanfield were forced to sell off the rights to previous animation to make good on the gap caused when payment was not made. These were the kinds of people who wanted to make cheap Disney knock-offs to coincide with their film releases, and ultimately they were the death of the company. “

Where/how did these films ever get released or shown? Did anybody ever watch them?
“None of the animation was intended for theatrical release, and I don’t know if anyone really thought of the feature length productions as anything other than a means to make a quick buck. I’ve seen them in pound shops and being given away free with the Daily Mail.

“Tim Forder directed two live action features, both of which had limited cinematic releases. The Mystery of Edwin Drood actually got a Royal Premiere, with Princess Anne turning up.”

What was The Magic Seven and why has it never been completed?
“The Magic Seven was an animated project, book-ended with live action, and had big ambitions to be a real force for change in the world. Many top name actors of the early ‘90s affiliated themselves with it.

“The focus of the story was the damage that humans are doing to the planet, and followed the story of Sean, an environmentally unconcerned teenager who gets sucked into a fantasy world. Here he met the Dreaded Deadlies, the personifications of six bad forms of behaviour: littering, wasting electricity, carbon pollution, not recycling, death through disease and weaponry.

“The voice cast was wonderful, but sadly the live action which had been completed years earlier was not well shot, and the script left a lot to be desired. Amazingly, actors such as Michael J Fox and Demi Moore were made to sport ridiculous accents so it was impossible to recognise them.

“We were still determined to do our best with the project, but shortage of staff and ultimately lack of payment caused the project, and our company to bite the dust.”

What is your own background in animation?
“I studied animation at Newport Film School, then spent the best part of a year at Dave Edwards Studio in Cardiff before moving to London. I boarded much of Crapston Villas for Spitting Image and one of Loose Moose’s award winning Pepsi commercials. In addition I’ve worked a lot doing concept drawings for quiz shows. Mostly I’ve been working as a storyboard artist, with occasional design jobs.”

What was Tiny Planets like to work on?[Tiny Planets was TF Simpson's favourite show when he was a baby - MJS]
“I worked on it through a recruitment agency, which took a huge chunk of my pay-cheque, so financially it was a bit of a disaster for me! Each board was supposed to take a week to do, although not one of the boarders I spoke with said they managed to get it done during that time. There were many brilliant people working there, in the pre-production department I worked in, and the animation side of things. Some went on to work for Pixar and ILM.

“In talks with some colleagues, I was told that Bing’s mouthless look was a little controversial. He originally had a mouth, but it was decided that he looked better without, although it caused many problems as far as storytelling. An extra character, Halley was added two thirds through the series to make the whole thing more understandable.

“The management side of it reminded me of Bevanfield at times. There was a sense of quite a lot of time and money being used for baffling reasons, and the marketing never really took off. After Tiny Planets, the company essentially stopped working and never crewed up fully again.”

What are you working on now/recently?
“In the last five years, I worked as the in-house storyboarder of Tiny Planets and as storyboard supervisor on the BBC show Gordon the Garden Gnome. I was also one of the layout artists on Yoko! Jakamoko! Toto! and The Secret Show. From August to November last year, I designed illustrations and storyboards for an animated presentation by the chef Heston Blumenthal.”

interview originally posted 4th February 2007

↧

interview: Amanda Gusack

August 23, 2013, 11:15 am

≫ Next: Halloween: 25 Years of Terror

≪ Previous: interview: Paul Gunson

Amanda Gusack directed the extraordinarily effective and spookyIn Memoriumand kindly agreed to a short e-mail interview in September 2006.

What was the initial spark of inspiration for In Memorium and how close is the finished film to what you initially envisaged?
“The initial spark came after I bought my house. I looked around and realised I could write a horror film to shoot inside. As far as I remember, the film is pretty close to what I’d envisioned. Then again, sometimes my memories are clouded by wishful thinking and a heavy lunch.”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of shooting a film in your own home?
“The advantages are that it’s cheaper and that you don’t have to drive anywhere in the morning. The disadvantages are that your house-mates lose sleep and your bedroom becomes a common area for electrical equipment.”

How did you select your cast and crew?
“We put ads on mandy.com and craigslist. I interviewed the creative keys and the producers interviewed the schedulers/organisers. We called every reference we were given and ended up with the most dedicated and talented group of people I could have asked for.”

In a ghost story like this where we hardly see anything, how do you judge the fine balance between letting the audience see that something is there and showing them too much which might spoil the effect?
“I generally believe that less is more, because when you’re subtler with visual elements, the audience fills in the blanks with their own fears. To me, that’s so much creepier and more potent than anything I could’ve put on film.”

What has the response to the film been like so far?
“Happily, people have been really unnerved by it.”

What other projects do you have lined up?
“I just finished writing a thriller that I’m really excited about. I can’t say too much now, but I’ll let you know more when it’s finished.”

interview originally posted 4th September 2006

↧

Halloween: 25 Years of Terror

August 24, 2013, 10:55 am

≫ Next: The Hand

≪ Previous: interview: Amanda Gusack

Director: Stefan Hutchinson
Writers: Stefan Hutchinson, Sean Clark, Anthony Masi
Producers: Stefan Hutchinson, Anthony Masi
Cast: almost everyone who has ever worked on a Halloween film
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK DVD screener (Starz/Anchor Bay)

There have been plenty of horror movie documentaries over the years - especially since the advent of DVD - but they often fall into one of two traps. There are those, such as David Gregory’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth, which pull no punches in revealing the truth about what went on behind the scenes but must, by virtue of their unofficial status, illustrate their points with non-copyright images such as trailers and press stills. And then there are official documentaries which, though they have all the clips they want, skim over some of the more controversial aspects of film-making.

Halloween: 25 Years of Terror successfully ploughs a middle furrow between these two subgenres. Executive produced by Malek Akkad, son of Moustapha Akkad, there is no shortage of clips and access to pretty much all the relevant cast and crew, with only a few notable exceptions. But at the same time the film does not shy away from controversy, especially regarding the tortured production of the aptly named Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers - even to the extent of including dodgy nth generation bootleg clips from the unreleased (but widely available on eBay) ‘producer’s cut’ of that film.

While ‘25 Years of Terror’ is a great subtitle it’s somewhat inaccurate as the eight films were produced over a period of 23 years and this documentary feature was released five years after Halloween: Resurrection, ie. 28 years after the first film. The ‘twenty five’ bit comes from a silver anniversary convention in 2003 where much of this material was filmed, either as single interviews to camera or as group discussions on stage. This was a fan-run but officially sanctioned event with an amazingly comprehensive roster of guests.

It should be stressed that, although this documentary was released in the UK in October 2007 to coincide with Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween, that film was too far away from the 2003 convention to be discussed here. The only mention - and strictly speaking it’s the putative Halloween IX they’re talking about - is when one convention member wins a chance to appear in the film (I understand that she did have a scene in Zombie’s film but it was cut). Zombie appears several times in the documentary but only as a celebrity fan, a status also accorded to Clive Barker and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright.

I have only ever seen Halloweens I, III and VII so I found this a helpful reminder of those films and an interesting and informative introduction to the other five. I’m sure it won’t tell the hardcore fans anything they don’t already know, but it is certainly aimed at horror fans rather than just casual browsers. The narration, read by PJ Soles, seems pitched at those, like me, who know something of the films but are not experts. (And yes, if you’re wondering, the Michael Myers-free third film does get more than a passing mention.)

Obviously, scooting through eight motion pictures in 83 minutes means that each gets only a few minutes of screen time. Similarly, the number of people interviewed means that many only get one or two brief comments. John Carpenter and Debra Hill crop up briefly but that must be existing footage from elsewhere. Jamie Lee Curtis is nowhere to be seen, not unexpectedly, but a brief clip of Donald Pleasence interviewed on the set of Halloween 5 is a nice surprise. Most of the directors are interviewed but Steve Miner (Halloween H20) and Joe Chappelle (Halloween VI) are notable by their absence. Producer Akkad, who died in 2005, appears several times, both on stage at the convention and interviewed in his office. As the one linking factor between all eight films and the main driving force between the franchise, this seems only fair. He has some good stories to tell too.

