Director: Sam Casserly
Writer: Sam Casserly
Producer: Sam Casserly
Cast: Nick Hayles, Rachel Laboucarie, Stephen Sheridan
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.twomasks.com

The Girl with Two Masks is an interesting film. It will not be to everyone’s taste, and it’s not without its problems, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it for what it was.

The premise couldn’t be more British if it tried: a national pub chain is trying to take over independent boozers. Young Mike Parker (Nick Hayles, who also starred in director Sam Casserly’s 2012 steampunk short To Kill a Princess) is on the Acquisitions Team, led by sweaty, balding, misogynist dinosaur Harry Ashley (a blistering performance from Stephen Sheridan, who was in Casserly’s short Red Wedding and a Will Young video!). Given one last chance, Mike is despatched to The Girl with Two Masks, instructed to persuade the owner to join the chain or else.

That owner is straight-talking, tee-total, vegan tough cookie Dexi (Rachel Laboucarie: Frank Slasher, Ponder’s End), a fascinatingly complex and contradictory character – and not just because she runs a pub but doesn’t drink. Though Dexi comes across as a solid, practical woman, Laboucarie’s deceptively subtle performance gives us clues that all is not well or right here.

Well, Dexi ain’t selling, so there’s no point Mike going back because he’ll just be sacked – so she lets him stay overnight in the pub (in fact, on the floor of her bedroom) in exchange for some work around the place. The middle act is very talkie, to be honest, but these are two well-constructed characters who have enough in common and enough differences to make these talkie scenes perfectly watchable.

Gradually we find out a little more about the pub’s unique name, which commemorates an incident centuries ago in the village when a travelling circus performer was accused of witchcraft and tortured. Somehow the girl’s influence lingers in the drinking establishment which bears her name and it becomes clear (well, clear-ish) that Dexi has some kind of unwelcome connection with the girl’s spirit. Nothing supernatural or disturbing happens until quite late in the day, but the build-up is steady throughout the film which kept my attention the way that so many other films haven’t.

I would be lying if I said that the story is clear or that what we see makes complete sense, but much like many classic Italian horrors (Casserly cites Argento as an influence), it’s more about the overall impression, and in that respect the final act can be seen to work. There is blood, don’t you worry. And uncertainty about what is really happening (or not). And more blood.

But don’t come here looking for blood. This is a talkie, thinky, character-led film, the half-dozen-strong cast being bolstered by Roxi Gregory (The Séance, Dead Love, To Kill a Princess) and Lauren Mills in small roles plus Sian Denereaz as Mike’s Aunt Mary, with whom he lives and who runs an escort agency from her home. The only other credits are assistant director Jenny Pearman and three credited composers: Marilyn Bordier, Keven MacLeod and Laurie Anderson. (Presumably not the Laurie Anderson…) The film was shot – for £300 over five separate days – in late 2014 with a cast and crew screening in April 2015.

The acting is good, the direction is adroit, the camera and sound are both fine. Where the film stumbles – and it’s a frustratingly big stumble – is in the location. Because it’s abundantly obvious that, wherever this was filmed, it wasn’t in a pub. The building used for both interiors and establishing exterior shots of The Girl with Two Masks is some sort of clapperboard-built parish hall or sports club pavilion. It has fold-away tables and stackable chairs. There is sort of a bar, but it’s more of a serving hatch. When Dexi pulls a pint for Mike, a combination of under-the-counter miming by Laboucarie and a spot of foley (most of the credits are acknowledgements of creative commons sound effects) cannot disguise the fact that there’s no pump.

This is a shame because, in my personal experience, a pub is about the easiest location to source apart from your own front room. As long as you shoot in the morning and are out by opening time, most pubs are more than happy to let you film there, in return for a credit. And nothing looks like the inside of a pub quite like a pub. Scenes on a railway station were shot at Bramley near Guildford and there’s at least two pubs in that village, The Jolly Farmer and The Wheatsheaf, plus plenty more in the surrounding area.

The above notwithstanding, Sam Casserly could at least have made the location look a bit more like a pub by rounding up a few extras. We never see or hear a single customer, which only serves to reinforce how unlike a pub this ‘pub’ is. There is also a poor decision towards the end when things start to get spooky and some ghostly messages are painted the door and walls of a bathroom. It’s very obvious that these messages are actually on sheets of paper which have been stuck up the walls and door. I know the budget was tiny, but a bit of that £300 could have been spent on a couple of pots of paint to cover up the writing afterwards. And you know, places are even more likely to let you film there if you offer to repaint their bathroom for free as part of the arrangement.

All of this distracts from the story though it doesn’t detract from the story, which is original enough and interesting enough to carry the film for its 73 minutes running time, bolstered by fine, sometimes very intense, performances from the small cast.

The Girl with Two Masks is Casserly’s debut feature following a number of shorts, including one with the same title shot back in 2010. In the feature, the circus performer who inspired the pub’s name survived her torture but was so psychologically damaged that ever after she would laugh when upset and cry when happy, hence her use of two masks to convey her true emotions. The six-minute film is set in a mental hospital where a patient has a similar psychosis brought on by having, as a child, witnessed her father murdering her mother. There’s no other real connection between the two films. The short (which stars Lewis Saunderson from POV and TORN: A ShockYouMentary) is bloodier, tauter and – because it has a strong simple concept – less obtuse. It also has considerably more name in the credits!

Despite some curious production choices noted above, The Girl with Two Masks is a valiant attempt to do something different, which succeeds enough to make it worth a watch. It bodes well for future films from Sam Casserly.

MJS rating: B

Director: Howard J Ford
Producer: Howard J Ford
Writers: Howard J Ford, Jon Ford
Cast: Joseph Millson, Anand Gopal, Meenu
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: screener

I saw The Dead at the Fifth UK Festival of Zombie Culture in Leicester back in November 2011, and it blew me away. I’m not sure why I didn’t review it – sometimes I’m just too busy with other stuff. Nevertheless, since then I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the very best zombie films ever made.

Zombie films should be scary – that’s a given.  They can be action-packed, or funny, or intense and broody. Or just bleak and depressing – that’s my favourite sort. The genre’s ur-text, Night of the Living Dead, is bleak and depressing. It is also riven with social and political subtext, and for me that’s the icing on the cake of any zombie film. The Dead has social and political subtext in spades. It can’t help having subtext. I don’t know to what extent the Ford Brothers wanted to explore ideas of racism, colonialism and globalism – but that’s what the film is about. You simply cannot show a white guy shooting a succession of shuffling, blank-eyed black folk without there being some sort of racial subtext.

The Dead also did what most zombie films fail to do, which is take the genre in a new direction. In one sense, that was as high concept as ‘zombies in Africa’ but it was much more than that. It was taking the standard global zombie apocalypse out of its traditional urban environment and placing it in a desolate, empty landscape. The sort of place where you can see the zombies when they’re still a mile away.

These are traditional, shuffling, shambling zombies – killed by existing zombies then reanimating themselves. There’s no running, no moaning for “Bwains!” They’re actually really easy to avoid, provided that you don’t let yourself get surrounded or trapped in a corner. But there’s just so many of them, and they’re everywhere, and all they have to do is get one bite in and you’re doomed. Much like the Terminator, they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bargained with and they absolutely will not stop.

Hell, as someone once pointed out, is other people. As a card-carrying misanthropist, I take that as my sermon almost every day. And that’s what a fine zombie picture like The Dead uses as its underlying premise. The zombies are us. Sometimes literally: recognisable friends and family. Sometimes generically. These are not vampires or werewolves or extra-terrestrials or killer robots: not ‘the alien other’. Zombies are people. (Which is not the same as saying that a zombie is a person – though sometimes that’s true also.) It’s the anonymity of the zombie hordes that makes them so powerful and effective in exploring socio-political ideas. A shuffling crowd of zombies is a riot happening in slow motion, but happening nonetheless.

Sometimes a film gets it just right. The Dead got it just right. I remain both puzzled and disappointed that it didn’t receive more acclaim (although 72% on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t bad).

The first film premiered at the 2010 Frightfest; three years later the world premiere of the sequel, which transposed the action to India, was the opening movie at the same event. It has taken a couple of years to subsequently appear on UK DVD but the wait has been worth it because this is another terrific zombie feature. It repeats the success of the first film while also doing something new – always the biggest challenge for a sequel.

British actor Joseph Millson (SNUB, Dead of the Nite, The Sarah Jane Adventures) effects a convincing accent to play American engineer Nicholas Burton, working on wind farm installations in Rajasthan. Meenu Mishra (credited as just ‘Meenu’) is Ishani, the girl he has fallen in love with. She lives with her parents (Sandip Datta Gupta and Poonham Mathur) in Mumbai, 300 miles away. Her father distrusts the American, wants his daughter to marry a good Indian boy, and isn’t likely to react well if/when he finds out she’s pregnant.

A slightly clunky scene at the start in the dockyards of Mumbai justifies the arrival of the zombie infection in the subcontinent. Before too long, violence and fear are working their way through the city streets and into the countryside. US citizens are evacuated but Burton sets off across country to find Ishani.

India is a very different place to Africa. The first film traded on the empty desolation of its locales. The Dead 2 has some open landscapes but more urban and suburban scenes, including Ishani and her family, locked inside their house, trying to stay away from the chaos outside. Where Africa was presented as simple, basic and largely featureless, India is shown to be a complex country: a mix of cultures, politics, industry and tradition. It also has a very large and well-organised army, who are swiftly deployed to deal with the situation. It’s not like there isn’t already civil strife and unrest in Indie. “It’s probably just another Hindus vs Sikhs things,” opines Burton’s voice-on-the-phone colleague Max (Holby City’s Hari Dhillon).

Where the first film dwelt on themes of humanity and understanding, played out against a tapestry of historical and modern colonialism, the principal theme in The Dead 2 is parenthood. Ishani is indeed expecting Burton’s baby, and her relationship with her father has shades and tones. “He is a good man,” her sick (bitten) mother assures Ishani. “He provides for us.” Burton himself becomes an ersatz parent when he teams up with a young orphan named Javed (brilliantly played by Anand Gopal, whom the IMDB thinks is Wall Street Journal correspondent Anand Goyal!). Each needs the other to survive: ‘Mr Nicholas’ can drive, ride a motorbike and fire a gun, but Javed knows the countryside, the routes, the locations which might provide further transport or ammunition.

There are other ways that the parenthood theme emerges, including an agonisingly painful scene near a train track which I won’t spoil for you. There’s even a lovely moment when Javed and Burton’s path is crossed by a troupe of langurs, one of them carrying a baby. That’s almost certainly entirely coincidental, but that doesn’t stop it from being part of the mise-en-scene and thus worthy of critical notice.

Although a journey from Rajasthan to Mumbai could have been a mere picaresque, there is much more to The Dead 2 than that. The relationship between Javed and Burton develops magnificently, both in the action scenes where they fight or escape the undead and in the more talkie bits inbetween where they tell each other about their respective pasts. At the same time, there are the familial relationships between Ishani and her parents. And behind all this we see the outbreak spreading. We don’t really see the breakdown of society as one might expect; rather the establishment of martial law as the army sets up roadblocks, calmly despatching the undead and searching for victims who have been bitten but not yet turned. Beyond a few brief phone conversations with Max, we have no real concept of the bigger picture – as nor do any of our characters.

I’ve never been to India (though I do live in Leicester: largest Indian population in the UK by percentage; biggest Diwali celebrations outside India itself; best damn curries anywhere – and of course I’m not just a fan of Bollywood films, I’ve also been in one). The Dead 2 is a long, long, lo-o-ong way from Bollywood, but my point is that I can only judge its depiction of India – the countryside, the cities, the people – on the basis of what I know at this remove. Although most of the cast and crew were local, this is perforce an outsider’s interpretation of India. But hey, so was Slumdog Millionaire and that won eight Academy Awards.

In fact there’s probably a great degree thesis to be written sometime by someone comparing Danny Boyle’s unavoidably westernised version of India with that of the Ford Brothers (or indeed with other western cinematic depictions of the country such as Sabu the Elephant Boy or – my all-time favourite film ever – The Man Who Would Be King).

There are actual Indian zombie features. Last year’s Leicester zombie fest screened Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru’s Goa Goa Gone which was tremendous fun. There’s also Devaki Singh and Luke Kenny’s Rise of the Zombie which was an unofficial remake of Andrew Parkinson's 1998 indie I, Zombie! A third movie which attempted to become ‘India’s first zombie film', Navdeep Singh’s zom-com Rock the Shaadi, fell apart during post-production and has disappeared into limbo.

Goa Goa Gone was an Indian spin on the established western zombie genre – and I suspect the other two films are too – but not actually a film about India. In that respect, it’s very, very different to The Dead 2 which is more interested in exploring its characters, its setting, and its relationships – especially the post-colonial relationship that Burton has with the country – than in simply putting new or recycled zombie gags into an Indian setting. You could actually argue that The Dead 2: India is a more Indian film than many actual Indian films. Colonialism and post-colonialism are part of India’s culture and history and the Ford Brothers explore them here in fascinating and powerful ways in this feature.

Howard J Ford is credited as producer and director (also editor), Jon Ford as DoP and co-director, with ‘Screenplay by The Ford Brothers’.  Darkest Day director Dan Rickard provided the ‘special and visual effects’, as he did for the first film, while Stuart Browne (A Day of Violence) and Max Van De Banks (The Dead, Soul Searcher, Harmony’s Requiem, Siren Song) were responsible for the ‘special make-up FX’. All are excellent. The score is once again by Imran Ahmad (whose other credits include the BBC Radio 4 version of The Martian Chronicles). The three executive producers are Brighton-based chartered accountant Amir Moallemi, plus Miles Ketley and Josephine Rose (former Head of Acquisitions and Development at Goldcrest, who recently co-produced In the Dark Half) both of media law firm Wiggin.

After its festival run, The Dead 2: India was released in the States in September 2014 as just The Dead 2. Curiously, the July 2015 UK release carries the variant title The Dead 2: In India on the sleeve, although the original title is on screen. Slightly disappointing is the absence of a Making Of, something which would have been much more interesting for this film than for many of the production-line pictures that do bother with a bland featurette. But no matter: I review films, not DVDs.

Both The Dead films are absolutely top-notch: serious, powerful, thought-provoking, thoughtful movies that really use the zombie genre instead of just playing with it. You should watch both.

MJS rating: A

Directors: Devaki Singh, Luke Kenny
Writers: Devaki Singh
Producers: Devaki Singh, Luke Kenny, Reshma Mehta, Abhijit Mehta, Om Sawant
Cast: Luke Kenny, Kirti Kulhari, Ashwin Mushran
Country: India
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: online version

Now here’s something utterly bizarre.

Indian films sometimes copy the plots of western films. I’m not talking about shameless, copyright-busting cheapo clones like the old Turkish stuff. Just a tendency for Bollywood producers to use the plots of successful American (and sometimes European) films with an Indian setting and an Indian spin. There are Indian versions of When Harry Met Sally and My Best Friend’s Wedding and Hitch and Clueless.

Anjaane: The Unknown is an Indian version of The Others. The first half of Koi... Mil Gaya is an Indian version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the second half is an Indian version of ET. Why bother coming up with an original storyline when there are proven plots out there which can be easily reworked to make them attractive to a huge domestic audience?

The thing is: the source material for these films is usually well-known, successful movies – not obscure little British indies. Yet here he have Rise of the Zombie– an unofficial, unacknowledged Indian remake of Andrew Parkinson’s 1998 indie feature I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain!

Luke Kenny (Indian born to Irish and Italian parents) stars as wildlife photographer Neil Parker who splits up with his girlfriend Vinny (Kirti Kulhari: Shaitan, Jal) and seeks solace in a trek into the woods. He hires a tent and has a local man bring him hot food every day. He cycles around the mountains and sometimes goes down into a local town for provisions.

Things start to go wrong when he is bitten by a strange bug. The bite on his arm spreads, the flesh rotting away, and his body starts to reject cooked food. Instead he takes to eating bugs, and then lizards and birds, ripping the raw meat from the bones. Unkempt and bloodied, he staggers around the woods, increasingly unaware of what is going on. Eventually he starts attacking people that he meets, ripping into them and eating their flesh. Meanwhile Vinny is worried about Neil and teams up with his best friend Anish (Ashwin Mushran, who was in supernatural comedy Hum Tum Aur Ghost) to try and find what has happened to him. Benjamin Gilani (Alaap, Mirch Masala) plays Neil’s father, a hospital consultant with the very un-Indian name of Dave Parker.

There are a lot of differences from I, Zombie, obviously. A bug bite rather than a crazy lady. The couple split up before he disappears. He’s a wildlife photographer rather than a biology student. The setting is rural rather than urban. And he doesn’t kill himself at the end with chloroform. (Nor does he have a wank over a photo of the girlfriend he can never see again.)

But… I could come up with a similar list of differences between The Others and Anjaane. So what? The derivation is obvious. The basic story here is clearly modelled on I, Zombie. A young man, isolated from his previous life, becoming more and more ill from an infectious bite which rots his flesh and gives him a desperate hunger for human flesh - cannibalistic necrosis – while his family and friends are concerned about, and mystified by, his disappearance. Andy Parkinson’s film is completely distinct and utterly unlike any other zombie picture (even Colin, which shares the basic concept of a zombie as the central character but is otherwise utterly dissimilar). Somehow Luke Kenny - or more likely, writer/co-director Devaki Singh - has seen a copy of Parkinson’s film, or maybe just read a review of it, and decided to make an Indian version.

I’m not criticising. Unofficial remakes happen. Julian Richards took the basic concept of The Wicker Man and turned it into Darklands. Jason Impey took Andreas Schnaas’ Violent Shit and turned it into Sick Bastard. Even if this was a clone, there are enough differences to make it worthwhile: not just the geographical switch but the passage of 20 years (no digital cameras or Blackberries in the 1990s). I bet the budget for Rise of the Zombie was not dissimilar to what Andy P spent on I, Zombie but that much money buys you a lot more nowadays – in India or England – in terms of technology. No grainy 16mm here; just crisp, clean digital video.

Ritu Jhanjani has the main make-up credit and was cited in publicity as responsible for the zombie make-up, although Saved Ismaile gets the actual credit for ‘prosthetic make-up’. Whoever did it, I’d be lying if I said it was particularly good. Pranab Lahkar is credited as ‘Creative VFX Supervisor’; his previous credits include Dhoom-2, Rocket Singh and even 28 Weeks Later.

Luke Kenny, who considers himself thoroughly Indian despite his parentage, came to prominence in the 1990s as a VJ on a video music channel. He now fronts a rock band (called Luke Kenny LIVE) and DJs as well as making films. Since Rise of the Zombie he has shot a short film called Stephen King, I am Your Biggest Fan. Devaki Singh, who was described in publicity as the first woman to direct a zombie film (hmm, possibly...) is an artist whose first exhibition was in 2009.

In 2013 three films vied to be ‘India’s first zombie film’: Kenny and Singh’s angst-ridden drama; Goa Goa Gone (a fun action-horror-comedy which screened in Leicester last year); and Rock the Shaadi, a rom-zom-com set at a Punjabi-zombie wedding(!). Kenny’s film was originally going to just be called Zombie but the makers of Rock the Shaadi had registered that title so he went for Rise… instead and somehow avoided confusion with the contemporary Danny Trejo picture Rise of the Zombies. Ironically, Rock the Shaadi hit problems during post-production and looks unlikely to ever be finished.

