In 1999, shortly before the release of The Phantom Menace, SFX asked me to research and write an article about the original release of Star Wars in 1977. I spent a day combing through the archives of the British Film Institute, checking the facts in original trade mags and this was the result. (The one instruction I was given was that I had to start with a reference to the Ash album 1977.) Written as a look back at how things had changed in the intervening 22 years, this has now become a fascinating time capsule in its own right of a time just before the prequels opened, when hopes were high...

Accompanying the article were two box-outs on contemporary reviews and the film's UK release.

If a band released an album called 1956, on which the first sound was the whirring of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, you might think they were a bit eccentric. If the album was called 1963 and started with the sound of the TARDIS, you might think the band were a bit sad. But if a band (such as, say, the popular beat combo Ash) released an album called 1977, kicking off with the distinctive sound of a TIE fighter, it would not only be seen as acceptable, but actually be deemed cool and played to death in the SFX office. Which it is, and has been.

Because it’s Star Wars.

All of which probably doesn’t totally encapsulate the significance of George Lucas’ little space opera in the grand scheme of things, but it’s as good an example to start with as any.

Very simply, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Star Wars in the history of cinema, in exactly the same way that it is impossible to overstate the importance of the Beatles in popular music. Like the Fab Four, Lucas’ film was not only a watershed in its own medium, but sent ripples throughout the whole of popular culture which still lap on the shore to this day. Just as you can instantly tell if a record was made before or after the Beatles, you can instantly date any film (not just SF) to pre- or post-Star Wars. And in the same way that Decca famously turned down those lovable moptops (D'oh!), so Universal passed on the chance to make George Lucas’ second film (D'o-oh!!!). Fortunately, Alan Ladd Jr at 20th Century Fox had the perspicacity to see something in Lucas’ idea and gave him the backing he needed - and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, it is not strictly true to say that nobody expected Star Wars to be a hit. Admittedly, when the film opened on 25 May 1977, George Lucas was in a diner across the street from the Chinese Theatre and wondered what the long queue was for (he probably assumed it was for Rocky, Annie Hall, or the Mohammed Ali biopic The Greatest). He and his wife were planning to be in Hawaii when the film opened and had forgotten that the actual premiere was on the Wednesday. But let’s face it: Lucas would have had an ego the size of the Death Star if he had thought, “I bet they’re going to see my film.”

Percy Livingstone

However, when Screen International asked movie executives about their expectations for the coming year, five months before the film came out, Percy Livingstone (Managing Director, 20th Century Fox Great Britain) had this to say on his company’s line-up: “Who could fail to be impressed by a schedule that includes movies like Gary Kurtz’ and George Lucas’ Star Wars, a majestic visual experience of extra-ordinary worlds?” A letter in the same trade mag the following week said: “The big movie for me for 1977 will be 20th Century Fox’s spectacular science fiction epic Star Wars.” So there was some expectation of success, but obviously not of success on the scale that the film achieved. What there was none of was hype. No big press build up; nothing. The film’s release wasn’t buried, but neither was it particularly trumpeted. Certainly not to the extent that, say, The Greatest was.

And yet Star Wars was a hit literally from day one. Though the reviews were on the whole superlative, they only started to appear as the film opened and could not possibly have directly influenced its record-breaking opening weekend (neither could word of mouth, obviously). It can only be deduced that there was a huge unspoken need among the public for a film of this type, which nobody except Lucas, Ladd and co. had picked up on - and even then quite possibly only by accident.

Star Wars opened in 21 American cinemas and on its first day grossed $215,443 at a ticket price of $3-4 each. By the end of its first week, Star Wars was playing on 42 screens and had taken $2,898,347. One week later, playing at 45 cinemas, the takings had risen to $5.2 million; a fortnight after that, on 157 screens, $13 million. At the end of June, by which time the film was playing across America at 360 cinemas, the gross was $20.5 million, already nearly double the film’s cost.

Explaining the success of Star Wars would take more than a few pages, but the key seemed to be the way that every aspect of it blended the old and the new. The story and characterisation were of a sort that had fallen out of favour with film-makers and could only be caught in TV screenings of old movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s, yet the movie was not presented as anything retro, but as something bang up to date. The technology used to make the film included cutting edge, innovative techniques, yet it also employed seemingly outdated ideas such as Vistavision (running 35mm film sideways to gain greater definition).

Though Ben Burtt’s sound effects gave the film an aural ambience never heard before, and Dolby stereo was a new concept to many audiences, John Williams’ score was an unashamed return to the sort of symphonic film music which by 1977 had completely died out. Even before the soundtrack album’s release, 20th Century Fox Records were saying that they expected the LP to be “a very, very big one” and were pressing as many copies as they could.

And what of the merchandise? George Lucas certainly didn’t invent spin-off movie merchandise - just consider the enormous range of Mickey Mouse ephemera sanctioned by Walt Disney in the 1930s - but he reintroduced the concept, fully aware that there lay the source of much of his income. Under the headline “Star Wars Product Bonanza”, the Hollywood Reporter on 8 June predicted “Although there are no projected figures on how much money merchandising will bring in from Star Wars, the amount will be astronomical, and possibly the largest ever for a motion picture.”

For the ordinary punter, Star Wars was simply like nothing that had ever been seen before, like nothing that had ever even been imagined before. With 22 years of post-Star Wars imagery in our minds, it’s difficult to imagine/remember (depending on age) what science fiction was like before this film. There were undoubtedly some pretty good SF films made in the early- to mid-1970s; indeed, given how small the genre’s output was at that time compared to the post-Lucas deluge, the overall standard was probably higher. Films like Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, Silent Running, A Clockwork Orange and the Planet of the Apes sequels had (and retain) their own charm, but it was notable that the 1977 Worldcon did not award a Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo because nothing received enough votes (Star Wars romped home in 1978, of course.)

1978 Hugo Award

The overall trend was clearly Earth-based future societies, and pretty grim ones at that - as indeed in Lucas’ own THX 1138. Space operas - especially feel-good space operas - were scarce, and there was a very good reason for that. Take a look at Dark Star, released almost simultaneously with Star Wars. The eponymous spaceship zips into the screen, sits there, and zips out - because it couldn’t do anything else. Think of the Enterprise in the original Star Trek: almost always seen in orbit, and from the same angle. The Discovery in 2001 didn’t seem to be moving at all, which is very realistic but hardly thrill-a-minute stuff. So imagine what it was like to suddenly see spaceships that whooshed and whizzed and zoomed and went ack-ack-ack-ack at each other. This is what spaceships are supposed to do (actually it’s not, but never mind) but you never thought you would actually see them do it. Today, this sort of thing is seen constantly in Star Trek, Babylon 5 and whatever piece-of-crap-with-stock-footage-from- Battle-Beyond-the-Stars Roger Corman has managed to knock up this week, but in 1977 it was unique.

Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the sci-fi action. There were a few SF films already in production, notably Superman, Norman J Warren’s Prey, and two Disney flicks: Return from Witch Mountain and The Cat from Outer Space. But the market domination of Star Wars meant that studios around the world rushed through anything they could find that could be slotted into the space-based trend. The first two productions of note were the Italian Star Crash and the Japanese Message from Space, although one must admire the British entrepreneur who simply picked up a 1976 Hong Kong film set during the Korean War and rush-released it as Sky Wars! Not wanting to be left behind by their own success, Fox immediately gave the green light to Ridley Scott’s Alien. And by the end of June, the Hollywood Reporter was announcing that the second season of The Muppet Show would feature a weekly sci-fi serial called Pigs in Space. Star Wars had definitely arrived.

And once it had arrived, it stayed. The Star Wars trilogy created more instantly recognisable icons - names, images, characters and ideas - than any other film or films before or since. In fact, more icons than almost any other story, with the possible exception of the Bible. Can there be anyone under the age of about 50 who doesn’t know Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2-D2, Jabba the Hutt, Yoda or the Millennium Falcon? Surely everyone recognises a lightsabre, or an X-wing, or an Ewok. You don’t know what a Wookiee is? Get out of here, man! Science fiction has created other widely recognised iconography, such as the TARDIS or Mr Spock, but these images took time to ingrain themselves on the public consciousness. Darth Vader and co. were known all over the world within weeks of Star Wars opening.

Above all, Star Wars established in the public consciousness an idea of what science fiction was: all dogfighting spaceships, rebels battling empires, eccentric robots and aliens with funny heads. For better or worse, when Joe Punter now thinks of 'sci-fi' he doesn’t imagine Doctor Who or Thunderbirds or The Day the Earth Stood Still or Dune or The Time Machine. He thinks of the Millennium Falcon.

At the same time, Star Wars created the concept of the 'event movie', or at least The Empire Strikes Back did, because people were looking forward to that film for three years. Even beyond the films, the Star Wars franchise has continued to break new ground. Before Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy was published, spin-off novels were ephemeral paperbacks, often written by hacks or pseudonyms. Suddenly, hardback spin-offs by respectable authors were topping the New York Times bestseller list.

Even in the late 1980s, the closest the franchise ever came to the doldrums, when there had been no new film for several years and the novels had yet to appear, Star Wars and all it contained were still prevalent throughout popular culture. In books, on records, in other films, on TV and radio, in comics and magazines: reference to Star Wars was common currency. It was a shared experience not just for an entire generation, but also for everyone who was too young to see it in 1977/78, but caught it on TV or video.

Over the past few years, with the books, the comics, the Special Editions, and now the run-up to Episode One itself, interest has built up to fever pitch. Lucasfilm’s management of the publicity has been magnificent, just teasing us all enough to get us hooked, and then gradually increasing the momentum with more and more photos and interviews. If we’re not all screaming for The Phantom Menace the week before it premieres, it will only be because we will be catatonic with anticipation by then.

But therein lies the great question: can Star Wars hit the same note again? One generation on, will audiences go crazy for The Phantom Menace the way they went ga-ga for the first three films? At the most basic level: will Jar-Jar Binks become as famous as Chewbacca? You see, it’s all changed. No really, it has.

Here are some of the things that were around in 1977 and are now no more: 8mm films (Star Wars in your own home, drastically edited to 15 minutes!); eight-track cartridges (the Star Wars soundtrack in this format is now worth several pence); supporting films (The Empire Strikes Back played with the less-than-thrilling Paws in the Park - can anyone remember what they saw Star Wars with?); theatrically released pornography (it is unbelievable how much porn dominated the mainstream cinema trade in the late 1970s); ladies who stood at the front during the intermission and sold choc ices; the intermission; Saturday morning matinees. Oh, it were all fields around here…

And here are some of the things we have now that we we didn’t have then: home video; home computers; the internet; satellite TV; cable TV; digital TV; laserdiscs; CDs; CD-ROMs; DVDs; CGI, SFX; THX; multiplexes; and a 16-year wait between Star Wars films. All of these will have some sort of effect on how The Phantom Menace is released, and how it is perceived. Twenty-two years ago, the only film mags were shallow little publications, providing studio-sanctioned news to the dwindling hordes of obsessive film-fans (“UK cinema audiences reach all-time low,” reported Screen International in April 1977). The only specialist SF mags were the fledgling Cinefantastique and the last death throes of Famous Monsters. There was no large-scale, organised SF movie fan-base, and a visit to the cinema wasn’t the universal pastime which it is now or was in the 1950s.

There is much more expectation now - even more than there was for Empire or Jedi - and the new movie has a lot to live up to: not just in comparison with the original trilogy, but also against other films. Everyone is wondering: will the new Star Wars film make more money than Titanic? Maybe, maybe not. The awful thing is that, even if it does better than every other film ever made except Titanic, it will still be deemed to have failed in some way.

But The Phantom Menace cannot bomb, simply because of what it is. Think of how successful the Special Editions of A New Hope, Empire and Jedi were. When we filed out of the cinema after the very first UK preview of the revamped Star Wars in May 1997, the overall mood among journos and fans was: “Erm, was that it?” Yet all three films topped the movie charts around the world, and the only people who didn’t buy them on video the moment they appeared were those who were still recovering from spending £100 on the Star Wars Chronicles book. (And can you think of any other topic you could compile a book on which would sell out in weeks with a cover price of a century?)

So yes, we all bought the lovely boxed set of the Special Edition videos, even though most of us had bought the remastered originals which were released only a year or so before. (And some of us still had the original rental tapes which we bought for £80 in the early 1980s!) And we will all go and see The Phantom Menace as soon as it opens (in fact a lot of people will see it on bootleg video in the two months between the US and UK premieres; one of Lucasfilm’s few planning slip-ups). We will buy the books and the toys (and the computer games and the CDs and the duvet covers and the Thermos flasks…), and then we will probably go and see the film a second time, maybe a third.

And when Episodes Two and Three come out, we will do it all over again.

Because it’s Star Wars.

Now see the two box-outs:
Box-out 1: Contemporary Reviews
Box-out 2: Star Wars released

These box-outs accompanied the SFX article '1977: The Birth of Generation X-Wing', originally published in 1999.

Box-out 1: Contemporary Reviews

The first ever reviews of Star Wars were in two daily Hollywood trade mags on 20 May 1977, which both considered it “magnificent”. “Lucas combines excellent comedy and drama and progresses it with exciting action in tremendously effective space battles,” gushed The Hollywood Reporter, while Variety deemed it “the kind of film in which an audience, first entertained, can later walk out feeling good all over.” When the movie actually opened, the Washington Post called it “the kind of sci-fi adventure movie you dream about finding, for your own pleasure as well as your kids' pleasure” while the New York Times lauded “the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.”

Time called it “the year’s best movie”; Analog thought it was “a galactic Gone With the Wind”; Box Office magazine said “few fantasies have been made with such a sense of humor”; and Films in Review commented “it offers an amusing blend of past and present, combining fairy tale with science fiction, medieval hocus-pocus with modern gadgetry” while noting that “except for one bit part, Princess Leia is the galaxy’s only female”.

Screen International admitted: “The story is so-so, with written-down dialogue which emphasises the strip cartoon nature of the characters and situations. But it is this very simplicity which is the secret ingredient in the successful formula.” Film Review summed up the whole phenomenon with: “There has never been a film like Star Wars - not for sheer fun, mindboggling spectacle and overwhelming popularity.”

Of course, a knee-jerk reaction was to be expected from some quarters. The Listener pondered: “Star Wars is great good fun and cleverly made, but what is there about it that has created this hysteria? It can only be its marriage of sci-fi knowingness with something it is hard to resist calling religious nostalgia.” A typically clinical review in the Monthly Film Bulletin said: “It could scarcely be termed science fiction at all, but… a simple space adventure, now overlaid with sterile nostalgia and multi-levelled movie puns.” Time Out employed no less a person than JG Ballard to review the film: “It is engaging, brilliantly designed, acted with real charm, full of verve and visual ingenuity,” he wrote. “It’s also totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable and an acoustic nightmare.”

Film Comment offered two opposing reviews. On the one hand, Star Wars was: “an antimodern message in an ultra-modern wrapper: what could be more stylish? What could be more fun?” On the other: “The survival chances of Star Wars are slim. No matter how one looks at it, George Lucas has not only made a movie which is mindless where it would be mind-boggling, he has made a movie which is totally inept.”

“I cannot see what all the fuss is about regarding Star Wars,” said a hilarious letter in the May 1978 Film Review. “There were better space stories over 40 years ago in such publications as Boys’ Magazine, of which I have many copies.” The following month, the nation’s dullest 14-year-old wrote to say: “I just don’t know how adults can sit and watch Star Wars. I went to see it and I thought it was a very boring film.” But first prize for missing the point must go to Take One magazine which mentioned “the disastrous casting” and “the bad acting” before concluding: “There is no sense of wonder or magic in the film.”

Box-out 2: Star Wars released

The first place outside the United States to see Star Wars, in late June 1977, was (somewhat bizarrely) the Philippines, and by the time the film opened in Britain, it was also already playing in some European markets. SF lore has it that Star Wars opened in London on Boxing Day 1977, then opened nationally one week later on 2 January 1978, the same day that the first episode of Blake’s 7 was broadcast.

However, a study of trade papers from that time shows that the UK premiere was actually on 27th December. Star Wars opened on that date in two West End cinemas, the Leicester Square Theatre and the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road, where it took a record-breaking £117,690 in its first week. (The previous London opening week record-holder was Jaws, which took £90,655 at four cinemas.) Other SF films showing in London that week included: Dark Star, Demon Seed, Escape to Witch Mountain, Futureworld, The Giant Spider Invasion, Godzilla Vs the Cosmic Monster, The Island of Dr Moreau and Flesh Gordon!

Star Wars continued to play exclusively at these two cinemas for over four weeks, with police clamping down on touts who were selling the £2.20 tickets for up to 30 quid a throw. Then on 29 January it opened in twelve major cities around Britain, followed by a further 16 cinemas in Greater London the following week.

Two other science fiction debuts in Britain in January 1978 were Blake’s 7, as mentioned, and Doctor Who’s chamois-clad assistant Leela, who made her first appearance in Chris Boucher’s story 'The Face of Evil.' The first season of The New Avengers was drawing to a close on television, while the second season was already in production. Depending on your ITV region, you could also be subjected to Logan’s Run, Man from Atlantis, The Six Million Dollar Man and/or The Bionic Woman.

Meanwhile, the first radio series of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was being recorded, and a new writer called Orson Scott Card was receiving acclaim for his debut short story, 'Ender’s Game'. Scariest of all, the BBC had broadcast an SF pilot on 13 December 1977 which convinced them that it would be worth making a whole series of Come Back Mrs Noah!

Director: Ross Adgar
Writer: Ross Adgar
Producer: Ross Adgar
Cast: Dean Sills, David Chambers, Geri Preston
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/The-Railway-Carriage-1457082814587031

I seem to be getting sent a lot of non-narrative films recently. Or at least films which are so obtuse in their storytelling as to be effectively non-narrative. I don’t mind. I’m not some reactionary old duffer who believes that a film must have a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order), although I can’t deny I do like a good hero’s journey. Even if it’s just the old climbs tree, falls out of tree, is he alive (comedy) or dead (drama) hero’s journey.

The Railway Carriage is ten minutes of imagery which is probably meant to be allegorical or metaphorical or symbolic but comes across more as hallucinatory. We have an old church, containing a few candles and a metronome. And we have an old-fashioned railway carriage (empty, stationary) containing a framed photo and an old-fashioned portable radio. The photo is of the two teenage children of our protagonist, John. The radio carries a news story about a father (presumably John) abducting his children from his ex-wife and killing them.

In some way, this railway carriage and this church are the same place, in that when John steps out of the church we cut to him in the carriage and vice versa, although naturally our initial assumption is that there is an edit there and he has travelled between the two. Like I say: hallucinatory. The two children appear intermittently in the carriage, dressed as they are in the photo.

Eventually John wakes up somewhere else, although I’m not sure whether that’s meant to be a return to reality or more of the dream. If the former, it raises the unanswered question of why he has a metronome on his bedside table, which is an odd thing to have. (As indeed is a very collectable vintage radio.)

The Railway Carriage is competently and sincerely made, but I’m afraid that it left me cold. Does it just represent the anguish in the head of a man who has lost – either literally or metaphorically – his children? That’s the only interpretation I can come up with, but that’s a bit clichéd and obvious. There must be more to it than that, surely. And: apart from being a nice location, what is the actual significance of the railway carriage? Or indeed of the metronome?

I’m not looking for pat, simplistic answers, but that’s probably because The Railway Carriage didn’t really raise any questions. A film like this should make the viewer think, but it only makes me think about this film - What does it mean? – instead of making me think about the subject of the film, whatever that might be.

The Railway Carriage bills itself as a horror film but that doesn’t come across. Dean Sills (Blaze of Gory, Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, Xmas Creep Tales) delivers a solid, largely wordless performance as John but he seems only confused, not frightened. The film is dreamlike but not nightmare-ish and I really couldn’t say in what sense it could be considered ‘horror’ except in the very basic sense that (a) our protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on, and (b) there are references to two kids being killed.