So much for the pros, what about the fans? The footage of the convention itself, I must say, is truly scary, much more frightening than a bloke in a boiler suit and a William Shatner mask. Maybe they only filmed the more extreme fans. I hope so because the ones in this documentary are just terrifyingly weird and disturbing fanboys (and fangirls). There’s the the one who seems to value the films for their level of violence and nothing else, there are several with Halloween tattoos and there are the ones who submitted short videos of themselves to the ‘Win a role in Halloween IX’ competition. These are the scariest of all, especially the overweight white woman rapping about how she’s the biggest Halloween fan in the world. Run, run for the hills! These people have the vote and the right to bear arms!

The young lady who played the little girl (Laurie Strode’s niece) in the middle part of the film series explains how she has been stalked and she is worried that the loony might approach her at a convention. And you just find yourself thinking: gee, how would you pick him out from the crowd? Oh, these are scary, scary people. I’ll never criticise Trekkies again.

So anyway, on the whole Halloween: 25 Years of Terror is a decent documentary. But don’t you sometimes find, when you watch something like this, that it’s frustrating seeing only 45 seconds of an interview knowing that the whole thing probably lasts 20-30 minutes? Well, Halloween 25YOT comes as a two-disc package which partially alleviates that problem by including extended versions of interviews and convention panels.

I originally reviewed this film for Death Ray magazine but was only able to give a very, very brief rundown of the extras because of the available wordcount. As there seemed to be nowhere on the web actually listing the contents in detail, here’s an expanded version of what would have been in Death Ray if I had twice the space.

‘Horror’s Hallowed Grounds’ (18m) is a Horror Channel show visiting locations from the first film, with PJ Soles and relevant clips from the movie. ‘Halloween Interviews’ (36m, listed on the menu as ‘Extended celebrity interviews’) and ‘Halloween 2& 3 Interviews’ (24m) are full versions of interviews extracted in the feature but were not available on the review disc which had an authoring error. However I am indebted to ‘Red Gargon’, a poster on the Classic Horror Film Board, who provided me with the basis of the following.

‘Halloween extended interviews’ includes: Charles Cyphers (Sheriff Brackett in H1/H2), PJ Soles (Lynda in H1), Dick Warlock (stunt co-ordinator on H2/H3, Michael Myers in H2), Alan Howarth (composer on H2-5), John Carl Buechler (make up effects on H4/H6), Greg Nicotero (special effects on H5), Brian Andrews (Tommy Doyle in H1/H2), Nicholas Grabowsky (writer of H4 novelisation), Larry Brand (writer of H8), Rick Rosenthal (director of H2/H8), Kathleen Kinmont (Kelly Meeker in H4), Danielle Harris (Jamie Lloyd in H4/H5), John Ottman (composer on H7), Moustapha Akkad (executive producer of H1-8), Sasha Jenson (Brady in H4), Bianca Kajlich (Sara Moyer in H8), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe (Sarah Wainthrope in H7), Chris Durand (Michael Myers in H7), Dean Cundey (cinematographer on H1-3), Don Shanks (Michael Myers in H5), Ellie Cornell (Rachel Carruthers in H4/H5), JC Brandy (Jamie Lloyd in H6), Nancy Loomis (Annie Brackett in H1/H2, Linda Challis in H3) and Thomas Ian Nicholas (Bill Woodlake in H8). That works out an average of just under 90 seconds per person so these ‘extended interviews’ are probably not extended very far.

‘Halloween II extended interviews’ includes: Gloria Gifford (Mrs Alves), Pamela Susan Shoop (Karen Bailey), Tawny Moyer (Nurse Franco), Rick Rosenthal (director), Tommy Lee Wallace (initially approached to direct) and Dick Warlock (shown and credited but not actually interviewed in this segment). ‘Halloween III extended interviews’ includes: Brad Schacter (Little Buddy Kupfer), Tom Atkins (Dan Challis), Garn Stephens (Marge Guttman) and Tommy Lee Wallace (director).

‘Halloween 5 on-set footage’ (7m) is a montage of un-narrated behind-the-scenes clips plus ultra-brief interviews with Wendy Kaplan (Tina Williams) and Donald Pleasence. This is a different clip from the Pleasence interview in the main documentary, frustratingly suggesting that a longer interview exists somewhere. ‘Halloween Returns to Haddonfield - 25th Anniversary Convention’ (4m) is a montage of scary fans and brave guests, while ‘The Fans of Halloween’ (10m) is described as “collections of props and memorabillia” (sic) but is actually a montage of clips from fan videos submitted to the win-a-role-in-Halloween-9 contest. As mentioned, some of these are scary (oh, that rapping white chick!) and some are sad but a few show genuine creativity including some stop-motion animations and a Reduced Shakespeare Company-style run through all eight films in two minutes by two actors.

The second disc in this two-disc package has seven panel discussions from the 2003 convention. The fanboy questions are typically bland, even asinine on occasions, and mostly consist of, “What was so-and-so like to work with?” and “Can you say such-and-such a line?” but despite this there are a few good stories in the answers. However, this is all appallingly amateur-looking footage which suffers from being shot single-camera, so that speakers are sometimes off-screen (and people occasionally walk through the shot). Considering how much was obviously spent on the con, on getting all the guests there and printing up banners and suchlike, it’s a real shame nobody thought to spring for a professional video team who could have filmed these with two or three cameras and edited the footage together properly.

The panels are: ‘Halloween’ (23m) with executive producer Joseph Wolf and actors PJ Soles, Charles Cyphers and Brian Andrews; ‘Halloween II’ (24m) with actors Pamela Susan Shoop, Tawny Moyer, Cliff Emmich (Mr Garrett) and Gloria Gifford; ‘Halloween 6’ (19m) with writer Daniel Farrands, producer Paul Freeman and actors Marianne Hagan (Kara Strode), Janice Knickrehm (Mrs Blankenship), Bradford English (John Strode) and Kim Darby (Debra Strode); ‘Michael Myers’ (28m) with stuntmen Jim Wiburn, Dick Warlock, George P Wilbur, Tom Morga, Don Shanks, Chris Durand and Brad Loree, who have all played the lead character; and ‘Halloween Producers’ (??m) with Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans.

There are also solo stage sessions for H4/H5 actress Ellie Cornell (15m) and H1-3 cinematographer Dean Cundey (24m). In addition, the disc has 33 uncaptioned present-day ‘location stills’ from around South Pasadena, 86 uncaptioned photos of guests, props and crowds at the convention and 40 pieces of often frighteningly poor fan art. These last two seem frankly self-indulgent and don’t make up for the lack of a poster/video sleeve gallery.

Now here’s where things get really complicated. Because there are differences between the US and UK releases. The US release includes ‘Halloween IX Contest Drawing’ (3m) which is self-explanatory, self-indulgent and briefly shown in the main film anyway, plus trailers for H1, H4, H5 and John Carpenter’s episode of Masters of Horror. The package also includes a small Halloween comic-book.

In the UK, we don’t have the contest drawing, the trailers or the comic but we do have... Halloween. That’s right, the entire original film is included as an extra on the DVD of a documentary about it and its sequels. That just makes my head spin. This was not on the screener disc so I don’t know what the quality, ratio etc are like but it is apparently the digitally remastered version.

But that’s not all! As well as the standard two-disc version, Anchor Bay UK (or Starz Home Entertainment as they now call themselves) are releasing a four-disc version exclusively through HMV, combining these two discs with two more that seem to feature some or all of the material from the 2001 two-disc release and/or the 2003 single-disc 25th Anniversary Edition. This has the original Halloween with a soundtrack in 2.0, 5.1 or mono (so presumably it doesn’t have the film on the other two discs like the two-disc version). Does anybody ever listen to these things, by the way? “Ooh, I know - tonight I’ll watch Halloween in mono for a change!” I don’t know what screen ratio this version is and we must assume, since its not mentioned in the publicity, that this omits the Carpenter/Hill/Curtis commentary from the 2003 release (originally recorded for a Criterion laserdisc in the early 1990s), making it slightly less ultimate than “the ultimate Halloween companion” that the publicity claims.