Rise of the Zombie was originally announced for release to cinemas on 22nd February 2013, a date which appeared on a number of poster including one that was produced for PETA promoting vegetarianism. Despite having a clear opportunity to steal a march over Goa Goa Gone, Rise… was bumped to 5 April meaning that both films were released on the same day. So theoretically either can claim to be the country’s first zombie picture. What is more Murzy Pagdiwala, who was DP and executive producer on this film, also DP-ed the second unit on Goa Goa Gone!

V One Entertainment picked up the film for international distribution and there is an English-subtitled version on Amazon Prime. The version I watched was on the VOneEnt channel of DailyMotion which is free but has adverts every few minutes. That wasn't subtitled but there's really very little dialogue in the film and half of that is in English anyway.

The end of Rise of the Zombie promises a sequel in 2014, Land of the Zombie, and includes shots of numerous zombies shuffling around, implying that the virus has spread beyond its initial host. Kenny had plans for a trilogy but Land… has not yet appeared.

Truth be told, Rise of the Zombie isn’t a bad movie. Kenny gives a spirited performance and Pagdiwala’s camera-work captures both urban and rural locations well. The film runs 86 minutes and has a few songs on the soundtrack (but no dance numbers). What’s missing is the bleak nihilism of the original, and there’s not really anything to replace it. Instead of cutaway talking heads of the people he left behind, the film simply lurches into Vinny and Anish’s story in the third act, which goes nowhere. Instead of social comment or character development, we’re treated to lots of fast-edited flashbacks and dream sequences which look flashy but don’t give the movie any substance.

Nevertheless, one must grudgingly admire Kenny for taking such a non-commercial tack on his zombie film. It would have been easy to just go for a standard zombie siege and throw in a few culturally specific gags. The story of one man’s lonely descent into a zombie state was radical when Andrew Parkinson made it nearly 20 years ago and it’s still pretty radical now.

In March 2013, when promoting the film, Luke Kenny was interviewed by Bollywood Life. This is what he told them: “If we were telling a zombie survival story, there are 40 years of zombie survival films to see who did what, and what we could try to do differently. ... In this case, there was no precedent; there has been no zombie origin film ever been made. There is no story that has ever been written that tells you the story of this one human being and what happens.” Now, that’s not strictly true, is it?

MJS rating: B-

[Update. Devaki Singh may be the first woman to direct a zombie feature, but Isabelle Defaut directed The Long Night, the 2002 short which inspired Devil's Playground. - MJS] 

Directors: Jason Impey, Wade Radford
Writers: Jason Impey, Wade Radford
Producers: Jason Impey, Wade Radford
Cast: Jason Impey, ‘Dylan Jake-Price’, Samantha Keller
Country:UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: http://jasonimpey.co.uk

Even by Jason Impey’s standards, Fluid Boy is a nasty piece of work: a brutal, unpleasant, unbelievably misogynist film which is as simple and stark as it is violent and revolting. But… it’s not gratuitous. It raises questions. It makes a point. It’s well-made. It’s worth watching. It bolsters Impey’s position as an important name in the British Horror Revival.

The story here is very, very simple. Impey plays indie film-maker Joe Newton who has hired a hall to audition an actress for a role in his planned zombie film The Orgasmic Dead. With him is Maximilian, the film’s leading actor and co-poducer. Joe hates Max – and with justification. While Joe is trying to be professional, Max is just an arsehole, utterly disinterested in the audition process and given to manic, high-pitched laughter at things that aren’t funny. Max is played by regular Impey collaborator Wade Radford under the nom-de-screen ‘Dylan Jake-Price’ for some reason. The aspiring actress, Julie, is played by Samantha Keller who also worked with Jason in his segment of the Grindsploitation anthology.

Julie gamely tries to audition, confused by the relationship between Joe and Max, but eventually decides to leave, freaked out by the whole thing. At which point Max knocks her senseless, ties her up, and spends the rest of this 62-minute film abusing and humiliating her in increasingly unpleasant ways while Joe films everything with the view to distributing the footage as a snuff movie.

A lesser film-maker would have concentrated on the abuse, treating the story as simple torture porn for sick bastards who get off on seeing women hurt. But Jason Impey doesn’t do that sort of thing; he’s more interested in human nature and the boundaries (or lack thereof) of acceptable behaviour. Which is not to say that there aren’t sick bastards out there who would get off on a transgressive film like this; the question of whether a film like Fluid Boyshould be made is one for sociologists  and moral philosophers, not farty old-school film reviewers with a blog.

The reason why Fluid Boy is somehow watchable - even for a guy like me who really, really wants to just see a nice, cuddly monster rip somebody’s head off – is because of the relationship between Max and Joe. Max is a nutter, and quite possible coked up. Constantly prowling around, never still for more than a few seconds, grinning and giggling, he has ‘sociopath’ written through him like a stick of rock.

Joe on the other hand takes no part in the abuse and humiliation at all, simply recording it with a handheld video camera, a Go-Pro on his chest and assorted static cameras around the room, which is empty except for a table and a couple of chairs. A door leads through to toilets and a shower. And, in a piece of chilling mise-en-scene, a serving hatch through to a kitchen remains open, the occasional background glimpses of prosaic domesticity serving to underline the unreality of the violence and abuse meted out to the increasingly cowed Julie.

Joe argues frequently with Max, but his complaints are about mishandling of expensive equipment, the failure of the promised ’snuff’ film to deliver the goods, or just his colleague’s unprofessional, infantile behaviour. Joe makes no effort to help or save Julie or alleviate her suffering in anyway, even during the times when Max is out of the room. “It’s not up to me,” he tells her, gnomically.

A film that was just about Max hurting Julie would be not just unpleasant and misogynist but boring as well. It’s the inclusion of Joe, the third wheel, that raises Fluid Boy above thematically comparable pictures.

Here’s what I assume is happening. The way I read this, there are only two people in this room. Max is a projection of Joe. In Freudian terms, Max is Joe’s id, unfettered by any sort of super-ego, while Joe’s fucked-up ego stays behind the camera. Jekyll and Hyde basically, but existing simultaneously. Fight Club without the Hollywood gloss. The opening scene is Joe in his car, tmetically swearing like a trooper to himself about how much he hates Maxi-fucking-milian, which only bolsters my theory that the two personalities inhabit the same head. Once I realised this, my opinion of the film dropped slightly in expectation of a cheesy ‘twist’ ending that I could see coming a mile off.  (And can I just add that, as a writer, the fact that watching and reviewing Fluid Boy has given me the chance to use the adverbs ‘gnomically’ and ‘tmetically’ – ie. pertaining to tmesis – is justification enough for the time that I spent viewing the film and the time it has taken me to write all this. Anyway…)

Here’s what’s interesting. Jason never gives us that twist. The film just ends as the violence reaches a climax, with a brief single credit screen naming the three people involved. And that absence of a cheesy twist actually lifts the film back up in my judgement. It doesn’t detract from the Fight Club explanation of what is going on: who these two men are and why each is behaving the way he is. But it also raises the alternative prospect that everything we see, within the reality of the film, is ‘real’ and not some psychological projection. That Joe and Max are both sick in their own way, rather than Joe being sick enough for both of them.

That’s what I mean about how this film, precisely because it’s a Jason Impey joint, raising questions and provoking thoughts. If there wasn’t space for the psychological interpretation this would just be lowest-common-denominator torture porn and I would have switched off after ten minutes and you would be reading my review of something fun with zombies in it. I honestly don’t know whether Jason and Wade made this with the Fight Club scenario in mind or whether that explanation is an accidental result of my take on their take on something intended as just misogyny for misogyny’s sake. I’d very much like to think the former. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. Jason Impey is a natural film-maker (albeit one who chooses to pursue a transgressive oeuvre below the radar of all but the most committed ‘cult’ fans) and as such he can’t help but make films that are interesting, in the same way that a natural artist doodling on a notepad can’t help but create interesting drawings, or a natural musician can’t help but whistle interesting tunes in the shower.

In film-making terms, the skill here is in Jason’s editing of the multiple cameras to create a smoothly flowing narrative. The picture unfolds in almost real time (there’s a brief jump at about 32 minutes and another at about 51 minutes) but it clearly wasn’t shot in 62 minutes.  Fluid Boy draws us in through established cinematic conventions – the wide-shot, the close-up – without the film-makers relying on cinematic set-up of shots and angles, but rather through the selection of shots and angles in post-production.  This is Jason Impey’s 428th film (or seems like it) and his experience shows.

Radford has acted for Impey in films like Sex, Lies and Depravity (which he wrote) and Lustful Desires and the two have collaborated on stuff like Twink and the Boys Behind Bars trilogy; films which, with all due respect to Jason and Wade, you’re never going to see reviewed on this site. He’s chillingly good as the unfettered id: violent, sexual and scatological (seriously: this is a film for those of you who thought The Human Centipede was a little reserved and tame). Impey, playing yet another variant of his much-used indie film-maker character, provides the vital pedestrian counterpoint to Max’s manic antics. Joe is mostly behind the camera, or cut off at the neck, or hidden behind Max. When we do see him, he’s hunkered over an eye-piece so that we almost never view Jason/Joe’s face, while Max/Wade has more than his share of close-ups.

But the bravura performance here is Samantha Keller. It’s incredibly brave of an actress to film something like this, skirting so close to reality. Clearly she’s not really struck in the face, not really tied up and that’s melted chocolate not faeces, but nevertheless it’s a strong-minded, strong-willed (strong-stomached) woman who can handle something like this. Playing a believable victim in any violent film is always a challenge and Keller turns in a hugely impressive performance. Although how much of this extremely NSFW film she could include in her acting reel is a tricky question…

Bizarrely, the IMDB lists Radford and Keller as the same characters in a forthcoming feature called Allusion, directed by somone named Tony Newton who would appear to be a real person and not just another Impey pseudonym. Whether that is a remake of this film, or reuse of this footage, or something else entirely, is a revelation we will find out in due course. Or not, as the situation may be.

Fluid Boy is one of Jason Impey’s best works (of the comparatively few I’ve watched) and Impey fans (they do exist, I’m sure) will have no hesitation in watching it when the film appears on DVD. Should other people give it a try? Only if they know what they’re letting themselves in for. I have done my best to describe and analyse the movie. Like most of Jason’s work it’s most definitely not for everyone. But if you have an interest in transgressive cinema, and in particular in zero-budget films that push the envelope, then this will be worth your time.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Andrew Jones
Writer: Andrew Jones
Producer: Andrew Jones
Cast: Rachel Howells, Alison Lenihan, Lee Bane
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/NorthBankEntertainment

It’s been a few years since I watched an Andrew Jones movie. Back in 2007 I reviewed his second feature The Feral Generation, a bleak drama about homelessness. At the time he was attached to a mooted remake of Driller Killer, and he wrote an unproduced remake of Beyond the Door for Ovidio Assonitis. He then teamed up with James Plumb to make three new entries in public domain franchises: Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection and Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming (both directed by James) and The Amityville Asylum (directed by Andrew).

In the past two years, Jones’ production company North Bank Entertainment has become a veritable film factory, pumping out a new low-budget horror every few months. And because Andrew is a reliable source of material, he’s having no problem finding distribution. In 2013 he shot The Midnight Horror Show (aka Theatre of Fear) in October and Valley of the Witch in November. In 2014 he shot The Last House on Cemetery Lane in April, Poltergeist Activity in September and A Haunting at the Rectory in November. All five of these are now available on DVD. Already this year, Andrew has shot Robert the Doll in February (out on DVD next month as just Robert), thriller Kill Kane in April and The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund in June!

Conjuring the Dead is actually a retitling of Valley of the Witch for its VOD release through the ever-reliable TheHorrorShow.tv. Announced for an October 2014 DVD release through 4Digital Media under its original title, that disc was evidently pulled, retitled and rescheduled for early August, making this July VOD release the film’s UK debut. (Hanover House released it in the States in January.)

Anyway…

Rachel Howells (who was in Jones’ first film, Teenage Wasteland) stars as recently divorced Londoner Kristen Matthews who takes the opportunity of inheriting a house from her aunt to leave the city and move to the small Welsh town of Cwmgwrach. This is a real place, whose name translates as 'Valley of the Witch' and which has assorted legends attached, although I can’t find any record online of the historical part of this film’s plot. Incidentally, Aussie Prime Minister Julia Gillard was born in Cwmgwrach – although her PR people generally claim she’s from Barry!

Kristen befriends her neighbour Barbara (Alison Lenihan, variously a radio presenter, a cabaret artiste and a Cher tribute act) although she’s slightly freaked out to discover that Barb is a practising Wiccan who belongs to a small coven of white witches. Although Rachel is nominally the film’s central character, the picture’s heart lies in a magnificently subtle performance by North Bank regular Lee Bane (who has been in all of the company’s films since NOTLD: Resurrection) as Jim Eckhart, the local plod. Three suicides in swift succession, apparently unconnected and all allegedly happy individuals, suggests something strange is going on.

Among a succession of flashbacks, dream sequences and other interstitial elements which help to pad the slender story out to feature length – some of them featuring colour distortion effects of an intensity rarely seen outside of 1970s Top of the Pops– we learn of how three witches were crucified and burned in 1614. The leader of the three cursed the village in the traditional manner of horror movie witches – and evidently this relates to what is happening now.

Kristen is attacked in her own home by a maniac in a hood and manages to stab him – but when PC Jim arrives, the body has disappeared and there’s not even any sign of a struggle. Truth be told, the ‘spooky’ things which happen throughout the film are somewhat random and don’t fit together in any way, leaving assorted flapping plot strands, not least the suicides which don’t seem to relate to anything else.

It is all, as one might expect, connected to the 17th century witch burning and certain people being direct descendants of certain other people. A family tree website is used to identify people’s ancestors although that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. All we see on each occasion is a name and a late 16th century birthdate, but only one of those names has any obvious meaning. More to the point, even at a conservative estimate of, say 33 years per generation, at a remove of four centuries each of us has about 4,000 direct ancestors. It’s unlikely they’d all be listed on a family tree website, but nevertheless characters do seem to somehow go straight to a specific name and we are left to infer that this particular ancestor was involved in some way in the witch burning.

Nor could it truthfully be said that the film’s final scene makes total sense; it’s unclear why this is happening and why the person doing it is doing it. On the plus side this scene, which is shot silent and in slow motion so that we see – but don’t hear – people shouting and screaming, is extraordinarily effective. Solid evidence, if any were needed, of how confident Andrew Jones is in his craft and his niche.

Jones does a good job overall in capturing the spirit of the small town, with its local copper, local priest and local shop for local people. Furthermore the film is remarkably well cast. Jared Morgan plays the priest. (God almighty – it’s the guy who was ‘interviewed’ by Uri Geller in the footage Jo Roberts and Jim Eaves shot when they turned Diagnosis into Sanitarium! Also in Footsteps and an obscure 2004 semi-documentary version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth.) Rachael Jones, Patricia Ford and Jessica Ann Bonner (Devil’s Tower, Serial Kaller, Christmas Slay) are the three witches, and the legend that is Kenton Hall (A Dozen Summers, KillerSaurus) clearly has a ball in his brief appearance as the Witchfinder General.

DP Ryan Owen Eddleston also shot Theatre of Fear and The Last House on Cemetery Lane for Jones and is currently prepping his own documentary entitled I am Dracula. Make-up effects are by Harriet Rogers who also worked on Amityville Asylum and SJ Evans'Dead of the Nite. In fact most of the crew have multiple North Bank Entertainment credits and/or have worked on other features and shorts produced as part of the 21st century Welsh horror boom.

Under either title, Valley/Conjuring is a solidly crafted, very watchable slice of serious low-budget horror that hits its targets. Many film-makers have talked in the past of establishing their own film factory to produce a catalogue of horror films, often citing some mythical version of Hammer as their model. In today’s marketplace, it looks like that’s a real possibility and Andrew Jones’ North Bank Entertainment has achieved something like that. I really should watch some more of his pictures…

MJS rating: B+

Screenwriter David Pabian doesn’t have many produced credits but he’s been earning a steady living writing Hollywood scripts for many years now and the few that do have his name on are among the very best straight-to-video B-movies of the early 1990s. This interview with David was conducted in November 2007. The picture shows David with Carroll Baker, star of Andy Warhol's Bad, The Watcher in the Woods and other cult movies.

What are you doing in Italy?
"I live here part of the time. Six months here, six months in Los Angeles. I can work here of course also, thanks to e-mail and things like that. So it’s the best of weather in LA and here, living year round in the perpetual Spring."

I understand that both of your parents were animators.
"As a matter of fact, they were."

So how did you end up as a writer, rather than making Charlie Brown cartoons?
"Because I have no talent for drawing or art! Everyone in the family actually, uncles on both sides of the family, were animators but it was not a talent that came naturally to me. I always read and was always very interested in films and film history, even as a very young kid. So it just seemed a natural thing to do, to try and make my own, and since I didn’t have the wherewithal to actually make movies I just thought I could maybe start writing them. And I did for a while as a kid, just messing around. Then I joined the real world and got an honest job at the telephone company and sat around for years doing that. But when an opening came for a reader at United Artists studios, friends of mine suggested I look into that. So that’s how I got back into the business."

Did that give you an ‘in’ to be able to show your own scripts to somebody?
"It did eventually, although what it really was, was upon reading all those scripts I realised that good stuff would be seen. The competition is astounding, there are thousands of scripts floating around. But I saw as a reader, and speaking with some of the executives, that the good stuff is seen, is held onto. There are scripts that film executives cart around with them for years, trying to get made. And when you get down to the pool of the quality stuff - there’s not that much, there really isn’t. I knew that I had some facility for writing and I thought I could get back into doing that. Then eventually, when I moved into a more executive development position, that’s when I began meeting people and was able to show my stuff to a few agents. It was an agent who told me that there was a writing job at Charlie Band’s company Full Moon that she couldn’t recommend any of her writers for as she was a signatory with the Writers Guild. Charlie didn’t want to use any Guild writers of course. At that time I was not a member of the Guild, so I sent in a couple of scripts, he called me up and that was it."

What was the first thing that you did for Charlie?
"The first thing I did was called Crash and Burn. He actually had a script called Crash and Burn and he told me that it was one of the few scripts that he had actually made a Writers Guild deal on so he was contractually obligated to use that writer’s name. But he wanted a total page one re-write and they would end up giving me, I think it was ‘dialogue coach’ as a credit at the end! So along with Crash and Burn, he also then hired me to write Puppet Master II."

Was Crash and Burn intended as a sequel to Robojox?
"It really wasn’t. I do remember him talking about that but I don’t think he wanted it to be. He had actually gotten the Crash and Burn script, I think, before Robojox but by the time it got made I believe it came out afterwards. I’m not sure on that. I was not aware of that at the time and he had had Crash and Burn for at least a year or two before he finally got around to getting somebody to rewrite it."