Writer-director-producer Ross Adgar set out to tell his story in an ‘unconventional way’ which is very laudable, but conventions exist for good reason. Conventions aren’t clichés, they’re tools that allow a storyteller to tell a story without getting bogged down in details and allow audiences to concentrate on what's important. If you leave out the conventions you’re working without your best tools.

Rarely am I completely ambivalent towards a film, but I’ve watched The Railway Carriage twice now and it has just washed over me. I felt no involvement, I took no interest, I found no empathy. Sorry. Nevertheless, it has been picked up for a couple of festivals and Ross Adgar shows definite promise. But for his next film he needs to explore how cinematic conventions can help and support him, if used skilfully, rather than aiming for something abstract which renders itself inaccessible and hence unsatisfying.

MJS rating: B-

When I was researching Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, I really wanted to find out the truth about Ivan Reitman’s unmade 1980s feature film of Hitchhiker’s Guide. I couldn’t get hold of Reitman himself but I knew that there were two associate producers attached to the project: Joe Medjuck and Michael Gross (not the Tremors actor). Through a bit of online sleuth work that even I found impressive, I located an email for Joe, who not only gave me a great interview but also put me in contact with Mike. Their contributions to the book were invaluable. In December 2015 I learned that Michael Gross had passed away the previous month, aged 70. I immediately dug out this interview, conducted over the phone in April 2002, and posted it online as a tribute.

How and when did you first meet Douglas Adams?
“I don’t know the specifics. I was at National Lampoon in New York, I was the art director, and after that I designed a book by Terry Jones and Michael Palin.”

That would be Dr Fegg’s Nasty Book.
“Thank you. It wasn’t officially Python. We designed the updated American version for them at National Lampoon. I know that Terry knew Douglas but I didn’t know anything about Douglas then. Then in 1980 Joe Medjuck and I worked with Ivan Reitman on Heavy Metal. When I did Heavy Metal, it was my first film as associate producer and art director. We had a lot of production in London, so I found myself going to the sci-fi stores, where Hitchhiker’s was well into its swing at that point. I was unaware of it in America. So I started listening to it; very cool stuff. I still hadn’t read the book but I’d heard the radio show.

“Time passed, nothing much else happened. I still don’t know how Douglas came to us. I know at one point, ‘82 or ‘83, after we’d done Heavy Metal, I was part of Ivan’s office. And I was up for directing what might be a sequel to Heavy Metal. We had high hopes for Heavy Metal but it didn’t do that well so we didn’t do a sequel. We were going to do an animated sequel, I was going to do it. Then it morphed into: okay, what kind of animated film can we or should we do, if we’re not going to do a sequel to Heavy Metal? And Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came up.

“I don’t know who put it on the table. It wasn’t me; it might have been Joe. We looked at this thing; Joe and I loved it. We read the book, loved it, saw it as an animated feature and went to Ivan. Ivan saw the potential in it, said, ‘Okay, let’s do something here.’ And Douglas was wooed. Now who really did that I don’t know. But I do know at one point that I was the pivotal point in there being any relationship, any dealings with Douglas. Douglas came to see what we had done, because at that point I don’t think we’d even finished Heavy Metal. Maybe it wasn’t released, because I remember I couldn’t show him the film. I guess it was finished, yes.

“He knew we’d done Heavy Metal, and he didn’t want to do an animated feature particularly. But he was interested in me and my talents, and Joe and he got along beautifully. They just chimed at a certain level. I remember taking a long walk on the beach. He really didn't want to go forward with Ivan Reitman because at that point all he knew from Ivan was Animal House and Stripes. And he didn’t see Hitchhiker’s at the same level. American is difficult enough, without it turning into Animal House, which certainly he didn’t view Hitchhiker’s Guide as. Neither did we, but I think Ivan’s point was he saw the commerciality in it. Joe and I saw the - if you’ll forgive the word - intellectual side of it. We connected with the material more strongly.

“I took a long walk on the beach, I remember, with Douglas and kind of sold him on it. He was fascinated with the technological changes that were starting to take place. I know he was a fanatic with Apple and computers. I wasn’t, but I was tuned into special effects. We couldn’t do an animated movie, he absolutely did not want to do an animated feature. Then the decision was: if it was live, how the hell would you do this? We were aware there was a television show, and he’d had some funny experience at ABC that didn’t work out, and how does it not be another Doctor Who?

“I said, ‘You know, there’s great potential in all this because of what’s starting to happen in computers. You can generate these things.’ They didn’t have CGI backgrounds like now, or computer-generated animation per se, but what they did have was the ability to create a fanciful graphic, like reproducing a photo of the ocean and then putting it on a ball. That sort of thing. So I said, ‘There’s the potential for leaping through these worlds and places. It’s starting to develop now.’ We were just aware of it. I don’t know whether that connected with him, or my enthusiasm or my Lampoon background, or a combination or the potential here that he saw. He then came back and said, ‘We’ll do this.’ I remember Ivan calling me up and congratulating me: ‘Congratulations on swinging that with Douglas Adams. You took him over the line.’ Because we were all wooing him. And there we were - we were off to a running start.”

Was this a fairly hefty deal that you signed?
“I don’t know the deal. I wasn’t privy to that.”

How did Ivan and Douglas get on?
“You’ve got to remember that Ivan was doing several things at one. Ivan’s structure was that Ivan was the core of the thing, the rest of us were his support team. Joe went right back to college with him; my connection started in earnest with Heavy Metal but went back a little bit to Lampoon days, peripherally. I helped him with some Animal House stuff and I knew Animal House people. I wasn’t really involved but we were part of the circle. I think he saw me as the graphic end of it mostly, and Joe as many ends of it but in particular the literary side of it. And sometimes those functions meshed together.

“So Ivan might have a position on something, then Joe and I implemented it. Very often Joe and I brought our positions to Ivan and he’d go, ‘Good idea.’ It went two ways. Joe and I had this project while Ivan was doing at least two or three other things. This was one of many. It was never intended for Ivan to direct it. I remember the point when Ivan called me and he said, ‘I know we said you were going to direct the next animated feature, but I hope you understand that if we do Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you can’t direct it. You’re not qualified. We’re going to have to look for a director.’ I agreed to that, I understood that, that was fine. I didn’t have the history.

“So a lot of what happened between Ivan and Douglas was buffered both ways by Joe and I. We understood how Ivan worked, we understood his vision, we understood his popular view. We understood where he wanted to go. Then we also understood Douglas. And they were further apart than was ever possible to make out. Joe and I kept thinking we saw some sort of compromise situation because we just understood both sides of it. We thought some place in the middle was our vision of it. But in fact they never really reconciled. As a consequence, Douglas would meet with Joe and I, and we really became dear friends, I’d like to say. We socialised quite a bit and had parties at my house, pool parties. We really got along as friends and we were sympathetic to each other’s needs.

“When we got along with Ivan, Ivan would speak Ivan-speak, which was a very blunt, singular, focused point of view, which at its core was not Douglas’. He had a hard time being in a room with Ivan, and Ivan had a hard time being in a room with him. Ivan did not have a great history of working with the English. Gerry Potterton who did Heavy Metal - he and Ivan didn’t get along. We had an English director later on for a picture that was a flop, and Ivan voiced at one point, ‘I just don’t see what the English see. I may be Canadian but I’m quintessentially American - and these people are too English.’ Somehow Joe and I were more sympathetic to the English sensibilities than Ivan was. Even a bit of that was at its core.

“And the real problem for Douglas at that time was: Douglas was Hitchhiker’s Guide-ed out. I mean, he’d had it. It was just too much already, it was driving all the fame, but it was enough. Already ABC had tried to do something, already it was a radio show, already it was book, already it was recorded. For him to sit down and do a draft, he was in pain, regardless of who was with him. He struggled so hard with it, he tried so hard, and he just hated the whole process.”

Legend tells that the first draft he handed in was an enormous script that was basically the book.
“I think so. One of the problems, the reason it never got made by us, is Ivan is a structurally conservative film-maker. He really believes in the three acts, he really believes in motivation, a ticking clock, characters that develop. That’s not what the Hitchhiker’s Guide is, period. Some would say the Hitchhiker’s Guide is perfect bathroom reading. You pick any chapter and just laugh at it for a while. Once you know the characters, it doesn’t matter where you are in the story. Ivan always voiced something that frustrates him in certain kinds of films, time travel movies and things like that: once you know anything can happen, then there’s no conflict, there’s nothing. Because anything can happen. Just when we think it’s all going to go - ‘Oh, they’re not really dead, they’re alive.’ ‘Oh, the Earth didn’t blow up, it’s really still there.’ And it keeps on going to the point where the audience does not care about anything. Well, that’s not Hitchhiker’s Guide.

“What Ivan saw was the humour. He got the humour, he loved the characters, he loved the robot, he loved the interaction, he just loved so much about it. But structurally, it wasn’t right. And Douglas came to understand that. That’s why, long after Douglas left the project, we went through other directors and writers and even more drafts of it. Ironically today, if you did it right now, probably you could go back to its original form. Because the audience has shifted and they could see it now. But it’s also been knocked off so much now. Who knows? I certainly wouldn’t get up on a pedestal now and say, ‘I think it’s time to do Hitchhiker’s Guide.’ But you certainly could do it closer to its original form now than you could have in our hands in the ‘80s.”

Can you remember the changes that were made to the story?
“They were always trying to put some kind of: what is the goal, what is the race, what is the three-act structure? We had to focus on something, so let’s focus on these characters. You had these discussion which were irrelevant to the book that were really what staked it. All these very fundamental things. Part of Douglas’ success was breaking all those rules and here we were trying to rope it back into those rules again, just to drive the story.

“So what they did do, though, is manage to simplify things: we won’t go there; what we need to do is have this race about the Earth’s about to be destroyed and these guys are out to do something. So we just kept it more linear. In the end, if we had made that, I think the fans would never have liked it. And would the public have found it accessible? That’s the long history of Hollywood – you could play this out forever. What makes a movie from a book? Sometimes easy, sometimes impossible.”

Was any thought given to the film’s look or design?
“No. The wonderful thing about it is - you’ve got to remember it’s the early ‘80s. Just to digress for a second, as we continued over the years - because we had the thing about five years - as it went through Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, we were making progress with them because they were very filmic. Even through there, what happened is Ghostbusters came and that was it. We knew what we had to focus on. And we were exhausted by the process, so we let it go. But when we started Ghostbusters, or in that period as opposed to now, not so many sci-fi films. Apart from Star Wars and Alien, you hadn’t seen nothing. Everything that I can think of that we started to think of doing, you’ve pretty much seen in films since.

“We knew we weren’t going to go back and draw on the TV series or any of that. The magic was: boy, this is going to be a movie, and a big movie, and we could do all kinds of neat things. Part of it was trying to figure out the nearly impossible vision. I did think that it opened the door to wonderfully imaginative, ‘Terry Gilliam’ style thinking than standard sci-fi movies. We knew that. And I was really jazzed about that part of it. But I didn't have any specific visions. We never did a drawing, or if we did I don’t remember it. We figured at that point, having a good art director was going to do the job.”

Douglas always cited this meeting with Ivan where Ivan asked him to change the answer from 42. Do you remember that?
“I wasn’t there. But I know that kind of meeting happened. That was the crux of the problem. In hindsight, we should have realised that this could never be reconciled. You can’t make a Hollywood commercial feature out of it without abandoning something as fundamental as ‘the answer is 42.’ What made us getting in, knowing that, and yet get in conflict with it, is complex. Maybe we jumped when we shouldn’t have jumped. Maybe we maintained our enthusiasm when we shouldn’t have. Maybe we were fighting our own internal conflicts.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book about the Heaven’s Gate scandal? It’s a fascinating book. I always recommend it to anyone who wonders: how does that happen in film? How do you get there? How do you get so far in and not see it? That answers it very well. What happens is you fool yourself. You think it’s a minor problem when it’s the core of the problem. You think you can solve it, but in fact it reaches deeper than you thought. We were kind of in that mess when we should have gotten out - which we did. But it’s hard; you talk yourself into a thing, you love something. We loved him - what’s not to love about Douglas? He was on all the time of course.”

Did Douglas understand how Hollywood works?
“No. Well, maybe he did, maybe he really did. It worked like he most feared it would work, so maybe he did. I think he was surprised. He thought we wouldn't be like Hollywood. We weren’t ABC. We weren’t six executives in a room with: ‘Here’s the formula.’ We were a little more advanced in our thinking. After all, we did do Heavy Metal. Which, even in its time, there was nothing like it. We were running the front of things. Ivan had done Animal House. Whether you liked Animal House or not, it broke Hollywood rules. So we were probably, to his mind, not the standard Hollywood guys. And even if Ivan was, Joe and I weren’t.”

As I understand from Joe and Abbie Bernstein, Douglas did three drafts.
“It was a contractual obligation to go to three in a way, but your definition of what’s a first draft, what’s a second draft gets murky. But yes, we drafted him out. He got exhausted. He dreaded going in there every day, having to look at those goddamn things again. We just knew he wouldn’t work unless we tried to keep him on track. I’m amazed that Ivan kept going with it, actually.”

After so many drafts, why did it eventually disappear?
“I believe that five years was because that’s what the option was. Part of the reason for continuing to run through this was because there was some studio money presumably to pay for this development. Ivan’s involvement wasn’t heavy - he was doing other things - and as long as we owned it within the five years, we might as well keep trying different ways to do it. I think, because I wasn’t part of the process, Joe brought the writers on and Joe brought Rocky and Anabel on. By the way, I always thought the most successful version we had was Rocky and Anabel’s. It was a very good script. But why did it end? The five years were over, it would have meant renewing it, and Ghostbusters was there. It was time just to give up.”

Did you see Douglas much after that project?
“No, I didn't see him at all. We talked a little by phone. There were parties with Terry Jones. I guess Terry became a good friend of his later. I remember that somewhere in the early ‘80s they were good friends. I remember we had parties. They had a party at a restaurant in LA for Terry Jones. If Douglas was really bitter about it he certainly didn’t reflect it in our presence. He was frustrated and disappointed and we understood. It’s not like anyone was really pissed at each, except maybe him and Ivan! We said, ‘Look Douglas, we know what you went through and you also have to know what we went through. And you also know where our loyalties are and you also know that we believe in what Ivan believes in. This is not like toothpaste - that’s the way we make movies.’ We just thought we could connect the dots and make things work for everybody. And we were wrong.”

RIP Michael C Gross, 1945-2015

Dan Rickard, director of micro-budget zombie epicDarkest Day, kindly answered a few questions by email in December 2015.

How close is the finished version of Darkest Day to what you originally envisaged when you started making the film?
“Darkest Day ended up taking eight years from the first shoot up until the end of the post-production. Originally it was going to be a 30-minute short film (that was supposed be finished in a few months, rather than eight years). And so in that sense the film ended up being much bigger and obviously longer than intended, but in terms of the feel of the film and the basic story it is in fact remarkably similar to what I had first envisaged all those years ago. I certainly had not considered that anyone other than friends and family would ever see the film, but it’s been really exciting (and a little scary) that it’s now gone out into the world on DVD and VOD for all to see.”

During the long, long production, what was the lowest point and how did you get past it? Did you ever consider that the film might never get finished?
“The lowest point was probably during the middle of the post-production. Looking back, there was an insane amount of work to do. I don't think people quite realise what it takes to make a feature film (and I'm not sure if I knew myself at the time). Most films will have several hundred names on the credits for post-production; we had about five working in our free time. We spent years working on the edit, as well as the hundreds of VFX shots. All of the dialogue in the film was re-recorded (ADRed) and that took two years in total. Also all of the sound had to be created from scratch in every detail. The music was also a big undertaking. I found that the only way to cope in those situations is to take each day as it comes, and focus on the task at hand. If you stop and look at the big picture and see all the work required, you can go mad.

“Despite all that, I never once considered that the film wouldn't get finished. So many people had put so much time and effort into the film that I couldn't not finish it and that’s what kept me going really, as well as having such great support from everyone, especially my producer/co-director Simon Drake and actress/co-editor Sam Bolter who took a keen interest in the edit and other post-production and stuck with me all the way.”

Why do you think zombies are so popular as a theme among low-budget film-makers?
“I think the great thing about the zombie genre is that it allows film-makers to make big concept films in a ‘relatively’ easy way. You can use fairly normal locations, and it’s not too hard to do the zombie make-up on your extras - and it’s relatively cheap to do. Imagine if you want to do a sci-fi, a monster film, or a war film, the logistical issues and budgetary limitations are too big for many low budget film-makers. Zombie films are a way of making larger than life films for almost no money, otherwise you might end up having to do a fairly straight drama (something which in my opinion is much more challenging to do well).

"Also, as we found out making Darkest Day, so many people love the idea of being a zombie for the day, that it’s actually so easy to spread the word and get a large number of extras together. I think people love cutting up their clothes and getting covered in blood and just letting go. I can't imagine getting the same enthusiasm trying to get people to be extras for a drama set in a supermarket.”

How did you become involved with The Dead and what was the biggest challenge on that film?
“I was at film school in Brighton when I met director Howard J Ford. At one point, he saw one of our films that I had done some VFX on (it was a giant tidal wave destroying Brighton, so I've never strayed far from major destruction in my work, ha). I started doing some basic advert VFX work for Howard. When he asked if I would be interested in working on a zombie film that he and his brother Jon were going to shoot in West Africa, I said a pretty definite yes. I then asked if I could come out on the shoot, expecting that it wouldn't be possible, but amazingly they said yes.

"To cut a long story short, it ended up being one of the most disastrous shoots ever, and it’s a miracle that the film exists (so much so that Howard wrote a book about it called Surviving The Dead, which is well worth a read, and I can confirm that everything in it is all true). Despite the incredibly harsh conditions, I loved every moment of it, and was able to learn many new skills having worked on special effects, make-up, sound recording, focus pulling and camera assisting by the end.”

From your point of view, how did The Dead 2 differ from the first one?
“The Dead 2 was also a very challenging shoot, but relatively far easier than the first film. We shot the whole film in India, which has similarities to Africa, but overall it has a much faster pace of life and I think that comes across in the film. I think it’s a faster film in general and perhaps has a bit more action, but I also think it keeps enough of the dark vibe of the first film that worked so well.”

What other projects do you have lined up now?
“It's been a very busy time for me over the last few years working on various films. I was the cinematographer on Simon Drake’s first feature film Angel on the Ceiling which is well into post-production. I worked with Howard Ford again on a thriller set in North Africa called Never Let Go which should be getting distribution very soon. I also worked with Jon Ford on a revenge film recently. But I have decided that it is now time to direct another film myself which I am hoping to shoot sometime next year. No zombies unfortunately, this time it’s an action adventure film about the quest to solve the mystery of King Arthur.”

Director: George Clarke 
Writer: George Clarke
Producer: George Clarke
Cast: Shane Todd, Alan Crawford, Laura Jenkins
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: UK DVD
Website: www.yellowfeverproductions.com

George Clarke’s first film Battle of the Bone was in my TBW pile for quite some time. I dug it out and watched it after receiving a screener of Clarke’s The Blood Harvest just ahead of its January 2016 release. Inbetween those two pictures are five other movies across a seven-year period. Clarke’s Yellow Fever Productions is clearly Northern Ireland’s number one film factory.

The province has given us some interesting movies over the years, from Enda Hughes’ brilliant but frustratingly unavailable The Eliminator (and his awesome short Flying Saucer Rock’n’Roll) to Kieran Majury’s Deadville. ViaFreakdog (which had its moments), Ghost Machine (which was awful), Ditching (which was very curious) and WAZ (which was set in New York). The first horror shot in Northern Ireland was probably Naked Massacre, which I reviewed a couple of years ago for a magazine published by Factotum, the guys who made Ditching.

So anyway, I’ve finally watched Battle of the Bone and I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it. It’s smartly produced, technically very competent, uses its locations brilliantly and demonstrates above all that George Clarke has a masterful eye for composing the perfect shot. This is a film where you leave the cinema whistling the mis-en-scene.