Also included is Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest, an 87m documentary produced for the 2003 release (so that’s a feature-length documentary about Halloween included as an extra on a feature-length documentary about Halloween). The only four participants not also featured in Halloween 25YOT are Joseph Wolf (executive producer of H2/H3), Nick Castle (Michael Myers in H1), Fangoria editor Tony Timpone and crucially, Lady Haden-Guest herself. Presumably the others (Carpenter, Hill, Akkad, Cundey, Cyphers, Soles, Wallace and Yablans) get more time to discuss things and for all I know this could be where the Carpenter and Hill interview clips in the other film originate. The film is narrated by Rino Romano who has no connection with Halloween but does voice the lead character in The Batman.

If you still don’t have your fill of Halloween documentaries there is also Halloween Unmasked 2000, a half-hour effort from the 2001 release featuring comments from Carpenter, Hill, Akkad, Yablans, Curtis, Cundey, Soles, Castle, Wolfe, Wallace and Brian Andrews, narrated by Twisted Sister singer/Strangeland director Dee Snider. The publicity I have says that the feature disc of this package will include ‘Trailers, TV Spots, Radio Spots, Talent Bios, Still Galleries and Trivia’ while the documentary disc will have ‘On Location: 25 Years Later’ in which PJ Soles revisit the film’s locations a quarter century later (presumably this is different to ‘Horror’s Hallowed Grounds’ in which, um, PJ Soles revisit the film’s locations a quarter century later) plus ‘Theatrical Trailer, TV Spots, Radio Spots, Poster & Stills Gallery, Talent Bios, DVD-ROM Screenplay and DVD-ROM Screensavers’. Are these the same radio and TV spots and talent bios on both discs? Who knows?

Jesus, will you look at that lot? No wonder I couldn’t fit that all into 350 words for Death Ray! Despite all the above (which I include as a public service because I searched for it and could not find it anywhere), what I’m reviewing here is Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, which is a good, solid, reliable if perforce swift run through all the incarnations (except the latest) of one of the more respected horror franchises (I can’t imagine anyone ever doing this for the Leprechaun films).

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 15th October 2007

↧

The Hand

August 24, 2013, 11:07 am

≫ Next: Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman

≪ Previous: Halloween: 25 Years of Terror

Directors: David Lilley, Stephen Gray
Writer: David Lilley
Producer: David Lilley
Cast: Jenny Yu, Nick Goh
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.loonatikanddrinks.com

This spooky short film from the Loonatik and Drinks team of David Lilley and Stephen Gray is a vignette, a sequence of frights without any real narrative. It looks beautiful, the sound design is terrific and the scares are really scary. What it lacks is an actual story with a beginning, middle and end: this is all effect and no cause. But when something lasts only seven minutes, that’s not as serious a problem as it might be elsewhere.

The Hand falls into the same sub-subgenre as Watch Me and Ghost Month: western films not just influenced by Asian horror but deliberately aping the stylistic touches, all coloured gels, deep shadows and percussion music. In this little treat, a young Japanese couple (played by Chinese actors) retire to bed but the girl can’t sleep. Accosted by visions (of a tunnel and a forest, so far as I can make out without freeze-framing) she is visited twice by a spectral hand. The first visit is a simple physical effect but very spooky, the second is some relatively basic CGI employed in a really disturbing way. I can’t honestly decide which is better. Or worse, if you see what I mean.

And in the morning, she has gone. The hand has got her.

This is a middle, inspired by a nightmare that Dave Lilley’s wife Helen had. Nightmares are scary but, like any dream, they don’t have a narrative structure. A producer once told me that most people who claim to have “a great idea for a movie” actually have a good idea for a scene. And that’s what we have here. Which is not to say that (a) this isn’t a very well-made, genuinely spooky little film and (b) The Hand could not be expanded into a feature, with a good scriptwriter at the helm.

Grant Bridgeman (who has worked with Steven Shiel on various shorts and the superb Mum and Dad) is credited as ‘sound mixer and additional sound recording’ while Daniel J Yeomans was ‘supervising sound editor’. That sounds a complex arrangement for a film with virtually no dialogue and fairly long sequences of silence, but the sparsity of sound effects and music makes their choice and arrangement even more crucial. The original music was provided by Kubilay Uner who also scored the Corbin Bernsen-starring sci-fi feature The Tomorrow Man. Lilley and Gray share directing and editing credits, with Stephen concentrating on ‘photography and visual effects’ while Dave gets the writer and producer gigs.

The screener disc which I received also had two Loonatik and Drinks microshorts: Fate and Mr McKinley, a hilarious spoof silent film which has played more than twenty festivals around the world; and Lucy Spook in The Birthday Wish, a black comedy about an emo girl shot in an effective mixture of black and white and colour which was shortlisted for the Bafta ‘60 Seconds of Fame’ competition. These two are available to view on the L&D website, along with a trailer for The Hand. (A trailer for a seven-minute film? Okay...)

Also on the L&D site you can read about some of their future shorts including: Vespers, a post-apocalyptic tale set in 1850; further outings for Lucy Spook and McKinley; and adaptations of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and Conan Doyle’s ‘The Horror of the Heights’.

I’m a big fan of Loonatik and Drinks. Their films are short, pithy and to-the-point but they’re also magnificently put together, using the absolute best in sound design and some extraordinarily good CGI to create fantastic worlds. I can’t wait to see what they do with Conan Doyle and Poe. Or indeed with anyone or anything.

My only reservation with The Hand is the incompleteness of it, but as an experiment in style and production it’s a resounding success.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 15th December 2007

↧

Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman

August 24, 2013, 12:21 pm

≫ Next: Happiness of the Katakuris

≪ Previous: The Hand

Director: Shohei Tojo
Writer: Bunko Wakatsuki
Producer: Sompot Saengduenchai
Cast: Hanuman, several Ultramen
Year of release: 1974
Country: Japan/Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD (Tiga)

Technically of course that should be Hanuman vs 7 Ultramen but it seems that Thai, like Japanese, does not distinguish between plural and singular. And there’s no concept of ‘vs’ here either. Unlike the previous team-up between Japanese and Thai giant superheroes in Mars Men, there is no element here of ‘fight each other until we realise we should team up to beat our common enemy’. No, Hanuman and the Ultra-brothers are pals from the off. But the most amazing thing about this film is that, well, let’s be honest here - there are only six Ultramen in it. Well, six at any one time anyway.

I love what little I have ever seen of the various incarnations of Ultraman (produced by Tsuburaya Productions, Japan’s greatest special effects house). But as my VCD of this film (obtained from the ever-reliable eThai CD) is in Thai I am indebted to the sorely missed Absolute Ultraman site (AU) for some of the finer details.

We start with a five-minute sequence explaining about the home of the Ultramen - some great Tsuburaya footage of futuristic city miniatures though presumably stock shots from one of the previous Ultraman films or TV series. Then we get a rollicking title sequence which is all footage from the movie’s climactic fight, but don’t worry about ‘spoilers’. It’s Hanuman and some Ultramen fighting some monsters - you were expecting anything different?

In an ancient ruined temple, a bunch of kids are dancing, one of whom, Piko, wears a mask based on Hanuman, the Thai monkey god. According to AU they are doing a rain dance because the sun has moved closer to the Earth causing a global draught - with that simple bit of info, a lot of odd things in the movie start to make sense!

Also in the group is a smaller boy named Anan, who may be Piko’s brother. Anan’s mother (and possibly Piko’s) watches over them. (AU gives Piko’s name as Kochan but perhaps that is in the Japanese version. He’s certainly Piko in the Thai dub because Anan spends a good part of the movie shouting his brother’s name.) Three crooks turn up in a jeep and steal the head from one of the temple statues - Piko spots them and gives chase but they give him a bloody good kicking. There was never violence like this in Children’s Film Foundation movies! But worse is to come: Piko recovers, takes a short cut and leaps aboard the jeep, only to be shot in the head at point blank range! Anan and the others find his body and carry it back to the temple (presumably his mum has left by this point).