What sort of instructions were you given about limitations such as effects sequences?
"He did tell me to use all the characters and only the characters that existed in the first script. But I remember there were two women in there who were hookers and he thought that they were far too over-the-top and vulgar so he wanted them toned down. They also were drug-users, they were always high in the original story, and he didn’t want them to be drug-users. I didn’t exactly turn them into nuns but I softened them very much. I softened them and had one sort of a world-weary women of the street, who has moved out of it, and the younger woman, rather than her protégé, she is now trying to get out of that life.

"I remember when I turned in the first draft, Charlie’s wife Debra read it and she said, ‘Where’s that line about looking for the mindfucking drugs?’ Right away I had to put back the line about: ‘You got any good mindfuckers around here?’! Which I never thought was a particularly funny line. But I was told to soften the girls and then the first comment was: why aren’t these girls tough whores? But the effects, actually at that time he said nothing about keeping the budget in mind. I think he just figured that he and David Allen would figure it out in post-production. They actually did a pretty good job for the kind of stop-motion stuff it was, I thought."

How familiar were you with Charles Band’s work before you started working for him?
"Actually I knew some of the work of his father, Albert Band, who had directed some interesting small films in the fifties. A very creepy, odd movie called Face of Fire with James Whitmore which was based on a Steven Crane short story, ‘The Monster.’ Other things that Albert had done, he seemed like a pretty interesting guy. I barely knew Charlie’s work when I was hired. My job at the time, as a development executive, I just wasn’t looking at that kind of stuff. It was sort of under the radar. Though I really had the idea myself of putting together a company where we would do low budget horror films. But I wasn’t that familiar with what was coming out of Full Moon - or Empire I guess it was, before Full Moon. I had seen some of his stuff but I hadn’t followed him in any way."

Where did Puppet Master II come from?
"Charlie said that he wanted a sequel but I was not to worry about anything that happened in the first one except in the vaguest of ways. They of course wanted to keep the puppet characters and of course Andre Toulon - although Charlie wasn't pleased with Leech Woman and wanted her killed off, so I did that - but anything else was completely up to me. He didn’t care if it didn’t match at all. I had actually seen the first one before we even talked about this and I thought that storywise it could have been a little punchier. Charlie had also told me that, no matter what I came up with as a story, he would be taking story credit as he did on all his films - and I figured okay, fine. But you got it - you mentioned somewhere in your review - that it was very heavily influenced by the Karl Freund Mummy from 1932. I did that on purpose, I thought of it as an homage. I love that film so much.

"And I was very pleased actually that David Allen followed the script. There were only a couple diversions. Not only did he follow the script as written but he absolutely followed my directives: when to go to black and white; cut to a poster and fade from that poster to the next screen. I was really pleased that he did that because we seemed to be very much on the same page - if I may use the word! - artistically on that film. He saw it very much the same way I did, except I did see the whole thing moving a little faster than he directed it."

It’s the only feature that David Allen directed. Did he want to direct more films?
"Yes, he was set to do another one called The Primevals and actually was in pre-production on it and the deal was ready to go. There may have even been one or two scenes shot when he died."

Charlie Band tends to reuse people. Did David Allen not want to do any more films and concentrate on effects?
"No no no, he definitely wanted to direct more and it was only his death that stopped this. He got very sick, I mean he was obviously sick for quite some time before he actually left us. But Charlie and he had a whole little roster of films that, at least at the time, Charlie had told David he was willing to let him direct. And David was working in pre-production on things. I lost track of David actually before he died. I didn’t see David much after Puppet Master II. I would stop by his studio on occasion, which was an amazing place, and we would just talk and jaw. David would often be booming Wagner from his high-end stereo all day - 12" vinyl, as he didn't like the CD remasters. I don't know what his assistants thought of Brünhilde's top Cs, but the over-the-top mythology of Wagner's Ring obviously inspired him and his work. But I could see he wasn’t well, then whatever he was planning with Charlie did fall apart."

What sort of response did Puppet Master II get? Was it successful?
"It was successful. Actually I think there was only a couple of other films that were released by Paramount after that. Charlie got into some trouble apparently with them, in some way."

I think we’ll hedge round that a bit!
"But it was well received. It actually got some good reviews and I got some jobs from it, not from the script but from people who saw the film. It was extremely successful but of course it was also straight-to-video and I think Charlie always had pretty much a guaranteed box office on those things. I don’t know what it was like in Great Britain but all the video stores in Los Angeles at least had basically walls or large displays of Full Moon films. They had a real audience of 14-18 year-old guys and then older geeky types. He really connected with them and I think he had a pretty captive audience. I don’t really know, in the larger realm of things, how those films do in the world at large, outside of the Full Moon crowd. Puppet Master did really well and Charlie told me that he had won a couple of awards for Puppet Master II. Of course I was not even mentioned in those or went anywhere to receive an award. But there was a marketing company, a film-releasing company of some sort that gave Charlie an award for Puppet Master II. So he’d done well for somebody - I can’t tell you exactly who."

It’s one of the first DTV sequels, around the same time as Trancers II. Now we think of Charlie as the king of the sequels, but this must have been around the time that he was just starting to realise that he could extend these films into franchises. Was that part of his plan?
"We didn’t discuss his long-term plans. I didn’t know that when I did Puppet Master II. By the time I did Subspecies and he showed me the poster he had, for me to write the film around the poster, he told me at that point that Subspecies was going to go on and on and he wanted to get as many films as he could from it. Shortly after I began Subspecies, I heard that a friend of mine was writing Puppet Master III so I figured that was where Charlie was going now on those things. But when I had written II, I really thought that that was basically going to be the end of the Puppet Master thing. I think they went on to ... five?"

It goes up to Part V, then Curse of the Puppet Master, then Retro Puppet Master and finally the non-Band Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys.[This was before Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, obviously - MJS]
"But you know, he’s very cagey that Charlie. There was a scene in my script that was a very quick flashback to Nazi Germany. I think it lasted a page and a half in the script and he told me he was going to cut it. It was sort of important in the first draft but he said, ‘No, we just don’t want to do that, we’re going to cut that.’ So I cut it out and wrote around it it - and that is what Puppet Master III was. So he took that page and a half that I wrote and figured out how to do a whole movie out of it. So that’s what III turned into and then in fact all the Puppet Masters, at least the next two, until about V - I sort of lost track of them after that, obviously - still used that Nazi Germany background that I had given him in that first film. But he’s very good at that kind of thing. He does see the elements that are going to make a good sequel or a movie and zero in on them and realise how to exploit them to the hilt. He’s a really smart guy.”

What was the next script after Puppet Master II?
"That’s Subspecies. That’s the one where he showed me the poster of the scantily clad woman being carried away by little green men, then said, ‘By the way, we can’t shoot this scene. You have to write the film around it but we can’t shoot this scene because we really can’t afford to do this kind of effect. So you have to figure out how to suggest this is going on so the poster will make sense, but you can’t actually write this scene’! So I did show the little green guys coming in the window, then I think we saw her arm disappearing out the door as she is dragged out. But ultimately he did shoot that scene. First it was done with Romanian guys in little green suits but it looked so ridiculous that he went back and hired David Allen after all to do some stop-motion."

The irony is that that’s not the main thrust of the Subspecies films. It’s all vampires and Bloodstone and whatnot.
"Right. That I made up. I hadn’t been able to come up with an idea and I was actually driving to the meeting to give him my idea. I had recently seen a production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and I said, ‘Let’s just reverse that story around a little bit. The search for the Holy Grail. Let’s see, it’s something that keeps the vampires alive. Okay, it’s this Bloodstone thing. All right, that’s what it is.’ So I went in and I pitched this idea based on Wagner’s Parsifal! Two vampire brothers, a good one and a bad one. I used a lot of the imagery from the original Nosferatu, and Herzog’s 1979 remake - and just came up with that story. Stefan the good guy, Radu the bad guy and these girls who were in Transylvania doing their thing. So I just came up with that Bloodstone story, using it as the Holy Grail."

When Charlie just had the poster, was it intended to be a vampire film or just about the little green guys?
"Initially it was to be a vampire film. It was explained to me that it had to be a vampire movie but those characters had to figure into it. He also at the time told me that he wanted it to be very adult. He wanted to use it to break away from his teenage boy audience. So when I first wrote it, I wrote this creepy thing where - get this - one of those little creatures actually crawled up into one of the girls! I think that after seeing that script he decided to go back for the 15 year-old boys! That whole idea of going grown-up for a theatrical release - which is also what he told me his plan was - it just didn’t happen. He wound up making it more like a Band thing. But that’s right; I had forgotten that when I began writing it was to be a vampire film but I had to work that in. He’d already had the posters so those characters had to come in. So it was how to put that together into a vampire story - and it doesn’t really work!"

Did you work closely with Ted Nicolaou?
"No, I didn’t. I would send Ted the scripts and we talked on the phone maybe five or six times. Because he didn’t get attached until the final draft had been sent in. We worked on some polish; I polished the script up a bit with Ted’s notes and really liked him. We talked only a bit but he was really a smart guy. When they got to Romania though, they found logistically things were so different from what they expected. This was actually, I’m told, the first US production to be shot in Romania. They do a lot now. They now create Los Angeles in Romania. But this was the first and it was so difficult when they got there, they basically just rewrote the script on the set. Ted did it with Jackson Barr, the guy I get the co-writing credit with. I never worked with him; he did the day-to-day rewrite kind of thing.

"When I first saw that film, I thought it bore no relation - except the names - to my script but when I read a synopsis of the film, I realised it was my story. It was very interesting; I thought it had been so changed but somehow when I read that synopsis, I said, ‘You know, it does look like they followed it.’ They just changed the order of things and added a couple of characters. But it was a nightmare apparently, according to Ted, it was just a nightmare. They had to wing the whole thing."

Subspecies had three direct sequels and a spin-off in The Vampire Journals. Have you seen those?
"I only saw the second one, Bloodstone. That’s the only other one I saw. There were comics also, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of those. There were Puppet Master and Subspecies comic books, which are a rarity now. And cards, baseball cards."

I’m guessing you didn’t see any residuals or credits for reuse of your characters.
"Part of the deal with Charlie was, since they were not Writers Guild deals, there were no ancillary benefits at all. I will admit to a bit of cynicism about the films that were written after. In a way, I didn’t want to see just how far the stuff I had written had changed. Also by then I had become a member of the Writers Guild and I was off doing Disney projects and things. I just put it all as: that was the Charlie Band stuff and we’ve moved on."

The other film you did for Charlie was my favourite Full Moon film - and Charlie told me it was one of his favourites too - which was Dollman.
"Yes, although that also got very changed from the script I had written. Albert Pyun the director is a pretty sharp guy, I really liked him, Again, it got changed. I like my script better than what was shot but I really liked that film. I think it’s clever, it’s fast, it is one of the best ones I think that Charlie has done. I don’t know how far he went with that, how many others he made after that."

There’s only really one other Dollman film which is Dollman vs Demonic Toys although the character turns up very briefly right at the end of a really terrible film called Bad Channels. What sort of brief were you given for Dollman?
"They wanted it in an urban setting. Dollman had to be twelve inches tall initially. In fact I remember going out and looking for a GI Joe or something and at that time they had become very politically incorrect and you could not find boy dolls any more. I think they’re all out there again now but I couldn’t find one. I almost bought a Ken doll because I wanted to have something in front of me to imagine moving around and doing stuff. I think I eventually found an old GI Joe at a garage sale. Charlie wanted him to be twelve inches tall and he wanted him to fight crime in an urban setting. Again, he wanted it to be very gritty with drug users and a really dark, nasty urban sprawl. I think I probably overdid it in the script and they softened that. Because I had pretty rough stuff going on. I thought I was writing a film that would be looked at by grown-ups. But what he came up with ultimately I think is really better. Certainly I am also surprised that it didn’t go on. I really don’t know why not because it is one of the best things he ever did."

Did you come up with the prologue on an alien world and the other sci-fi elements?
"No I didn’t. That was all Pyun I believe. That alien world, there was very little background on that in my draft and that’s the way Charlie wanted it. He really wanted to start this thing in Chicago, which is where we had it initially, and to delve a very little bit, he didn’t want more than a page or two on back story. So that was all another writer. It was Albert Pyun who worked on that. Albert was a really good writer and he just invented so much. I almost didn’t recognise that film when I saw it. It doesn’t represent my writing nearly as much as Puppet Master II or Subspecies. And Crash and Burn, although I don’t get the credit for that, is page-for-page what I wrote. I cringe at some of it when I see it now but it is what I wrote. Dollman is about the best and yet it’s the least me."

Did you work on any other stuff for Charlie?
"Not for Charlie, no. But I had a great affection for that group of people.

Did your credits on the Full Moon films help your career?
"Yes they did but not an awful lot. I had so many scripts of my own that by the time I was out pounding the pavements and going to the majors, and I had a good agent and I had joined the Writers Guild, I had other material to show them and other material I was getting hired from. But having those credits, having produced credits, even Band video produced credits, even the straight to video stuff, is always a help. More doors open simply because you’ve had produced credits. You make the comment on the website - and I really appreciate it and it is true - you can have really good, long-lasting careers in that town where you’re writing and writing but very little gets made. You’re getting assignments and getting paid for them but there’s very little to show as far as produced credits go. Or for various reasons you have to write things that you know your name is not going to be on, there’s Guild-contractual things involved in that.

"Certain percentages of structure changes have to be met before a different writer will get a credit and very often producers will say, ‘Don’t go over the forty per cent structural change rule because we’re going to use the original writer’s name. They do that because they don’t want to get into the whole, sometimes very long, arbitration process in deciding who gets what kind of credit. Those produced films are great on the resume but most of my later jobs came from other writing samples that they saw and other written things that I’d done."

Are you allowed to say anything else that you’ve worked on?
"I can’t claim credit for the things that are credited to others. There was a Disney feature called Dragons which never got made. A Disney feature called Minotaur, based on the Greek myth, which never got made. And doctoring jobs that I’ve done but will shy from naming."

Is it frustrating seeing that work and not getting a credit? Would you like to get something else out there with your name on it?
"Certainly, and I’m working on something now., I’ve been commissioned to write something. It’s an assignment and oh, absolutely, it does kind of drive me nuts. I said to my agent, ‘Look, I don’t even want to share a credit with a director. It’s not going to be A Film By. I want A Film By with my name on it too.’ They laughed at that. That’s actually a huge bone of contention at the Writers Guild now and one of the reasons that we’re all going on strike as of Monday, because of this proprietary credit that directors are taking, A Film By. The writers are saying, ‘Wait a minute, I want my name up there too.’

"That‘s another thing, a bit of an aside. When Puppet Master II was finished and there was going to be a viewing of it, David Allen called me up to very gently break the news and prepare me for the fact that Charlie didn’t give me a separate card in the opening credits with my name on it as script but put me on the same card with his name: ‘Story by Charles Band, script by David Pabian.’ I couldn’t care less. I didn’t care at all about that, it didn’t bother me. What I did think was it was kind of sweet that David called me up, really thinking I’d be worried and he wanted to prepare me for that. He told me he had argued with Charlie about that. That’s what David was like, he was a real sweetheart. Too nice in some ways, really too nice. I will say in closing that I look back on those years with great affection and even some for Charlie and Debra his wife. I enjoyed it.”

Director: Tony Gardner
Writer: Tony Gardner
Producer: Tony Gardner
Cast: Tony Gardner, Geoff Dunlavey, William Bain
Country: UK
Year of release 2012
Reviewed from: YouTube
Website: http://densefear2.webs.com

Here’s an obscure entry in the small but fascinating subgenre of British werewolf features. Dense Fear Bloodline was a labour of love, shot for peanuts over six years around Gateshead by Tony Gardner and eventually ‘released’ via YouTube. And you know what, it’s pretty damn good. I think we can all name werewolf pictures considerably worse than this.

Gardner plays (sans dialogue) Paul Johnson, a tragic lycanthrope on the run after killing his psychologist. Theatrical agent, casting director and former Byker Grove bit-parter Geoff Dunlavey is Chief Inspector Ryan of Tyneside CID, charged with tracking him down. An early scene introduces us to Detective Wendy Hale (Michelle Bayly aka Louisa Hart: Zombie Women of Satan, Mirrorvael) and there’s an absolutely wonderful chemistry between the two coppers. Ryan is bitter, weary, professional but occasionally accident-prone (a later scene with a car alarm is a corker!) and his demeanour contrasts beautifully with Hale’s joyful, teasing flirtatiousness. I was really hoping that the movie would be about these two, but sadly although Ryan has further scenes, Hale only reappears once and that’s on her own. If Dunlavey, Hart and Gardner are up for it, they should certainly consider a spin-off based around those two characters.

I was also impressed by the ingenuity in the production design demonstrated by this scene. Dressing up a room to realistically look like the office of a busy senior CID officer is a hefty task. Other films have failed miserably at this (Deadly Pursuit notoriously used the changing room at a boxing club!). Gardner has simply tweaked his script to explain that Ryan is in a temporary office, hence its spartan appearance. Indie film-makers take note: this is how to do it.

Sadly, we have to leave the two plods and meet our principal ensemble, a bunch of squaddies hunting Johnson in the woods, hoping to catch him before nightfall when the full moon comes out. (As so often with werewolf films, the script ignores the rather basic fact that there’s only one full moon every four weeks. So if Johnson transformed last night and ripped his psychologist’s guts out, he can’t also be transforming tonight.)

Actually I say ‘squaddies’ because these are guys in camo with guns, but they’re not regular army, rather they’re mostly ‘ex-military’ (according to introductory captions). One is now a zoologist (there’s an interesting career path!), one’s a former royal bodyguard etc. Joining them is Layla Price (Shannon Grey), a feisty, no-bullshit MI5 operative with a talent for kickboxing. She says she’s 21 but, since I’m pretty sure you need a degree to join MI5, her field experience must be pretty limited. William Bain plays the squad leader, Marcel. Also under his command are grizzled Gulf War vet Jackson (Dave Newsome); paranormal expert Roberts (Michael McDermott); bolshy Scot Ford (Alan Clennell) and animal behaviour expert Dylan (Mark Salem).

Despite the natural difficulty in distinguishing between a bunch of men all dressed in camo, there are some lovely moments of characterisation and interpersonal relationships. The combination of ‘squaddies + werewolves’ can’t help but draw comparisons with Dog Soldiers (which must have had a thousand times this film’s budget). While the script, acting and production values on show here obviously don’t approach Neil Marshall’s film, they are respectable in their own right, given the nature of the production, and bolstered by Gardner’s adroit direction and editing.

One thing that Dense Fear Bloodline has very much in its favour is the actual werewolf (characters don’t shy away from using both the W-word and the L-word). There is a transformation scene at about the halfway point which is a master class in how to handle on-screen transmogrification. There’s no CGI, no lap-dissolves, just a succession of shots of Gardner on all fours intercut with some smart physical effects and – here’s what makes the whole thing work – a great foley track of unpleasant-sounding snaps, crackles and pops as muscles, bones, sinews, tendons, flesh, nails and hair rearrange themselves in ways that nature never intended. The mightily impressive special effects were supervised by Mark Danbury whose other gigs include Bloodlust, Coulrophobia, Wire in the Blood, Zombie Women of Satan and The League of Gentlemen.