At heart it’s a straightforward, generic zombie film. The middle act is basically our three main characters running away from hordes of zombies. It’s adroitly directed and the pace never flags. If anything there’s a little too much of it and this 90-minute film could have lost a few minutes from the middle.

The first act is less successful. Each scene is very well done but they don’t seem to fit together in any coherent sense. We kick off with a young thief slipping through a skylight into a Government research lab and stealing a jar of pink pills which two infodump scientists have explained are some sort of booster drug for soldiers. This leads into a hugely impressive chase sequence as the burglar escapes a whole slew of security guards. Clarke uses the balconies and stairs of whatever building this is to great effect.

An effect which is slightly lessened when the second scene turns out to also be a chase, this time through some woodland. Two drug dealers chase a lad who I assume is the same one as we saw before. He seeks shelter in a rundown but still functioning mental hospital. Within the hospital is an orderly pushing a bearded guy in a wheelchair, a staring-eyed girl who stabs the wheelchair guy for no apparent reason, a diligent nurse and two blousy nurses (Vivian Jamison and Jo Lamont-Crawford, who were both in The Last Light: An Irish Ghost Story) who would rather mess about with a piano than actually attend to the patients.

It’s pretty much impossible to ascertain what is going on, or indeed where the zombie virus originates. If it has any connection with those pink drugs from the prologue, that passed me by. Individual scenes, as I mentioned, are fantastic. And the gradual build-up from a single zombie, as the violence and infection spreads around the building before bursting out and taking to the streets, is masterful. It’s just the lack of a coherent narrative that frustrates.

Our central characters are David (Shane Todd, now a successful stand-up comedian), Scott (Alan Crawford, also in The Blood Harvest and director of indie sci-fi feature The Truth About Tom, Dick and Harry) and Jill (Laura Jenkins). David helps Scott when he sees him in a fight with some low-lifes who are pinching his bicycle.  Together the two try to get across Belfast but it’s 12th July, the politically fractious day when Protestants insist on marching around with orange sashes in a way they know will piss off Catholics, and Catholics go out looking for Orangemen because they know it will annoy them and provide an excuse for some aggro.

Battle of the Bone (a pun of course on the Battle of the Boyne) does a great job of comparing the threat from the roving bands of mindless zombies with the threat from the roving bands of mindless thugs whose interest in politics extends no further than looking for an excuse to smash someone’s head in for being different. There’s a scene where a bunch of drunken revellers draped in Union Jacks are attacked and another where the zombies happen on part of a marching band in a hall, preparing to head out.

It should be stressed that there’s absolutely no political subtext or bias to Clarke’s film. It is made abundantly clear, not least though a well-written voice-over monologue near the start, that both sides are as bad as each other and neither represents the majority of the population who just want to live in peace.

So there’s a confusing, well-made but fragmentary first act and a non-stop, energetic middle act as David’s girlfriend Jill turns up and joins the boys in some determined running away and occasional fighting back. Jill is a great character because Laura Jenkins is a well-built girl. Too many women in horror films are skinny wannabe models but Jenkins – and hence Jill – has some real meat on her bones. Which doesn’t stop her from delivering some powerful spinning kicks to both humans and zombies. It’s such a delight to see a real woman in a zombie film. What a shame that Jenkins doesn’t seem to have made anthing else.

Having escaped the thugs, the trio are chased by zombies until we come to a climactic sequence which just blew me away. As David, Scott, Jill and some passing soldiers plunge into a melee with the undead horde, George Clarke fiddles with the colour and contrast (and speed) of his images and for five to ten minutes the film becomes an oil painting. It’s just beautiful. Movement and power are visualised without sacrificing character or relationship. I’ve never seen anything like it. Worth the price of admission alone and culminating in a powerful, magnificently choreographed shot of David grasping an Irish Tricolour and a Union Jack.

Just amazing stuff. The film as a whole is a joy to watch. The fight scenes are particularly adept, managing to be realistic without being brutal yet also slightly flamboyant without losing credibility. A fine balancing act which few directors, let alone first time directors, could pull off.

The cast includes Logan Bruce who had uncredited roles in Freakdog, Killing Bono and Keith Lemon: The Film; John Gallagher who was in Michael McNulty’s extraordinary feature Lost Claws; Graeme Livingstone (now earning a good living as a stand-in on Game of Thrones); and Lindsey Mitchell (who was in something called Zombie Formal Queen). As well as writing, producing and editing, George Clarke was also DP, fight arranger and assistant editor. He had actually planned to play David himself but instead concentrated on working behind the camera, although he is somewhere among the (300 or so!) zombies. Roddy Conlon and Joe Maxwell handled the special effects make-up.

Battle of the Bone premiered in October 2008 at the Freak Show Horror Film Festival in Orlando, where it won the Audience Choice Award. The UK DVD was released in January 2009 by Clarke’s own company. Five years later, Eagle One Media picked up the US rights and released an American disc in August 2014 retitled Zombie Wars: Battle of the Bone.

If George Clarke has gotten even better than this over the subsequent years, then The Blood Harvest should be an absolute belter.

MJS rating: B+

When did I interview Harley Cokeliss? I don't have a record but it must have been towards the end of my time on SFX in early 1998. At the time, Harley was developing a slate of films adapted from 2000AD strips. Although none of these projects came to fruition, this is still a fascinating look into what might have been. Of course, I also wanted to talk about Glitterball, The Empire Strikes Back and other cool stuff too.

What can you tell me about Fleetway Film and Television?
"Amongst other things. I’ll give you some information, but it has to be cleared for press release. It’s just the clearance from upstairs, because once we did a press release in Variety and the people in Copenhagen got terribly upset. So we have to go through internal announcement before it goes to worldwide announcement."

Who are the people in Copenhagen?
"Egmont Foundation owns Fleetway. It’s now called Egmont Fleetway. One of the largest magazine and comics publishers in the world - hugely successful in Germany - with a focus on children’s books, magazines and comics. The Foundation has a very educationally solid orientation, which is why Fleetway and the magazines are a little bit the black sheep of the family. They don’t really know how to pigeonhole us, but what they see now is that the magazine line is quite an interesting line. If you talk to Steve Macmahon or David Bishop, they’ll tell you that these magazines are not about superheroes. They’re really about ordinary people in extraordinary situations."

You’re in charge of licensing properties that Fleetway own?
I wouldn’t say I was in charge. Ileen Maisel and myself and Duncan [xxxxx?] are engaged as consultants, and togther we created Fleetway Film and Television with a view that FFTV would be there to protect the integrity of what they refer to as the intellectual copyright. I can’t remember if it’s intellectual property or copyright. I think it’s intellectual property. I think they’re concerned that the integrity of the characters are preserved. Because I think they felt that maybe the character wasn’t kept as much as he could have been."

In other words, making sure that Rogue Trooper stays blue?
"That’s an interesting question about the colour. You know I developed this about five or six years ago with Joel Silver and Rita Henson at Warner Brothers."

How far did that get?
"Three drafts of a script. They were a little bit concerned about the scale of the script, even though they told the writer: ‘Don’t feel inhibited by budgets. Just write your vision.’ That involved long discussion with Rob Bottin who is the wonderful special effects make-up supervisor. Rob and I had long discussions about why blue is a difficult colour, and how grey is  much better colour."

Difficult for blue-screen work.
"Well, there’s that. That is true. But what he was refering to was what he called ‘the mantle of the eye’ and the inside of the mouth. Because the inside of your eye is red, so that makes a very strong contrast between the blue and the red. The inside of your mouth is pink, and the inside of your nose and the inside of your ear. And all these point up the fact that it’s make-up. So he was saying steer away from blue, go more in the direction of grey. We were going to give him a kind of skin texture, because we felt that one of the things that the genetic engineers would do would be to give him a skin that was more resistant to scratches and cuts and abrasions and bullets.

"I’ve just seen Saving Private Ryan, which was a very salutary experience I must say because when we considered how to do Rogue, we always envisioned it as a kind of World War One movie. Certainly like the newsreels that we saw: handheld. That kind of modus operandi was very much in our mind, and Steven got there and did it and did an astonishing job. It’s truly remarkable. I think it’s a remarkable piece of work. But Rogue is going to be a very interesting project. When you look at how long it’s been running, which is nearly 20 years now, we have a great number of stories. There’s always the discussion: ‘Are you going to go for the origin story?’ Which is quite logical. But we have so many extraordinary characters, that it’s really going to be a question of: ‘How do we do the best story and which are the strongest characters?’ Like Venus Bluegenes has an enormous number of fans and I think it would be foolish to ignore her presence."

Venus Greygenes as she’d become.
"I think Levi’s would have a thing to say about that. But I’m a big fan of the chips. A lot of the time when I was developing this in California with Lee Drysdale as the writer, Dave Gibbons was writing his version. Because Dave of course as the creator visually was taking a shot at doing another version that Will Simpson drew but Dave wrote. And we would meet and we’d exchange ideas and talk about the way that I saw the character and the way that Dave saw the character. And Dave decided to go without the chips in war machine, whereas we love the chips. And I’m very sure that in the next development of Rogue, we’re going to be very true to the character - and the chips are back."

It would be a good way to get some big name stars in the film.
"Exactly. that’s what we intend on doing. Of course, in the intervening years since the original development at Warner Brothers, special effects technology has proceded at a pace. There’s some young men and women coming out of the computer animation schools in LA - some even self-taught - and they’re doing remarkable work on home-based machines. You don’t have to spend 35-40 million dollars on a Silicon Graphics machine anymore. So it’s becoming more affordable. My whole orientation with CGI is about making CGI invisible. In other words, if you use CGI, say in the way that they used it in Braveheart, where you have the pikes and the horses nowhere near each other, but when the horses charge and get tangled up in the pikes, you know.

"But before we plunge specifically into Rogue Trooper, perhaps I can wet your appetite and wet the fans’ appetite by telling you what’s happening, what we’re on the verge of announcing. I think a lot of this will be announced in October at MIPCOM, which is the television marketplace. By the time you get ready to go to press with this, we shall have finalised a very protracted negotiation, I must admit, with Showtime Television to make two two-hour movie/television pilots for two of the Fleetway pilots: Strontium Dog and Outlaw."

Remind me of Outlaw.
"In the future, on another planet, the fastest, most skilful user of a particular weapons system has retired but the Powers That Be won’t leave him alone. They bring him out of retirement and when he refuses, they kidnap his daughter to force him to work for them. Because he’s the best. And they want to win because the winner of the conflict obviously makes more sales."

Who created that?
"I don’t know. I was talking to Steve McManus yesterday about this because the character basically had one story. It just ran for one series. I’d say Dan Abnett because Dan writes everything. We’re huge fans of Dan’s. We think that the new storyline that Dan has come up with for Sinister Dexter is absolutely terrific, and we think it has definite movie potential."

And Strontium Dog?
"Strontium Dog? Well, guess what, guys? Johnny Alpha returns."

And Wulf Sternhammer?
"Well… I think anywhere Johnny goes, Wulf’s going to be around. But I can’t really say for sure which way the studio’s going to jump."

So as TV movies, these could spin off into series?
"I think they like to call them cable movies. Because they aren’t on broadcast television, they’re on cable television. And I think they’ll be getting some theatrical release in certain territories, depending on how they turn out. They’ve hired John Shirley, who I’m a big fan of: one of the cyberpunk writers who I think has worked with Bill Gibson.  And for the writer on Outlaw - I think they’re negotiating with Lloyd Fonvielle, a very interesting LA-based writer who just finished writing Have Gun, Will Travel, the movie version of that, so we thought ‘Brilliant idea: let’s have him do Outlaw. Which is a western a bit like Winchester 73.’ Remember Winchester 73? It’s about a shooting contest. And there’s also The Quick and the Dead which is also about a shooting contest. It’s also a bit reminiscent of a picture that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a hunter in, Commando, where he’s a retired guy and the government want to press him back into service, and find ways of getting him to capitulate."

What sort of budgets are we looking at?
"Well, no-one’s set any budgets, but I think the budgets are going to be modest by movie standards. But I can’t really tell you because the scripts haven’t been written so the budgets can’t be made. But I don’t think they’ll be 78p or a hundred million dollar movies. They’ll be several million pounds, but where on that scale, nobody knows until the script’s written. But the thing is, I think they’re looking to spin off and once you establish basic sets - like the sets on Star Trek: Voyager - you’ve built your sets. You don’t have to keep building them for every show. So those costs, which might be considerable, are averaged over the life of a series. I think those final cost equations will enter into the budget process when they know what they have. And as you know, Spice Factory has been in negotiation with Egmont over Rogue and also Bad Company. I think the intention with Bad Company is that the writer and creator of the series, Pete Milligan, would write the script."

Does he have any experience of scriptwriting?
"Pete is a very much in demand young British screenwriter, who’s written for about half a dozen companies: Paramount, British Screen, Handmade, Pathe. He’s a friend of mine; we collaborated on a couple of scripts. One is kind of a hallucinatory crime story, Pilgrim. We’re hoping to put it into production very soon. In fact there might be an announcement within a month or so. We’re out of Development Hell and in the zone of Casting Hell. Because they don’t greenlight movies until there’s someone to play the parts."

Who has final say-so on things like what colour to paint Rogue?
"Well, I speak as someone who was at the table in California a long time ago, when at the time I jointly held the rights to Judge Dredd with Charlies Lippincott. He and I did not pursue business very long, and he went off with the rights. But I remember that discussion - ‘Will he take his helmet off?’ - going on and on and on. The thing is that Egmont has been very fair to the creators and given the creators first shot at creating a treatment or series bible. Then at the point when a major studio or network or production company gets involved and starts spending serious amounts of money, no-one is going to do that without having a certain degree of creative freedom.

"You see, that’s where FFTV comes in, in terms of our brief of protecting the integrity of the character without, I think, becoming obsessive. There is a logic you have to apply. One of the problems is that you get fabulous artists drawing extraordinary images of characters and situations and even costuming them, but when you come to the practical matter of designing costumes that somebody actually has to wear, move around, be able to lift their leg, then a whole different set of parameters comes into play."

It’s like the problems with the Vampirella costume.
"Well, I’m a big fan of Durham Red."

Is she going to be in Strontium Dog?
"Let’s just say that she’s in the Strontium Dog universe. I think Durham and Johnny are terrific partners, but whether she’s going to be in the movie I don’t know. Because John Shirley hasn’t officially started work. I think John has been working, but this is all subject to contract. The contract’s on the verge of closing as we speak."

Do the writers have freedom to use all the established characters within each universe and/or to invent new ones?
"Oh, I should think so."

So they could give Johnny a new sidekick if they wanted to?
"Absolutely, because I think what you’re talking about is a very different artform. When you look at a comic series, you see this medium: eight to ten pages in a weekly strip, going over six or eight weeks or whatever it takes to tell the story. It’s exactly like a serial or a part-work. But you know, if you do a serial in the sense that you keep bringing the character back week after week, you never bring your story closure. You keep it suspended, unresolved. Now, that’s fine for the TV series continuations that might be possible spin-offs, but the artform of movies demands bringing a story to closure. There has to be a climax, there has to be a denouement, you have to send the audience out having the feeling they’ve had a complete experience. You can’t jerk out the rug from under them at the last minute and say, ‘The story’s not over. You’ve got come back again.’

"But obviously when you get into a television series, a whole new set of script parameters then apply, where you have a situation in which you have what’s called the long story. Like in The Fugitive: is he going to find the guy with one arm? Then you have the specific episode story which you have to bring to closure. Look for example at the soap opera techniques that Steve Bochco refined with Hill Street Blues. Or LAPD Blue. Rolling stories: that’s much more similar to a comic, but in each story there has to be an element that comes to closure. Because otherwise the audience isn’t satisfied. I remember just recently I was really annoyed because I was watching this really terrific episode of Star Trek: Voyager. That show is remarkable. The writing on that show is truly excellent. The great American shows are great because of the quality of the writing. But anyway, I got to what I thought was going to be the end of the show, and it turns out that it was part one of a two-part thing. And the vagaries of satellite broadcasting was that the second part was going to be shown at a time and a day when I couldn’t see it. I was very cross because the story hadn’t resolved for me.

"I think you have to be aware, when you’re trying to spin a character off into a series. Those are very good examples of the different demands of the different forms that the characters are going to be transformed into. They’re moving into major motion picture. With regards to Bad Company and Rogue Trooper - those are theatrical. Cable movies, with regards to Strontium Dog and Outlaw; with the potential to spin off. We have some interest in Robo-Hunter - I think Sam Slade’s terrific - and also ABC Warriors. All of that is possible now."

A lot of the 2000AD universes are interlinked. If somebody has the rights to ABC Warriors, do they also have the rights to Ro-Busters or Nemesis the Warlock as well?
"I think they would probably want to take the characters in that instance and try to avoid cross-examination, violating the rights of the creators, although I think they’re all Pat Mills stories. But I think all of this is possible. We’re at very, very early stages."

When will these start shooting, best case scenario?
"We’re hoping - and maybe this is wildly optimistic - but I’d like to think that we could get two of them into production in 1999. I know that John Shirley has done a lot of thinking about Strontium Dog, so he’d be ready to go into screenplay pretty quickly. I know that Michael Cowan has a particular writer in mind to do Rogue Trooper. I know they’re in discussions with Lloyd Fonvielle for Outlaw."

Spice Factory are talking of Michael Hurst to do Rogue.
"That’s right. But a lot of this is subject to contract."

Let’s move on. I was watching Glitterball last week. 
"What? Where? How?"

I have the video from the '80s. Who were the Children’s Film Foundation?
"Well, they’re a very interesting organisation, which I think is mutating to stay alive in the changing media marketplace. They originally were the beneficiaries of some of the funds from the Eady Fund. The late, lamented, much missed Eady Fund, whereby there was a tax on cinema tickets, much as there still is in France. So people going to the cinema to see American movies were subsidising the indigenous film industry. I think it should come back, myself. When I made my two films - I did The Battle of Billy’s Pond and Glitterball - in the middle-to-late '70s, they still had the funding resources that they could make the films. And with the demise of the Eady Fund that was no longer possible.

"So what they’ve been doing recently is get involved in the development of projects. They were involved in the early development of the Borrowers television series. That’s what they do. The new Lottery Commission people regard them with some affection and I think the true nature of their relationship is yet to be defined. Because: what they do, nobody else does."

Was Glitterball made as a second feature, because it’s only an hour long? 
"It’s about an hour. They made it and they showed it in cinemas as a Saturday morning picture, which still existed then. There were these cinema clubs where people would go and they’d watch the movies on Saturday mornings. So I don’t know whether you can call that a second feature; it was a Saturday morning picture kind of thing."

Nobody makes hour-long movies. 
"No, not any more. Except, of course, television."

Did you get in FX guys to do the sequences of the ball rolling around? 
"We made the film, an hour-long 35mm movie, for £56,000. For my alien, I couldn’t afford soft, cuddly, fuzzy creatures with arms and legs moving around. I couldn’t afford even reptilian, semi-turtle-looking creatures. So we hit on the idea of a very simple - easy to animate - ball."

A ping pong ball? 
"There were three different kinds of ball for three different kinds of motion. A ping pong ball, yes, which you can manipulate with an air-line. An off-camera air-line will blow a ping pong ball away quite quickly. Or a wooden ball, which bounces downstairs differently than a ping pong ball bounces. And a steel ball - we got a big ball bearing and sprayed it with paint - and that was the hero ball. We’d use it for a close-up or sometimes we’d do the stop-frame animation with it. Then there’s a guy who did the Wombles television show. Barry Leith was the animator on that and he animated the ball. The intergalactic stuff and some of the other big stuff was done by the crew of special effects people, lead by Brian Johnson, who were at the time working for Space: 1999.

"We went over and saw Gerry Anderson, and said, ‘You know, Gerry, we can’t afford to put together a special effects team but would it be possible for us to borrow your team and have them do some effects for us?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely.’ He didn’t charge us a penny. He said, ‘Just deal with the crew and pay their overtime.’ I’ll always be very thankful to Gerry; he was very helpful and a true gentleman. So we had Brian Johnson, who then went on to do Star Wars and a bunch of other things, building the mother ship and the little ship with complicated folding hatches and stuff like that."