But up on M78, where the Ultramen live, the Ultra-mother notices Piko’s death and reaches down through the clouds to him, much to the amazement of the assembled kids. The subsequent scene, in which Piko is restored to life as Hanuman, is apparently re-edited footage of Ultraman Taro being born, which is why as well as the Ultra-mother there are only five Ultramen on screen. AU says these are Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman Jack, Ultraman Ace and Zoffy, and who am I to argue?

Hanuman is all-white with a scary monkey face and lots of superfluous Thai detail in his costume, as opposed to the smooth futuristic lines of the Ultra-brothers. He generally flies upright with his limbs bent, sometimes carries a short trident, and has a tendency to jump about scratching his armpits, on account of being a monkey god.

Back on Earth, Anan collapses from the heat. Hanuman talks to the Sun God - you can tell he’s the Sun God because he’s in a chariot - and endlessly chases a talking flower up and down a mountain before extending his tail and grabbing it.

The three crooks (remember them?) are amazed to see Piko jump out in front of their jeep and do a monkey dance at them. They take a few more potshots but the bullets bounce off him, then he magically transforms into Hanuman and grows to giant size. The crooks run off on foot but Hanuman treads on one, crushes another under a fallen tree, and picks up the third before squashing him in his hands! He then flies back to the Sun God, receives the magic flower, heads back to Earth, turns back into Piko and uses the flower to revive Anan. The stolen statue head, meanwhile, floats back to the temple and reattaches itself.

But that’s just half the story. Elsewhere we have a huge rocket base where a bunch of scientists (including Anan’s mother in an attractive pink dress) are hard at work on a scheme to break the drought. The first rocket launches successfully and explodes in the upper atmosphere, somehow causing rainfall. Much rejoicing. But the second attempt goes wrong, the rocket explodes on the launch pad and sets off a chain reaction among all the other rockets. I am pleased to report that from this point, about halfway through the 85-minute movie, until the end there is non-stop action. There is always either somebody fighting or something exploding or both. It’s fantastic!

The crashing rockets cause an earthquake and from the fissure emerge, for no adequately explored reason, five giant monsters. AU tells us that they are all, unsurprisingly, left over costumes from old Tsuburaya TV series and that they are called Gomorrah (epic!), Tyrant (scary!), Astromonse (impressive!), Dorobon (mighty!) and Dustpan. Dustpan? Surely they could come up with a better monster name than Dustpan? Is there also a monster called Brush? Perhaps one called Duster and one called Broom? What are they going to do, clean us all to death? (One of the monsters, incidentally, has Godzilla’s distinctive roar.)

Anan and his mum go in search of Piko and find him doing his monkey dance in the forest. He swiftly changes into giant-size Hanuman to battle the monsters, which have various scary appendages and can blast beams of stuff from eyes, mouth or horns. But he needs help. Fortunately here come the six Ultra-brothers (the five we saw before plus Ultraman Taro) to help him kick some monster arse.

The last 40 minutes really is one huge fight and it’s bloody great. There’s an unresolved subplot when one of the monsters chases after Anan and his mum which is a bit odd and means we only ever see four monsters destroyed, but they do go in style. Hanuman fires energy bolts from his trident which slice the heads and arms off two of the beasts. The decapitated bodies then run in circles before crashing into each other and, as seems to be traditional with Thai monster flicks, exploding. Another monster is defeated when Hanuman magically turns his trident into a staff which fires a vertical energy bolt that cuts the monster in two vertically down the middle! (Both halves, naturally, explode...) But the best death is when Hanuman and Ultraman rip the skin from the head of a monster, leaving only a skull. They then rip the skin from its arms like pulling the sleeves off a jacket. Finally Hanuman blasts a bolt of energy at the monster and all the rest of its skin dissolves leaving a goofy looking skeleton. This is what we pay our money for!

With all the monsters disposed of (apart from the one last seen chasing Anan and his mother...), it’s time for Hanuman to do one last monkey dance, give each of the Ultra-brothers a kiss and a hug, and wave them bye-bye as they fly back to M78.

Traditionally Ultraman and his brothers have time-limit devices in their chests which keep all their fights down to three or four minutes. But not here. Non-stop giant-size hero-vs-monster action for more than half an hour - bloody hell!

The effects, credited to Kazuo Sagawa (who was still overseeing Ultra-FX as recently as 2001’s Ultraman Cosmos: First Contact), are well up to Tsuburaya’s usual standard, despite the use of some stock footage for the outer-space sequences. The rocket base miniature is excellent and the explosions would put an episode of Thunderbirds to shame. The limited usage of mattes and green screen to mix the giant characters into scenes with real people is also very effective (considering the time and the budget).

Shohei Tojo also directed episodes of the 1971 TV series Return of Ultraman as well as shows like Dynaman, Goggle 5 and Zyu Ranger (the original source of the Japanese footage in early Power Rangers episodes). He was also AD on Toho’s Lost World-style romp The Last Dinosaur. Writer Bunko Wakatsuki was one of several credited scribblers on the cobbled-together TV movies Star Force and Fugitive Alien, both of which were released in the UK by Xtasy Video.

Oh, and according to AU, when Hanuman chats with the Sun God he persuades him to move further away from the Earth, thus ending the draught.

So are there six or seven Ultramen in this thing? Well, I suppose there are seven altogether but only six at any one time. Ultraman Taro is missing from the M78 sequence - because he’s actually Piko/Hanuman in that bit, if you follow me - and Ultra-mother doesn’t come to Earth and fight monsters. The Japanese title (this was made in 1974 when Ultraman was big in Thailand but not released in Japan until 1979) is Ultra Roku Kyodai Tai Kaiju Gundan - ‘roku’ is Japanese for six - and many sources list this under the English translation Six Ultra-brothers Against the Monster Army. But the Thai title is Hanuman Pob Jed Yod Ma-nud and 'jed' is Thai for seven; in fact it actually has the title in English on the VCD. (The Chinese dub gets round this problem by using the title Fei Tien Cha Jen - ‘The High-Flying Supermen’.)

Allegedly there is a re-edited version called Hanuman Pob Sib Et Yod Ma-nud - ‘Hanuman vs 11 Ultraman’! - and my initial assumption was that this was just the original title translated into English then mistranslated back again. After all, the screen is so full of Ultramen, it’s difficult to see where you could fit another four of them in! But such a beast does in fact exist as proved by the gloriously colourful poster.. (Some footage from Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman was reused in a 1985 US-produced ‘spoof’ called Space Warriors 2000.)

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted before November 2004
Many thanks to Ultramong for the pictures

↧

Happiness of the Katakuris

August 24, 2013, 12:29 pm

≫ Next: Happy Hour: The Movie

≪ Previous: Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman

Director: Takashi Miike
Writer: Kikumi Yamagishi
Producer: Hirotsugu Yoshida
Cast: Kenji Sawada, Naomi Nishida, Keiko Matsuzaka
Year of release: 2001
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (Far Out 2002)

Takashi Miike first came to western attention (or at least, this westerner's attention) with Audition, a slow-building, atmospheric, deeply nasty tale of psychological and physical torture. Two films more different than Audition and Happiness of the Katakuris it would be hard to find. Because this, my friends, is a musical!

In a nutshell, this is The Rocky Horror Picture Show crossed with The Shining and shot in Bollywood by Terry Gilliam. Kenji Sawada (Hiruko the Goblin) stars as middle-aged ex-shoe salesman Masao Katakuri, who starts up a guest house where he hears a new road is to be built. Helping him are his wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), their divorced, lovesick daughter Shizue (Naomi Nishida: Godzilla Millennium) and her little girl, their ex-con son Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), and Masao’s father Jinpei (Tetsuro Tamba - who was in Kwaidan and You Only Live Twice!). And Pochi, the dog.

They wait for their first customer, and he eventually arrives in a thunderstorm, goes to his room, carves his room-key into a point and stabs himself to death. Knowing that calling the police would mean the end of their business before it has begun, the family dispose of the body, while suspecting unenthusiastic slacker Masayuki of stealing the man’s missing wallet.

Further guests arrive, in dribs and drabs, most notably a randy sumo wrestler and his petite teenage girlfriend; he has a heart attack during sex, and she is found crushed to death beneath him... Meanwhile, Shizue has met and fallen in love with a rogue in naval uniform who claims to be an illegitimate member of the British Royal Family. The story climaxes with an escaped killer and a volcanic eruption.