On top of which, Johnson is played for the remainder of the film by (a succession of actors in) an absolutely awesome home-made full-body werewolf suit. Shaggy fur, fearsome (movable) jaws and sharp claws exacerbate a fantastic performance of quasi-lupine body movement. Clever lighting and editing lets us get a good view of the beast while covering up any unavoidable deficiencies in the costume (such as the non-moving eyes). Pumpkinhead-style stilts in the legs raise the creature to a good seven feet tall. Low-budget UK werewolves have been poorly served over the years, from the glove puppet of Full Moon Massacre to the joke-shop fangs and fuzzy sideburns of Strippers vs Werewolves to the complete absence of lycanthropes in Lycanthropy. Gardner is a major-league werewolf fan and has constructed a terrific costume around which he has then crafted a very watchable micro-budget feature film.

Once transformed, Johnson becomes the hunter and the squaddies are the hunted, despatched with some gruesome gore effects. Watch out for the brilliantly clever but actually very simple ‘snapping the neck’ shot. In a possibly unique take on lycanthropy, victims who are severely injured but not actually killed swiftly return as second-level werewolves (with fuzzy-face’n’fangs make-up that is sensibly kept largely obscured). This requires characters to cold-bloodedly shoot injured colleagues, just as they would if the threat was zombies. Also worth noting is that Tony Gardner (who pulled additional duty as cinematographer) shot all these night-time scenes actually at night. Major kudos for that – it makes a helluva difference.

This hugely impressive five-and-change production is sometimes listed as Dense Fear II Bloodline and indeed turns out to be the sequel to a 50-minute sub-feature, Dense Fear, which Gardner shot in 2000 and finished in 2003. I shall have to watch that next. Certainly one doesn’t need to have seen Part 1 to understand and appreciate Part 2; there are enough references to events in the first film to get the gist of what has happened up to now. The only real mis-step is something about a hooded figure who was the original lycanthrope and now protects all werewolves (or something). This figure does turn up towards the end but it’s an unnecessary, confusing additional level of fantasy and probably could have been ditched. But it incorporates quite a groovy visual effect so, hey-ho.

The feature had a local premiere at a club in Gateshead a few days before Halloween 2012 (‘optional fancy dress’!), followed by live streaming the following night, complete with an online chatroom. Gardner then posted the whole movie onto YouTube in November. And, although I described this film at the top of the review as ‘obscure’, in less than three years that YouTube version has had more than 300,000 views (and 300+ comments). Okay, those viewers may not all have watched the entire movie from soup to nuts, but nevertheless that’s way more people than would ever see a low-budget British film in even a well-publicised theatrical release. And probably more than most micro-budget horror films manage in DVD sales. Distribution is a different world from what it was 15 years ago (ironically about the time Gardner started making the original Dense Fear).

That said, this undoubtedly is obscure because who the hell has ever heard of it? I first came across Dense Fear Bloodline when I was checking cast credits for my review of Legacy of Thorn. So far as I can tell there is not a single review anywhere online, apart from a couple of typically effusive customer reviews on the IMDB. In April 2015 Gardner updated the film’s website with a promise of “information about the DVD release very soon” so a more formal release is indeed on the way, to include a Making Of, bloopers, deleted scenes and all manner of delights. The version on YouTube, while eminently watchable, is certainly a very long way from HD, although one has to wonder to what extent that reflects (a) the budget and (b) how long ago the fellow actually shot this thing.

Also in the cast are Sam Hampson (Soldiers of the Damned), Simon Craig (The Last Zombi Hunter, Legacy of Thorn, Blaze of Gory) and William Scott Johnson (A Home for the Bullets, Feast for the Beast). Paul Palance gets a ‘special guest’ credit, perhaps on account of having played a drunk in one episode of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which probably marks him out as minor royalty in Tyneside.

I take my hat off to Tony Gardner. On a budget that wouldn’t buy a crate of Newkie Brown, he has created a genuinely enjoyable and exciting feature-length werewolf movie that stands as a significant title within the British Horror Revival. It just goes to show what gems are out there when you start looking.

MJS rating: A-

This is a combination of two interviews that I did with Susan Sheridan – the original Trillian in Hitchhiker’s Guide on Radio 4 - posted today as a tribute to a bright and funny lady who has just left us too soon. In 1998 I did a stack of phone interviews with cast and crew for a big 20th anniversary feature in SFX. These are my notes from talking to Sue Sheridan in January that year:

How did you land the role of Trillian?
"I was hooked into doing it by Richard Whiteley and Miriam Margolyes - which is an odd combination. Like most of the cast, I suspect, I read the script and didn't understand a word of it. I was in the second episode, so everybody knew each other except me.”

Did it feel at the time like it might be something more than just another Radio 4 comedy?
“We knew it was so zany that it would either be a brilliant hit or a complete flop. I think the first time I realised how successful it was when my brother, who was a schoolboy at the time, said that all his friends in the sixth form at Gordonstoun were fans and absolutely loved it.”

Why were you not in the cast of the Original Records LP?
"I didn't do the LP because I was doing a voice for Disney at the time, for The Black Cauldron.”

Did the show help you career?
"I think Hitchhiker's was one of the big coups of my acting career. It certainly opened the door to a lot of radio, including being part of the radio rep. I went on to work with John Henderson on a series called Round the Bend - I think that was because of Trillian.

How did you feel about not being cast in the TV series?
"I knew they wouldn't use me on TV. It was an opportunity to have a glamorous blonde - which I am now but I wasn't then! Also an American voice. But I didn't mind. My career has been mostly theatre and voice-work, which is fine.”

What is your abiding memory of Hitchhiker?
"My memory is of being in the Paris Studio, where we recorded most of it, standing on stage with all these strange sound effects and bizarre music all around us. Geoffrey Perkins was in charge, and I think Douglas was there all the time.”

Was there any suggestion that Trillian might return for the second radio series?
"Was I in the second series? No, I don't think I was. I'm probably confusing it with the repeats, because they repeated it almost immediately, and kept on repeating it ad nauseum. Although that meant I kept getting paid for it - which I didn't mind at all!"

Five years later I finally got to meet Sue when Dirk Maggs reunited the original radio cast for 'The Tertiary Phase'. This interview was conducted in November 2003:

When did you first hear about this project?
“Well, we were going to do it in the 1990s and we were all prepared to have our reunion then. I can’t remember the details but I think unfortunately it was to do with there not being a script that was usable then. It was very sad for us but in a way it means that now we’ve got a better script than we would have had then.”

What did you think when Dirk contacted you and said it was back on?
“Well, of course I was delighted. Trillian has been one of the high spots of my career, it goes without saying. We enjoyed it when we first did it, to a certain extent, but we didn’t really understand it. I think I’ve told you that before! This time we understood much more of it, partly because we’d read the book! So it’s a great pleasure in doing it this time. There are certain other factors too. I wasn’t in the television version so I rather thought I’d never see any of them again, so it’s doubly nice for me and Geoff McGivern to be back in the fold once again.”

Had you stayed in contact with any of the other actors?
“I hadn’t at all. Because Simon had been in America. Stephen I’d bumped into once or twice at the BBC but we’d not really worked together. David Tate I knew very well indeed because we were worked a lot together and then of course very sadly he died. I think he might have been the first one to die of the three missing cast members.”

Now you have Bill Franklyn, Richard Griffiths and Roger Gregg in those roles.
“Indeed, and very, very well too. Very good performances. But David was the first one to die and that was terribly sad because he was far too young, not to mention far too talented. He was stunningly talented and a very nice man. As was Richard Vernon, as was Peter Jones, although we didn’t really have much to do with Peter Jones because he did the book separately in the recording whereas Richard and David were with us in the studio. Richard Vernon was terribly funny. He famously said, ‘I don’t understand a word I’m saying’! And yet, 26 years on, it’s part of the language. Computers and mobile telephones - we’re much more technically minded than we were 26 years ago, and I think in a way doing it now is probably much better than if we’d done it in the 1990s. This is the time to do it! I can’t help thinking that it’s rather timely that yesterday was 26 years to the day since we did the first episode of Hitchhiker’s Guide. 23rd November 1977. The first episode of the main series, not the pilot, because I wasn’t involved in the pilot.”

Trillian is a different sort of character in this story.
“Yes, she’s a bit more proactive. She’s got some nice lines. She didn’t have a lot of lines in the first series. She always had a lot of spunk and of course she’s got a great brain, but I think that in this one she sees sense, she sees through Zaphod and his ego.”

Trillian’s not in Book 4 but you’ll be back for Book 5.
“That’s right. We’re doing that in April. Trillian, as you will know, has a baby by Arthur Dent which is terrribly exciting so we worked towards this last week to make sure that there was a clear sign - because there wasn’t anything in the book at all, any sign of them getting together. Then she does something rather miraculous and clones herself and I understand that’s when Sandra Dickinson will be coming in to be the other Trillian. I do love the idea because I know Sandra a bit and admire her work. I think she was miscast as Trillian but I don’t think I would have been right either in the television version. So it’s interesting that now we’ll be getting together and I think it will be absolutely wonderful. She’s a lovely lady.”

RIP Sue.

Director: Jane Clark
Writer: Jane Clark
Producers: Jane Clark, John W McLoughlin, Tara Carbajal
Cast: Vicoria Profeta, Cathe DeBuono, Andy Gala
Country: USA
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.thecrazybitchesmovie.com

Crazy Bitches is an enjoyably mature and well-made take on the slasher subgenre, substituting for the traditional college airheads a bunch of friends who have settled down and grown up a bit since they were students together. It has a nice streak of dark humour and characters who are well-defined and distinctive without being caricatures or stereotypes. It does take a long time to get going, and the ending is undeniably talkie, but there’s enough here to more than justify your time.

Thus we have stable cornerstone, wife and mother Alice (Victoria Profeta); uptight virgin (still?) Taylor (Samantha Colburn); rational cancer survivor TBG Dorry (Nayo Wallace: the voice of Harmony Bear in the current incarnation of Care Bears); manly lesbian Cassie (Cathy DeBuono: dabo girl M’Pella from Deep Space Nine); prissy princess, um, Princess (Scottish born Mary Jane Wells, who reads the Downton Abbey audiobooks); Alice’s sister, dippy new age vegan Minnie (Liz McGeever); neurotic actress Belinda (Guinevere Turner: writer of American Psycho and Bloodrayne!); and communal gay friend BJ (Andy Gala). These eight have rented a vacation home on a ranch to catch up with each other.

Over the first hour we explore the various relationships: sexual, romantic and otherwise. More than one person seems to have slept with Alice’s husband Eddie (David Fumero from One Life to Live). Cassie wouldn’t say no to any of her friends, given the chance, but is constantly disappointed by responses both positive and negative. (“Straight girls!” she angrily mutters on more than one occasion.) Princess gets it on with scrawny local Gareth (Blake Berris from Days of Our Lives) who also has his eye on Taylor.

BJ has his own online TV show about spooky and mysterious stuff, as a result of which he is familiar with the story of how seven young girls were brutally murdered in this place, their murderer never found. In the first act he carries a camera around with him videoing his friends but this idea fades away.

Despite BJ’s atmospheric recounting of the location’s unpleasant history, despite a brief scene with a Ouija board (a cliché that the film really doesn’t need), indeed despite a couple of actual murders, there’s very little really happening for much of the film. It’s more relationship comedy-drama than horror. No-one is aware that anyone has been murdered, so there’s no tension. It’s all very well written, directed and acted, don’t get me wrong, but it leaves the viewer champing at the bit for more than an hour, until eventually things turn nasty and the remaining characters realise that they are in mortal danger. The final act makes up for what has gone before by having plenty of action, plenty of blood and lots of twisty-turny plot stuff as suspects are considered, accused and discounted.

The final reveal of who is killing the friends (and why) didn’t work completely for me. There seemed to be two unrelated rationales behind the killer’s behaviour, one that made sense and one that relied too heavily on flashbacks and revelations about who was who and what was what. The latter really wasn’t necessary and just muddied the waters somewhat. There’s a couple of intriguing semi-twist hints right at the end that raise questions likely to provoke much post-screening discussion, which is a good thing.

One thing that did catch me off-guard was the setting. With no working transport, the group will have to trek 20 miles to the gate. What? At one earlier point they drive into the nearest town for a meal so that must be, what, 25 or 30 miles. Just for dinner? That’s outside of my understanding. Because we don’t have ranches in the UK, I simply had no concept of how cut off they were. In any similar situation over here, the walk to the gate would be maybe a mile and half tops. Like the old saying goes: the difference between Britain and the USA is that Americans think 100 years is a long time and Britons think 100 miles is a long way.

Expanding on this transatlantic unfamiliarity, I’m uncertain whether there were any other properties on this vast ranch. Also whether Gareth and his possibly special needs brother Gardner (John W McLoughlin, also one of three producers) own this place or are just employees.  I’m not saying this should have been clearer, just highlighting the problems of culturally specific mental real estate.

On the plus side, there are llamas on the ranch. Also horses and at least one awesome pig. When the transport options ran out, I was kind of disappointed that no-one suggested trying to ride a llama, but I guess that’s a different film. Candis Cayne (Dirty Sexy Money) appears in a splash panel prologue which seems entirely unrelated until right at the end of the film.

This is the second feature from writer-director-producer Jane Clark, following a drama called Meth Head which used several of the same actors. She is currently working on a sequel, Crazier Bitches. Clark is a former actor who was a nurse in Chicago Hope. If the IMDB is accurate, she was also in Vista Street sequel Witchcraft VI and William Mesa’s awesome Brigitte Nielsen cheese-fest Terminal Force (which I totally must track down and rewatch). On the other hand, there’s probably a lot of people out there called Jane Clark…

What I liked about Crazy Bitches was mainly the things it didn't do. I liked that it didn't fill the cast with twentysomething teenagers. I like that the characters weren't drunk, stoned or perpetually horny. I liked that they didn't play unfunny practical jokes on each other. I particularly appreciated the absence of cat scares. (A few times characters are startled by an unexpected knock at the door etc. - that's fine, that's acceptable.) I liked that the film was about characters and relationships, I just could have done with a bit more fear and fright. But on the whole, Crazy Bitches is as fine an indie slasher as you'll see this year.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Mark Nuttall
Writer: Nigel Horne
Producers: Stephen Rigg, Nigel Horne
Cast: Gil Darnell, Miriam Cooke, Lucas Hansen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.soldiersofthedamned.com

Any British movie where the majority of characters are not English-speakers faces a three-way choice. Do you do the whole thing in the characters’ real language(s), subtitled? Do you have the actors speak English with the appropriate accent? Or do you just have the actors use their regular accents? Obviously the first option is artistically preferable, but it requires actors fluent in that language and it can be a tricky sell to both distributors and audiences. So we’re left with two alternatives. Every character in this film is German (except for a small number of Russian soldiers): should they use German accents or not?

As a film-maker, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m firmly in the pro-accents camp. I can believe that they’re German better if they at least sound German and not like they’re from Hampstead or Barnsley. But I know there are other people who hold the opposite view: that if the words aren’t German it’s ridiculous to use a German accent. I think it perhaps boils down to the quality of the actor. It takes skill to provide enough of an accent that we believe the character’s nationality without sounding like a comedy routine.

Bizarrely, one of the actors in Soldiers of the Damned does use a German accent (he’s not actually German – I checked). Also odd is that the actors playing Russian soldiers do use Russian accents when speaking English (which is presumably supposed to be German), while their Russian dialogue is actually in Russian but subtitled. Which I suppose does at least let us know when they’re speaking which language. But still consistent use of accents would have benefitted this movie.

But that’s not the film’s big problem.

Historical accuracy is hard, and gets harder the smaller your budget. I’m not a military history nerd and I can’t tell you whether the uniforms and weapons in this film are accurate for a group of German soldiers in Romania in 1944. I did spot one thing. An SS Officer who has an almost obsessive pride in the importance of the SS uniform wears his hat wrong. He wears his dress cap jauntily on the back of his head. The whole point of the low peak on a hat like that is that it comes down in front of your eyes and forces you to hold your head stiffly upright if you want to see anything. It was an idea developed by the German in the 1930s and, like so many sartorial/practical aspects of Nazi military uniform, is widely copied today around the world. Any SS soldier wearing his hat like this guy would have been given a serious dressing down, no matter his seniority.

There are some other oddities that I noticed. At one point a character writes a message on his forearm. But… how? You can’t write on your skin with a pencil or a fountain pen. The ball-point pen was only invented in 1938 and was an expensive, specialised piece of equipment. RAF bomber crews carried them because the ink wouldn’t freeze at high altitude, but an ordinary German soldier wouldn’t have anything like that.

The film begins with an entirely unnecessary – and frankly inane – narration over a map of Europe: "World War II was in its fifth vicious year of conflict. The German war machine, controlled by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, had a stranglehold over much of Europe, from the Atlantic coast of France to the Russian Urals. Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was head of an armed Division called the Waffen SS.”

Leaving aside the fact that the SS was actually a wing of the army consisting of 38 Divisions, do we really need to be told that Adolf Hitler was in charge of Germany? While we hear this, a blood red stain spreads from Germany across Europe, including neutral countries like Spain and Switzerland. Although I only noticed that inaccuracy second time around as I was initially distracted by the presence on this map of countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic which didn’t exist until the 1990s. Talk about spoiling the ship for a hap’orth of tar. How difficult could it be to get a public domain 1940s map of Europe? Wikipedia’s crawling with ‘em!

The main purpose of the narration is to (a) imply that regular German soldiers weren’t Nazis and hated the SS, which is a gross over-sophistication, and (b) explain that Himmler oversaw an organisation called the Ahnenerbe which investigated occult ideas. But the plot of this film is a squad being sent on a mysterious mission without explanation, so that could have waited until much later in the film when one character tells another what the Ahnenerbe is.

What might have been worth narration is a description of the situation in Romania in early 1944 which certainly wasn’t as simple as the Russians advancing and the Germans retreating. Romania was a Nazi ally whose troops had been instrumental in the invasion of the Soviet Union. By 1944, with the RAF bombing their previously untouched cities and the Red Army advancing across the countryside, the Romanian population were turning against their Fascist leader Antonescu and were ready to switch sides, which they did in August 1944 after King Michael staged a royalist coup.

So in the spring of that year, there was little enthusiasm for fighting from the Romanian troops but the Germans were using every power and threat they had to keep the Romanians fighting. Because Germany desperately needed the Romanian oil fields; as soon as they were lost, the war was effectively over because there would be no fuel for tanks and planes. However, in spring 1944, with the Atlantic wall unbreached and the Allied forces in Italy bogged down at Monte Casino, there was still every expectation of German victory. The weary desire among German troops that the war would just be over soon, espoused by one of the characters in this film, was still some months off.

Okay, so maybe I am a bit of a military history nerd.

Fascinating as the situation in Romania in spring 1944 was, it’s not actually germane to this story. We neither see nor hear mention of any Romanian troops and there’s nothing about the oil fields or anything like that. So, to be honest, the film could have skipped its anachronistic map and patronising narration and just started with a caption reading ‘Romania, 1944’.

But that’s not the film’s big problem either.

There are in fact three quite big problems with this film, and one really big problem. But first, let me tell you what it’s about.

A small squad of German soldiers, accompanied by two SS Officers, are charged with escorting a female academic into a forest, some 20 miles or so behind enemy lines. They are told only that they have to get her to a certain place, then get her out of there. These orders come direct from Himmler.