Where did you find your child actors? 
"When you’re acting with children, you have to go through a process where you go to the acting schools and sometimes you find a lot of them are very highly trained so they come on in a more stage-bound fashion. Or you go to acting clubs like Anna Scher’s Children’s Theatre where you find the kids can be very relaxed on stage and give a very cinematic performance. Or school clubs. Ben Buckton, who is now a very successful violinist with a string quartet, we found in a school drama club that the casting director knew. And it turned out that he was the son of somebody that I knew at the BBC."

How long had you been directing when you made Glitterball? 
"Well, I went to the London International Film School and did a bunch of movies there, student exercises, some of which went to film festivals. Then right out of film school I begged, borrowed and cadged some cameras and some friends and we went to Chicago and made this documentary called Chicago Blues. I had Tak Fujimoto as one of my cameramen, who went on to shoot Silence of the Lambs and basically everything that Jonathan Demme makes. And Terry Bedford who became a very talented cameraman and went on to direct movies and television commercials. He’s back in television now. And we had a great time making this documentary that the BBC then bought. I then started directing at the BBC: both documentaries and some dramas."

What series were you working on? 
"Horizon. Omnibus. Review - which prefigured Arena - with the late James Mossman. Arena, when Alan Yentob was the producer there. A bunch of shows like that, and I did a kind of drama up in Yorkshire. Then I had this idea and wrote a script and got it to the Children’s Film Foundation. They liked it, and that was The Battle of Billy’s Pond, the first one, which I went off and made. Then I came up with the idea of Glitterball the following year and we made that."

A lot of people have commented on Glitterball’s similarities with ET. 
"That was five years later. Inbetween the two times, I had worked as second unit director on Empire Strikes Back, and I showed George some of my films. I showed him the science fiction documentary I made for Omnibus called It’s Fantastic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Science Fiction! I loved that film because I got a chance to meet a bunch of really wonderful and exciting science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury, people like that. And I showed him The Glitterball, which George liked. And then when I saw ET I kind of recognised certain jokes. When you do a film with the Children’s Film Foundation, you sign all your rights away, so there was no way I was ever going to benefit or anything. But I think the Foundation had a copyright attorney look into it.

"You know, whether Steve saw it before, I have no idea. But I guess the potential jokes and gags and situations that you think of when an alien comes to visit and maybe hangs out in a garden shed, then goes rummaging around in a refrigerator - the certain kinds of jokes that you can do there are finite. So, much later, when Spielberg was in London doing Raiders, we had a mutual friend in the producer Robert Watts, who I had met on Empire Strikes Back, and I gave Robert a copy of The Glitterball to give to Steve. Steven - I call him Steve; I’ve never met the guy - looked at it and sent me a very nice note saying that he liked it and ‘admired my economy … the narrative compression’ that we were actually able to get through the story in an hour."

As second unit director on Empire, which scenes did you direct? 
"Well, Peter McDonald did the snow scenes in Norway, and I came on board once they got back to Elstree through the tragic death of a wonderful guy called John Barry who was the production designer on the first film. I knew John through mutual friends like Tony Craft[?] and I was as shocked as anybody when John died so quickly. He got a form of meningitis which killed him very quickly, like within a day. So the crew is shattered and I happened to be in Elstree looking through publicity photographs for a movie that I did called They’re Coming[?]. And I went to the set to visit my friends. Chris Menges who had shot Battletruck for me in New Zealand, as well as a documentary. He did an extraordinary job shooting Chicago Street for me for ATV. Amazing film: Chris is an extraordinary cinematographer and a truly gifted operator. And David Garfath and Madelyn Most: a lot of the camera crew were friends of mine.

"So I went to say hello and they were extremely downcast, and when they told me I too was upset because I’d known John and he was a real gentleman. They said, ‘Oh, what are we going to do? We have so much work and we don’t know which director we’re going to get?’ And I said, ‘Listen, if I can be of any help, let me know.’ So I got a phone call from Robert Watts and I came down to the studio the next day again to meet Gary Kurtz and Irvin Kershner, and I started the next day and did it for four months. I thought it would be a four-week job and it turned out to be a four-month job. I got the nicest compliment from George Lucas who said to me: ‘Harley, your unit’s not the Second Unit, it’s the Other Unit.’

"They were shooting so much stuff because there were just so many sets to get through on that movie. What would happen is that Kershner would come onto a set, stage a scene, block it, shoot the key angles, get the performances he wanted, then he would have to leave that set to move onto another set. Which left me with all the actors shooting side angles, anything with a window that had to have a blue screen, back angles through a window, anything that had a special effect. There was a sword fight that had to have squibs. If you remember the famous sword fight between Luke and Darth Vader, my unit did most of that because of the time it took. Every time the lightsabres touched the railings and there was a discharge of sparks, those squibs - as they’re called - had to be individually set. So for take two, you had to wait while they reset the squibs and rebuilt the set if anything had broken. So it was a very time-consuming process, so it fell to our unit to do all the shots that were time-consuming, difficult, involving stuntmen.

"Like a lot of the acrobatics of Luke when he was fighting Darth in the carbon-freezing chamber, the orange, glowing set. Those were particular stuntmen: sometimes they were wired, sometimes they weren’t wired, sometimes they used trampolines. So there was a lot of time-comsuming set-up time, becuse when you’re working on stunts and special effects, the last thing you want is for anyone to get hurt. You take the time it takes to get it so it’s safe. Likewise with the blue screen shots. There were days when we had about thirty brutes, the old-fashioned carbon arc lights, burning to try to get the correct exposure to get the perfect blue screen. Because George wasn’t interested in doing any substandard work. It had to be perfect. We had to take the time to do it perfectly. It was a great experience."

Were you working with the principal actors? 
"Oh absolutely. Everybody. Obviously when you do a side angle, it’s still got to be Harrison’s profile, it’s still got to be Chewbacca or Tony Daniels, who I bumped into on the street a couple of days ago. He was doing some looping on the new movie."

Why didn’t you work on Jedi? 
"I was in New Zealand. I can’t remember exactly the timescale of where I was but I actually had to leave about three or four weeks before the second unit actually wrapped. I talked to George and he basically said, ‘Fine’, because I had the opportunity to direct Battletruck in New Zealand. So I went down to New Zealand to do that and it took the better part of a year. I visited the sets of Jedi out in Arizona. Harrison filled me in on his experiences on Blade Runner and things like that."

Was that when it was still being disguised as Blue Harvest? 
"I don’t remember, but it could have been. It was a great team of people and I’ve stayed in touch with Gary Kurtz ever since. Any Star Wars fan would be insanely jealous of the R2D2 cookie jars which the crew were… well, not given, but there was a limited run of these cookie jars in the shape of R2D2. Everyone on the crew signed up for them. I didn’t keep any bits of the set."

Were your bits updated for the Special Edition? 
"The Special Edition of Empire? Nothing struck me as being majorly redone because I think the big changes were done in the first film, where they had a chance to redo a lot of the early effects on the first Star Wars and they replaced Jabba the Hutt. Most of the changes are in that one. The clean-ups and the wrap-ups in the subsequent films; I think by then the technology was pretty damn good. So there was a bit of reworking but fundamentally the shots were the shots."

Battletruck was part of the post-Mad Max 2 genre of the early ‘80s. 
"Well, there was a certain zeitgeist and it was pretty funny because the film won the jury prize at the Avoriaz Festival when it was still a science fiction festival. George Miller was the chairman of the jury. So George and I sat down once and I said, ‘I haven’t read your script but we set our script in Australia because… blah blah blah.’ And we basically agreed that certain ideas were just in the air at the time. He was very complimentary about the film. What’s extraordinary is it’s not a post-apocalyptic story, it’s a post-economic collapse story. The film opens with the oil fields of Mesopotamia burning and the world economy which was so dependent on oil goes backwards.

"Well Mesopotamia is the area that is now called either Iraq or Kuwait. So when we’re talking about the oil fields of Mesopotamia burning, we’re talking about Kuwait burning, and of course we had all those extraordinary images from the Gulf War. I actually called up Roger Corman who distributed the film in America and I said, ‘Roger, you really ought to re-release this movie.’ Because it’s all about how society regresses to kind of western times in a world that is suddenly without oil.

"After Battletruck, I did a couple of movies in Hollywood. I did Black Moon Rising with Tommy Lee Jones. The original script was written by John Carpenter and then there were several other drafts subsequent to that, one by Desmond Nakano and one by Bill Gray. And dialogue polishes by Tommy Lee Jones who is an extraordinarily good writer. In fact when you see Tommy Lee Jones in a movie, most of the time he’s scripting his own lines. Then I went up to Canada and did a movie called Malone with Burt Reynolds and Cliff Robertson and Lauren Hutton and the lovely Cynthia Gibb.

"After that, it was back to England to do Dream Demon. I got a phone call the other day from a horror writer by the name of Nick Royle. ‘Funny you should call,’ he said, ‘because we were just watching Dream Demon the other night.’ He had some friends round and he just wanted to show them the opening sequence. He just wanted to see their reaction to the big surprise in the opening sequence. After Dream Demon I went back to California and worked on the development of the Rogue Trooper movie. That was three years, just working on that, going back and forth, because we really thought that it was going to take off. It was a big commitment of time and resources, and in the end, when you’re dealing with a major studio and a major producer who might have 50 or 100 things in development, it was not high priority for them. Which was a great pity.

"Then what happened is I got a phone call from Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert, who I had met originally at the Sitges Festival through the people at Palace who were releasing Evil Dead. And Sam and Rob asked me whether I’d like to go back to New Zealand and do the pilot for the Hercules series, a two-hour movie called Hercules and the Lost Kingdom. They did four two-hour movies in New Zealand. This was the pilot script but Bill Norton shot the second script first because there was still some script development work they wanted to do on the pilot episode. Amazon Women was shot first and I think goes out first sometimes, even though there’s a bit more of the origin story in the pilot episode. So whether the pilot’s the pilot because it was written as the pilot, or is not the pilot because it wasn’t shot first: other people can split those hairs, but it was written as such. Then I did a couple of episodes of the first season and I did an episode of the first season of Xena.

When Hercules started it was a radical departure from standard TV fare. 
"I think Sam and Rob had a great concept. They wanted to do the characters from Greek myths in a way that Sam refered to as ‘non-toga’. This was going to be a non-toga version. They didn't want to get trapped in any of those Charlie Schneer movies where the Greek gods are presented on Mount Olympus with olive leaves or laurel leaves or whatever they put on their heads. So they went for this slightly fantastic, imagined, primitive world where anything could happen. And of course they looked at various places for locations and New Zealand was perfect becuse it has an extraordinary, other-worldly quality about the landscape. And there aren’t pylons and roads everywhere; it’s still very much an unspoilt country.

"And of course Sam and Rob are huge fans of Hong Kong martial arts movies, so they’ve really done an incredible, in-depth study of some of those sequences and analysed the way that some of those techniques can be applied to episodic television. As you may or may not know, some of those Hong Kong-style movies take a very long time to shoot, because of the time it takes to do stunts safely and carefully and effectively. A lot of it is wirework which is very time-consuming work. So this is kind of a stylisation of the Hong Kong-style fights which became the imprint or the stylistic signature of the show, that kind of fantastical action."

Was it planned as TV movies which would lead to a series? 
"They had the commission from the network and from the studio, Universal Pictures, to do four two-hour films as part of something called the Action Wheel. That was basically the studio testing about half a dozen ideas for long-running series. Each of those potential series got this budget to make a number of movies, some of which came off and some of which didn’t. But the one that clearly was the star of the show was the Hercules films which then got commissioned very quickly to go to series. Then, when they came up ith the idea for Xena, they didn’t even go to pilot; they just said yes right away. It’s created a new genre, there’s no question of that."

Have you done any recently? 
"No, I had to move back from New Zealand but I’ll be going back there soon to do a new series that I’m involved in, which is called Ivanhoe, The Dark Knight. It’s a kind of sword and sorcery X-Files in which we take the characters from the Ivanhoe book - Ivanhoe caught between the love of two women and fighting Prince John and trying to raise the ransom for King Richard - and also introducing some really wonderful other characters of our own creations. Such as Friar Bacon - Roger Bacon - who as you know was an early alchemist. He actually lived fifty years after the time when Walter Scott set Ivanhoe, so we just pulled Bacon back into that time zone. Bacon was an early alchemist who died during one of his experiments when his lab blew up, and accounts refer to him being ‘carried away by a red, winged demon’ - which could have happened! This is being developed by TVNZ, Television New Zealand, and a producer called Terry Marcel.

"A writing partner of mine, Mark Ezra, and I did the script at the end of last year. It’s being set up at the moment and we’re hoping actually to shoot the two-hour pilot before the end of the year. We haven’t cast the leads yet so we might have to push it back into the early part of 1999 but of course, as you know, the weather in New Zealand is upside-down. So we’re still in the summer, so we can come back in January and have the best weather of the year. We’re probably going to use the cameraman that both Terry Marcel and I worked with in Lithuania who does a remarkable job.

"We’re very excited about it because we think we have a new and original take on this material, because we’re not going down the Herc and Xena road. Too many people have chased after those shows to imitate them, and of course, why bother looking at an imitater when you can look at the original Herc and Xena shows because they do them so well? So Ivanhoe, The Dark Knight is a whole different take on that particular genre. We’re not doing Hong Kong-style fights. It will be much darker than Hercules and more sword and sorcery. Which I do think is coming back in a big way, with Peter Jackson, also shooting in New Zealand, getting the commission to do a three-part version of Lord of the Rings. It’s being financed through Miramax and New Line Cinema. He’s got $130 million to make three movies.

"And Michael Mann, who is another alumnus of the London International Film School , and you know his work I’m sure - Heat and Last of the Mohicans and a lot of wonderful films - Michael’s just bought the rights to the Dungeons and Dragons game. So he plans to do a sword and sorcery adventure. So we see some huge Hollywood enterprises gearing up to get back into sword and sorcery and we’re hoping to be there first with our sword and sorcery X-Files. Which brings me back to sword and sorcery, because Milton Subotsky asked me to do Thongor in the Valley of Demons, which would have been the first sword and sorcery movie in a long time and even have pipped Conan at the post. This was around 1980. We had Wilfred Singleton designing and we had some really great special effects guys. We were building monsters and the sets were about to go into production, then I got a phone call. I can tell you exactly when it was. December 1979, I got a phone call from Milton Subotsky, telling me that Universal, who had allocated $17 million, which was a reasonable budget in those days, had pulled the plug because another production had spent our budget."

And that was? 
"Heaven’s Gate. Heaven’s Gate spent the entire production budget of United Artists, and one of the films that got hit was Thongor in the Valley of Demons. It was a really neat script and we had some fabulous designs. Tony Pratt was production designer and did a great job. It was going to be terrific. So the idea of coming back to the genre of sword and sorcery after all those years will bring back that particular story to closure for me anyway."

I understand it’s fairly primitive out there in Lithuania shooting Robin Hood. 
"Yes, it’s not a Hollywood studio. But the Lithuanians are lovely people and try really hard. And there’s a team of people who are being trained up by the production who are good at their jobs and their English gets better every year. The key thing is to make sure the scripts can be accomplished and I think that Fred Weintraub and Tom Kuhn are smart enough to know how to do that."

It always seemed to be the poor relation of the genre. 
"I think what happened was they had a little bit of difficulty finding their particular niche, and what we’ve seen in England is they’re actually playing it as a daytime show - Saturday mornings, Channel 5 - and I think it’s probably doing fine there. I knew Fred from way back and he knew that I’d done Herc and Xena shows and he asked me to come out because they were setting it up. I did some of the early episodes and I had fun, I enjoyed being in Lithuania. But the shows are international co-productions so they were edited in France and for whatever reason the directors never went from Lithuania to France to edit the shows. So my shows were never put together in the way that I envisioned."

Lithuania is a strange place to shoot. 
"I think when they began work there, it was an extraordinarily cost-effective production base. But what’s happened is: the longer they’ve stayed, the more it’s coming up to standard international or European rate. But it was just a studio facility that they could get a hold of; there was a very co-operative studio management and a whole base, in terms of electricians and grips and things like that. It was actually quite fun because the first season especially was a very international enterprise, because the special effects guys were from America, the stunt men were Russian, the script supervisor was French, the cameraman was Hungarian, the sound man was English - Harry Brooks - and the directors were both English and some American. But if you were an American director you had to have an English domicile, because they had to qualify as being a European production."

What was a film you did called The Ruby Ring? 
"It was a very sweet movie. It was the Showtime Thanksgiving Special ‘97, and it was one of four movies that Hallmark made in Scotland at the end of ‘96, beginning of ‘97. It’s based on a book called The Ruby Ring by an Irish writer, and it’s a fantasy about a girl who makes a wish and unfortunately that wish comes true. Because she finds herself propelled back in time and living in a Scottish castle as a scullery maid. And she’s lost her ring which enables her to magic her way out of this time that she’s been trapped in. The head groom, played by Rutger Hauer, gets ahold of the ring, so the question is: how can she get it back? It was absolutely delightful.

"Working with Rutger was a treat, and there was the lovely Samantha Bond and Judy Parfitt and some young actors and actresses. Christian Anholt played the son of the family and Emily Hamilton played the girl, and her friend Emma Culloch. Wonderful young actors and I had an absolutely delightful time up in Scotland. We had a little bit of CGI special efects during the time transition scene, but they remained very modest. We didn’t go too crazy. But I’m very pleased with the way things worked out, and it had a good response in America over Thanksgiving, and kids seemed to like it, and when it’s going to show in this country I have no idea."

Was that the last thing you did? 
"Since then there was the second season of Robin Hood, and then I’ve been doing The Professionals. There were some episodes shot in South Africa, some shot here and some shot in North Carolina. I did one here and one in North Carolina. These are high-energy, high-action, very slick shows. Working with Edward Woodward was a complete delight, and the two young lads are fun and the young Canadian lady that plays the third new agent is great. Her name is Lexa Doig and she’s a kind of Scottish Filipino, originally from Canada. The style is very hut-hut-hut: a lot of action, very fast, trying to be a hip show. I think some territories are showing this already, but my two shows aren’t even finished. They haven’t done the sound yet. I heard that they’re just picking the sound on now."

What stuff is in development? 
"Any day now I might get the phone call to go to Canada and start pre-production on Pilgrim, which is the hallucinatory crime thriller written by Peter Milligan. Peter and I have been developing this one for a number of years, almost made it three times now, and we think this is a lucky time. It’s going to be a Canadian/UK co-production, we’re shooting it in British Columbia and probably do some of the post back here. Basically, the way to  sum up this movie is if you imagine a Parker novel; I don’t know if you know the books of Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark. He writes as Richard Stark when he writes things like... the Boorman movie Point Blank was based on a Richard Stark novel called The Hunter. It was one of the first Parker books; he’s written 16 of them. As you know, Bill Gibson just remade the first one, Payback. Well, imagine a Richard Stark novel on acid, and that’s basically what we’re trying with Pilgrim.

"I don’t know whether you’re familiar with Pete Milligan’s work as a comic writer. One of his most famous series, which he wrote for three years, was called Shade the Changing Man. That was always leaping back and forth in time and space and dimensional shifts. Pete does that really well and he’s given our character a particular kind of problem. He has to cope with it and figure his way out of the mental maze that he’s in. So we’re very excited about that. Pete and I have done a number of things together. Pilgrim was the first, and then we developed something for Ileen Maisel at Paramount when Ileen was running Paramount UK, which was kind of a take on Death Takes a Holiday, which in fact somebody has now remade. We had a go at it and it was an interesting script but somebody got there first.