In any other film, a story like this would be an amusing, Fawlty Towers-esque sitcom, but Miike goes crazy with several song and dance sequences, which range from the endearing non-coordination of the six Katakuris (including the little girl) to full-blown Bollywood-style fantasy scenes. One romantic duet between Masao and Terue is even done with on-screen subtitles and the to-camera exhortation to “join in with us”!

And as if that wasn’t enough, parts of the film are animated! The opening sequence, entirely unconnected with the rest of the film, is an amazing piece of Svankmajer-like clay animation following a little angel/demon-thing and is reminiscent of nothing less than the titles of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. At various times later during the film, characters become clay animations too - but not always everyone on screen. On the other hand, another stylistic device, shaky handheld camerawork, doesn’t add anything to the scenes in which it is used.

On the basis of this and Audition, it’s hard to identify anything specific about Miike’s style as a director, except that he clearly does what he wants and isn’t afraid to go to extremes. He also makes a lot of movies. Between Audition in 1999 and Katakuris in 2001, he also made MPD Psycho, The City of Lost Souls, The Guys from Paradise, Dead or Alive 2, Family, Visitor Q, Agitator and Ichi the Killer - apparently. Whatever, he’s clearly a busy guy. (Earlier Miike films of note include Fudoh: The New Generation and Full Metal Gokudo.)

An absolutely bonkers, laugh-out-loud, must-see film - with, it must be said, a great zombie dance sequence - Happiness of the Katakuris is unreservedly recommended to anybody who likes offbeat cinema.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 3rd December 2004

↧

Happy Hour: The Movie

August 24, 2013, 12:36 pm

≫ Next: Little Deaths

≪ Previous: Happiness of the Katakuris

Director: Anthony P Azar
Writer: Anthony P Azar
Producer: Anthony P Azar
Cast: Crystal Louthan, Tonya Hall, Anthony P Azar
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener

Three slimeballs - two corrupt politicians and a corrupt judge - visit a bar for drinks after one of them is handed a flier on the street by a hot chick. The place is empty apart from the barmaid (Tonya Hall) until that same hot chick (model and backstage wrestling interviewer Crystal Louthan) enters. One of the men unsubtly approaches her and they head off together, leaving the other two men impressed and jealous.

One week later the two remaining slimeballs visit the same bar for drinks. The place is again empty apart from the barmaid until that same hot chick enters. The men discuss how they have not seen their friend for a week then one of them unsubtly approaches the hot chick and they head off together, leaving the other man impressed and jealous.

One week later the last remaining slimeball visits the same bar for drinks. The place is again empty apart from the barmaid until that same hot chick enters. The man ponders (in voice-over) how he has not seen his other friend for a week. Eventually, he plucks up the courage to approach the hot chick and they head off together.

Out in the parking lot, he discovers what happened to his two friends.

That’s the basic plot of this just-over-half-an-hour short film and if you think the synopsis is repetitive, that’s a deliberate ploy on the part of this reviewer to accurately reflect the film. Because, despite it’s short running time, this could easily lose fifteen to twenty minutes.

The opening scene, that’s fair enough, but we then get the whole damn thing repeated at full length twice with a progressively fewer number of men.

Anecdote time. Some years ago there was a British comedy show called Saturday Zoo and one week the special guest was Christopher Walken. Dressed in a colourful jumper, he read the story of The Three Little Pigs in his own distinctive way. It’s hilarious and a quick Google or a search on YouTube should bring up a copy.

After describing what happened to the first little pig, Walken got a huge laugh by summing up the next part of the tale thus:

“Pig two - same story.”

The point is that the audience can grasp that the same thing is happening without being shown the whole thing again. In fact, once we’ve clocked that this is a repeat of the previous scene we become impatient, waiting for it to finish so that we can get on with the plot. And an impatient audience is not an appreciative audience. Then - damn me - we have to sit through the whole thing again.

Which is a shame because, although this is clearly shot cheaply, director Anthony Azar has a definite knack with the camera. There is real skill and imagination in the direction including difficult, effective and memorable shots: viewing our protagonists through a glass or keeping the actors off camera to concentrate on their shadows. The individual shots are great but the redundancy of the second and third scenes detracts from them.

The other problem which Happy Hour: The Movie (not to be confused with the 2003 feature film starring Anthony LaPaglia) is that the ‘twist’, when it comes, is exactly what we expect, one of the hoariest old clichés in horror movies. Not only that but what little impact it might have is let down by some of the worst joke-shop vampire fangs I have ever seen outside of a Jean Rollin movie. Oh, and the ‘twist’ is also given away on the Truth in Creativity website. Maybe it’s not meant to be a twist but in that case, what’s the point? We’ve been kept waiting through three variations-on-a-theme scenes, expecting some sort of payoff for our attention and unless that payoff is clever or surprising in some way we are bound to be disappointed.

This ‘revelation’ scene is followed by an entirely unnecessary (and extraordinarily long) epilogue in which three different slimeballs enter the bar in what is effectively a replay of the first scene. I assumed this would finish when they sat down at the bar, then I kept on assuming it would finish any moment now as the scene dragged on and on, adding absolutely nothing to the story and losing more and more dramatic impact with every line of dialogue.

We get it, all right already. Three more little pigs - same story.

Technically and artistically, bearing in mind the nickel-and-dime production values, Happy Hour: The Movie is highly commendable. The acting’s all pretty good (neither the hot chick nor the hot bartender chick has any dialogue) and it’s nice to see the use of actors of an appropriate age; many low-budget film-makers would have cast their twenty-something mates, irrespective of whether they were actually old enough to be politicians or judges. Craig Chamberlain’s other roles have included a ‘psycho father killer’ in Unforgotten Past and a ‘vampire serial killer’ in Body of Evidence.

One of the slimeballs is played by Florida-based writer/director/producer Anthony P Azar who is pretty much a one-man band although he has the good sense to disguise some of his credits, such as ‘special effects’, behind his company name, Truth in Creativity Productions. Azar also handled the camera and the editing and provided some frankly corking guitar music. A couple of the actors are among the ‘production assistants’ credited with help in the lights/camera department and the main other credit seems to be for Eric Emerick who assisted with cameras, lighting and some suitably unpleasant sound effects.

All well and good but it is, as so often at this level of film-making, the script which lets the side down, with four very similar scenes all played out to their full-length instead of being judiciously trimmed. There’s an old scriptwriting maxim which says that one should always start a scene as late as possible and leave it as soon as possible. There is simply too much dead wood in this film - but it could be fixed.

Scenes two and three both need some judicious editing and the epilogue needs a single snip of the scissors as soon as the audience has realised that we are watching the start of the story repeating itself with three new characters. (There is one other problem with the epilogue: two extras sat further along the bar whose presence is irrelevant - I suspect they might be investors making a cameo appearance in a film devoid of opportunities for cameos - and who actually spoil the scene. Surely the whole point is that this is an empty bar where the only people present are the two predatory women and their three slimeball victims.)

Thinking about it, there is also a script problem in the idea that the first three scenes happen at intervals of one week (indicated through unnecessary captions). Are we really to believe that a politician has disappeared and, one week later, the only repercussions is that two of his drinking buddies are idly musing where he is? The scenes would work better as consecutive nights.

I’ve been hard on Happy Hour: The Movie despite its promise and Azar’s evident talent because it doesn’t live up to that promise or support that talent. The script simply hasn’t been developed properly. A tight, ten- or fifteen-minute film might get away with such a clicheed central premise but when the film drags like this, audiences are less likely to forgive a revelation which can be seen coming from about five minutes in. Less is more is the nub of what I’m getting at here.

The screener included a long trailer for Azar’s Lloyd Kaufman-starring feature The Cops Did It which features many of the same actors and which I’d like to see, if only to judge whether the writer-director can construct a full-length story. On the basis of this one short (admittedly completed two years ago) my belief is that Azar is spreading himself too thinly and should devolve some of the work to other people, especially the scriptwriting.