A common problem with films about soldiers is distinguishing between the characters, and it was quite some time before enough of the squad had been killed that I could actually identify all the remaining characters. The CO is Major Kurt Fleischer (Gil Darnell: Blood Moon) who (in)conveniently is a former lover of their charge, Professor Anna Kappel (model turned archaeologist turned TV presenter turned actress Miriam Cooke). With Fleischer are Lieutenant Eric Fuchs (Tom Sawyer: FestEvil, Little Deaths) who carries a Native American throwing axe around with him for reasons that are explained towards the end, and Private Dieter Baum (Jason Kennedy, who was in a Morrison’s ad), who is initially presented as a bit mentally challenged although that is fairly swiftly forgotten.

Lucas Hansen (Bloodlust, Psoro, The Human Centipede II) is Major Heinrich Metzger, the SS Officer assigned to accompany them, along with another SS soldier, Lieutenant Sven Jung (Nicholas Keith, who was in a couple of episodes of the 2013 Dracula TV series). Metzger (the one who wears his hat wrong) is like a slightly less camp Herr Flick while Jung is a psycho. There are some other soldiers but they made even less impression on me than the main players. Mark Fountain, Matthew John Morley (Victor Frankenstein) and Nicky Bell (When the Lights Went Out) round out the squad. The cast also includes Alan French (Before Dawn), Andrea Zayats (Frankenstein’s Army), Stuart Adams (Hobgoblyn, Zombie Women of Satan 2), Sam Hampson (Dense Fear Bloodline) and onetime X-Factor contestant Craig Davies.

After sneaking past literally the Red Army’s worst sentry ever (he stands with his back to the view and can’t hear a dozen people passing about five feet away from him), the Krauts spend the rest of the film walking through deciduous woodland. But there’s no sense of a journey. There are no landmarks in this forest and no-one ever consults a map or a compass.

Considering that they are well behind enemy lines and there are Russian patrols in the forest (which they occasionally encounter) the Germans seem surprisingly unbothered about caution: letting off guns, shouting to each other, at one point being surprised by a lone loony who attacks them. Sometimes they walk as a group, at other times two of them are alone. Which serves a narrative purpose, because the script wants to include a duologue, but leaves the question of why the group has split up and how they could possibly find each other again. No thought has been given to the practicalities of a long-range mission in enemy-occupied territory; it’s just a set-up for the plot.

The plot, such as it is, is that this forest is haunted or ‘possessed’ in some way. Well, in several ways actually. Like so many horror scriptwriters before him, Nigel Horne has simple included a range of ‘spooky and creepy things’ without any overarching structure or coherent rationale. Sometimes people glimpse glowing faerie-folk running among the trees. Sometimes characters encounter white-faced, black-eyed children who may possibly be the ghosts of Jewish victims of SS atrocities. Or possibly not. There are various instances of, or references to, people being many years older than they could possibly be, and also people and things falling from an improbably great height. Some people hear voices, others don’t. None of this fits together in any satisfying way.

Also people burn up in seconds, leaving small piles of white ash. Eventually we discover that when this happens the person who has burned up finds himself in another part of the wood (or possibly the same part at a different time – there are all sorts of random time-loop ideas thrown into the mix too). Now alone, the person then meets a nasty end; an idea not dissimilar to what happens in KillerKiller (and also reminiscent of The Devil’s Chair). The problem is: we don’t really care about any of this. We don’t care when the person burns up, once we realise they’ll still be alive somewhere else – and we don’t care when they finally meet their end because they are effectively already dead.

Underlying all this random spookiness is the idea that these woods are inhabited by some sort of mythical ‘godmen’ who are the ancestors of the Aryan race (or something). The McGuffin for which Professor Kappel is searching is a device that will allow contact with these godmen, represented by an unseen glowing item in a rucksack, unavoidably reminiscent of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction and the car boot in Repo Man. Eventually the remains of the expedition reach some sort of ancient stone temple where matters resolve themselves to some extent.

I would be lying if I said that Soldiers of the Damned kept my attention. I frequently paused the screener to make a cup of tea, or go to the loo, or check the weather on the BBC website, or a number of other reasons. At no point was I engrossed in the film. And this – yes, this – is the film’s big problem. Its really big problem (I’ll come to the three other less big problems in a moment). I never at any time felt involved. I really didn’t care about any of the characters. Horne’s script tries to give them personalities but there’s no real depth to any of them. They’re on a mission that most of them don’t know any details of, in a featureless woodland, occasionally jumping backwards and forwards in time, or something, while a mixed buffet of weirdness happens to them, around them, or in anecdotes which they tell each other.

Yes, there’s antipathy between the SS and the regulars. Yes there’s a romantic history between Fleischer and Kappel. So what? I never cared what happened to anyone. I wasn’t worried about what might happen; I didn’t feel any emotion once we found out what had happened; and often it was entirely unclear what was actually happening – while it was actually happening. Mark Nuttall’s direction is competent, but there’s nothing to work with here.

Possibly the root problem is that there simply isn’t a clear antagonist. Except for a few brief occasions, our protagonists are not actually being shot at by Russians. They are in denial of the spookiness they encounter until very near the end of the film. The tensions within the group are never explored in any depth. What exactly are they meant to be up against? Who or what are they trying to overcome?

The acting is distinctly variable. Although, to be fair to the cast, most of whom do seem to be very good actors at some point or other in the film, I think this is a problem with the script, not the performances. You could cast this film entirely with players from the RSC and parts of it would still sound wooden. You can write this stuff, George, but you sure can’t say it. Ironically, I think this is a problem which could have been alleviated by the use of German accents. With an accent, the mannered, almost leaden dialogue would seem less stilted and artificial.

The script is one of the three not quite so big problems. The others are the photography and the production design.

My beef with the photography is this. Despite all the talk of the forest being a creepy, spooky, ‘possessed’ place, it never seems even slightly unnerving – because almost the entire movie is shot in bright daylight. In purely practical terms, if the squad was behind enemy lines wouldn’t they move mostly at night? I bloody would! At one point we have the always cheesy line: “It will be dark in a couple of hours.” No it won’t! We can see the sun beating down almost vertically on you from a cloudless sky! Jeez, if you must have a line that clichéd, at least wait until the end of the day to get that shot.

There is one day-for-night scene of the squad bedding down which is as unrealistic and unbelievable as every single other day-for-night scene ever shot in the entire history of motion pictures. I think this may have been the same scene where, alarmed by spooky voices, the squad run away a short distance and then, collecting themselves, set off into the forest again – without bothering to return for their blankets (which there is no sign of them carrying in other scenes anyway). James Martin is clearly a competent cinematographer and has photographed a lot of short films over the past few years, but he completely fails to instil any atmosphere or invoke any sense of dread, fear or even apprehension. The soldiers look like they’re going on a nature hike.

And then there’s the production design. Seriously, I’m not enough of a military history nerd to spot the wrong mark of machine gun or say, “That type of tank wasn’t deployed in Romania.” Maps and pens aside, there’s nothing obviously anachronistic or wrong here, and I’ll leave it to the real nerds to point out any pedantic mistakes. The film has as its ‘military advisor’ a gentleman named Ronnie Papaleo who has been involved in lots of big budget war productions, mostly credited as vehicles co-ordinator or similar. To judge from the site for his own in-development feature The Ice Cream Man, he actually is a serious military history nerd himself. Good for him.

Papaleo evidently has, or at least has access to, large amounts of original or authentically recreated materiel: uniforms, helmets, weapons, vehicles etc. Nowadays, a combination of re-enactment groups and CGI make it eminently possible to create a very believable wartime setting for a film, even on a low budget (as was recently proven by Allies). But here’s the problem. Everything is simply too clean. Re-enactors, collectors and costumiers like to keep their uniforms in good condition, but in the real world, in wartime, soldiers wear the same clothes for weeks at a time without ever washing them. Clothes and other personal items get covered in mud and blood, get ripped and patched. Fleischer and his men look like they’ve just stepped off the parade ground, even after spending several days and nights in the forest. I could maybe accept the SS duo starting off smart and clean, but even they are sleeping rough.

What gore effects exist in Soldiers of the Damned are largely kept away from clothes, while bullet hits and knives send cascades of CGI blood spurting into the digital realm. But throughout, the uniforms remain clean and neat. (Rebecca Hall is credited with the SFX make-up. Her other BHR gigs include The Eschatrilogy, Devil Makes Work, The Sleeping Room, The Vicious Dead, Ibiza Undead and Dark Signal. Shrewd Ape was the VFX company.) Also, despite walking for several days, all the men remain completely clean-shaven. Which to my mind is even spookier than black-eyed ghost children.

Thus we find that, despite the undoubted sincerity and hard work of the cast and crew, a perfect storm of problems – some of them, frankly, avoidable – combine to make Soldiers of the Damned a joyless, dull, poorly executed picture. It’s precisely because the film is dull – characters we don’t care about on a mission they don’t know about with no clearly defined antagonist to defeat – that the other problems are so noticeable. A killer script and taut direction might have distracted from pristine uniforms, clean-shaven chins, sunny forest days, and maps that are out by half a century. In fact pretty much the only time I enjoyed the film was when I shouldn’t have, in that a few scenes are so bad they’re actually funny. If you don’t laugh out loud when the tank appears, you’re made of stronger stuff than me (they show it twice, and it’s even funnier when you know what’s coming!). But I don’t think any part of this film is intended as comedy.

What a shame. Soldiers of the Damned had a lot of potential and I was really looking forward to it. But ultimately it joins the ranks of unsuccessful British war-horror crossovers, alongside Deathwatch, The Lost and Nazi Zombie Death Tales. Only The Bunker came anywhere close to succeeding in this subgenre. Basically, these sort of films would all like to be The Keep (Soldiers… even casts one of The Keep’s actors, Renny Krupinski, as the Colonel who gives Fleischer his orders). But The Keep has already been made. Make something new.

And it’s not impossible to have weird things tormenting soldiers in a low budget horror movie. I was reminded of how effective Ivan Zuccon’s debut The Darkness Beyond is. Ivan managed it, but sadly Nutall and Horne don’t, despite undoubtedly valiant effort. Too many things don’t work. Yes, some of my comments are pedantic nitpicking. Really, does it matter how Major Metzger wears his hat? Of course not. But does it matter that the viewer feels no empathy for these characters? Does it matter that the supposedly spooky forest is devoid of atmosphere? Does it matter that characters who have been sleeping rough look like they just got dressed for parade? Does it matter that the dialogue is dull and lifeless? Yes. Yes it does matter, I’m afraid. That’s the essence of film-making. Sorry.

For the record, director Mark Nuttall is a former TV graphics guy who has directed music videos, documentaries, ads and episodes of The Chuckle Brothers. Writer-producer Nigel Horne made a comedy called The Wedding Tackle back in 2000 and is now Managing Director of Safecracker Pictures, who released Soldiers of the Damned on UK DVD in August 2015. Shot in the Lake District over five weeks in April/May 2013 (with a few pick-ups in September), the film was trade screened at the AFM in November 2014 and officially premiered at a one-off screening in Manchester a couple of weeks before the disc hit shelves.

MJS rating: C

Director: Tofiq Rzayev
Writers: Tofiq Rzayev, Erdogan Ulgur
Producer: Tofiq Rzayev
Cast: Deniz Aslim, Gizem Aybike Sahin, Cevahir Gasgir
Year of release: 2015
Country: Azerbaijan. No, seriously: Azerbaijan
Reviewed from: online screener

I have films on here from nearly 20 different countries. I have ghost stories from Thailand and giallo from Ireland, cartoons from Russia and superheroes from India, martial arts from Chile and vampires from France. But this is something new. The Girl in the Woods is the first film I have ever been sent from Azerbaijan.

Running about 24 minutes, this is a simply told, well-made, gripping mystery with a satisfyingly horrific conclusion. Gizem Aybike Sahin plays Ceren, whose fiancé Ali has disappeared. He left no message, no indication of where he might have gone or why. The only clue is a text message to their friend Mert (Deniz Aslim) saying simply ‘Find me.’ With another friend Cem (Mehmet Samer), they set to searching for Ali.

Mert takes a look in the woods, which Ali was last seen heading towards. There he meets a mysterious, seductive girl (Cevahir Gasgir) who hasn’t seen Ali but is interested in seeing more of Mert. Does she know more than she’s telling?

Crisply directed by Tofiq Rzayev, the script was originally written by Rzayev in English then adapted and translated by Rzajev and Erdogan Ulgur. There is a good mixture of location shots, both rural and urban, giving a distinctive regional feel to the picture, plus tight dialogue scenes emphasising the solid acting of the cast.

Rzayev has been making short films since 2010, with the IMDB listing a dozen or so titles. I can’t claim to be an expert on Azerbaijani cinema but apparently film-making started in the country as far back as 1898. Obviously during the years that Azerbaijan was part of the USSR domestic movie production was generally limited to serious dramas and historicals, but since independence in the 1990s the local cinema industry has evidently been expanding.

The Girl in the Woods is the first evidence I have seen (though admittedly I haven’t been looking) of an independent cinema movement in this particular nation.

With subtitles that are mostly accurate, The Girl in the Woods is easily accessible to international audiences and would be a fine addition to festivals looking for something unusual to show.

MJS rating: B+

I interviewed Ross Shepherd, director of The Kingdom of Shadows, at the 2005 Festival of Fantastic Films where it won the award for Best Short Amateur Film. With Ross at the festival was his friend Charles Henry Joslain who worked on the film as assistant director.

Was this film a student project?
RS: "Yes, this was our graduation film from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. It was our third year piece.”

What sort of instructions or limitations did you have?
RS: "It was quite open really. We were asked to make a maximum of twelve minutes film - obviously ours went over that already. The criteria is to make a 12-minute short film which can be fiction or non-fiction. The tutors are looking for the film to have a social context of some kind.”

What 'social context' does your film have?
RS: "It’s all about escapism. The idea was taking the Lumiere films and the reaction that those films would have created in the public when they first came out, the sense of awe and wonder of cinema, and mixing that with a childlike curiosity and anticipation and loneliness that comes from the relationship between the boy and his mother which is obviously a bad one. He’s isolated in his life and the escapism comes when he discovers this kingdom which is his own. No-one believes him.

“I was looking for some way to pay homage to what the Lumieres did by discovering film. Alex’s reaction to the kingdom is supposed to pay homage to what the public experienced when they first saw a moving image. He has found a kingdom which is his own. It’s strange and it’s eerie but he escapes from mundane living. He’s a lonely child. His mother has a job and it’s obvious that she wears the trousers in that relationship. There’s probably something about modern day families in that. He’s an only child, doesn’t have brothers and sisters. He’s attention-starved maybe and he needs somewhere to escape; that comes in the form of film and film history. It was designed to link together in that way.”

Charles, did you make your own film with Ross as 1st AD? How does it work between you two?
CHJ: "I guess the first time we worked together was on Ross’ first independent project from school. Then we did a project, which I wrote and directed and he was my first AD. Then we switched back for Kingdom of Shadows. And just before last summer he wrote a project called The Man on the Stairs which I directed which was another totally independent project. So basically, it’s hard to meet people you get along with well and it’s hard to keep friends on a set. A lot of our friends say, ‘It must be great to make a film with your friends.’ No man, it’s not great. You just lose friends on a film set. So it was a great thing to work together.”

RS: "We were delegated to groups as part of the course and Charles was not officially put in my group. But we’ve always worked together from the first films we ever made to this and I knew that I wouldn’t want to make the film without him. We’ve always done everything together.”

Is it better to have that hierarchy of director and 1st AD rather than trying to be co-directors?
RS: "I believe it is.”

CHJ: "I think it’s better. If we’re co-directors we’re just going to end up arguing about things. The way we work together is: we have the same eye, although sometimes different vision. We know what works. On the other hand, sometimes with the pressure I’m going to forget about something, if I’m the director on the film, and he’s going to say ‘What about this?’ Other times, if he’s the director, I might say, “A dolly here could help...’ We’re not trying to compete against each other - that’s not the point. We’re complementary. I see it this way: we work together very well without having to compete with each other. We don’t have anything to prove. We’ve already proved that we get along well.”

RS: "We share the same taste in film, which is how we became friends. That was how we ended up working together.”

Are you fans of early silent cinema?
RS: "Yes, I was a big fan of Porter at film school: The Great Train Robbery and so on. The inspiration for this film came when I was researching for an essay on film theory and I came across the Maxim Gorky quote ‘Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows...’ which is at the end of the film. That quote sparked something inside of me and I thought: the way he described seeing that first film is such a great description, so imaginative and so powerful. That was the premise for the film.”

You shot on 16mm which is increasingly rare nowadays.
RS: "Yes, I thought that was important because we were making a film about film and if we shot that on video, something would be wrong there. We’re supposed to be paying homage to the fathers of film so we should therefore surely use that format. It proved to be a great expense, shooting on 16mm, and there were quite a few frantic calls to Kodak when we were running out of stock each day. And getting the final bill for the telecine was not pleasant.”

You were using reel ends, were you?
RS: "No, they did us a student discount on buying the stock. When it came to the telecine, first of all they offered us a one-light pass but James the DOP was adamant that we were going to get the best light and it was graded. I’m so glad we did. It was expensive but I think it was very much worth it. We had a students end-of-term screening at the NFT and on that screen you could really tell video from film. It looked so lush, it was really worth it, it was a good decision. Plus I’d never had the opportunity to work with prime lenses before as a director. I think that’s very important. James, as DOP, growing and learning about the format, he was keen to work with an array of lenses and we could really take the time to feel the scene and find the correct set-up. And you need to have that. If you’ve just got a zoom lens then you can’t do that.”

Was the black and white stuff shot on monochrome stock or digitally graded?
RS: "The whole film was shot in colour. When we came to shoot the Lumiere sequences we used a different filter. So we did some colour corrections in camera but yes, all the black and white was done in post.”

You’ve got some interesting old actors in there.
RS: "Dennis Chinnery lives local to where the film school is, near Guildford in Surrey. I was aware of him from another student project that he’d done the previous year and I thought he was fantastic in that. I spoke to the producer of that film and he gave me his details and I had a chat with Dennis, then sent him the script. He was so enthusiastic and supportive of young film-making. There was no ego or any mention of a fee or anything like that. He was a pleasure to work with and a fascinating character.”

Have you shown this film anywhere else yet?
RS: "No, only the NFT which was part of the student screening. Apparently it’s going to be shown on a Sky digital channel called Propeller Television. They e-mailed me recently. It’s a new channel which they’re planning to launch with Lottery arts funding to promote new filmmakers and the new film industry. I sent it along there and a producer there named John Offord seemed very enthusiastic about it. They’re having the launch in September so I’m not sure when it should get a screening - which will be amazing.”

Having graduated, what are the two of you going to do?
RS: "Basically the plan is to keep working, keep making short films. Whether it’s extremely short ones or slightly longer. We’ve just shot another film called The Man on the Stairs which I wrote and Charles directed. And to try and work the festival circuit as much as possible, to try and get noticed, try and get our work on TV if we can, and start sending our stuff to agents and try to get work in the industry.”