"What I did was I spoke to the people at the Children’s Film Foundation and they were very complimentary and said that my two films, The Battle of Billy’s Pond and The Glitterball, were two of the best films that were ever made for the Foundation, and what did I want to do in this genre? I said I’d go away and think about it and come up with a book because I didn’t want to start from scratch. Both The Glitterball and Billy’s Pond were originals and it just takes so long with an original. So I went to Dillons, to the Young Persons section, and I saw this wall of books. It was like: how do you start? Over there in the left-hand corner and read your way across? So I did some research and found some people who really know the area well. There’s a BBC programme that deals with children’s books, and I actually did some research and went into the prize-winning young people’s books for the last ten years and that focused it down much more.

"Then I started doing some reading and the one guy whose work leapt out at me was Melvyn Burgess. Melvyn who just recently won the Guardian Prize for Junk, which I understand is going to be a television series, about young people getting addicted to heroin. He had done a book earlier that had been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. It’s called An Angel for May and that is another kind of time-shift story. But that’s not the important part; the important part is the relationship between two youngsters, two sub-teens, and the girl is autistic. It’s such as extraordinary book, such a moving book, and really I guess it’s about the power of love.

"There are certain technical problems: when you’re dealing with any kind of time-shift story like that, there are difficulties. You get into loops and paradoxes. So I gave it to Pete to read and he not only loved the book but had a way of fixing the problems. He’s good at these kind of metaphysical dilemmas. I suppose you could say that’s true of Pilgrim too: Jack Pilgrim has a metaphysical dilemma. So Pete is currently scripting. We’re expecting the first draft by the end of the month, and we’re very excited about getting it together.

"The question will be how to finance the movie in England which is a family movie. Because no-one makes children’s films any more, it’s all family films. The time-base, where we go, where the boy ends up back in, is a Second World War setting. And suddenly that seems very topical. This is not quite as heavily special effects oriented as The Borrowers, it’s just an incredibly powerful, well-written book. Pete’s outline for it is very effective and we’re all excitedly waiting to get started. The Spice Factory guys are going to be involved in that too and help put it together."

I interviewed husband and wife Garrick Hagon and Liza Ross in September 1998 at the recording of The Gemini Apes, an original sci-fi radio drama by Dirk Maggs. Of course, we mostly talked about Star Wars.

How did you get involved with this?
“I’ve been involved with Dirk right from the very beginning, right from the very first pilot of Superman, when I played the voice of… what was his name? Something like K-Tel or K-Mart! Anyway, I did that and then I did Clark Kent. We did Superman and then I did Batman’s twin in a very early radio show of Batman, and then later it was Spider-Man. So I’ve been with Dirk since the first one.”

Do you do a lot of radio?
“Oh yes. My whole, budding career started in radio, when I was about six. I do a lot of radio; I do a lot of readings of books and stories. I just did a drama recently, I did Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. An awful lot.”

I think to most people you’re Biggs.
“Yes, people are still harking back to Biggs.”

Does that role haunt you, or was it useful?
“It doesn’t haunt me. It’s become much more prevalent since the reissue and I’ve started going to a few conventions. I went to one a few weeks ago at the hotel in Russell Square. Then I was at one a while ago on the Isle of Wight. So yes, there are more requests for photographs and all of that. A doll has come out.”

Famously, your scene with Mark Hamill was cut. Was it actually filmed?
“Oh yes, the scene was filmed. It’s all there. In fact, they showed it at a convention not so long ago. Somebody actually mentioned that they’d seen it and actually had a copy. Not a very good copy, but there are contraband copies being sent around, I believe.”

Not that we endorse that sort of thing at all.
“Not at all, not at all!”

That must have radically reduced your screen time.
“My screen time was virtually non-existent. That scene, the whole segment on Tattooine was about six minutes, I understand. All my information comes from fans who write and tell me. I had no idea what the length was or why it was cut. I’ve never understood. I’ve never really had an official letter as to why.”

So you filmed it but then it wasn’t there on the screen at the preview.
“I knew it had been binned, but only from another actor as well; Anthony Daniels. It wasn’t there. Subsequently George has talked about it in various interviews and indicated it didn’t fit, it was slowing us down, it made Luke look weak. In fact, it just changed the pace of the first part of the film. It’s a very talky scene, it’s a kind of grown-up scene. A very nice, warm, friendly, human scene that just takes a different tone from the early part of the picture.”

Do you think he was right to cut it?
“Well, I don’t know. Mark said at the party for the opening: ‘I’ve always wanted it to be put in, because it gave him a background, it gave him a bit more past life.’ I guess that would have added something and a lot of people still would like it put back in. Get a bit of life on the planet, you know. Because there were other people: Koo Stark and Anthony Forrest and so on. We had a nice little scene in the power station there that kind of gave a community to it.”

Did you film that in Tunisia?
“Yes.”

I heard that was fairly rough.
“Oh, it wasn’t rough for me. I sat around the hotel for a week and then did it on my second last day there. It was hot, but I’d worked in the desert on Mohammed or The Message for a year. It was nice to get back and talk a little bit of Arabic. So it was fun; I really enjoyed it. We had nice horse rides on the beach.”

Most of your remaining footage is flying the X-Wings.
“There’s a little bit of me in the hanger, meeting Mark. Which is nice to see because it’s a very nice, warm, friendly scene as well. Kind of a happy scene. It was near the end of the picture, I think we were just pretty bubbly that day. But it was nice to see it back. And who knows - one day I may actually see the whole scene. Who knows? There might be a good copy in this country, I don’t know. It might come from the office eventually.”

The cockpit scenes: was that just a close-up camera on a tiny cockpit set?
“I don’t know how close it was. It was just outside the cockpit, a light going round on a track around it. I can’t remember whether we did the whole thing in sequence. I found that I knew the whole scene, so I may have just shot it and gone right the way through it. I believe I did. But anyway, that was all one day, one very short hour or two.”

When you were making Star Wars, how much idea did you have that it might be so huge?
“Some of them must have felt that, but I don’t think any of us on the floor did. I don’t think anybody had any idea at all. We knew it was fun, we knew it was ingenious, a lot of good people in it, and so on. Especially with Alec Guinness being in the midst, you knew there was something of quality here. And George kept his cards fairly close to the chest. Gil Taylor didn’t seem too bemused by it all, but he was doing a lot of good work on the cameras so the sets and everything looked pretty good. So you knew there was something, but you didn’t have any idea what.”

You mentioned Mohammed, Messenger of God. Now there is a controversial film.
“It was controversial but on the other hand it got a very big wide audience - and still does - among the Muslim nations. Of both versions: we did two versions, Arabic and English. So it’s still very much there. I get people coming up to me occasionally who have seen it. Mainly Muslims of course. That was a great experience for a whole year.”

As I understand it, you can’t show the Prophet or any of his wives or…
“No, it’s absolutely forbidden to show the Prophet or any image of the Prophet. We all played to the red light on the side of the camera. Anthony Quinn, when he finally got fed up with the red light, used to call for me if I was around to get in there beside the camera and do the lines behind the camera, but nobody knew that. But he just couldn’t work to a red light. There was actually a lot of wonderful horse stuff and nitty gritty in the desert, and I enjoyed that. It was a great time and I loved the Arabic cast, and I learned an awful lot about another culture on that film.”

People must have realised that there was going to be controversy.
“Yes, but they had advisors from the council of Islam - I’m not sure what they were called - in Cairo. They were always there and they vetted the script endlessly of course. So it was only the fundamentalists. Nowadays I think they’d find it even harder to make the film because the fundamentalists are much more in evidence. It was finally Saudia Arabia, King Faisal, that put the pressure on King Hussain of Morocco, and we had to leave Morocco with half of the film done. Then Gadaffi took us under his wing and we did the rest of the film in Libya with a lot of help from Gadaffi and Zalut, his second-in-command.”

When it opened, I understand a lot of people who hadn’t seen it, condemned it.
“That’s right. There were a lot of protests in New York. In fact, people were afraid to show it. I think it was eventually withdrawn from New York and Toronto. It played here and then it went. It played in the Muslim countries of course.”

You and Liza were both in Tim Burton’s Batman.
“Yes, we started Batman. We opened the picture. That was a wonderful set and an incredible night. We continued the scene on another night, but that whole Gotham City set was one of the most exciting sets I’ve ever been on. Wonderful. Tim Burton was a great director; he didn’t say very much but he was a very nice person to work for. It was a good experience.”

You were in a Doctor Who story.
“Yes, I was. Somebody came up to me at a conference with my picture from ‘The Mutants’. I played a character called Kai in ‘The Mutants’ who starts as this very rough and ready rebel character in a cave and ends up a butterfly. A very sweet transformation. I had a lot of fun and it’s a good episode, and it still seems to be about today. People come up to me at the conferences and mention Doctor Who.”

Which Doctor was that?
“It was Jon Pertwee, with Katy Manning. They were very good together and we had a lot of fun in that.”

You were in Moonbase 3.
“Yes, I was. That was more intellectual, more scientifically based. I was playing an Italian scientist in that who was quite an angry young man too. But it didn’t go very far. I don’t know how many we did: six, or something like that. But it was a pretty worthwhile little series.”

The Spy Who Loved Me.
“Oh well, I did everything I could not to be seen in that. I just ran around as a member of the crew and thought ‘I really shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s good money for Christmas.’ I just thought I should be doing something better. I’d played very good parts in films, and I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll do this for the money but I don’t want to be seen.’ And indeed, I don’t think you can see me. I think you have to really work hard to see me in that picture! Whenever there was a line-up of American troops, I was always at the end - I thought, ‘They’ll have cut by this time’! But I made nice money, except we practically got burned. A lot of the fellas got injured in one sequence; that was a bit scary. But aside from that, that was a good time. A lot of the American guys in town were in that.”

Fatherland.
“I just saw that. That was a picture with Rutger Hauer and I played an American journalist. That was in Prague. It was a scary story about: what if the Nazis had won the war? Nice, good, solid TV film.”

Were you in Mission: Impossible?
“I was, but I did a reporter and it didn’t mean much. It was just a day.”

A Bridge Too Far.
“That was an early picture I did in the midst of Star Wars. I played a military policeman who wants to arrest James Caan. In fact he does, he says, ‘Arrest him’. So I arrest him for a count of ten. He’s arrested for ten seconds then he can operate on the guy. He’s rescuing this young, wounded soldier and Arthur Hill operates on him then and saves his life, or something. Anyway, I memorably count to ten. But that was awful because I had to cut my hair for that and I thought George Lucas wouldn’t let me back on Star Wars. Because I did it inbetween Tunisia and the London locations. But George, when I got back, said, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. You got your hair cut at the academy!’ Because I wasn’t wearing a helmet in Tunisia. I had nice, long hair and a beautiful, long cape and a great costume. So if they’d kept Tunisia, it would have been a complete transformation from me in Tunisia to me back in the London sequences. As it was, they never showed Tunisia, so there was no problem!”

Have a lot of your film roles been odd days?
“Well, except for the one I spent a year on. And I starred in a film way back called Some Kind of Hero. That was my first and only leading role, but it was a lovely story about an American deserter who escapes from Vietnam and comes to London. It’s actually a bit of a love story. My leading lady was Mary Larkin. That’s a long time ago. But that was a film in which I go all the way through, which has subsequently been lost to history. That was my first one; I did that along with Anthony and Cleopatra with Charlton Heston. I was Charlton Heston’s faithful servant Eros. I have a lovely picture of me helping Chuck down the stairs.

"It was a great, nice experience because Eros is a very moving part. Chuck was always very supportive and it was a good way to start filming. He always felt badly about it because it wasn’t the big success he wanted as a director and as an actor. But it was a very fine English cast - some were Spaniards too - and it should have done well. I think the photography was not great, it was done not as well as it could have been shot. It was well acted but not as well shot as it could have been. For one reason or another, it was not a success.”

Do you do a lot of film work?
“Over the years yes, I have. I’ve done a lot of telly and a lot of film. I’ve done other series in Europe, like The Nightmare Years, and a lot of films and television in Canada, and American things over here too. I did a series called Openheimer, again with my wife. A lot of stage work too. I did Arthur Miller’s All My Sons with Colin Blakely and Rosemary Harrison; After the Fall at the National Theatre; and I’ve just done Macbeth with Pete Postlethwaite; and a play at the Royal Court called I am Yours. I do a lot of voice work as well, so I’ve managed to do quite a wide variety of stuff.”

Do you do many cartoons?
“Liza does. I do some. I heard her talking about Star Fleet, and I did that. Somebody came up the other day and said, ‘Oh, you did Captain Carter in Star Fleet.’ Somebody remembers it. It’s amazing. Somebody came up with a full treatment that he wanted to direct, a live-action series. I thought: ‘Well, good on you.’ Of course, I’ve had another chap write a whole book really, then a treatment, then a radio script of Biggs Darklighter’s life. I’ve had a number of those actually, but one very, very well constructed one from somebody in England, but of course you can’t get the rights to do anything like that.”

Have you thought of getting a role in the new film?
“That hasn’t even come up. Kenny Baker was saying he’s in it, but they weren’t throwing them about to a lot of the old members. And there was no reason to because we’re dead or not born or whatever. I don’t know who else is in it from the old ones. Tony, I know, is in it.”

Ian McDiarmid is in it.
“Oh, that’s great. The guy’s wonderful. Tony I think only has the droid’s voice off-screen or something like that. Everyone would like to be in it, I suppose, but they’re not handing them out like candy, these roles.”

What else are you working on?
“Mostly books, I suppose. For the next month, I seem to be doing two or three books, and I’m doing another radio show. But I have no films lined up at all.”

website: www.garrickhagon.com

Many years ago I interviewed Dave Prowse at his gym about his brief but memorable role in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That appeared in the Hitchhiker’s Guide fan club mag. This second interview was done by phone for SFX in Feburary 1996 on the occasion of the VHS release of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Of course, you can’t talk with Dave Prowse without discussing Darth Vader…

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was your third time as the monster, wasn't it?
“Third time, yeah. The first time I did the monster was in Casino Royale, which was the original bolt-and-neck job. The second time I did it was for Hammer, which was The Horror of Frankenstein, then I did another Hammer horror, which was Vampire Circus in 1972. Then we finished with Monster from Hell in 1973 with Terence Fisher directing and Peter Cushing playing the Baron.”

You had very different make-up in Horror of Frankenstein.
“It was a terrible job because it used to take two and a half hours every day to put that headpiece on. All the things had to be molded in with mortician's wax. It was horrendous. It meant I had to be at the studios at half past six in the morning so I was available for nine o'clock on set. Whereas when we came to do the second one, they made a complete plaster cast of my body and my head. Then what they did, as soon as I agreed to do the part, they then made the mask and built the body up on a wetsuit. Consequently I used to get to the studio about ten minutes before I was required, zip the wetsuit on, put the mask on and I was ready and available in about ten or 15 minutes, which was great.”

Was it difficult acting in it?
“Not at all. It was very comfortable actually. It was very easy to walk around in. I had no problems with it whatsoever.”

There's not much expression you can get into the face though, is there?
“Well, you see the film. There's a lot of expression comes out of the monster. It's like people say to me about Darth Vader. They turn round and say, 'You're playing behind a mask,' and all the rest of it. But it's amazing what you can convey through body movement and hand positioning, or just the movement of your head. Exactly the same applies to the monster. The eyes were very expressive. It was my own eyes, obviously. It was surprising how expressive you can get. At one stage the monster actually breaks down: a very touching little scene, when he smashes up the violin and breaks down.”

This was the last Frankenstein film that Hammer did.
“It was the last film that Terence Fisher did. It was one of the last of the Hammer horrors.”

Was it thought of as the last in the series?
“Oh no, not at all. Nobody had any idea that Hammer were going to fold up. Obviously Terence Fisher was right at the end of his career. He wasn't a well man when he did it. He was on walking sticks while we were actually filming. You could tell he wasn't a well man, but he was a lovely guy.”

Did he do either of your other Hammer films?
“No. The first one I did was with Jimmy Sangster, the second was with Robert Young.”

Are you pleased to see it finally out on video?
“Yeah, I am, I'm looking forward to it. I'm amazed at the amount of interest that's been shown. I just had a call from Inverness. They want me to go on Scottish radio, and I'm doing the Ann and Nick show. Loads of press, television and radio interest. I'm amazed by it, to be perfectly honest.”

How's your Hammer House of Horror marketing coming along?
“Not very well. We haven't done very much with it, to be perfectly honest. We've launched a range of model kits. I think we've got three out at the present moment. Our first one was Oliver Reed's Curse of the Werewolf. Then we followed that with The Reptile. We did one of Dracula at one stage and we weren't very happy with it. I've got a feeling that we're going to launch the Dracula kit again. Now we've got things like trading cards, telephone cards, computer games. There's quite a few things on the market now. And we've got posters coming out. They're specially designed. An artist in America - called George Bush, would you believe? - has done some fantastic artwork for some posters for us. These are all going to be available quite soon.”

Have you heard whether anybody's bought up the old Hammer Horror mag?
“No, I haven't actually. It was produced by Marvel, and we've been waiting to see whether anybody has actually taken the magazine over.”

The other interesting thing is this Star Wars video game.
“That's coming out in April. That was produced by Hasbro. What happened there was that the Hasbro people decided that they were going to come out with an interactive game. It was about 50 minutes, all Darth Vader, and they decided they wanted me to play Darth Vader. So they got in touch with Lucasfilm, and Lucasfilm were under the impression that I wasn't walking very well. I had this problem with my ankle. Well, I had a hip problem for starters, then I developed arthritis in my ankle, and at one stage they wanted to take my leg off. I had all sorts of problems, but I was walking around reasonably well, albeit with a caliper and surgical boot.

"Lucasfilm decided they wanted me to do a screen test to play Darth Vader. I thought it was quite funny, actually, having a screen test to play the role that you created. Anyway they came to the gym and then they filmed me walking around in an empty room up on the top floor. And would you believe - Lucasfilm rejected it! They said I was limping too badly. Then the Communicator people, the company that filmed the game, they got back in touch with me and said, 'Look, Hasbro and us definitely want you to do Darth Vader. We don't want anybody else to do Darth Vader. We've already got the voice of James Earl Jones. He's already gone into the studios and done the voice. Would you do us a favour and do a second screen test? But please, please, please, try and walk without limping!'

"So they came to my gymnasium again and I walked around upstairs. They went back to Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm said, 'Fine, lovely, everything's okay.' So in July of last year we filmed this thing. We filmed it in two days and worked from eight o'clock in the morning to about half past ten at night both days. It was a real hard slog, and it finished up with 50 minutes of nothing else but Darth Vader giving instructions to the kids. it was interesting because it was me acting to James Earl Jones' voice, whereas before, James Earl Jones supplied the voice to my acting. It was super. They've got all clips from the films and it looks really good.”

Have you got any more projects lined up?
“I'm off to America in March to do a big science fiction convention in Washington DC. At the present moment we're waiting to hear from an organisation in America that's trying to organise what they call a 'Men Behind the Masks' tour. With a bit of luck, if it all comes off, I could be spending the next year, eighteen months touring the world, in connection with the 20th anniversary of Star Wars.”

You worked with Peter Cushing on Monster from  Hell and on Star Wars. Have you ever worked with Christopher Lee?
“No, I haven't. I know him. We've met a few times but I've never actually worked with him. Although years ago... Do you remember Celebrity Squares? I used to carry the money in. For the first 39 episodes of Celebrity Squares, I was the man who carried the money in. What happened was they asked me if I would do it and they said, 'We're going to make a big thing of this, of you bringing this thousand pounds in. One week we'll do it with you dressed up as a pirate with all the money in a chest. Another time, you can come in as a security guard with all the money in a briefcase. And so on and so forth.'

"So I went up to the studios to do the first one and Bob Monkhouse decided that he didn't want me to have any of his limelight. He told them that they had to zoom in on the case, and all you ever saw, from the first one onwards, was my hands on the briefcase with the thousand pounds in. That was it. But I did 39 episodes. And what used to happen was Christopher Lee used to come up and be on Celebrity Squares every so often. We used to sit down and chat and we've been pals ever since. But I've never actually worked with him.”