MJS rating: C+
review originally posted 30th May 2008

↧

Little Deaths

August 25, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice

≪ Previous: Happy Hour: The Movie

Directors: Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley
Writers: Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley
Producers: Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley, Samantha Wright
Cast: Luke de Lacey, Jodie Jameson, Tom Sawyer
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener (Monster Films)

‘Little death’ is a literal English translation of petite mort, the French term for orgasm. In 1996, Ellen Datlow edited Little Deaths, a literary anthology of ‘erotic horror stories’ including contributions from Clive Barker, Nicholas Royle and Joel Lane. That book has no connection with this film. (Incidentally, I used to also own a 1980s anthology of erotic horror called The Devil’s Kisses whose anonymous editor hid behind the brilliant pseudonym ‘Linda Lovecraft’! Anyway...)

Little Deaths is part of the recent resurgence in British horror anthologies which also includes Bordello Death Tales, Nazi Zombie Death Tales, Three’s a Shroud, The Eschatrilogy, The Forbidden Four, Grave Tales and Tales of the Supernatural. Like the first three in that list, this is a team effort: three directors each making a half-hour short then bolting them together. The film has taken a couple of years to appear on UK DVD (the US release was back in December 2011) which is why, in the Making Of, the directors observe that there hadn’t really been any anthologies recently.

I’ve been waiting and wanting to see this film for a while now and have been studiously avoiding any detailed reviews. All I knew was that the three tales of sexual horror are quite extreme, and I was braced for some serious unpleasantness. It therefore came as something of a surprise to find that this isn’t just a film about extreme cruelty and suffering: two of the three stories actually have some element of the fantastique to them, and all three are powerful, grippingly-told tales which fascinate rather than repel. Maybe I’m just inured to this sort of stuff but my stomach wasn’t turned and I didn’t look away. Although, to be fair, it’s a lot easier to accept stuff like this watched from one’s own armchair than it is in a cinema surrounded by horror fans.

NB. If you want the same experience that I had, then stop reading this review now as there will be some details in the ensuing descriptions, although I will try to avoid actual spoilers.

We kick off with ‘House and Home’, directed by Sean Hogan , whose debut feature Lie Still is positively reviewed by me in Urban Terrors and whose sophomore effort The Devil’s Business is in my TBW pile. Sean is the only one of the three directors I don’t know personally; indeed, I’ve known the other two chaps since the 1990s.

‘House and Home’ stars Luke de Lacey and Siubhan Harrison as a middle-aged couple who invite a homeless young woman (Holly Lucas: Holby City) into their home on the pretext of Christian kindness but actually to use her as a sex slave. something which they apparently do on a reasonably regular basis. This occasion however is not like before, and to say more would be a spoiler. I will say this, spoiler-free: although the characters, story and narrative development (call it a twist if you like) are well-handled, there was no need for the epilogue sequence, which didn’t really add to the horror or the story. I would have ended this with the car scene.

Curiously, I had exactly the same problem with Lie Still: an unnecessary epilogue which lessens the ambiguity - and hence the effectiveness - of what has gone before. Sean Hogan makes terrific films, he just needs to wrap them up a little sooner.

If I didn’t know that the second segment, ‘Mutant Tool’, was an Andrew Parkinson joint, i think I could have guessed. Way back in 1998 or so I first met Andrew when I saw I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain at the Festival of Fantastic Films and covered it in SFX. Or at least, I think I did. I know I wrote something for Fangoria. Actually, it’s all so long ago that I can’t remember what I wrote. You want to know how long ago this was? Well, I recently found, in my filing cabinet, some black and white 8x10 publicity stills from I, Zombie. It was a time when publicity images for films were still routinely sent out as monochrome prints. It was like, the palaeolithic or something.

Andy P followed the brilliant I, Zombie with Dead Creatures, then a few years later made the utterly bizarre (and sadly never released) Venus Drowning. Three and a bit films in 15 years or so is not exactly a factory production line but we are assured of quality and it’s certainly good to have Mr Parkinson behind the camera once again.

‘Mutant Tool’ is borderline science fiction, because it does actually have a mutant person in it. The story also involves psychic connections, organ bootlegging, dodgy drugs (narcotic) and dodgy drugs (pharmaceutical). Jodie Jameson is an ex-hooker, shacked up with her former pimp (Daniel Brocklebank: The Hole): wow, there’s a solid foundation for a stable relationship. She deals drugs for him now but he doesn’t know that she’s also still on the game, working through an agency. Meanwhile Brendan Gregory (also in Venus Drowning and Dead Creatures) is the dodgy doctor at the centre of proceedings, while his two employees are played by Steel Wallis and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’s Christopher Fairbank (whose roles in MindFlesh, Anazapta and The Bunker make him something of a BHR regular).

It’s not difficult to see parallels with Venus Drowning here (which also starred Jameson) though it is of course very difficult to see Venus Drowning. This is body horror film, but not Cronenberg-ian body horror. This is Parkinson-ian body horror, which is scuzzier, more prosaic, less about shock and more about bleakness. Very much the British Horror Revival approach, which is appropriate for the man who kick-started the BHR.

Finally, we have another old mate of mine, Simon Rumley, who I first encountered when I reviewed his extraordinary talking-head debut feature Strong Language in Total Film. More recently, Simon made the amazing The Living and the Dead which is featured in Urban Terrors (as are Andrew Parkinson’s two zombie films). Simon’s story is called ‘Bitch’ and it has rightly been left to the end because it is the strongest of the three tales.

Tom Sawyer (Soldiers of the Damned) and Kate Braithwaite (who was in a couple of Bollywood pictures) are the couple here, their relationship based around a dog-related fetish that will make your eyes stick out on stalks. You will wonder: do people really do this? If they do, how does Simon Rumley know? And if they don’t, what sort of sick mind has he got to come up with this sort of stuff?

Tom Carey (Exorcism) plays the third wheel which prises the couple’s relationship apart, leading to an extended sequence of revenge - planning and execution - set to a brilliantly selected piece of music. You won’t be able to tear your eyes away from the last ten minutes or so (assuming they are back in their sockets).

Aside from the slight over-extension of ‘House and Home’, it’s hard to find a fault with any of the segments or indeed the feature as a whole. Acting is top-notch, including a number of perverted sex scenes which must have been either very upsetting or difficult to do with a straight face. All three gentlemen are bang-on in both their scripts and their direction.

Rumley’s regular cinematographer Milton Kam (Red, White and Blue, The Living and the Dead) photographed all three segments superbly. Kudos also to Kajsa Soderlund (Tower Block) for some top-notch production design (I love the sly inclusion of an Emmanuelle chair in one scene!). It is interesting that essentially the same crew worked on all three stories: in these multi-director anthologies it’s more common for all three pieces to be shot separately but Little Deaths has been made as a cohesive feature, swapping it’s head at regular intervals.

Also in the cast are James Oliver Wheatley (A Dying Breed), Scott Ainslie (The Zombie Diaries), Errol Clarke (A Day of Violence) and stunt man Rob Boyce (as the mutant). Richard Chester (The Living and the Dead) and Andrew Parkinson composed the score. Dan Martin (F, Sightseers, The Devil’s Business) oversaw the special effects.

Among the various executive producers is veteran Canadian producer Pierre David - yes, the guy who directed Scanner Cop! Over the past 40 years he has been involved with such notable titles as The Brood, Videodrome, The Vindicator, Dolly Dearest, The Dentist, Wishmaster and, on the BHR font, Gangsters, Guns and Zombies. Mostly though he has executive produced scores of DTV thrillers with interchangeable titles: The Wrong Woman, Never Too Late, Marked Man, Alone with a Stranger, Her Married Lover, Living in Fear, Blind Obsession, A Woman Hunted, The Rival, Demons from Her Past, My Daughter’s Secret, A Lover’s Revenge... I wonder if even Pierre David can tell these things apart.

So, to conclude, what themes can we see in Little Deaths? Well, obviously these are stories about sexual transgression, but each takes a different tack. The sex in ‘House and Home’ is straightforward, even if non-consensual: the transgression there is a moral one. In ‘Mutant Tool’, the transgression is physical: what sex acts we see are actually almost incidental to the story but the mutant himself is physically transgressive. In ‘Bitch’, the transgression is behavioural: these two people do some very odd things, but they’re not hurting anyone.