What about you, Charles?
CHJ: "Well, actually he graduated. I was officially a second year student. There’s a long story which won’t be interesting to you but basically I nicked an essay off the internet because I had other things to do, important things like making films! I forgot to write an essay, I nicked it off the web, they found out, they said it was plagiarism. Yes it was plagiarism, I’ve never denied it - big fucking deal! So anyway, now this year I will be a third year student officially so I have two projects, one which is a group project and another one which is an independent project. I wrote both scripts and they went through so I got a crew for my group project, I will get one for the independent project, hopefully Ross might be a part of both of them! Both projects will take place in France hopefully - which is where I’m from, even though I don’t sound like it. Both will be expensive I guess; 16mm again. I’m very keen on digital. You can get very impressive results with very good digital grading and digital technology nowadays, but celluloid kicks ass.”

What do you want to do ultimately? What’s your dream project?
CHJ: "Replacing Spielberg and Lucas, I guess.”

RS: "Feature film is my ultimate goal.”

Do you want to direct shorts until someone gives you a feature or will you go in at a much lower level and work your way up?
RS: "Well, I’ve considered this highly and although obviously going in at the lower level is a tried and tested way of doing it, nowadays there’s so much competition and there’s so many runners and gophers and assistant everythings - it’s the fastest growing industry in the UK right now - it doesn’t seem like that much of a plausible plan to me, especially financially because often people don’t even get paid for being runners. So I’m going to just try to keep making shorts until they let me make a feature, until we get an offer of funding or until we can do what we want.”

CHJ: "I have nothing to add to that. I did the same analysis and the higher you aim, the higher you can land. That’s my way of thinking.”

Director: Bill Thomas
Writers: Bill Thomas, Ian Thomas
Producers: Bill Thomas, Jason Emery
Cast: Matthew Neal, Eve Pearson, Jon Lee Pellet
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: http://fallensoldiers.savagemedia.co.uk

Fallen Soldiers managed to get all the way through development, production and post-production without appearing on my radar so that the first I knew about it was when I spotted it on Amazon. I posted a piece about the film on my British Horror Revival blog which was spotted by a colleague at work – who said she knew the film-makers (and indeed, her other half is actually in the film). By this unexpected route I was able to get my hands on a screener

The subgenre of ‘historical zombie films’ is very small. If we remove the two sub-subgenres of ‘historical zombie films set during World War II’ and ‘historical zombie films set in the Wild West’ we’re left with very few indeed. Off the top of my head there’s this feature and two shorts: Mathew Butler’s E’gad, Zombies! and Ross Shepherd’s Victorian Undead. The big advantage of historical zombie pictures, of course, is that the characters come to the zombie threat without any baggage. In a contemporary zombie film, either the characters have to work out which established zombie tropes apply to these particular living dead, or else you have to set the story in some sort of alternative universe where the post-Romero cinematic zombie simply doesn’t exist. But in anything set before 1968, the whole thing simply becomes ‘a disease’ – which is how it is referred to here.

Bill Thomas’ debut feature, co-written with his brother Ian, is set in Belgium just a few days before the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon, escaped from exile on Elba, has marched North through France, gathering his army about him. The British and the Prussians are racing to try and stop him.

Matthew Neal (who played ‘Freeway Killer’ Randy Steven Kraft in a TV docudrama directed by Thomas) stars as John Cross, a British soldier who hitches a ride in the carriage of Belgian noblewoman Celine (Eve Pearson). Most of the film is a sequence of flashbacks as Cross explains where he has come from and why he needs to get back through the French lines to Wellington’s army.

The story he tells is of how he and a colleague, Hardy (Jon Lee Pellet) unsuccessfully tried to rescue some British hostages from French prison wagons. Instead, the pair find themselves locked up in one of the wagons with Cross’ friend Piper (Zachary Street). When they are given the last rites and a savage, animalistic peasant girl is thrown into the confined space, snapping and scratching at them, they realise that they are more than just prisoners of war.

Long story short, the Froggies have somehow got their hands on a zombie virus. Their grand plan is to use it to reanimate the ‘Old Guard’ elite who died on the retreat from Moscow. This is a great idea but… it basically just remains an idea. It doesn’t fully explain why they are infecting Belgian peasants and British prisoners. And of course reanimating frozen corpses that died three years ago isn’t the same as simply spreading a contagion. The plan seems to be: once a prisoner/patient is infected, their blood is collected and can be used to reanimate an Old Guard soldier. But if that’s so, why all the complications? If you want to reanimate 200 Old Guard, why not just round up 200 Belgian peasants and slaughter them? It’s not like Napoleon ever had any qualms about that sort of thing. The man was a monster.

Matters are additionally complicated by the introduction of another British prisoner whom Cross recognises and who, confusingly, looks like the now-deceased (?) Hardy. It took me a while to work out what was happening. There are secondary flashbacks – within the main flashbacks from Cross and Celine in the carriage – explaining where the zombie virus came from and how it got to Europe. In the third act Cross finally makes it to British lines where we meet a new character who proves very significant and some of the things we’ve only just managed to work out are pulled away from under us as characters reveal different intentions and motivations to the previously established ones.

It all gets a bit confusing, to be honest, a situation not helped by this particular zombie virus have a very significant difference from what we normally expect, which renders it both more and less of a threat.

There’s a lot to commend in Fallen Soldiers. The acting is generally good (barring a few Allo Allo accents), so is the production design. The camera-work is excellent, combining with top-notch sound mixing to really put us into the heat of the action – and effectively disguising any corners cut when shooting a historical on a tight budget. I have to assume that the uniforms and arms are accurate for 1815, and unlike Soldiers of the Damned these clothes at least look lived in. There are a couple of unfortunate anachronisms in the dialogue, both of them in an early scene where Celine’s carriage is stopped at a check-point. A character lets slip the 20th century term ‘okay’ and there is also a reference to ‘saboteurs’. Despite the popular belief that the term comes from French Luddites hurling their clogs or ‘sabots’ into machinery, in fact that word is not recorded until the 1920s (the root ‘sabotage’ dates from the 1890s). Yes, I’m being picky, but these things are worth checking.

More problematic is the very limited number of zombies. We only ever encounter one at a time, and in a confined space usually. Thus there’s no sense of approaching danger, no attempt at evasion. I once described all zombie films as “either a siege or a chase (which is a siege with a vector)”. But Fallen Soldiers is neither of those. It’s a sequence of flashback scenes, some of which involve close combat with a zombie: either a recognisably human one like the peasant girl introduced to the prison wagon, or a barely human reanimated corpse. The very limited nature of these attacks means that the setting becomes largely irrelevant. Any of those scenes could happen in a contemporary zombie tale and all that would change is the clothes.

What we don’t get is what the DVD sleeve promises, which is the living dead in military uniforms. There are no military battles in Fallen Soldiers, no massed ranks, and certainly no zombies in redcoats. Now, to be fair, this is far from being the first or only horror film to grossly exaggerate its content in its marketing to the point of downright deception. That sort of thing goes with the territory, I guess. It is nevertheless disappointing that in a film (actually the only film) about zombies set during the Napoleonic Wars, where most of the characters are military personnel, there’s not a single actual ‘zombie soldier’ (apart from one reanimated Old Guard whose uniform is in no better condition than his skin) and no actual warfare (beyond an artillery bombardment from unseen cannon). There are a number of French soldiers wearing iron face masks which render them conveniently anonymous but they’re just armed goons, like Napoleonic Imperial Stormtroopers. We don’t see them in action.

I must commend Bill Thomas not only on his imagination and originality but also on his ability to use re-enactors and their materiel to create a realistic early 19th century setting. However, I do think he’s been overly ambitious, creating a story which must perforce be largely told in flashbacks and where the really impressive spectacle happens off-screen or only hypothetically. Fallen Soldiers is very, very talkie, especially the climax where characters endlessly explain things to each other. There’s a bit of a fist-fight near the end, but you couldn’t call it an action-packed third act.

More problematical is the way that Thomas has played with the basic core ideas of the zombie genre. It would have been quite enough to set this tale in this previously unexplored place and time. There was no need to add a unique aspect to this particular zombie contagion which makes it actually a completely different thing from what we are familiar with (and which doesn’t, in all honestly, tie in particularly well with the underlying ‘reanimating the Old Guard’ plot).

As the credits rolled and I started thinking about what I had just watched, I can’t say I was disappointed, but I did feel curiously unsatisfied. Fallen Soldiers doesn’t seem to make anything out of its setting. Yes, the eve-of-Waterloo scenario informs the basic premise that is eventually revealed to us, and yes it creates interesting window-dressing in the sets and costumes. But on the level between those two – the actual, you know, story – there’s not much to gets one’s teeth into. After some rumination, it occurred to me that there wasn’t a single memorable image in the film. Just one glimpse of a massed rank of British or French zombie-soldiers lurching across a battlefield, unfazed by musketry hurtling around them, would have been a money-shot par excellence, even if it was just a dream. But there’s nothing like that – or any other sort of arresting and startling visual spectacle. (Frustratingly, the film has been graded throughout to almost monotone, so that even Cross' scarlet jacket is rendered colourless and dull, however bright it may appear in publicity shots.)

Bill Thomas’ day-job is providing props and models for blockbusters like Guardians of the Galaxy, Clash of the Titans, The Force Awakens and assorted Harry Potters. Back in 2009 he directed a short called Butchers Blossom (sic) about a plague in Victorian times but it’s not clear whether that was also a zombie picture.

Fallen Soldiers was shot over ten days in July 2011 as Grist for the Mill (with a few pick-ups later in the year). After lengthy post-production, there was a one-off screening in February 2014 and the film finally made it to DVD in July 2015.

MJS rating: B

Director: Mark Murphy
Writer: Mark Murphy
Producer: Alan Latham
Cast: Tony Curran, Rupert Hill, Diana Vickers
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/awaitingmovie

Awaiting is a brutal, powerful, agonising horror-thriller which offers a well-crafted take on some established themes. It is completely gripping and, though it slightly trips over its own feet right at the end, by then it’s been so good that you don’t really care.

Rupert Hill (Cameron from Family Affairs, Jamie from Corrie) is Jake, a young lawyer driving across Yorkshire who wakes to find he’s been in a car accident. Though not injured (beyond, presumably, a little light concussion), he has been taken in by a creepy father and daughter. Morris (Tony Curran - Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who -  giving an awesomely disturbing performance that you won’t soon forget) lives ten miles from the nearest town, earning a living in some unspecified way which we soon discover involves selling other people’s cars for scrap.

His 20-year-old, willowy daughter Lauren (former X-Factor contestant Diana Vickers) has not only never been kissed, she’s barely been further than the end of the lane. The duo have no landline and there is no mobile signal to be had so Jake is stuck there until the jovially aggressive Morris either drives him into town or gives him back his car keys. (That actually was the one major flaw in the plot. Ten miles is about three hour’s walk – even assuming no traffic passes which could provide a lift. It’s eminently manageable for any reasonably fit person. To be fair, by the time Jake realises that Morris is completely nutzoid, he’s no longer completely fit.)

Morris will confirm every prejudice you hold about people from Yorkshire, a beautiful county inhabited by England’s second most unpleasant population (after Essex, obviously). But this isn’t the gleeful insanity found in something comparable on a basic level like Inbred. This is that disturbing, deeply uncomfortable, going-to-kill-you, just-a-joke-mate fake bonhomie that makes acquiescence the best strategy to avoid causing offence and possible conflict. Jake goes through a series of emotions and ideas as the situation becomes inexorably worse. Should he have just rudely walked out that first morning? Perhaps. But would Morris, a man often seen toting either an axe or a shotgun, have let him get to the end of the lane? Probably not.

The key to the film’s successful take on admittedly well-worn themes is Lauren, raised in almost complete isolation by her dad - though they have a television so she’s aware of the outside world. She just doesn’t realise that her situation is not normal. Her mother evidently left the scene quite a few years ago and now Lauren is the home-maker. But she is also a young woman, no longer Daddy’s little girl and, although there’s no suggestion of actual incest, her creepy replacement of her mother’s role is one of the first clues Jake has that all is not well. That, and the fact that the family are celebrating Christmas in September (an idiosyncrasy never fully explained, but which makes for some memorable imagery).

One of the things which most impresses about Mark Murphy’s second feature, which runs just over 90 minutes, is the economy of storytelling. Among the opening shots is a drawer full of watches, a single image which tells us what some other storytellers would take five minutes of expository dialogue to convey. A few moments later, when Lauren first sees the unconscious Jake, she asks her father, “But Daddy, what if he doesn’t like me?” “Then the pigs can have him,” replies Morris, leaving us in absolutely no doubt about what sort of man he is and what sort of set-up is going on here.

Lauren is attracted to Jake, which Jake is uncomfortable with until he realises how crazy her father is, at which point he resolves to not only escape but to take Lauren with him. And eventually, if he can’t escape, to at least show the daughter what her father is and does and thereby split the family asunder. Morris is a contemporary, rural Dr Frankenstein. He has created his daughter, but she has grown up and now wonders: did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me? In his heart (he does have one, even if it’s withered and twisted), Morris always knew that his day would come, but his denial of its impending arrival is just one more facet of his general denial that what he is doing, both with Lauren and with unlucky passing travelers and their vehicles, is wrong.

There are several moments in Awaiting which will make you wince in pain and possibly cry out loud. There’s one at 30 minutes, one at 40 minutes, again at 43 and 49 minutes and after that I lost count. There’s a really excruciating one near the end involving a guitar. But this certainly isn’t torture porn and the violence is far from gratuitous; it’s intrinsic to the story and the characters.

I mentioned that there’s a couple of mis-steps right at the end, which I’ll elaborate on without spoilers. After the story ends there is a final twist – and then another one. The second isn’t needed. It slightly devalues the effect of the first and, truth be told, is not only unnecessary but also somewhat clichéd (and doesn't, strictly speaking, make sense). The film would be stronger if it ended about 30 seconds earlier. The other problem, and it’s really unfortunate, is in the choice of music. One bloody sequence right near the end is shown in slow motion, without diegetic sound, accompanied by a hauntingly powerful song entitled ‘Outro’ by a French band called M83. If, like me, you have never heard of M83, you will nevertheless recognise this as ‘that song from the Persil advert’. The one where a little girl in a white dress gets splatted with different coloured paint. In slow motion. It means that when we should be thinking “Dear God, how can one person do that to another? How must it feel to receive treatment like that?” at the back of our head another voice is chipping in with “Those blood stains will come out, even at 40 degrees.”

I guess that in the long term, and internationally, this won’t matter. But it’s a real shame which comes perilously close to spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar.

Murphy’s script and direction are both whip-smart. Awesomely named cinematographer Hong Manley, whose credits include the Ken Russell segment of 1996 anthology Tales of Erotica, does a cracking job here, balancing out the interiors, the surrounding woodland and the occasional diversions into town so that the film remains atmospheric without ever tipping over into cartoon horror. Romanian editor Dragos Teglas also does sterling work; he’s another X-Factor alumnus, having served as editor on his home country’s version of that show.

The excellent production design is courtesy of Tony Noble, who also worked on the silly Gnaw, a feature with a not dissimilar plot that serves only to highlight how good Awaiting is by contrast. He also designed Michael Bartlett’s feature Treehouse and Giles Alderson’s short Awake. Simon Webb, most of whose credits are TV light entertainment, composed the score. It’s a real shame that he didn’t provide an additional cue to replace the washing powder music. David Christopher Brown (Siren Song, Last Days on Mars) designed the gruesome make-up effects.

The small, effective supporting cast includes Peter Woodward (whose many voice credits include Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Megazone 23 and Postman Pat: The Movie) as a local plod, Sophie Lovell Anderson (stripper Candy in Stag Night of the Dead) as Jake’s girlfriend, Adrian Bouchet (The Seasoning House, Alien vs Predator and cracking fanfilm Predator: Dark Ages) as a scrap dealer, and Charley McDougall (Christmas Slay, Invasion of the Not Quite Dead) as a van driver. Some of the cast and crew also worked on Mark Murphy’s first feature The Crypt aka The Convent which remains frustratingly unreleased (outside of France).

Awaiting was shot over four weeks near York in June/July 2014, test screened locally in September and premiered at Fantasporto in March 2015, with a second screening at the Horrorant Festival in Greece later that same month (where it picked up three awards). The UK DVD was released in September 2015, a few days after its UK premiere at Frightfest.

MJS rating: A-

I first came across the name ‘Simon Savory’ when David DeCoteau was discussing his adaptation of Poe’s House of Usher. So, a couple of years later when I received an enquiry from the British distribution outfit Peccadillo Pictures about the thrillerYou Belong to Me, I instantly recognised the name of the publicity chap who had e-mailed me. Simon very kindly answered a few questions for me in March 2009.

To what do you attribute Peccadillo's success and growth since it was launched in 2000?
“That’s really a question my boss, Tom Abell, would answer better than me. However, I’ve been lucky enough to work at Peccadillo for two years now, and it is by far the most rewarding, satisfying and exciting full time work environment I have ever experienced. It is also hard work, but every day is different.

“Peccadillo has always prided itself on bringing gay and lesbian cinema ‘with a difference’ to the UK. This is what separates us from TLA, who do more commercial and mainstream gay films. We focus more on foreign language, art-house, controversial and below-the-radar films. Recent examples are Argentine intersexual film XXY, Olivier Meyrou’s chilling gay hate crime documentary Beyond Hatred, Before I Forget which is about what happens when rent boys grow old, and the quite frankly bizarre but brilliant and very faithful adaptation The Last of the Crazy People by Laurent Achard, which we are releasing on DVD May 18th.

“These are films that probably would never have had a UK release, and we certainly take risks in picking them up, but it’s something we feel needs to be done to justify our existence. Also, sometimes they can be unexpected hits, as XXY proved to be. We also do the odd ‘straight’ film, purely because we think they deserve a release, such as council estate spaghetti western Saxon and German jail drama Four Minutes, which we put out under out the Petit Peché label.

“It hasn’t been an easy ride putting out all these difficult films (granted, there have been big hits like Lost and Delirious and Summerstorm), but along the way Peccadillo has garnered a very faithful following among gay audiences who are looking for something a little different from the usual rom-coms that get thrown their way, not that there’s anything wrong with that!

“Now Peccadillo is entering a new and very exciting phase: gay short films. In 1993 Tom Abell’s Dangerous To Know was the first distributor to release compilations of short films on the VHS format. Lesbian Lykra Shorts and Boys on Film introduced a number of new film-makers to an international audience. They became a popular way of showcasing new talent who went on to become celebrated and successful filmmakers. These compilations were followed by Lesbian Leather Shorts - which included a short starring a very young Lucy Lawless!

“Our first DVD volume, Boys on Film 1: Hard Love, has been doing really well (it contains a short I think your readers will like, Gay Zombie, which is my favourite!) and two volumes are to follow before the end of the year. Boys on Film 2: In Too Deep is out in June and has a terrific short called Cowboy by director Till Kleinert who is definitely one to watch in horror circles. The film blends gay romance with cannibalism and a combine harvester massacre! Beyond that, we have plans to build on our little cult and horror label, Bad Cat, currently home to Bruce La Bruce’s films and a lesbian vampire film, Vampire Diary. So, in short, Peccadillo’s success is attributed to hard slog, creativity and a love for what we put out.”