Director: Frazer Lee
Writer: Frazer Lee
Producers: Frazer Lee, Alan Stewart
Cast: Daniela Finley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: thestaymovie.wordpress.com

The Stay is a slickly crafted nine minutes of spookiness with a neat-o central performance and adroit direction which frustratingly stumbles in the narrative department. It’s good, it’s very good, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Nevertheless, as the first film directed by Frazer Lee since 2002, I can’t help but recommend it to you.

Either side of the millennium, Frazer directed a pair of critically acclaimed shorts, both starring Sir Douglas Bradley: On Edge (adapted from a Christopher Fowler story) and Red Lines. In the 13 years since then he wrote Jason Fragale’s 2010 short Simone and was one of the many hands who made heavy work of the Panic Button script. The IMDB throws up a few other curious credits I didn’t know about: production assistant on legendary, unfinished, Alex Chandon scripted oddity Siamese Cop, script editor on a 2009 Norwegian horror short called Palazzo Massacre and best boy on Urban Ghost Story(!). Mostly he has been writing novels: six to date including The Lamplighters (which was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award) and a novelisation of Panic Button.

Now comes The Stay. Daniela Finley (who was in a Dizzee Rascal video) gives a bravura, solo, dialogue-free performance as a young woman who arrives at a holiday cottage for some me-time. A bit of supper, a glass or two of wine, snuggle under the blankets – lovely.

What sets the spookiness in motion is the discovery of a shattered, circular, black mirror. Initially spotted in the bin, this item recurs in both broken and unbroken forms throughout the film. Unlike some mirror films, there is actually something spooky to be seen in the mirror, and Frazer’s direction of these creepy moments ably demonstrates his mastery of the genre.

Individually, the various moments work brilliantly but there doesn’t seem to be anything tying them together. The ending, while effective, doesn’t relate in any noticeable way to what has gone before (except maybe the loose concept of a mirror image, I guess). The plot is basically ‘woman arrives at cottage, weird things happen, the end’. Even in a film running just eight and a half minutes, there should be more than that. The absolute minimum, smallest thing that can constitute a narrative is two connected events. A cause and an effect. Something has to happen because something else happened. But as with some other shorts I’ve reviewed here recently, there’s really just one thing here: a random sequence of weird events in a cottage. At least there is a thing, the brief story progressing smoothly and satisfyingly, unlike some of the disconnected, unsatisfying stories I’ve recently watched.

But within that story, each of the spooky, mirror-related events seems disconnected from the others, like variations on a theme rather than a progression towards a crescendo. This is less of a problem in under nine minutes than in a feature, but it’s still a little disappointing to reach the end credits without a revelation of How It All Fits Together and What It All Means.

Frazer has roped in his old buddy Alan Stewart, who DPed Red Lines and On Edge, as cinematographer and to also share producer duties. Stewart also lit Lab Rats and the Quatermass Experiment remake and has pulled second unit duty on a bunch of notable stuff including The Woman in Black, Spectre, Pan, Inkheart and both Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. Lee David, Tom Tatchell and Stuart Pitcher provided the smoothly integrated and subtle visual effects.

Shot over three days in February 2013 in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, The Stay received its world premiere at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in May 2015 after a lengthy period of post-production. In December of that year, Frazer released the film on DVD with a solid hour of extras (plus a bare-bones VOD release).

The Stay is one of those films I feel bad about for not being more effusive over. It’s extremely well-made and undeniably atmospheric. If there had just been a distinct narrative arc, it could have been even better. Still, it’s great to see Frazer Lee back in the director’s chair and I hope we won’t have to wait 13 years for his next movie.

MJS rating: B+

Director: ‘Jason Meyers’
Writers: ‘Jason Meyers’, Matthew Palmer
Producer: ‘Jason Meyers’
Cast: Absolutely no-one you’ve ever heard of
Country: UK
Year of release: 1992/2013
Reviewed from: YouTube

Wow, here’s an undiscovered oddity. It’s an hour-long amateur horror made by some teenagers at Kidderminster College in 1992, and it has its fair share of cheesy effects, clichéd ideas and bad acting. But it’s genuinely enjoyable and, I would venture to add, historically significant.

Behind the slasher-inspired pseudonym ‘Jason Meyers’ (sic) is RN Millward, a West Midlands film-maker who has made a number of interesting shorts over the years although the only one I’ve actually seen is a fanfilm, The Hellraiser Chronicles: A Question of Faith. Twisted Souls predates that by a good 13 years, although it only became available when it was posted to YouTube in February 2013.

Millward and his classmates had access to four useful things: a cemetery, a light industrial plant which could be reasonably passed off as a coffin factory, the college’s AV equipment, and a coffin. From these, a fun little black comedy horror was constructed.

James Sankey is the proprietor of Cooper’s Coffins, whose two remaining employees are Bub (Mark Jones) and David (Bradley Gammond), neither of them particularly swift on the uptake. These two are also employed as gravediggers, and the scam is that, having buried a body, they return at night and dig it up. Not to sell the corpse for medical experiments like a latter-day Burke and Hare, but so that the coffin can be cleaned out and sold again. (NB. I’m not sure Gammond’s character is ever actually addressed by name, and there’s no character name in the credits, so I’m going with David.)

The above of course raises all sorts of questions which the film brashly ignores, like how come no-one has noticed all these desecrated graves. And how come every body fits into the same size coffin and all the customers at Cooper’s Coffins apparently want the same style of box.

One night, the two are disturbed by a couple of lads taking a shortcut through the cemetery (Nathan Fawke and co-writer Matthew Palmer). Panicking, the hapless grave-robbers kill the two witnesses with a pick-axe and then take the dead bodies back to the coffin factory, hoping their boss will know what to do. A terrific dream sequence shows us what could happen if the dead return to life.

Further problems mount with the investigations of a justifiably suspicious vicar (Adrian Mills) who is kidnapped and brought back to the factory, where he is subsequently murdered by the increasingly psychotic Cooper. Meanwhile, a customer (executive producer Mike Flight, who was an art teacher at the college) has found graveyard earth – and a dismembered finger – in a supposedly new coffin. The black humour and gradual escalation of horrific problems put me in mind of 1980s classic Crimewave. Sam Raimi is thanked for his ‘influence’ in the end credits - along with Argento and Jackson - althoughI imagine that’s probably more of a nod to The Evil Dead.

Then, about 20 minutes from the end, Twisted Souls take a sharp turn in a new direction. While Bub and David are burying the vicar, a bolt of lightning hits a gravestone (in an effects shot clearly pinched from somewhere else) and the dead start to arise, including the vicar himself and the two guys who got pick-axed near the start.

To my amazement, I found myself watching a 1992 zombie film. This isn’t the very first British movie with post-Romero zombies – Alex Chandon’s Bad Karma was made the previous year – but at 61 minutes it’s arguably the first modern British zombie feature. Some of the zombies still wear their shrouds, which is a nice touch. One has a full-head ‘old man’ mask which looks pretty bad. What’s really interesting is their style of walking which is much more naturalistic than we are now used to. In today’s world, everyone knows how zombies walk. They stumble forward, arms outstretched in a stance that can be traced directly back to Bela Lugosi in Ghost of Frankenstein. But back in 1992 there weren’t the same conventions. And of course, there are no fast-running zombies here. They all walk slowly – that’s a convention which was well established and not yet busted.

David escapes from the cemetery, teams up with a passing young woman named Alex (Karina Melbourne, rocking a very definite early ’90s look) and they head back to the factory which is, for some reason, judged to be the only safe place. Except it’s not. Cooper is by now playing cat and mouse among the lathes and band-saws with a plain clothes copper (Michael Dexter). The former now has a pistol, the latter has armed himself with a handy garden fork.

Did we mention that the reanimated vicar, who is now commanding the zombies, can magically teleport? No? Neither did the film but this he can do, and does – thereby entering the locked factory where the police officer, shot dead by Cooper, is reanimated as an additional zombie. David and Alex escape using a previously unmentioned tunnel connecting the factory to the cemetery. In a display of extreme cinematic chutzpah, the tunnel entrance is represented using the old ‘crouching down as you walk behind a desk’ gag!

Alex turns out to be a horror movie fan and there is some pre-Scream cinematic referentiality before she and David eventually trap the priest within a hastily drawn pentangle in the woods. Satan himself then appears, represented by some glowing eyes which must be one of the first ever uses of computer animation in a British indie film (it was done on an Amiga!). The priest burns up and all the zombies collapse. Or something.

What an incredible mishmash of ideas, themes, imagery and tropes, all crammed into an hour-long student film from over 20 years ago. While it’s nowhere near as polished as Demonsoul, I can’t help feeling that Twisted Souls should also be considered as a direct precursor to the British Horror Revival. It’s shot on video (variously U-Matic, Hi8 and VHS-C), it’s set in contemporary Britain (there’s even a reference to money being tight because of ‘the recession’) and the references and in-jokes are to 1980s films, not creaky Hammer classics.

This is a forward-looking, modern film, not a faux gothic throwback. It’s grabbing the camera and making a movie for today (when today was the early 1990s) rather than trying to recapture some quasi-mythical ‘Golden Age’ of British horror. And if the acting is distinctly variable, and if the effects are straight off the cheese counter (not least a gloriously cut-price papier mâché severed head), then who cares? There’s a devil-may-care, post-punk attitude here that simply ignores limitations.

Millward, who mostly makes corporates, has five subsequent horror shorts on his IMDB page, dated from 1999 to 2007, plus the Hellraiser film, a couple of recent horror-related documentaries and three docus on narrowboating (one of which nevertheless features Adrian Mills as a ghost!). Aside from a few roles in Millward’s shorts, no-one in the cast of Twisted Souls ever did anything else on screen, so far as I can tell.

The special effects are credited to Simon Cox (with a few specific ones by ‘Meyers’). This may possibly be the Simon Cox who made Written in Blood and has been working on low-budget sci-fi epic Kaleidoscope Man for the past few years. Or maybe not. Music supervisor Jesse Webb gets a special credit for co-writing the dream sequence, for some reason.

In 2013, Millward gave the original film a decent restoration and posted in onto YouTube, along with four minutes of out-takes/behind the scenes and a minute of split-screen clips showing how much restoration was needed. Since then the film has had a rather desultory 630 views.

Historically interesting for what it is and when it was made, and kind of fun in its own right anyway - if you can look past the pocket money budget - Twisted Souls is well worth a view by anyone interested in modern British horror. You won ‘t find it in English Gothic of course. In fact it doesn’t even seem to be on Pass the Marmalade (although it might be by the time you read this). Nevertheless this sort of grass roots production is the very essence of modern British horror cinema and it helped to point towards the 21st century explosion of domestic frightfare which I have been documenting lo these many years. I’m very pleased to be able to add this to the historical record.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ken Colley
Writer: Ken Colley
Producer: Ken Colley
Cast: Mel Stephenson, Matthew Reynolds, Kirsty Cox
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: Viewster

So I’ve just been to see The Force Awakens, which was very good (although, let’s face it, Star Trek was better). One thing I noticed was that the two lead actors have each starred in a recent British horror film. John Boyega was in the somewhat over-rated Attack the Block and Daisy Ridley is in the as-yet-unreleased Scrawl. Plus of course Mark Hamill himself was the token Yank in Airborne.

Which prompted me to dig out and watch Greetings, a curious and largely ignored British horror film which has its own Star Wars relevance because it was directed by no less than Admiral Piett himself, Ken Colley.

With its middle class domesticity and static, talkie nature, Greetings is oddly anachronistic, seeming to owe more to 1970s Play for Today dramas than 21st century horror, although this does certainly make it distinctively British. Cathy (Mel Stephenson, who was the mocap actor for Destiny Angel in the CGI Captain Scarlet remake) and her husband Matt (Matthew Reynolds, artistic director at the Labyrinth Theatre in Peckham, who once played Victor Frankenstein on stage) have invited a few friends round for drinks. It is both Cathy’s birthday and a year since they moved into their new house. Ken (Colley himself) and Maria (Maria Long, violinist with a band called Neroli whose music provides the party soundtrack here) both say goodnight before anything interesting happens.

Not that anything very interesting does happen for quite some time. The dialogue is realistic, the acting adequate, the direction competent but uninspiring and really all we’re doing for the first half hour is watching some strangers sit around drinking red wine and making small talk. On the one hand it’s great that they are all reasonably intelligent, well-spoken individuals. This isn’t just a bunch of horny teenagers smoking and swearing, as in so many low-budget horror films. But nothing happens. And curiously, no-one seems to get even slightly tipsy, despite the amount of vino being knocked back.

Cathy and Matt have recently bought an antique oak table, a small round thing with letters around the edge which one of the others identifies as being a Ouija board. You all know how I feel about Ouija board movies. Actually I don’t really have a problem with movies like this that are aboutOuija boards (especially when there are no horny teenagers using it ‘for a laugh’). It’s films which just throw in a Ouija board scene because they feel they need to which annoy me.

Can I also pause here and make it absolutely clear that the phrase ‘Ouija board’ - pronounced ‘weejee board’ - takes the indefinite article ‘a’. Because it begins with a ‘w’ sound. You would be amazed (or perhaps not) by how many people think the correct phrase is 'an Ouija board', justifying their mistake with “because it begins with a vowel”. The use of ‘a’/’an’ is not determined by spelling but by pronunciation, ‘Ouija’ does not begin with a vowel sound. One would no more say “an Ouija board” than “an university”. You can, I am sure, imagine how annoyed I was when Urban Terrors was published and I discovered that the editor had changed every mention of “a Ouija board” to “an Ouija board”. Gaaaah!

Also, ‘Ouija’ is spelled with a capital O apparently. I only discovered this recently and I have no idea why.

The friends use the board and get the message ‘D-O-N-O-T-D-I-S’ but then fall to debating which among them is pushing the glass around. In a clever touch, the rest of the truncated message (‘T-U-R-B’) appears in condensation on the bathroom mirror. But still the debate continues: how can we determine which one of us is actually pushing this? Eventually something genuinely spooky does happen when, unseen by anyone, the table inverts itself and floats in mid-air (a clever and effective special effect).

After this, Alan (John Rackham: Warrioress, Left for Dead) and Henry (Henry Dunn) head off home, leaving Kirsty (Kirsty Cox: Radio 4 Dr Finlay series) and David (Ben Shockley: Ten Dead Men, Cold Earth, Dark Rage, Preternatural) to stay over at the hosts’ place. In the final half-hour or so, things ramp up further, including messages written in burns or blood (a readable ‘NO’ among the blood splatters on a white T-shirt’ is one of several clever touches). Trapped downstairs in the living room, the quartet make their way back up to the bedroom so that Cathy can retrieve her sanitary towels, a sequence that manages to be tense despite the oddity of the motivation. In fact Cathy’s period becomes a major part of the plot as further messages complain about wanting to be ‘clean’ (which Kirsty correctly identifies as being the Biblical sense of the term). Menstruation and the supernatural have been linked in the past (think Carrie, think Urban Ghost Story) but rarely has menstrual blood been such a major part of a horror story.

Eventually the demon, which remains unseen except as a glowing light round the edge of a door, is defeated by being electrocuted. Dave and Matt somehow run a wire from a socket direct to the door handle and then – for reasons which totally escaped me – need to pee on the door handle to complete the circuit.

I can see that Ken Colley has thought through the rationale of his film: why the demon appears, what it wants, how it can be beaten. But that doesn’t mean that this all makes sense. The confused and confusing denouement could be excused if the narrative had been stronger up to that point, but sadly it’s all been very slow and drawn out. For example at one point Cathy makes three cups of coffee and a good minute or two is wasted on taking orders and then wondering who wanted sugar. It’s remarkable that a film running only 72 minutes can be this languorous and slow. Greetings might have worked better at a taut 40-50 minutes but this was made in the days when the Blockbuster 70-minute minimum still held sway.

Shot in 2007 in Colley’s own house in Hythe, Kent, Greetings had a £100,000 budget and a 20-day schedule. Until now it has sat on my master list as a 2009 release because of the DVD that Brain Damage put out in September of that year. However, a little research has revealed that it played for a single week at the Canterbury Odeon (with a ‘15’ BBFC certificate) in January 2008. Which – damn and blast it all! – makes this yet another title that should have been included in Urban Terrors: New British Horror Cinema 1997-2008. There were two additional big screen outings for the film in 2009 in Kent: Folkestone in February and the Swale Film Festival in July. All of these screenings played with Colley’s 2007 ten-minute short Alligator, in which he plays a retired hitman. John Rackham is in that too and it marks the final acting role for another Death Star officer, Richard ‘General Motti’ LeParmentier.

Colley, whose other horror credits include The Blood Beast Terror andScar Tissue, has been acting on screen since 1961. Aside from his turn as Admiral Piett in Empire and Jedi (and 2012 Lego Star Wars short The Empire Strikes Out), his most notable other role is probably playing Jesus in Life of Brian. His other directorial credit is a 2006 short called A Nearly Silent Film; Cox, Rackham, Shockley and the director were all in that too. In fact, it’s clear that there’s a bit of a Kent rep company as the cast have a number of other shared credits including Keith Eyles'The Avenging Spirit and The Shadow of Bigfoot and Rackham’s own The Liberator and Bloodmyth.

Editing by Andy Coughlan (also associate producer) and photography by Denis Cullum are both acceptable; truth be told, there’s not a lot can be done with a story set entirely inside a house. Steve Hayes (Warrioress, Left for Dead, Ten Dead Men) provided the limited CGI effects.

Though an undoubtedly sincere production and a laudable attempt to make a serious horror feature that’s not just another teen slasher or zombie apocalypse, it can’t in all honesty be said that Greetings succeeds. The cast give it their all but Colley’s screenplay was desperately in need of a good script editor: to tighten up the action, polish up the dialogue, clear up the ending and perhaps slightly reduce the amount of time spent discussing menstruation.

Greetings is available on various VOD sites, all using the Brain Damage sleeve image which bears no relation to the film. But then neither the title nor the fact that it’s Cathy’s birthday have any real relevance to the story anyway.

MJS rating: B-

Director: George Clarke
Writer: George Clarke
Producers: George Clarke, Kenny Martin
Cast: Robert Render, Jean-Paul Van der Velde, Rachael Stewart
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: screener disc (Left Films)
Website: http://theyfiff.wix.com/thebloodharvest

Two weeks ago I watched and reviewed Battle of the Bone, George Clarke’s debut feature from 2009. After Battle Clarke made The Knackery (more zombies), The Last Light: An Irish Ghost Story, Splash Area, Onus (which was a UK-Norwegian co-production, apparently) and most recently The Blood Harvest. Six features in eight years is a prodigious production rate. Clarke’s Yellow Fever Productions has built up its own fanbase, even if it remains largely outside of most horror fans’ awareness.

The Blood Harvest is a more confident and mature work, as one would expect from a more experienced film-maker. It’s set in Northern Ireland but, apart from a couple of lines of dialogue and a map on a wall, there’s nothing distinctively Northern Irish about the story or characters; with the most minor of tweaks this could have been set anywhere. In fact, the propensity for both working and suspended police to carry guns at all times suggests Clarke may have originally written this with a view to filming in in the USA.

A serial killer is stalking the province. Bodies are turning up all over the place, distinctively disfigured: one eye scooped out and the Achilles tendons sliced. Robert Render (a Clarke regular who has also had bit parts in Ripper Street and The Frankenstein Chronicles) stars as Jack Chaplin, an experienced cop with some unlikely theories about who or what is responsible. After arguing with his superior, Chaplin is sacked but he keeps working on the case from home. His former partner Hatcher (Dutch actor Jean-Paul Van der Velde giving an agonisingly wooden performance) stays in contact with Chaplin while pursuing more traditional lines of enquiry.

We see several attacks on various victims which are as well-filmed as they are gruesome. For most of the running time this is a slick, nasty, bloody horror film structured around a gripping police procedural framework. The killer, who wears a crazy steampunk welder’s mask and drives a battered old 1950s car, is revealed to us but we don’t know who he is or why he’s doing this until the end.