Then again, we could consider the three central relationships. The middle-class couple in Hogan’s story are the happiest, enjoying a stable sexual relationship until that fateful night. In Parkinson’s tale, the central relationship is in tatters and there was little enough there to begin with. Rumley’s couple start stable, or at least they think they are stable, but we watch them fall apart. All three couples share secrets, but not necessarily all their secrets. Only the first couple are open and honest with each other, trusting each other and working together as a team. the second couple don’t trust each other, they each have other activities that they don’t tell the other about. Once again, Rumley’s segment is the most complex: it chronicles how trust breaks down, creating new secrets that are not shared.

It’s all good stuff, it really is. Don’t be put off by the rather alarmist marketing that seems to sell Little Deaths as some ultra-extreme hardcore nastiness. It’s actually a trio of imaginative, thought-provoking, dramatic stories skilfully told by three of the best indie directors working in Britain today.

Incidentally, the marketing image of a woman with glass shards in her back, like some sort of S&M stegosaurus, is just that - a marketing image - and not related to any of the stories.

MJS rating: A-

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Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice

August 27, 2013, 2:01 pm

≫ Next: Harold's Going Stiff

≪ Previous: Little Deaths

Director: Mark Withers
Writer: Mark Withers
Producers: Mark Withers, Mike King
Cast: Alex Constantine, Pano Masti, Tom Clutterbuck
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener
Website: bigbrushfilms.moonfruit.com

Did you know that there are now so many spoof documentaries - ‘mockumentaries’ - being made every year that they actually have their own genre-specific film festival? It’s called Mockfest, it’s held at the Vine Theatre in Hollywood and the debut event screened 23 films in June 2007. Among them was Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice (subsequently retitled Bare Naked Talent).

Essentially, this does for porn what Spinal Tap did for rock music as documentarian Linda Boreman follows aspiring film-maker ‘Jack Innov’ (Alex Constantine, also in SF thriller Anamnesis) in his efforts to produce a sweeping romantic porn epic, Assanova. Jack has adopted his pseudonym in order to protect his identity when he eventually progresses onto the ‘real’ films that he wants to make, his real name being a fun in-joke. Boreman, who is uncredited, can occasionally be heard and appears once, briefly, towards the end in a development that marks Hardcore out as a mockumentary with a plot and characterisation, not just a collection of jokes. (It’s actually first AD Lucie Phillips Browne doing Boreman’s voice; she also worked on Simon Rumley’s magnificent The Living and the Dead.)

Jack faces several problems in his quest to film Assanova, including a minuscule budget, an eclectic, eccentric cast and crew, and his own sexual inexperience, highlighted in a pre-production scene when his request to the crew for suggestions of things that could be in the film rapidly descends into a list of specific perversions and acts, none of which he has ever heard of.

In the fly-on-the-wall sequences, the to-camera interviews and a few ‘self-filmed’ video diary pieces, Constantine gives a stirling performance as Jack, his mixture of ambition and naiveté recalling Ed Wood at his finest. Tom Clutterbuck is less convincing as his friend Derek ‘Tinto’ Brass, a thoroughly unreconstructed slimeball slacker who nevertheless swiftly takes control of shooting when Jack is indisposed, but that may be because the character is less sympathetic.

Greek actor Pano Masti (Martyr, Crooked Features, Little Deaths) has an absolute ball (as it were) playing hirsute Italian leading man Thom Cruz, a jobbing porn actor who is as over-endowed with heart and bonhomie as he is with moustache and cock. The various actresses include a pair of lesbians who have problems using explicit language (Shavonne Stevenson and Martina Goodman, who was in Mark Withers’ short My Mum, the Wrestler and is now Martina Goodman-Withers); a Scottish blonde who cheerfully recounts how her father abused her as if it was a major achievement on her part (Marysia Kay: Forest of the Damned, Colour from the Dark); and a librarian with a hankering for a different life (a nicely observed performance by Trudi Jackson: The Libertine). The crew includes a naked German cinematographer (Mike Busson, who was one of the AA men in that ‘You’ve got a Friend’ TV ad), a junkie continuity girl (Sonja Morgenstern, who was in a Chemical Brothers video), a second cinematographer with a fabulous moustache (Paul Preston Mills), a cynical soundman (Bruce Lawrence, the voice of Captain Black in the Captain Scarlet remake) and a gaffer who looks so much like me that I had to pause the disc and briefly wonder whether I had actually appeared in this film and forgotten about it.

The whole thing is bank-rolled by two gangsters, Ron and Reg, one of whom is obsessed with big tits while the other obviously prefers a more masculine chest. Along the way we also meet Jack’s chain-smoking mother (Hazel Kayes), his Tourette’s syndrome brother (James G Fain: Stag Night of the Dead) - whose un-PC, potty-mouthed outbursts are used for more than just shock effect - and a petty thug who shares Jack’s community service when the director is arrested for lewd behaviour. Daz Kaye (High Stakes) is one of several performers giving their all in an audition montage.

For a low-budget indie, Hardcore looks (and sounds) great, indicating that the real film-maker, Mark Withers, has put a great deal of effort into creating this fakery, not just taken an easy and cheap option. The script is terrific, developing characters, progressing the plot, never dragging or wasting time - and above all it’s funny. While rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious, Hardcore is genuinely funny throughout and that is rare in feature-length indie comedies; in fact, let’s be honest, it’s rare in comedy films full stop.

There’s a warmth to this film which could very easily have been cynicism in other hands. We desperately want Jack to finish his film, we want the camaraderie of the cast and crew to create something, however cheap and lascivious it may be. We care about these people and we believe (for a few moments) that they are real. That, surely, is the sign of a good mockumentary.

It would be impossible to make a movie like this without nudity - and all credit to the cast members who disrobe - but sensitive audiences needn’t worry as all genitals have been covered with superimposed graphics. If it goes to the BBFC I doubt if this would get more than a 15 and that would be for the occasionally profanity.

It is evident from reading the film’s website that Mark Withers has endured trials and tribulations in his career so far and that these have influenced this movie, making the character of Jack Innov somewhat autobiographical (there are some neat clips from the character’s earlier films). With Hardcore, Mark has achieved magnificently what he set out to do and perhaps this will get him the break he deserves.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 15th October 2007

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Harold's Going Stiff

August 27, 2013, 2:18 pm

≫ Next: The Harsh Light of Day

≪ Previous: Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice

Director: Keith Wright
Writer: Keith Wright
Producer: Richard Guy
Cast: Stan Rowe, Sarah Spencer, Philip Gascoyne
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.stiffmovie.com

Within the British Horror Revival, the Postmodern UK Zombie Film (or PUZF) is a distinctive subsubgenre. It can be traced right back to Andrew Parkinson’s I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain in the late 1990s, one of the ur-texts of the BHR.

Then we can find high-profile, distinctive examples of British directors playing with the tropes of the zombie film - Shaun of the Dead, Colin - as well as more obscure or esoteric examples: The Zombie Diaries, Zomblies, The Invisible Atomic Monsters from Mars. Which is not to say that there aren’t straightforward, conventional zombie pictures, ranging from the name-cast-medium-budget (Devil’s Playground) to the cheap-and-cheerful (Zombie Undead).

Harold’s Going Stiff is definitely a PUZF, twisting the ideas and iconography of undead cinema to extremes. To the extent, in fact, that what Keith Wright has made here is a zombie film for people who don’t like zombie films, but which most zombie fans will, I fear, probably turn off after ten minutes [I got this one completely wrong! - MJS]. It’s a bold and uncompromising move by a talented and skilled director for whom the easy, commercial route is clearly not an attractive option.

Except insofar as it has zombies in it - and people do use the Z-word, unlike, say, The Zombie Diaries - you would be hard-pressed to consider Harold’s Going Stiff a horror film. It sits on the completist fringe of British horror, much like Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It’s really a love story with an ambience of wry Northern comedy, though certainly not a rom-com. And definitely not a rom-zom-com.