How accurate would it be to assume that the genre films that Peccadillo distributes might find a smaller, niche audience among gay viewers but counterbalance this with greater mainstream appeal?
“This is another thing we strive really hard to accomplish. It is something that is still possible to do in countries like France and Germany, but British attitudes, especially in the industry, are somewhat different. First of all, to get a predominantly gay film out to a wider, more mainstream audience, you have to give it a cinema release. With that, you can get advertising support from various funds and you also get all the press writing about it, as they have more of a duty to write about cinema releases than the massive number of DVDs that get put out. There’s still a certain cachet in having an independent film on the big screen that earns the coverage of journalists.

“However, getting the films into cinemas is very hard because in the UK most cinemas, even those that you might think are truly independent, are in fact parts of chains, or they outsource their programming to a larger company that picks commercially viable films for them. This leads to two bands of cinemas, your commercial multiplexes and your small art-house cinemas, and the latter all tend to be showing the same films at the same time, and this is because programming is run by a very small select group of people, which is a pity.

“The only real way now to get diversity out there is to bypass conventional releasing methods by taking films on tour or to festivals, which we are currently doing with Boys on Film at the London ICA and Greenwich Picture House, and with the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Bradford Film Festival, Cambridge Film Festival and so on. What I preoccupy myself with most at Peccadillo is making sure our DVD releases get the maximum coverage possible in the press. Gay films for gay press is easy. Outside of that is another story!”

What is your own background/experience in the cinema industry?
“I started out in 2001 doing a film degree at Kent University, which really was just an excuse for me to write essays about Dario Argento and John Carpenter between getting incredibly drunk at some pretty mucky night-clubs! For the three years I was there, I would shuttle between Canterbury and London doing internships: making tea for Michael Winterbottom and making photocopies for various producers before settling into a nine month internship at Tartan Films (during their golden age: Battle Royale, Irreversible and Ted Bundy!)

“Then I went to Paris to study cinema for a year, but the only real bonus of that excursion was going to the Cannes film festival and taking part in the nude’n’bloody Troma parades with Lloyd Kaufman and his gang of loons. I continued to be a Troma loon myself every summer in Cannes for four years after that. From there I went to work on the eggscellent Troma film Poultrygeist in Buffalo, NY as a production assistant, before coming back to London and being film editor at a great music/fashion magazine called Disorder. A short while after, I came to work at Peccadillo.”

How did you end up writing for David DeCoteau and how familiar were you with his work beforehand?
“The first DeCoteau films I watched were Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy 2 (aka Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy) which I remember mostly for the random boyfriend who comes on screen for three seconds towards the end before getting killed (brilliant!) and The Frightening which was my first introduction to Dave’s notorious shower scenes! Very few of his films have made it to UK shores, and I think all of his 2000-2003 movies came here to capitalise on the success of the Scream movies.

“He’s a professional horror film director who never held back on putting male flesh on screen, which for a gay horror fan like myself was a godsend after all those years gawping at the hot jocks in ’80s slasher movies who were given such short shrift! I sent him a message on MySpace many moons ago, just stating that I was a fan, nothing more, and by complete coincidence he was on his way to the UK for the first time, to location scout for The Raven. I was very lucky with that, so I seized the opportunity and offered to take him around some old buildings in Kent that I thought might interest him. He came, and off we went, along the way stopping off at Pinewood, Ealing Studios and Oakley Court (Rocky Horror!) - I wish I’d brought my camera! I told him I wrote and a few months later he asked me to re-write a script, I think maybe he was testing me, and he liked it. House of Usher was the result of that.”

How much do your Poe films owe to their nominal source material?
“Well of course I try to be faithful to Poe as I love his stories, I had already read them all before I even met David. House of Usher is as faithful as I think it could ever have been. Of course, there are no gay ghosts in the original, or buff manservant, but this was a short story stretched to ninety minutes, you have to add some fresh elements to the mix otherwise all adaptations would be the same. At the same time I didn’t want to disappoint Poe fans, so there are several subtle nods to his works and the man himself: the cognac, the closing voiceover, Victor’s surname (Reynolds is the name Poe called out on his death bed nobody knows why!), lots of little references like that.

“I also threw in some little quirks related to photography, botany, some meta-textual hokum and, unwittingly, a Caligari-esque ending which I totally didn’t realise until I read it in a review! I’m really happy with how it came out. David is a magician when it comes to conjuring up ninety minutes of solid entertainment within such tight budgets and time constraints. And as for the casting, he picks some real humdinger actors! Michael Cardelle is mesmerisingly beautiful and very talented, while Jaimyse Haft happily chews up every scene she’s in.”

What sort of films (or specific titles) do you particularly enjoy watching?
“I’m very much into horror stories and slasher films of course, and have a soft spot for murder mysteries, crime novels and gothic fantasies. Anything from Hitchcock, Argento, Carpenter, Agatha Christie, Daphne DuMaurier, Bernard Rose, Easton Ellis, Lawrence Block, Poe, Cronenberg, Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, the list goes on! My favourite films are probably ones like Tenebrae, The Eyes of Laura Mars and Don’t Look Now, as they constantly make a point of something that exists in the real world outside of the film, something that exists right beside you, behind your sofa, in your popcorn or beneath your subconscious, and more often than not that is far more frightening than what’s on screen.”

What are you working on next?
“Well David just wrapped The Pit and the Pendulum and did such a good job on it. I really enjoyed writing that one and I love how he filmed it. It’s safe to say that the only similarity it has with the story is the pendulum itself. It’s not like you can film a whole movie about a guy underneath a pendulum, unless you’re witnessing his dream or the deliria in his head, but that would smack too much of a cop-out I think. So, we made it into a contemporary Hammer/Corman-esque throwback, complete with campy dominatrix with an obsession for hypnosis, and a group of student athletes who practice wrestling, diving and, er, storm chasing!

“Essentially I just tried to mould the script into one big metaphor packed with references to clocks, pendulums - even the characters ‘swing’, ha ha. Then there’s all these cacti lying around which, because the film is about these asexual characters and eroticising pain, is a pretty self-explanatory metaphor. Lorielle New plays the lead with relish, it is one to look out for!

“Next up for David and I is a Sherlock Holmes adaptation. I have a really good feeling about it and I know that his spin on it will be an exhilarating one. It’ll be faithful to the plots of the original stories, but there will be some interesting new characters cropping up and of course many a gay/lesbian sub-plot! I’m also collaborating on a script with a director in Luxembourg, about a Catholic girl who goes to ‘rescue’ a female cage-fighter and a post-op transsexual from a life of sin. We’ll see what happens with that one.”

Director: Paul Hyett
Writers: Mark Huckerby, Nick Ostler
Producers: Ed King, Martin Gentles
Cast: Ed Speelers, Holly Weston, Shauna Macdonald
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.facebook.com/howlmovie

As a non-driver, I travel by train a lot. And although I’ve never had any serious problems, I always carry certain essentials with me when travelling. In my man-bag you’ll find a pen-knife, a wind-up torch, string, safety pins and a range of other small items that could be very handy in an emergency, such as a derailment, a terrorist attack or, hypothetically, being trapped on the train by a pack of werewolves.

Which brings us to Howl, the second feature as director for BHR make-up effects legend Paul Hyett. Paul’s directorial debut, you may recall, was the jaw-droppingly brilliant The Seasoning House– a powerful, masterfully crafted film whose low rating on Rotten Tomatoes can be ascribed to its intensity, its bleakly nihilistic non-commerciality, and the difficulty of watching and understanding the disturbing ideas therein (especially for conservative mainstream film critics – and yes, I know that’s tautology).

Paul has followed The Seasoning House with a much more obviously commercial prospect. Werewolves on a train. It doesn’t get any more high concept than that. The end result is a fun monster movie with the requisite number of shocks, a decent amount of gore and a bunch of largely sympathetic characters played by a talented cast. But it’s not without its problems.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Howl. But it didn’t blow me away. And I was expecting it to blow me away. Maybe my expectations were set too high. But even with lower expectations, there are distracting, frustrating aspects of the film, which I will elucidate in due course. First though, let me go on record as saying that this review – as with all my reviews – is an honest, unbiased opinion. You see, I was going to be an extra in the opening scenes of Howl, shot at Waterloo Station, but the filming date changed and I had to drop out. Which was disappointing, but certainly didn’t affect my high hopes for the film and my annoyance at the ways in which it doesn’t manage to fulfil its potential. (Had I managed to appear in the background of this, I would be immensely proud but my critical opinion would be no different.) Just wanted to make that clear.

So: Ed Speleers stars as Joe, a bored young train guard who has just been passed over for promotion. When a colleague calls in sick, he finds himself assigned at short notice to the 23.59 from Waterloo to Commuterbeltville. On the plus side, the at-seat catering on this journey is provided by Ellen (Holly Weston), on whom Joe has a secret crush. Speleers was previously in Downton Abbey, A Lonely Place to Die and werewolf-comedy Love Bite as well as the disappointingly lupine-free Wolf Hall. Weston was Ash in Hollyoaks, was in BHR entries Dementamania and Splintered, and apparently was the dead body of the title character’s wife in epic Disney misfire John Carter.

Somewhere in the middle of the woods, the train suddenly lurches to a halt and the driver gets out to investigate what he just hit. This turns out to be a stag, although it's a bit difficult to determine as the cinematography by Adam Biddle (Crank, Blood Shot) is very dark throughout the whole film.

Anyway, this train driver is Sir Sean Pertwee and so it comes as no surprise that he’s dog-food before the 20-minute mark. Aboard the train with Joe and Ellen are a motley collection of, not to put too fine a point on it, stereotypes. They’re all believably portrayed characters, but it’s like they’ve been picked to be representative of a range of character types – as indeed they have, of course. Rather than rounding out the characters to make them real people, the script by Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler simply reins back their one-note characteristics to make them restrained versions of their respective stereotypes. But stereotypes nonetheless.

So the elderly couple (Victoria Wood stock player Duncan Preston and Ania Marson: Amityville Playhouse) aren’t too old and doddery. The self-centred millennial teen (Rosie Day: The Seasoning House) isn’t too selfish. The bolshie businesswoman (Shauna Macdonald: The Descent, Mutant Chronicles, The Hike) isn’t too bolshie. The mildly OCD nerd (Amit Shah) isn’t too nerdy. The working class kid described by another character as “ASBO boy” (Sam Gittins) isn’t too working class and certainly isn’t even remotely ASBO. And the rich, arrogant tosser (Elliot Cowan: Frankenstein Chronicles, Narcopolis, The Ruby in the Smoke) only really displays his full arrogance and tossership towards the end. Although, to be fair, the fat bloke (Calvin Dean: Tormented, Don’t Move) is certainly very fat. (Gittins’ character is particularly ill-served in this department. One of the others says, “You must have a knife,” to which he replies, “Why would I have a knife?” This would work if Gittins played a lary, foul-mouthed chav but his character is a well-presented, politely spoken young man and the audience is left equally puzzled: why would someone think he had a knife?)

This group are unable to make contact with anyone: there’s no mobile signal and the driver’s cab radio raises only a distorted voice saying something about being unable to send help because of fallen trees, or something. They do seem to give up on that cab radio very quickly, I must say. It clearly does work so I’d have stuck with it a bit longer.

But instead, the passengers decide that they all want to walk along the tracks to the next station, which they start to do until realising that there is some sort of dangerous wild beast in the dark with them - whereupon they high-tail it back to the train. And thus begins the siege which forms the greater part of the story (the cab radio having been conveniently forgotten). One by one the characters are dragged outside and devoured, until the beast makes it inside the train and they must fight for their lives.

There’s nothing new or different or original or clever in Huckerby and Ostler’s script. This is a thoroughly formulaic monster movie with absolutely no surprises. There are points which are possibly supposed to be surprises, like characters we had forgotten about reappearing, but they’re not actually surprising because it’s pretty obvious who’s going to reappear. All the beats are here that we’ve seen a hundred times before: the injured person with a loyal partner, the characters with a history, the false sense of closure (with nearly half an hour to run!). Paul Hyett and his cast take us through these with aplomb, but there’s nothing meaty for either director or actors to get their teeth into.

There’s a little bit of character conflict but not nearly enough. No big shouting match between two people with equally valid ideas over a decision which, if taken wrongly, spells grisly doom. One character does cause enough trouble to be briefly tied up – even though it’s glaringly obvious (to the viewer at least) that he will be proved right in his warnings about another character. Hustler and Ockerby have a background in kids’ TV (they have written other feature scripts but this is the first one produced) and I’m afraid it shows. Not in any juvenilia but simply in the lack of plot complexity on display here and the shallowness of the characterisation. Despite the numerous occurrences – and constant, imminent threat – of savage, bloody death, these characters behave and interact as if they’re in a film which “contains mild peril”.

The picture’s biggest problem however isn’t the script. It’s the production design. It’s like designer Ricky Eyres (The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Heartless, The Colour of Magic, Farscape) has read about trains, maybe even seen some pictures of them, but has never actually travelled by rail and has only the most shadowy idea of what the inside of a carriage looks like. The seats have been arranged along each side, facing inwards, like on the London Underground. This creates plenty of space for actors, for action, for drama and for the camera. So it’s practical. But it’s utterly unlike any sort of rolling stock operating on any British line. And this is not some obscure regional franchise, this is a commuter train out of Waterloo.

Seats in railway carriages face backward and forwards (as depicted on the Howl teaser poster). And the aisle down the middle is narrow, barely wide enough for two people to pass. Why does this need explaining? As soon as you redesign your set for practical purposes to something that doesn’t actually exist, you say goodbye to any sense of realism. I’m not being picky here. The confines of a railway carriage are a very well-known environment and, crucially, have tremendous potential in a horror scenario like this. If it’s difficult to get up and down the coach en masse, if it’s possible to be trapped between two rows of seats, if people have to scramble over seats – or even hide underneath them – to escape, then you’ve got yourself a brilliant horror location. But not here. This is just a long, wide corridor.

There’s no sense of claustrophobia in Howl – because everyone has so much room to move about. And the set’s total dissimilarity to what we were expecting, to the carriages that vast numbers of people sit or stand in every day, constantly distracts us from the story, taking us out of the movie. Great British horror films – of which Paul Hyett has worked on many – derive much of their strength from their settings, placing established horror tropes into prosaic, everyday British locations. The inside of a commuter carriage is one such location. Whatever this fantasy vehicle is – isn’t.

While I’m at it, there’s a frankly ridiculous scene about halfway through when the survivors produce from somewhere a cordless electric drill and use it to attach a range of metal gratings over the windows as improvised barricades against potential lycanthropic intrusion. Do the writers genuinely think that a commuter train has lots of easily removable, large metal parts, along with garden shed power tools (and presumably a decent supply of screws)? And it’s difficult to see what barrier this would present given that what the gratings are being attached to is just plastic. Seriously, have these guys ever travelled on Network Rail?

Here’s another couple of script things that didn’t work: [spoilers on] I didn’t buy for a moment that a diesel-electric train, which is a very complex piece of machinery, could be easily fixed by someone who repairs lawnmowers for a living. I know it’s just a leak in a fuel pipe, but the idea that he could first diagnose that, then find it (in the dark) and then just wrap it up with some convenient gaffer tape and the engine would start first time – is daft. Also, there’s a brief shot right near the end of lone survivor Ellen walking back through the morning commuters at Waterloo, bloodied and dazed. But how the hell has she got there? Has she really walked all the way back from the countryside into central London? And without encountering any police or anyone else who would help her? Finally, this is really nitpicky but the at-seat catering on British trains is usually provided by franchises, not staff of the train company itself. That’s not important, but would have cost nothing to get right – and further emphasises how too many of the people involved in this film have no experience of rail travel (except, presumably, on the Tube). [spoilers off]

Getting back to the production design, there is also a very obvious flaw in the set dressing. Your humble scribe has in the past wilfully ignored Aldo Lado’s sound advice and actually ridden on late night trains. In my SFX days I was a regular on the red-eye back to Bath. And let me tell you something: by the end of the day, trains are filthy. The carriages of anything departing at 23.59 will be full of beer cans, fast food cartons and other detritus. Apart from anything else, where are all the discarded copies of Metro? This sort of set dressing would have not only given verisimilitude to the mise en scene, it would also have (once again) added to the horror potential. You have the risk of slipping on the crap littering the floor. You have the desperation of searching underneath seats for half-empty drinks when the water has run out. Instead, we have a set of clean carriages where the only food packaging on view is the fat bloke’s briefly seen burger carton.

As ever, my concentration on the negative aspects of a film distorts the review and makes it look a lot worse than it is. If you’re a fan of British horror, of course you should watch Howl. But I couldn’t in all honesty call it a great werewolf film, and if it wasn’t for the imprimatur of the director’s track record I suspect it would be pretty swiftly dismissed by genre critics. The most obvious comparison is of course Dog Soldiers. Partly because Hyett has a history of fantastic work on Neil Marshall movies, although ironically Dog Soldiers is the one he didn’t do. But the comparison is directly thematic too because this is, like Dog Soldiers, a werewolf siege. Traditionally, werewolves have been introspective monsters, the horror coming from the plight of the poor soul cursed with lycanthropy. Here, as in Marshall’s debut, the werewolves are simply an external threat, an off-the-peg monster.

As director, Hyett left the actual effects to others. I wouldn’t like to try and decipher the range of credits on offer at the end, but Simon Webber (Godzilla, The Wolf Man) has ‘creature design’ and Kristyan Mallett (a mix of blockbusters and BHR, including Strippers vs Werewolves and Love Bite) has ‘prosthetics make-up designer’. We do get a good look at a werewolf well before the end (and indeed in the trailer). It looks like a body-builder with a fright-mask: plenty of teeth, shaggy hair atop its head. Other close-ups show us distinctly canine back legs; we never see the whole thing full-length but presumably it walks like Pan. In most of the exterior shots, the werewolves are merely shadowy humanoid figures with the previously mentioned glowing eyes. In interviews, Hyett said his concept was that the werewolves have slowly evolved over many years, but there’s no way to derive that from what’s on screen. (So far as I can tell, Paul himself has only designed one lycanthrope – for the Romanian-shot US movie Werewolf: The Beast Among Us. That was a more conventional, hairy, dog-faced affair.)

The idea of ‘Paul Hyett + werewolves’ was enticing, and I can’t fault Paul’s work here, nor that of his hard-working cast. Howl does its job. If you’re looking for an unpretentious, solid monster movie that will pass 90 minutes with a succession of fun and blood – crucially unsullied by cut-price CGI or bad acting – you won’t go far wrong here. But a weak, unimaginative script combined with seriously ill-judged production design prevents Howl from being the belter that it could and should have been. As a British lycanthrope picture it scores better than dreck like Strippers vs Werewolves (of course) but anyone who says this is the best British werewolf film since Dog Soldiers hasn’t seen 13hrs. (NB. I wouldn’t like to compare this directly with the recently reviewed Dense Fear Bloodline except to note that, while Howl is better on an absolute scale because of the budget and the quality of the talent involved, Tony Gardner’s microbudget feature did more with what it had available.)