Ah yes, the end – that’s where the film comes apart. For the first two acts we’re dealing with a psycho and there are enough hints of vampirism to keep us wondering whether the explanation will be rational or supernatural. I always enjoy films with that sort of ambiguity. But the waveform has to collapse at some point in the third act. And collapse it well and truly does, in a talkie scene that tips the whole narrative over into something that is frankly rather silly.

[spoilers on] So it turns out that the two (yes, two) grunting, screaming psychos we’ve seen at work are the sons of Hatcher, who is actually an alien. They crash-landed on Earth 30 years ago, when the sons were babies. Over time they discovered that the nutrients they needed to survive could best be obtained by sticking a straw into the back of somebody’s eye-socket, and were particularly good if the victim was in a state of abject fear (it’s difficult to see what other state one could be in after a stranger gouges out one’s eye with a fork…). Unfortunately The Blood Harvest simply doesn’t make the leap successfully from gritty cop-horror to out-of-this-world scifi-horror. The transition is too jarring and the explanation too daft. Plus we’re left wondering what the aliens did in the 29 years before they suddenly started kidnapping people and forking out eyeballs. And how a man with no identity was able to become a senior police officer... [spoilers off]

Even without the explanation of What’s Really Going On, the plot has some major holes. Not least how someone could commit 40 gruesome murders in less than a year without sparking the biggest man-hunt in UK history. And how the killer could so effectively evade justice when we can see that (a) he has serious mental problems and (b) he drives a really distinctive car. And groovy though that mask is, it’s never explained.

Don’t get me wrong, The Blood Harvest is a fun ride for horror fans and George Clarke continues to be one of the most consistently interesting horror film-makers in the UK. But you need to go into this film prepared for a preposterous revelation near the end. If you’ve ever seen WAZ, well… as Northern Ireland-shot cop movies about serial killers with a bizarre MO go, this ain’t WAZ, let’s put it that way. On the other hand, there are some absolutely cracking individual scenes, mostly based around the killer’s isolated farm and the attempts of two victims to escape. (One of these is Matt McCreary, who wowed the Britain’s Got Talent judges in 2015 with a free-running routine.)

I guess I have to give props to George Clarke (and fellow producer Kenny Martin, who shares story credit) for ploughing a distinctive furrow. I’ve got no problem with the third act per se (talkie scene aside), rather it’s the first two which needed work as they don’t adequately prepare us for what is to come. If more inexplicable (but ultimately, narratively justifiable) things had happened in the first hour, we would better accept what is revealed in the final 30 minutes.

Filmed in October 2014, The Blood Harvest premiered at the Freak Show Horror Film Festival in Orlando one year later where it won Best SFX and Best Actor (for Render). Left Films picked up the movie and released it to UK DVD in January 2016, including a Making Of, bloopers and trailers. (There are also bloopers under the four minutes of end credits.) Clarke’s next project should be the utterly bonkers Zombie Schoolgirls, Attack!!, a teaser for which was shot back in March 2014.

MJS rating: B

Director: Darren Ward
Writer: Darren Ward
Producer: Darren Ward
Cast: Nick Rendell, Paul Murphy, Andy Ranger
Country: UK
Year of release: 1998
Reviewed from: UK DVD
Website: www.giallofilms.com

Sudden Fury is an action-packed, low-budget British gangster picture with effective, professional-looking action sequences and the sort of generic two-word title that Andy Sidaris has made a career out of. (Actually, although Sidaris has never made a Sudden Fury, the title was used for films in 1975 and 1993.)

The plot is not overly complicated. Crime boss A, Randall (Paul Murphy), has stolen £2.5 million of cocaine from crime boss B, Harris, but his goons left one of the guards alive so Harris knows who hit him. Randall and his lieutenant Jimmy (Andy Ranger) hire top hitman Mike Walker (Nick Rendell) to pretend to return the goods but really take out Harris’ men. Jimmy will then kill Walker and plant stuff on him so it looks like he was working for another gang entirely, thereby deflecting the heat from Randall and co. But things go awry when Walker survives - which comes as no great surprise, really, given that they have already said he’s the best hitman there is. Now Walker is on the run with the cocain, Randall wants him taken out, and the threat of all-out warfare between the two gangs looms ever closer.

But before we meet Walker we have a prologue which, presumably in some attempt to out-pottymouth the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral, crams the word ‘fuck’ 57 times into five minutes. Yes, I counted. There’s plenty of other swearing - as indeed there bleeding well should be in a gangster picture - but it is so heavily laid on with a trowel in the prologue that it distracts from the important scene-setting information conveyed by the small number of words that don’t begin with F.

Considering the low-budget, the acting’s not bad, at least among the main characters, but no-one’s going to win any Oscars and most of the smaller roles are completely wooden. The cast are basically a rep company for writer/director/producer Darren Ward, their only other credits being his other films such as Bitter Revenge and Nightmares. There’s something to be said for the convenience of casting your mates but at some point a film-maker with ambitions needs to start putting out casting calls and getting people who actually profess to be actors.

And there is one of those here, to be fair: none other than dear old David Warbeck in his final screen role. He plays a slightly effete, asthmatic sadist named Pike, who works for Harris and takes great delight in torturing two of Randall’s men with a blow-torch. He lifts his scenes - in fact the whole production - to a new level through his presence and must have been a great boost to the morale and confidence of cast and crew. Unfortunately, he gets plugged about half an hour in.

Which leads me to one of the main problems with the film: characters are introduced and then killed off and it’s very hard to work out who our protagonist and antagonist are; in other words, who should we be rooting for and why? There has to be at least one character with whom we sympathise (even if he has a dark side - that’s the depth that an anti-hero brings to a story) and we must want him to achieve something. He must have a quest, even if it’s only to survive. All that stuff you read about ‘the hero’s journey’ may sound like media studies nonsense but, when you analyse why some films work and some films don’t (or, as in this case, only work partially), you find it often comes down to the presence or absence of a hero’s journey.

You can have as many explosions and as much spurting blood as you want - Sudden Fury has stacks of both and it’s all very well done - but the key to a good film lies in the script and that, of course, is where so many micro-budget pictures fall down, even though a good script doesn’t cost any more than a bad one.

The protagonist and antagonist here would seem to be Walker and Randall, but the relationship is simply one of employer and employee for the first act, until Randall and Jimmy double-cross Walker, and then they separate completely into two plotlines. The hitman hides out in the house of a friend, Alex Renzie (also a hitman, I think) while he recovers from his wounds and it is only when he learns that Alex has been kidnapped and tortured in an effort to track him down that Walker becomes an active character, driving the plot in the final act. Which is about the time that an unseen assailant plugs Randall full of lead.

We never know enough about Walker - or indeed anyone - to really care what happens to whom. Randall may be an amoral bastard who takes a delight in killing two small children but our introduction to Walker sees him gratuitously killing Randall’s bodyguard when he arrives for a meeting with the crime lord, so why should we sympathise with him either? He does get one of the few brief scenes of tenderness, but as that involves shagging a prostitute that Alex has ordered for him as a treat, that also fails to ground our sympathy with Walker. Ultimately, we sympathise with him only because everyone else seems to be much worse. The one truly likeable character who is not a violent criminal (or at least, not depicted as such) is Alex, but he doesn’t have much screentime before being brutally tortured and killed by Randall’s men.

This torture is actually pointless because Randall has a watch on Alex’s house anyway and the goon on duty spots Walker answering the door to the hooker. Unfortunately this was shot in 1997-98 when mobile phones were not ubiquitous, the few on display here being the size of a small house brick, so there’s no way to get the message back. (We also see Randall reading a copy of the now defunct newspaper Today - oh, it all seems so long ago...)

Alex’s torturer is a moustachioed South Africa named Lennox (Victor D Thorn, also in Chris Barfoot’s sci-fi shorts Phoenix and Helix) who seems to be in charge of the various gun-toting goons guarding an old warehouse which is, we assume, Harris’ (now Randall’s) cocaine factory. When Walker comes looking for his friend, he despatches a number of these before teaming up briefly with a character whose appearance is a surprise. This volte-face, and the instant trust which Walker places in his new accomplice, is narratively convenient but doesn’t make any sense at all and the other person is killed fairly swiftly.

This leaves the climax of the film as a one-on-one battle to the death between Walker and Lennox, briefly interrupted by a flashback to a time when they worked together. Dressed in camouflage gear, it’s not clear whether they are meant to be soldiers or mercenaries, nor where they are (it’s clearly deciduous English woodland, but I got the impression we were meant to be in Africa). Anyway, this reveals a long-standing enmity between the two men but it’s too little too late.

The climax is very exciting indeed, let’s not take that away from Sudden Fury, but our antagonist has switched arbitrarily from crime boss Randall to Lennox, who is nothing but a chief thug and whom we only met halfway through the picture. It’s simply unsatisfying to have the main threat dead elsewhere by another’s hand while our hero battles someone who up to now has been a minor character. What we want to see, after an hour and a half of this stuff, is the last two men standing: Walker, with nothing left to lose, and Randall, the wine-drinking sophisticate reduced to getting his hands dirty. But it is not to be.

Which is a shame because the climactic battle, in fact all the action sequences, are very, very well-staged. Pyrotechnics are deployed well, exciting without being gratuitous, while bodies and (importantly) the walls behind them are riddled with bullets. In terms of what would literally be ‘bang for your buck’ if this had been paid for in US dollars, Ward and his team have put together terrific action scenes that are violent, tense, bloody and exciting, without overstepping the mark. No kickboxing here, thank Christ! Ward’s direction combined with the two-for-one cinematography and editing of Peter Dobson (Sanitarium, Hellbreeder, Darkhunters) shows some of the Hollywood big boys how to stage a fight scene so that the audience is drawn in without losing track at any time of who is where and what they’re doing.

One final criticism of the script is that never, at any point, does any character make any reference to the police. Bodies pile up, entire families are wiped out in blood-splattered attacks and no-one seems at all bothered about what PC Plod might be doing to track down those responsible.

To sum up, despite excellent effects and professional-looking action sequences, Sudden Fury has a plot structure which doesn’t stand up, extremely limited characterisation and dialogue which boasts lots of swearing but no wit and no snappy, quotable ‘zinger’ lines. But does any of that matter to the intended audience? I suspect not. This is a film for those DTV movie fans whose idea of ninety minutes well spent is watching Steven Seagal’s unconvincing body double cracking skulls at least twice in every reel. In that respect, it succeeds and DVD releases in both the USA (through Sub Rosa) and UK (through Boudicca) are testament to that. But it is still a shame that Sudden Fury couldn’t find more time for characters and plot, in either the development process or, indeed, on the actual screen.

MJS rating: B+

At the American Film Market in Los Angeles in October 1998, I was introduced to Angus Scrimm, best known as the Tall Man in the Phantasm films. Angus, who was promoting the new fourth film in the series, turned out to be the most wonderful interview subject. An absolute gentleman, unfailing polite and enthusiastic. And knowledgeable too, about films and music. In fact he actually had a Grammy, which he won for writing the sleeve notes to an Itzaak Perlman album! A short version of this interview appeared in SFX magazine and proved to be the most popular, most commented-on feature I ever wrote for the mag.

In January 2016 came the news that this much-loved actor had passed away, so I dug this out and reposted it as my own humble tribute. Here's a secret no-one knows: when I interviewed Angus Scrimm, I had never actually seen a Phantasm film! (I have the silver sphere set now, of course.) It's a measure of the man that he was able to give me such a great interview when I had so little detailed knowledge to work with. Back in 1998, before I could ask my first question, Angus asked me:

“Whereabouts in England is your magazine based?”

In the town of Bath.
“Bath? Oh, that’s where I fell of a b... No, I fell off a bus in Bournemouth, rode all the way to Bath, was limping, limping, limping, and we went to the local hospital. This was in 1953 - coronation year - I won’t tell you how old I was, I was pretty young. I thought, ‘Well, this is the end of my English trip. God knows what I’ve done to myself. My arm is hurting and it’s going to cost the Earth.’ Well, they took X-rays and said, ‘You have a slight fracture in your ankle and in your elbow, but we’re going to bandage them up for you. Stay off them for about a day or two and then you can continue getting around. And you’ll have no further problem except that when you’re older you may have an ache where that fracture occurred.’

"Then I asked the burning question: ‘How much do I owe you?’ ‘It’s all on the National Health.’ You don’t know what that is when you’re a visitor! I can tell you: I always loved England but I dearly loved England after that. Of course I was there for six months and lived in London for a long time and in Bournemouth for part of the time, travelled over to Paris and back and went to Wales and just had a marvellous, marvellous six months.”

Tell me about Phantasm IV. What’s the basic premise?
“It actually begins at the precise moment that Phantasm III ended, with Reggie the ice cream man suspended from a wall with silver balls all over his body, ready to drill into him. Of course we have to free him from that situation - I won’t tell you how. Then it proceeds from there, unravelling the relationship, that’s always been a mystery, between Michael and the Tall Man: the young leading man and the sinister Tall Man. Just why is the Tall Man constantly in pursuit of him but letting him survive? The Tall Man doesn’t let very many people survive that he comes in contact with. This provides the answer to that and further involves Reggie in a number of unpredictable occurrences. The first film, as you probably know, I understand that it was not widely seen in England initially because it was just on British TV last year for the first time.”

I missed it.
“Did you? It definitely was. Because for a long time I worked for EMI over here and Capital Records, which they own, as an annotator, a writer of notes on the back of LPs and compact disc booklets. In fact, I was at Capital in 1962-3 when you sent over to us a rock group and I was asked to do the notes for the rock group. I got volumes and volumes of press materials from all over England and Europe and out of that wrote a note praising the group, very highly of course, saying that they were going to make a big impact on the United States. I remember my editor came to me and said, ‘Hey, this is a pretty good note. Don’t you want to sign it?’ ‘No way,’ I said. ‘These kids with their crazy haircuts and the strange little suits they wear, they’re never going to make it with clean-cut American kids.’ Well, you know who I’m talking about, I’m sure. And a year later I was listening to the Beatles with great enjoyment myself.”

How, over the course of the four Phantasm films, has the Tall Man developed?
“I’ll tell you. I’ll answer that, but did I answer your other question? I think I side-tracked you. I don’t remember. Something about... Why did I get into EMI? Oh, oh, we were talking about it having been on British television. That’s right, and you didn’t remember it. Friends at EMI - I still have friends there - told me that it made quite an impact. Barry, being an American who works for EMI in London, tells me that his co-workers refused to believe that he actually knew the sinister character of the Phantasm series.

"The Tall Man, to me, is always represented as the Grim Reaper, the personification actually of Death. What I tried to do with him in each film is to try to realise that concept as truly and as deeply as I can while contending with some of the unexpected things that Don Coscarelli the writer/director throws at me. Sometimes it’s a little hard to reconcile the things that occur. But I think we’ve managed to sustain that and I’m still convinced that that is the Tall Man’s essential character. He is certainly an alien figure from another dimension. But to Michael’s eyes I’m sure he represents Death.”

How long is it now since the first Phantasm?
“The first Phantasm came out in the United States - actually Avco-Embassy was the studio which then distributed it and it opened in the Spring in San Francisco and San Antonio. Then they bunny-hopped it around the country in increasingly greater clusters of cities. They sent Don and me on air flights to do press for the openings and that was in ‘79. Then the second one didn’t come out until ‘88, that was Phantasm II. The next was Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead. It became fashionable for the third one to have a descriptive subtitle. That came out in ;93.”

There was big gap between the first two.
“Yes, a very big gap.”

Why was it felt that Phantasm should be brought back after so long a time? It couldn’t be cashing in on the success of the first one.
“Actually there was a great movement for a Phantasm II after the first one, but Don Coscarelli did not want to become too closely identified with the horror genre. So he did a picture called Beastmaster instead which was a sword and sorcery movie, and then went on to do some other films, Survival Quest among them. In '88 there must have been a groundswell based on the horror cycle rejuvenating itself. But in any case he was approached by two or three studios to do a Phantasm II and he went with Universal Pictures.

"The film, I remember, came out in the United States the same week as Roger Rabbit and, I think, Rambo II, and Big with Tom Hanks. It was the greatest week in the history of American motion picture exhibition and Phantasm II was lucky to hold its own in the midst of all those big pictures, but we did and we went on to perform respectably. Not as well, I think, as if we had come out around Halloween. But for reasons of their own Universal was very keen to market it as quickly as possible and thought it would be a big summer hit. Then Phantasm III actually test-marketed here in Baton Rouge and another city and did very well. It outperformed all the pictures that week, but for some reason MCA decided that they didn’t want to invest the additional $7 million it would cost for prints and advertising, and sent it straight to video.

“This picture we’re hoping for a theatrical again of course and I do think it has some of the qualities that could be very compelling at the box office. The second two were really action pictures with comedy and a lot of gore. This pictures goes a little easier on the gore and gets back to the eerie mysticism, the weird, unsettling resonance of the first picture that made it such blockbuster. I think it’s going to be the most successful Phantasm picture since that time, although I think Titanic will probably outperform us!”

Does it help to have the same principal cast and crew working throughout the series?
“It’s certainly helpful for me to go back and see the wonderful, familiar old faces. It’s rejuvenating also to have the new people who come in each time. Don Coscarelli magnetises good people - he simply seems to draw them to him, and most of them have come to him because they are fans of the original Phantasm and want to work on a Phantasm film. Some of them are avid fans.”

I guess you’re starting to get people now who were hardly born when the first one came out?
“That’s true, that’s true. I remember on those aeroplane flights around the country, publicising the first Phantasm, Don and I had long, long periods onboard planes to chat. I remember one of us saying to the other - well, I said in fact - ‘When I was a child, a young kid, I saw Frankenstein and Dracula.’ They were my first horror films and they made an enormous impact and I went through a whole period of wanting to see nothing but horror films after that. I saw everything that came out and was re-released. And I said, ‘There will be youngsters all over the world for whom Phantasm will be their first horror film, and twenty years from now we’ll be meeting them.’ And indeed we have! They come up to me and they say, ‘I saw Phantasm when I was 13 and it scared the H out of me!’”

With the series having gone for so long, and especially with Part IV picking up exactly where Part III left off, is it difficult keeping the continuity going?
“I always go back and watch the previous films, and soak up the feelings that they engender. In actual fact, I continue to do the Tall Man inbetween pictures because I do occasional fan conventions and interviews and I’m invariably asked to say, ‘Boy!’ So he’s very much part of me; in fact he’s so much part of me that it’s getting to be a problem. I feel now that I own him, I forget that he’s Coscarelli’s. I feel that I own him and I’m very protective of him, constantly arguing, ‘Oh, he wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t do that, this shouldn’t be done.’ I have to fight to distance myself from him; he’s become like another self.”

How good is it for your career in general to be identified with this one character?
“It’s given me much, much more visibility. On the other hand I’m sure there are many, many people who think that’s probably all I can play. That’s a misperception that I have to correct as soon as possible.”

What was your career like leading up to Phantasm?
“I had done a previous Don Coscarelli picture called Jim the World’s Greatest, which was actually Don’s first picture, made when he was a late teenager, which was picked up by Universal and distributed and did rather well. In that, I played the alcoholic father of the hero, played by a young actor named Gregory Harrison. That got me into the Screen Actor’s Guild and got me an agent. Then I did small parts in ongoing TV series, usually just as a bit-player in one episode for a while. I did a small role in Sidney Poitier’s picture, Piece of the Action.

“I did the first film Jim Wynorski actually wrote and directed. Do you know Wynorski’s name in England? Wynorski’s very well known here; he’s done 20, 30 films as far as I know. He’s renowned for doing films under budget and under time. He always gets them in a day or two before he has to, and under budget oft times. He’s a very quick and deft film-maker with a great sense of humour. Anyway, Jim had liked Phantasm and he did a picture called Lost Empire and cast me as his main villain in that. So that was my first large role again. Then I’ve gone on to do a picture called Mindwarp with Bruce Campbell who’s another genre star. Bruce was the hero, I was the first villain. A picture called Transylvania Twist for Jim. Deadfall for Christopher Coppola with his brother Nicholas Cage and Michael Biehn and Peter Fonda. Charlie Sheen, James Coburn - it had a wonderful cast - Michael Constantine. I could go on forever just saying one name after another. I had again a villainous role in that, a wonderfully written part.”