There has been an outbreak of a condition called ORD - Onset Rigors Disease - which ‘zombifies’ people (actually just men - it doesn’t affect women). The three stages are a stiffness of the limbs, then confusion and mental breakdown, finally aggressive and violent behaviour. However these zombies apparently don’t go as far as eating people’s brains. In fact, we don’t see anyone get eaten but that’s because these are slow-moving zombies, not 28 Days Later-style runners.

That’s the thing about shuffling zombies: they are only dangerous en masse. One on its own is easy to run away from and even easier to run up to and destroy. In Harold’s Going Stiff, we only ever encounter individual zombies, who are merely stiff-legged, angry and inarticulate. But not really dangerous. And not living dead. As so often nowadays, these are merely folk suffering from a disease - in this case, the pre-death onset of rigor mortis, basically.

The eponymous Harold Gimble (Stan Rowe, who was one of the background artists at the Brits when Michael Jackson did ‘Earth Song’ and Jarvis Cocker jumped on stage!) was the first recorded case of ORD and also, for some reason, the disease is developing in him much slower than in other cases. So while we are told (not shown) that hospitals are overflowing with ORD patients, to the extent that community centres and similar establishments are being used to house them, and while we encounter individual third-stage ORD sufferers out on the moors, Harold still lives alone in his house, visited only by the local community nurse.

This is Penny Rudge (Sarah Spencer, whose time as a drama student included an appearance in one edition of Celebrity Wife Swap!), a warm-hearted, lonely lass on the lookout for a Prince Charming but perpetually disappointed. She visits Harold regularly to check on him and provide physiotherapy sessions to ease his stiffness.

Harold is old and a widower. Penny is young and probably a virgin. Neither is looking for sex or passion but both are looking for love and they, not unexpectedly, gradually find that their special, platonic friendship provides the companionship that both are missing. Both actors give bravura performances, rendering an offbeat romance which could - let’s face it - have seemed creepy or weird into a sweet, sad tale of two people who are right for each other despite their differences.

Intercut with this is the tale of three vigilantes, have-a-go idiots taking advantage of officially sanctioned public action which allows citizens to kill ORD sufferers if they attack. Jon (Andy Pandini, who was in Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit and a TV show called Tales of the Living Dead that turns out to be a History Channel archaeology-based drama-documentary) and Mike (Lee Thompson) are experienced zombie-hunters drive around Yorkshire with the gormless Colin (newcomer Richard Harrison) in tow. Colin is determined to score his first kill but is not only always too slow, he’s also the butt of endless slightly cruel jibes and japes from his two so-called friends.

The three vigilantes provide the limited violence and gore but the main focus is squarely on Harold and Penny - and this is where the film will lose zombie-philes. Because, with the best will in the world, Harold isn’t a zombie. He is basically an old guy with arthritis and the early stages of dementia (there’s a nice running gag about undrinkable cups of tea). If the Jon/Mike/Colin stuff was edited out (and you didn’t see the poster) this would seem to be an entirely mainstream gentle quasi-romance between a kind old man and his young nurse.

After a preview for cast, crew and friends, director Keith Wright shot some pick-ups to increase the ‘horror’ content of the film but it doesn’t change the essentially non-horror main plot, which is not only not horrific but has the exact shape of something which isn’t even genre but solidly mainstream. Good mainstream, excellent mainstream even - but presumably not what Keith was looking for, especially bearing in mind his decision to shoot those pick-ups.

Richard and Penny move together into a community centre where some more advanced cases of ORD are kept. Their hands tied behind their backs, growling and barking and eating food by sticking their faces into plates and bowls, these scenes are actually quite disturbing in their redolence of old-fashioned styles of ‘treatment’ for mentally disturbed people.

And that’s what ORD sufferers come across as: people with mental health problems. Sure. there’s some visual comedy as they run with stiff legs but for the most part the patients come across as simply ill and pathetic, in the word’s truest sense. Even the ones that lunge at the vigilantes seem to present no serious threat and to be nothing more than mentally ill. Which makes the violence meted out to them, especially given the official sanctioning of such violence, actually quite upsetting. There are connotations to this comic-book violence which contrast unpleasantly with the sweet relationship comedy-drama that is the A-story.

It pains me to say it but, for me, Harold’s Going Stiff doesn’t quite work. And the more it promotes itself as a zombie film, the less it works. But then, if it were too present itself as a gentle, Northern, cross-generational romance, the zombie-hunting sequences - which do become relevant to the main plot later and aren’t just token horror window-dressing - would be anomalous and bizarre. The denouement when the two storylines eventually cross is powerful and emotional but not enough to stop the film overall being a movie of two intercut halves.

The essential problem is Harold. He’s just not a zombie. If you showed any Harold-Penny scene to someone unfamiliar with this film and asked them to describe Harold, they would just say he’s a lonely, gentle old widower with arthritis and a poor memory. He’s not a monster, not even a human monster. We only know he’s a zombie because we’re told that in the publicity and occasionally in the dialogue.

There’s a tremendous irony, it occurs to me, in the fact that on the one hand we have a film like The Zombie Diaries where the film-makers are careful to never refer to the threat on screen as zombies even though that’s what they obviously are; and on the other hand we have here a film where the only way we know that Harold (or any of the other ORD sufferers) are ‘zombies’ is because other characters describe them as such.

They don’t really act like zombies, they certainly don’t look like zombies. Cinematic zombies, in all their variants, are distinguished by rotting or diseased skin (not a a predominant symptom of ORD although late-stage sufferers do look slightly icky) and a craving for human flesh, which we never really see here, despite the warnings that Mike and Jon give to Colin.

There’s no explanation of why Harold is developing the symptoms so slowly while people who started later have already reached stage 3 though we meet Dr Norbert Shuttleworth (Phil Gascoyne) who is studying Harold in the hope of finding answers. Nor do we ever feel that Penny might be in the slightest danger from Harold, even though we should because he might eventually reach stage 3.

Harold’s Going Stiff is a frustrating film because the two halves, each perfect in itself, just don’t fit together. It’s beautifully acted, wonderfully directed, with fine indie-British production values that belie its low budget. Naturalistic performances, visually appealing locations, excellent camera- and sound-work. Can’t fault any of that. But if it’s a romance, there’s too much violence in it. And if it’s a horror film there’s way too much romance and the circle just isn’t squared.

The characters are believable and likeable - even the vigilantes - and it’s clear from this and Keith Wright’s first film Take Me To Your Leader that he has a touch for characterisation that many other writer-directors would kill for. But, with the exception of the gormless Colin, there’s not much of the cheerful Northern eccentricity that populated Keith’s previous film.

Take Me’s Roger Bingham turns up in a few TV news sequences as exactly the sort of overweight, middle-aged male reporter that UK regional television still sometimes employs while the rest of the broadcasting world fixates on teeth-and-tits dolly birds. And Eleanor James (Colour from the Dark, Bordello Death Tales) of all people appears in an advert for a type of addictive sausage which is identified as the course of the outbreak, although that gag is never developed and seems somewhat shoe-horned in.

Among the cast is Molly Howe, a teenage actress who was in a few episodes of fantasy kidcom Jinx but, despite what the IMDB claims, probably isn’t the same Molly Howe who was in a Todd Solonz movie in 1995. Jane Hardcastle, who was a security guard in the Day of the Triffids remake and a businesswoman in an Autoglass ad, plays the owner of a charity shop where Harold buys a present for Penny. There’s also Lucy Wilkins (who played Bob in a stage production of Blackadder Goes Forth!) as the daughter of an ORD sufferer.

Composer Tom Kane (Surviving Evil) scored two zombie films in 2010: this one and the Ian McKellen-narrated historical zombie short E’gad, Zombies!. He also provided the soundtrack for an extraordinary-sounding version of The Tell-Tale Heart - a silent short starring Matthew Kelly!

Searching around for a suitable analogy, it struck me that Harold’s Going Stiff is actually very like the zombies which it portrays, in that it sincerely attempts to present a horrific threat but ends up just wobbling stiffly - albeit without losing any of its innate humanity, warmth and charm.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 17th April 2011

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