The really disappointing thing here, it eventually occurred to me, is that Howl signally fails to use its high-concept premise: werewolves on a train. Since the train is stationary and displays none of the distinctive architecture of a train - furniture that inhibits movement, windows that can't be barricaded - the fact that it's a train becomes largely immaterial. If this group of people were just in a metal shed in the middle of nowhere (for some reason) the bulk of the film would be pretty similar. The definitive 'werewolves on a train' film is still waiting to be made, I fear,

Ostler and Huckerby have another horror feature in production at time of writing: a supernatural chiller called Don’t Knock Twice directed by Caradog James. Most of their previous work has been kids TV, including the remakes of Thunderbirds and Danger Mouse, Tree Fu Tom, Peter Rabbit and a forthcoming cartoon series based on the monster-packed Scream Street series of books. They also wrote quite a few episodes of Thomas and Friends, a series which has an extraordinarily large number of horror-themed stories. Seriously: every third or fourth episode, Toby or Percy or someone thinks they’ve seen a ghost or a monster (which invariably turns out to be something harmless). Still, at least Annie and Clarabelle look like real carriages.

Shot over four weeks in May/June 2014, Howl had its world premiere at the Fantasy Film Fest in Hamburg in August 2015 followed by a UK premiere at Frightfest. It had limited theatrical play in October that year and hit UK DVD just in time for Halloween. Paul Hyett’s next directorial gig is one quarter of anthology feature Its Walls Were Blood. I retain every confidence in him and am as excited and hopeful about that as I was with Howl.

Not to be confused with Howl, a 2009 US short by Eric Hickey; Howl, an Israeli animation from 2011; Howl, a Taiwanese animation from 2012; Howl, an award-winning 2013 UK horror short by Jamie Sims; Howl, a 2015 short soccer documentary from Guatemala; or indeed the 2010 Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl.

Final point to note. The film’s Twitter feed and Facebook page describe Howl as “a new psychological werewolf creature feature.” What the hell is a psychological creature feature? Looks like yet another example of some PR wonk determined to avoid using the words ‘horror’ or ‘monster’ because we all know that no-one likes horror films…

MJS rating: B

Director: Megan Freels Johnston
Writer: Megan Freels Johnston
Producers: Megan Freels Johnston, Debra Trevino
Cast: Ashley James, Mark Schelbmeir, Wes O’Lee
Country: USA
Year of release: 2014
Website: www.reboundthriller.com

This horror-thriller has its pros and cons but the balance sheet leans towards the former so I’m going to recommend it to you, albeit with caveats.

Ashley James (also an executive producer) turns in an absolutely cracking central performance as Claire, who is leaving LA after becoming disillusioned with (a) her inability to make it as an actress, but mostly (b) her cheating arsehole of a boyfriend. The credits play under footage of her discovery of Eric (co-producer Brett Johnston) doing the nasty with a never-named hussy. (Ali Williams is the Other Woman. Though it’s just a brief, wordless, flashback role she absolutely nails it, revelling in her adulterous victory and looking almost demonic in some shots. Of course, this is Claire’s memory of the moment so it’s an exaggeration.)

So anyway, Claire packs up her belongings, says goodbye to her friend (Julia Beth Stern: Killer Holiday) and sets off home to her parents’ house in Chicago.

Though it plays out as very much prosaic reality, the premise of Rebound is distinctively American and to a British viewer (or reviewer) it’s an alien world that’s mysterious and unknown from the off. Chicago, we are told, is three days’ drive away. That’s just unfathomable, living in a country where no journey takes more than a couple of days max. If you lived near Land’s End and wanted to visit your friend in John O’Groats, you could get there by road in under 16 hours. But like the saying goes: Americans think 100 years is a long time and the British think 100 miles is a long way. The USA is a nation built on two inventions: cars and guns. Both feature in this film.

So I’m thinking: if you want to get from LA to Chicago, why would you not just go by air? But I’m not American. To Claire, a three-day drive along the interstate is just a normal thing to do. On the first day, she manages to lose her cellphone at a rest stop. Then, after dark, her car breaks down. That’s okay. There’s an old screenwriting maxim: it’s fine for a coincidence to get your character into trouble, it’s not acceptable for a coincidence to get them out.

Passing motorist Gus (Wes O’Lee, who also contributed some of the songs on the soundtrack) gives Claire a ride into the nearest town: never-named, but it’s the sort of place where there’s one motel and one car mechanic. That mechanic is Eddie (Mark Schelbmeir), who collects Claire’s car but tells her she’ll have to stay overnight as he needs to get a part.

Balking at the unexpected cost, Claire pleads with Eddie to knock a few bucks off, which could be considered sweet-talking, which could be significant. Claire then goes to the town’s only bar where, among creepy you-ain’t-from-round-here locals, she unwisely knocks back a couple of stiff ones, while chatting with Eddie.

…And at the halfway point in the movie, she wakes up tied to a chair.

It has to be said that Claire’s behaviour is not terribly sensible. Since she doesn’t want to interact with anyone in this nowheresville place, why does she go to the bar? If you just want to get drunk after the day from hell, why not buy a bottle of wine from the 7-11 and then drink it while watching cable in your motel room? That’s what I’d do.

Eddie, it turns out, is a psycho. Hence we are treated to about 20 minutes of really very nasty abuse which, with the best will in the world, is basically misogynist torture porn. This does raise an interesting question, in whether a film made by a woman can be misogynist. I don’t see why not. I’m a person and a card-carrying, person-hating misanthropist (which is why drinking wine alone in a strange motel sounds so inviting…) so there’s a sort of precedent there.

What really concerns me is that this ‘middle act’ doesn’t really develop anything. I can see what writer-director Megan Freels Johnston is trying to do (at least in retrospect, having seen the whole movie) but the little hints of subtext are lost beneath a sequence of “Oh God, no!” sadistically abusive actions. In the final 20 minutes or so, matters do start to develop and the film raises some interesting ideas, but too little too late. And while the very final scene is bound to prompt debate among viewers, I personally didn’t find it very satisfying.

There’s a lot to like in Rebound. Strong performances from the cast, very effective music from Michael Boateng (helped by fine sound-mixing by Clint Allday) and some absolutely terrific cinematography from Stephen Tringali. Johnston directs with an assured hand and ensures that the whole film is driven by characters. Except that, well, there’s not really much character to Eddie. There’s a brief mention of an abusive father, and a reference to previous victims, but really he’s an off-the-shelf cinematic psycho who just wants to hurt pretty women. Which isn’t very interesting.

There is a sort of feminist subtext underlying all this, an area I'm going to leave to theorists with too much time on their hands. I'll just note that, although Claire becomes stronger through her experience, it takes the intervention of a man to help her achieve that - and violent, abusive intervention at that. There's a thesis ti be written here.

Structurally, this falls into a trap that I’ve seen many times before, of putting the big turn-around at the midway point, which means that the film is unbalanced. Act 1 takes up half the running time, leaving Acts 2 and 3 not enough space to develop and fully explore the situation which Act 1 has created. While the combination of direction and acting ensures that the first half of the film doesn’t drag, the fact remains that really Claire should be in that chair after 30 minutes, not 47, so that we can spend another 25-30 minutes witnessing her terrible situation - ideally with a series of twists and turns that keep us glued to our seats - then a final half-hour of false hope and things getting even worse before eventual redemption (or not, as the case may be).

I wish Megan Freels Johnston had spent more time – more pages – exploring the very good premise that underpins this story, and less time building up to it before a metaphorical swift jog through what the film is actually about. Which is, I guess, male dominance and female empowerment. Or something.

But look, this is me being picky. If you want a finely crafted horror-thriller about a lone woman in a strange town full of sinister-seeming locals, Rebound is a good choice. It's a solid directorial debut by Johnstion who has been producing since 2009. Her first film was Sparks, a half-hour short starring Carla Gugino and Eric Stoltz, directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That was based on a story by Elmore Leonard, who was Freels' grandfather - which must have made for some interesting bedtime stories...

The cast also includes Liz Bauer (who was in Jeff Brookshire’s Awaken the Dead) as a homeless woman and Kevin Bulla (Joyful Noise) as a disconcerting barman. Joanne Adolfo provided the (limited) effects make-up.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ben Steiner
Writer: Ben Steiner
Producer: Dan Dixon
Cast: Ben Bishop, Simon Meacock, Peter Marinker
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screening (Fantastiq) and online screener
Wesite: www.fumefilms.com

It has taken me a ridiculously long time to review this 15-minute masterpiece of British horror. But I wanted to do it justice.

The Stomach premiered at Fantastic Fest in the States in September 2014. I saw it at Fantastiq in Derby the following May. In August 2015, Ben Steiner was kind enough to send me a screener, at about the same time that the film appeared on iTunes. All this time it has been touring the genre and mainstream festivals of the world, playing well over a hundred gigs, amassing more than 20 awards and impressing all who see it. Meanwhile, a major project at the University kept me working evenings and weekends (and exhausted when I wasn’t working) so that it is only in October 2015, five months after first seeing the film, that I have been able to find the time to watch and review it.

Please understand, folks, that a quarter-hour film doesn’t take a quarter of an hour to review. And frankly, in this house, just finding a quarter of an hour of uninterrupted viewing time can be a bleeding miracle. But I’m not here to write about my home life. I’m here to write about The Stomach. To explain why it’s one of the very best British horror shorts of recent years, why it has been such a popular choice at festivals, and why you should take the trouble to watch it.

The Stomach is a beautifully original idea. Not for Steiner and his Fume Films partner Dan Dixon the standard tropes of zombies, ghosts, psychos, vampires and so on. This is a tale of mediumship gone awry, of communing with the dead. So it’s a supernatural tale, but it also ticks the ‘body horror’ box because of the unique way that brothers Tom (Ben Bishop: Whitechapel and the 1999 Doomwatch TV  movie) and Frank (Simon Meacock: Slash Hive, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, lots of TV including Poldark, Outlander and MI High) do that communing – via Frank’s torso. A customer provides an item relating to the deceased. Lying in bed, stomach bare, Frank takes this, and then puts a wide tube into his mouth. His belly distends. The customer can then commune with the deceased by speaking into the tube in Frank’s mouth while listening to his stomach through a stethoscope.

It’s a disturbing, even repugnant vision, made all the more unpleasant by the shabby bedroom in which Frank lies, straggly of beard and pale of face. You have to wonder, first, what sort of sick mind comes up with a cinematic idea like this, and second, how Frank and Tom discovered this ability…

Tom, dressed like a seedy working men’s club compere in a velvet jacket that adds nothing but irony to their situation, is the organiser and the money man. The brothers are close; there’s no suggestion that Tom is ripping off or using his brother, though clearly he is the dominant partner while passive, prostrate Frank is the one suffering through these gastric séances. There is also no suggestion that anything is fake. This is genuine communion with the dead.

Most of their customers are rather sad old ladies like Mrs Bird (Jennie Lathan: Gangsters, Guns and Zombies, The House of Silence) who visits regularly to chat with her late friend. The problem arises with the arrival of Mr Pope (Peter Marinker: The Martian Chronicles, Nightbreed, Judge Dredd, Event Horizon and numerous voice dubs including Ben in Star Fleet!), an unsavoury, criminal character looking to contact his younger brother. There is more to Pope than meets the eye.

To say more would be to spoil a film which is at once startling, revolting, fascinating and thought-provoking. Steiner’s script is a fine, self-contained slice of horror which tells us everything we need to know about these people and this world. He has then directed the story with an eye for detail - the fish tank, the coughed-up blood – that makes this more reality than metaphor. What I really, really loved about this film – even above the script, the direction, the superb sound design (by the enigmatically named ‘Z No’)  and the terrific acting by all concerned – is Nicola Wake’s production design.

The combination of Wake’s design with Dominic Bartels’ cracking cinematography creates a seedy, working class, very British world. It’s not the stereotypical world of geezer gangsters (despite Pope’s dodgy motivation) but instead it’s the world of kitchen sink drama, more A Taste of Honey than A Day of Violence. It’s a prosaic (under)world of old bed-linen and peeling paint. This is exactly the sort of horror-meets-social-realism film which exemplifies the strengths and distinctiveness of the British Horror Revival.

Britishness is also key. It’s hard to think of any other country where this would work in the same way. Maybe Germany or Scandinavia, but that would be a different film. This is probably unintentional but it occurred to me that, in combining spiritualism with crime, The Stomach harks back to one of the forgotten bedrocks of British horror cinema. That’s At the Villa Rose, the AEW Mason novel which was written in 1910 and filmed (with extraordinary regularity) in 1920, 1930 and 1940. What goes around comes around.

The fine cast is rounded out by Kiki Kendrick (Grave Tales) and Neil Newbon, whose pop culture immortality is guaranteed by having played the waiter in the original Goodness Gracious Me‘Going Out for an English’ sketch! Editing is jointly credited to producer Dixon and Jacob Proctor (The Borderlands, The Scar Crow, um, MasterChef). Jon Revell (Belly of the Bulldog, The Forgotten, Scintilla) designed the costumes; Dicken Marshall composed the effective music; Jodi Cope designed the make-up. The prosthetic effects on which the whole story rests were supplied by Dan Martin (Sightseers, In Fear, The Sleeping Room, The Devil’s Chair, Salvage, F, Isle of Dogs, Little Deaths, The Devil’s Business, Nina Forever, Ibiza Undead…) and damn good they are too.

Steiner and Dixon’s previous short was The Flea, an eight-minute vampire film which played Frightfest in 2008 and is now available on YouTube. Before that. Steiner made one segment of 2008 half-hour mini-anthology HorrorShow. Both of those also starred Meakin. Dixon’s day-job in visual effects has garnered him credits on a number of blockbusters including Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Godzilla and Avengers: Age of Ultron. The pair are now developing a slate of four Fume Films features including an expanded version of The Stomach.

Wasting neither a second of screen-time nor a pixel of screen, The Stomach is a little slice of horror perfection. A film you must see and, having seen, will not easily forget and will want to see again.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Dave Campfield
Writer: Dave Campfield
Producers: Dave Campfield, Richard G Calderon, Joe Randazzo, Daniel Sullivan
Cast: Dave Campfield, Paul Chonicki, Scott Aguillar
Country: USA
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.caesarandotto.com

They’re back! Half-brothers Caesar and Otto Denovio follow their Summer Camp Massacre and their Deadly Xmas with a Paranormal Halloween. And if you’ve met these guys before, you’ll know what to expect and won’t hesitate to get your hands on a copy of Dave Campfield’s latest opus.

Caesar (Campfield himself), you will recall, is a waspish, selfish wannabe actor (here turning his hand to screenwriting). Otto (Paul Chomicki) is a pathetic, loveable slob. And their massively untrustworthy father Fred (Scott Aguillar) is once more along for the ride, along with the expected gaggle of B-movie legends.

Paranormal Halloween starts out as a lampoon of the original Halloween, with Caesar in drag earning a few bucks, between gigs, as a babysitter. A Michael Myers-style psycho comes a-calling but, after some close calls, is killed – resulting in the brothers Denovio being presented with the Key to the City. Which is fine and all but they’re currently homeless.

Not to worry, because the Governor of California (Ken MacFarlane, who has been in every C&O movie so far), who has weird artificial hands, offers them a job house-sitting his (haunted) property, starting in late October. As usual, Caesar and Otto find themselves surrounded by eccentrics, nutters and quite possibly psychopaths too, including neighbours, servants, security guards, cops, and a ‘money laundering service’ which provides clothes care and financial advice.

Otto is on a quest to find his long-lost mother. An Exorcist-based subplot centres around unconventional priest ‘Father Jason Steiger’ (Deron Miller: Return to Sleepaway Camp, C&O’s Deadly Xmas, C&O’s Summer Camp Massacre). A psychic married couple are keen to stress that they are in no way based on characters in The Conjuring. Caesar finds a collection of webcams and sets them up around the house. Fred locates a hidden cache of booze.

I can’t go into too much detail. It’s a complex plot but no-one is here for the plot, and the reason it’s so complex is because it’s trimmed neatly and wound tight, leaving not a moment to spare and nary a wasted line. Campfield directs with masterful precision, keeping the gags coming thick and fast (and varied: character gags, visual gags, slapstick, spoofs…). Zinger follows zinger for 90 minutes of brilliantly entertaining horror-comedy. Some comedy films achieve this sort of hit rate by chucking everything in and hoping enough of it works, but Dave Campfield’s approach is more carefully managed. Sean Steffen shares story credit with Campfield, as he did on Dave’s 2012 short The Perfect Candidate.

I'm not going to list all the horror pictures referenced or spoofed here - I probably missed a lot of stuff - but it's worth noting that this isn't some lame sub-Scary Movie comedy that thinks just referencing something makes it a joke. Dave crafts funny gags out of this intertextuality and self-referentiality, weaving it into the character-based farce that is the brothers' lives. My favourite sequence is one which - as you may guess from the title - brilliantly scuppers the found footage genre (which, let’s face it, had it coming).

Our two bumbling heroes sail through the story like it’s an old Bob Hope movie (just to clarify: I am a huge fan of old Bob Hope movies). Or maybe the Marx Brothers are a better comparison (but without the manic wordplay or musical interludes). What I’m trying to get at here is that things happen around Caesar and Otto - in front of them, behind them, to the side of them – while they pursue their own specific goals. This is why Dave has been able to place them into four films now, plus assorted shorts and guest appearances, with a teaser here for a mooted Caesar and Otto’s Spring Break of Death. You could put these guys pretty much anywhere where horror-related malarkey is happening and they would fit. Because Caesar doesn’t care and Otto doesn’t notice.

There are so many characters and cameos that keeping track of names and identities proved a thankless task, so I’ll just scoot through some of the cast highlights in IMDB order. We have Andre Gower (one of the kids from The Monster Squad!), Vernon Wells (Mad Max 2, T-Force, Power Rangers Time Force and Plughead in the Circuitry Man films), Sean Whalen (Python, Hatchet 3), Campfield regular Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp), Catherine Corcoran (Return to Nuke’Em High 1 and 2), Beverly Randolph (Return of the Living Dead), Monique Dupree (Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned), Nicole Cinaglia (Camp Dread), Caleb Emerson (Chop, Poultrygeist and director of Die You Zombie Bastards!), Frank Sorrentino (Sleepaway Camp) and Brendan Mitchell (Witchcraft 14: Angel of Death– holy crap, they made another one!). Some of these actors, and many of the others I haven’t got room to name, have appeared in one or more previous Caesar and Otto pictures, sometimes in the same role, sometimes as multiple characters.

Also present are three of my all-time favourite actresses, any one of whom (as should be clear from the number of links in this paragraph) is enough to make me watch a movie. They are of course the Shep (Nympha, Chainsaw Cheerleaders, The Frankenstein Experiment, Wrath of the Crows), the Roch (Colour from the Dark, Wrath of the Crows, Serial Kaller, C&O’s Deadly Xmas, Exhumed, Chainsaw Cheerleaders, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots, Dead and Rotting, Witchouse 3, Filthy McNasty) and - as Shining-inspired ghost twins – the Brinkster (C&O’s Deadly Xmas, C&O’s Summer Camp Massacre, The Naked Monster, Vampires vs Zombies, Hell Asylum, Witchouse 3, Invisible Mom).

Editing is wonderfully tight, cinematography and sound are both good. Caesar and Otto films never cost much but every penny is on screen and the return on investment is high. If you have met the Denovios before you’ll know what to expect and you won’t be disappointed. If you’ve yet to discover the delights of the Caesar and Otto series, take a look (no knowledge of the earlier films is required) and discover the funniest sequence of B-movie comedies around.

MJS rating: A