Is there any problem with playing villains all the time? Would you like a nice avuncular role?
“Jim let me play the nice, avuncular father-figure of Vampirella in his version of the famous comic-book. I got bumped off very early in the picture by Roger Daltrey of all people. I got bitten in the neck by Roger Daltrey - there’s not many other fellows that can say that, I’m sure! He played the lead vampire and I was an old gentle vampire who he wanted out of the way. Roger was fun to work with.”

I spoke with John Landis who also had a cameo in that.
“Actually he did. He was an airline pilot who also got bumped off. It was a Showtime premiere here. I think it will be turning up again on the Movie Channel later this year. A lovely actress named Talisa Soto played Vampirella and was just charming to work with also. Just divine; radiantly lovely and gracious.”

What next (a) for Angus Scrimm and (b) for the Tall Man? Will there be a Phantasm V?
“Phantasm IV brings the film to a very logical and satisfying conclusion. But of course if it’s an enormous success, I’m sure ways would be found to do a Phantasm V. In the meantime, I still want to do that drawing room comedy. If they ever revive that. Fortunately the other villains I’ve played have all been different. The diamond fence in Deadfall, the megalomaniacal seer in Mindwarp: they’ve all been quite different and challenging from that point of view. So it hasn’t gone stale. The villains always register strongly with the audience, so they’re funny to play. But in Transylvania Twist I got to do comedy for example, and it was lovely to get back to comedy roots.”

Thank you.
“Oh, you were asking about other things I’ve done. I forgot to mention one of the perks of being an actor is getting invited abroad to do a picture. And I went for Full Moon to Romania to do Subspecies. I got to play Vlad of all people. I got bumped off early in that picture of course. Then I was invited to Italy by Al Festa, the famous director of MTV-type musicals who was doing his first picture. He was a Phantasm fan and cast me in Fatal Frames alongside Linnea Quigley and Donald Pleasence and Rosanno Brazzi and Alida Valli and also a wonderful cast of great old Italian actors. With Rick Gianasi, who was an Italian-American actor, playing the leading man, and Stefania Stella who played the leading lady. A very, very charismatic star with all the impact of a Dietrich or a Garbo or a Rita Hayworth.”

RIP Angus Scrimm 1926-2016

Director: Ricardo Benz
Writer: Ricardo Benz
Producer: Ricardo Benz
Cast: Constance Cheloudiakoff, Darren Easton, Maria de Lima
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: IMDB

If you said to me, “Hey Mike, there’s a film you should watch. It’s kinda found footage, and kinda torture porn.” I’d say, “Well, I’m kinda not interested.” But in my quest to watch as much new British horror as possible – especially if it’s free – I took a gamble on this. And discovered an extraordinary movie that I’m really glad I watched.

The Hell Experiment is raw, brutal, uncompromising and upsetting but also powerful, dramatic, thought-provoking, serious, maybe even important.

This was shot in 2010 and I have to assume that the online version, which is actually on the IMDB, was posted pretty shortly afterwards. In the intervening five years, so far as I can tell, not one soul has posted any sort of comment or mention of this film anywhere else on the internet. Apart from the IMDB page and the StarNow/CastingCallPro pages of the actors, there’s not a single reference to this anywhere.

‘Found footage’ conjures up images of all those dumb films like The Mirror and ‘untitled’ and The Unfolding where people set up webcams everywhere in an attempt to capture footage of a ghost. In this case, the film is presented as genuine video footage shot by the unnamed main character (David Bruce Taylor), but most of it is just interviews, shot as simple talking heads. In fact this is the most talking heads-heavy film I’ve ever seen, apart from Simon Rumley’s Strong Language.

The 90 minutes divides fairly neatly into three half-hours. In Act 1, we first meet Harry (Harry Lobek), an old mate of the interviewer who was always a hit with the ladies, and who gladly shares some tips on pulling technique. Intercut with this, after a bit, is a second interview with Ruby, a middle-aged Portuguese prostitute (Maria de Lima) with the gaunt look of a junkie. We don’t know how far apart these interviews were recorded. At around the half-hour mark, something really nasty and shocking comes along which makes us sit up and pay attention.

Act 2 introduces us to Avanka (Constance Cheloudiakoff), a French teenager who has been abused since she was five. She speaks no English so her conversation with the interviewer is translated back and forth by Ruby. This isn’t nearly as tedious or irritating as you might expect and in fact adds greatly to the verisimilitude of the movie. Our unnamed, increasingly manipulative interviewer wants to know about Avanka’s sexual history and sexual preferences, and wants to see her strip. It becomes clear that he is paying her for something.

Intercut with this is the final interviewee, Daniel (Darren Easton). A fascinating study in amorality, it’s clear that Daniel is a card-carrying sadist. Not a psycho, not crazy or manic. He’s utterly calm and laid back as he discusses the number of whores he has killed and his favourite methods of torturing them beforehand. As the film progresses, with Avanka’s pathetic vulnerability and naïve acquiescence becoming clearer at the same time that Daniel’s prosaic descriptions of torture techniques become more and more appalling, we can sense that this is building towards something. We’ve got an idea what. But we don’t know how far the action, and the film, will go.

Thus we come to Act 3, upstairs in the ordinary suburban semi where this all takes place. Now we cut intermittently between two cameras: one fixed on the wall opposite a metal bed frame, one handheld by our interviewer friend. Under his instructions, Ruby dresses Avanka in a sexy outfit then Avanka is led upstairs and allows herself to be tied to the bed, gagged and blindfolded. Daniel – who has been told that the girl actually wants to die - begins his slow, subtle process of softening her up as the roving and static cameras looks on.

Where does this go? How far does it go? I’ll let you find out for yourself. There is narrative progression and some degree of resolution and you’ll finish the film with a head full of thoughts. There are a couple of faltering steps towards the end, admittedly. At one point it’s not clear what happens and it took me a moment (and a quick rewind) to realise that this related to Harry, whose involvement in the narrative had seemed somewhat oblique up to that point. And there is a slightly leaden speech from the unnamed interviewer about the difference between himself and Daniel which isn’t really necessary and sounds like the film trying to justify itself – which frankly it doesn’t need to do.

The film wraps up without any credits. There are just captions at the top and tail saying that what we are seeing is police evidence in an investigation into a planned murder. A carelessly missing apostrophe in the opening caption is annoying, but I’ll let it go.

The internet is full of micro-budget films about men torturing women, and most of them are utterly pathetic crap. So why does The Hell Experiment work? Well, a number of reasons. This isn’t a misogynist film. It’s a film about misogyny and sexism and patriarchy, thematically standing comparison with The House of Him and The Devil’s Vice. It's a film about what (some) men are capable of doing to (some) women. But it’s not about what such men do, it’s about who those men are and why they think they are entitled to do it.

It’s also a film about the women who allow this to happen, who let themselves become victims. It would be very easy to just dismiss Avanka as an idiot. What sort of person lets a stranger tie them to a bed and blindfold them? But it’s clear that Avanka and Ruby are both screwed up and have been their whole lives, because of the way they have been treated by the men around them: fathers and uncles and boyfriends. These women are victims before they even enter this house.

We know all this because of the interviews. We spend two thirds of the film getting to know the characters (including the interviewer himself), seeing into their psyches and, unless there’s something wrong with us, being repelled by what we find there. Those other cheapjack man-hurts-woman films that litter the web generally eschew characterisation in favour of action and gore. The reason why torture porn is so awful is that it serves up the worst of humanity with glee. It’s cartoon violence in the real world. There’s nothing gleeful or cartoon here.

Frankly I’m a little surprised that The Hell Experiment is so completely unknown. It’s not like it’s badly made. I have absolutely no idea who Ricardo Benz is; there are several people of that name online but none who seem to have any connection to film-making. Nevertheless, his restrained direction gives enormous strength to this film, which cannily uses its minimal production values: limited cast, single location, no music.

It’s the cast that really make the movie the undiscovered gem that it is. All five are excellent, but special praise must be reserved for Cheloudiakoff. Playing the victim in a film like this, a micro-budget indie where the budget is not much more than that of the fictional video being made by the lead character, requires bravery and dedication. Benz cleverly frames his image so that we don’t see the pain inflicted upon Avanka, yet the actress conveys the terror, shame and desperation superbly, even when acting through gag and blindfold. The third act cannot have been easy for anyone involved.

Darren Easton has played a policeman on numerous occasions including Silent Witness, Call the Midwife and the Dark Shadows movie, although most disturbingly on Crimewatch where he was cast as PC Keith Blakelock, the copper who was so awfully killed during the Brixton riots. David Bruce Taylor was Count Dracula himself in Sarah Steel’s 2010 short Job Interview with a Vampire and was also in a Paul TT Easter film. Harry Lobek mostly does theatre, including tours of War Horse and The Gruffalo’s Child. Maria de Lima has extensive experience in her native Portugal where she was nominated for that country’s version of a Gloden Globe (she was also a regular in the Portuguese version of Yes, Minister!). As for Constance Cheloudiakoff, she’s still acting, including a spell in LA, and also does comedy improv. While something like The Hell Experiment may not be an obvious choice for a showreel, her performance here as a vulnerable, pathetic, foolish, helpless victim - a woman who is weak because she has been systematically weakened - is a stunning piece of acting.

Although the film does not linger on the make-up effects, they are an integral part of the movie. Arabella Clarke was the make-up artist responsible and the results look suitably realistic, although the poor quality of the IMDB image hides the detail. Her other work includes a lot of theatre, music promos and TV ads, as well as the 2008 short Zombie Office. The only other name on the IMDB is editor Jenna Kay.

That then is the first ever published review of The Hell Experiment, after a mere half-decade. Don’t watch it if you’re looking for a fun movie, don’t watch it if you want gore and glee. But if you want 90 minutes of bleak, painful, depressing, compulsive insight into the lower reaches of the human condition, head over to the IMDB and take a look.

MJS rating: A

It's the best part of ten years since I last interviewed Steve Lawson. That previous interview was about his early action movies. In 2015/16 he had three horror films released within a few months of each other, all very good in their own way but all very different. This flurry of activity prompted this new interview in December 2015.

It’s been quite a few years since your micro-budget action movies like Insiders and The Silencer. Why the long gap in your filmography?
"I think, like a lot of indie film-makers, my ambition had always been to be able to walk into my local branch of HMV and see my own movie on the shelf! When I produced and co-directed The Silencer, which was a riff on The Exterminator but with added kung fu, we actually achieved this and the film is still out there on DVD and occasionally acquires new fans and online reviews. So at the time there didn't seem to be any further you could go with indie film production, short of going the whole hog and attempting to raise serious money and shoot something on 35mm. We'd pushed the Mini-DV format as far as it could go."

How has independent film-making and distribution changed during that time?
"Well, this is what drew me back into film production. It's hard to believe but when we were shooting The Silencer in 2004 there was no Facebook or YouTube, and HD video was still only in the hands of high-end professionals. By the time I started to write Survival Instinct all of these things had become available, and digital SLR cameras that could shoot full HD video with a range of changeable lenses had totally transformed what it was possible to achieve on a low budget. And by the time we started shooting, things had progressed again, and we ended up shooting on a Panasonic digital cinema camera that was higher resolution than the cameras George Lucas used to shoot the Star Wars prequels! If you think about it, it's an absolutely astonishing situation when the likes of me can go out and shoot a movie that ends up showing in theatres. But this is the democratisation of film-making that has happened, and I think it's wonderful."

Survival Instinct is far from the first film to centre on a nutter chasing a girl through the woods. What do you think you could bring to this scenario that’s new or different?
"I've always been a fan of what's called the 'survival horror' genre, which goes right back to films like Deliverance. It's usually a tale of city folk who go out into the wilderness and end up fighting for their lives either against the elements, the wildlife, or crazy inbred locals. So I wanted to make something in that style, and of course it's always popular to have the lead character be a girl, so I set myself the task of writing something that would slot easily into that genre, but at the same time hopefully wouldn't suffer from the many lame clichés that infect those types of films.

"So I watched an awful lot of movies that fitted this description, some good, many bad, and two things became very clear: in the vast majority of these films, the villains were random crazies who had no particular reason for attacking the protagonists, and the protagonists were incredibly annoying idiots who bickered with each other and usually caused their own downfall. The result was you didn't fear the villains and you didn't care about the heroes. So I was determined to do the opposite in Survival Instinct - have main characters that the audience could identify with and care about, and have a villain with realistic, plausible motivations. I wanted to create the kind of scenario the audience could believe might actually happen to them - if they just took that one wrong turn or made that one bad decision. The film has been compared by critics to Eden Lake and Straw Dogs, which are two films I admire hugely, so it's certainly in the right area."

How did you assemble your cast?
"Mostly by luck! The only cast member to actually audition was Helen Crevel, who plays the lead role of Stacey, and the audition process was frankly a bit of a shambles as I'd never auditioned anybody before. I was suitably impressed by the fact that she was willing and able to improv a highly tense scene from the script whilst sitting in my office car park! Also she has amazing eyes, really big, dark pupils, and I had already planned quite a few shots that would focus on the character's eyes, so that was what really secured her the part. That and the fact that I was too lazy to audition anyone else! Fortunately she was wonderful and I really can't imagine anyone being better in the role.

"The other key role was our antagonist Weaver, and by pure chance I had recently become acquainted with a local business owner who had a passion for films and was looking to get involved in something. Andy Coughlan had never acted in a feature film before but he was physically perfect for the part of Weaver and just something about him told me that he wouldn't let me down. I think his performance in the film is an absolute revelation and he really ought to be acting full time. Other cast members were people I knew from various places - Jay Sutherland had done a lot of corporates for me, Sam Smith was a member of a local stage school that I knew quite well, and there's even a cameo from The Silencer himself, Glenn Salvage."

The film was shot as Rites of Passage– why the title change?
"Whilst I liked the title Rites of Passage and felt that it had a ring of quality to it, the fact is when you're trying to get distributors interested in a horror-thriller you need a more hard-hitting title. It was always my intention to change the title at some point, in fact we even had a bit of a competition among the cast and crew to see who could come up with the best suggestion. Better Dead Than Queer! was put forward by one crew member who will remain nameless. It is actually a line from the film! But in the end Survival Instinct was my idea, and I googled it and to my surprise there was nothing else out there that had used that title so I jumped on it! And then they released the Walking Dead game..."

How did the distribution deal with Film Volt come about?
"Film Volt is a very new film distribution and sales company, and part of their plan has been to create a theatrical platform for independent films. They are releasing the last film Rik Mayall appeared in before he died, among other things. I had already agreed a DVD release with 88 Films but the release date got pushed back quite considerably so I started looking at what else I could do with the film in the meantime. As Film Volt are based in Derbyshire, and Survival Instinct is a Derbyshire-set film, I thought it might be a good match so I got in touch with them and they liked the film.

"In fact I was told it really stood out amongst the indie films they had seen, and so it was selected as one of a small number of films they are putting out theatrically. Of course, it's what they call a 'limited theatrical release' in 'selected cinemas' so it won't be in your local Odeon, but as of now it's showing in independent cinemas in London, Birmingham, Nottingham and Portsmouth and we're still looking to add more locations during February or March 2016. Then the plan is that the DVD will follow from 88 Films in April or May. The latest screening information can always be found on www.survival-instinct-movie.com."

Your sci-fi dino feature Killersauruscouldn’t be more different from the tense drama of Survival Instinct, and sexy ghost story Nocturnal Activity (which you produced for the enigmatic Georg E Lewis) is different to both. Is this a deliberate attempt to be diverse and avoid being pigeonholed?
"Not at all, I'd be happy to be pigeonholed if it meant I was at least known for something! Survival Instinct was something I really wanted to make and spent a lot of time planning, and I knew it was a quality film, so I was concerned about potentially signing away the rights to any old distributor who might just dump it onto VOD or do nothing with it at all. So the other two films were frankly quickies that I made specifically for two different distributors primarily to test the waters and see what kind of genres and distribution strategies might pay off the best. Turns out there was huge interest worldwide in Killersaurus and now I regret rushing it out as it wasn't as good as it could have been, I believe it was the second biggest-selling title of the year for our UK distributor 88 Films and it's been pirated everywhere. It's coming out in the States some time in 2016. So anyway, the different films in different genres were just horses for courses really - different films to appeal to different distributors."

How important was it that the dinosaur in Killersaurus was a puppet and not CGI?
"Well, it was never going to be CGI if I could possibly help it. The first version of the script was very different and concerned more of a raptor-type thing running around in corridors, and I planned to use one of those fantastic man-in-a-suit dinosaur costumes that you sometimes see performers using at live events. But due to the insane time-constraints involved in getting the film out onto DVD whilst Jurassic World was still in cinemas, everything had to be simplified and that's why you end up with a T rex that mostly just skulks around in a dark warehouse.

"One YouTube commenter announced that it was just the same old animatronic dinosaur from Carnosaur, but it wasn't! We didn't have the budget even for that! It was a hand puppet which we shot against green screen so I could scale it up to look huge next to the actors. Fortunately I had Helen Crevel again in one of the lead roles and she happens to be a very experienced puppeteer so it worked out well, but the puppet was pretty stiff and even she struggled to bring much life to it. But despite the limitations, I'd still much rather see a weak practical effect in a film than CGI, especially the crappy kind of CGI you see in low budget monster movies."

When we watched Nocturnal Activity, I turned to you afterwards and said, “Steve, you’ve made a Fred Olen Ray movie.” Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
"Funnily enough, I have vivid memories of watching the Fred Olen Ray episode of The Incredibly Strange Film Show and thinking it must be great to do what he did for a living! It was certainly an attempt to get into that kind of B-movie territory with a mix of supernatural horror and sexy girls, but I don't think I quite got the tone right. In my mind it was very much a tongue-in-cheek affair, and I think some people get it but a lot of people don't. The 'name' star in that one was Jonathan Hansler who had starred in Axed which was released by Lionsgate, and he picked up on the humour in the script right away and played the gags very strongly, but I think overall it's played a bit too straight and we should have camped it up more, made the in-jokes and movie-references a bit more overt. But for a low budget quickie I'm pleased with the way it looks, the lighting and effects are pretty good and the climactic paranormal lesbian seduction scene is worth the wait! It's climactic in more ways than one..."

Creativ Studios’ three new features are all being released within about a year of each other. What can you tell me about your financing model and production process which enables you to be this productive?
"Oh, if only there was a financing model...! I am by no means a great film-maker, but what I do have is many years of experience running my own production company doing just about every type of video production there is, as well as by this point having directed or co-directed five independent features which have all found distribution in one form or another. So this means I am extremely well organised when it comes to planning and executing a shoot. I remember fellow director Dominic Burns asking about any trials and tribulations that occurred during the Survival Instinct shoot and he couldn't believe it when I said we shot the whole thing in ten days flat and it all went perfectly smoothly!

"People don't realise that making a film - whatever the budget level - is 90% logistics and planning. It's just about making sure that your cast, crew, equipment, props, costumes and whatever else you need are all in the right place at the right time. The creative part of if it is really quite small in comparison, particularly when you're on a tight schedule. So to get back to your question, I produced and directed three features in less than two years because each one was tightly planned and executed. I have never in my life had a shoot fall apart or a project that didn't get finished, but these seem to be common events for other film-makers."

Among the current UK indie scene, which films or film-makers have impressed you?
"Well, sadly I could name you any number of British indie horrors that I've switched off before the end, but not many that I've been impressed by to be honest. As I said before, I'm all in favour of the democratisation of film-making that's occurred, but it does mean that an awful lot of rubbish gets made. If we're talking about the micro-budget end of things, the only film that sticks in my memory is Stalled, which was a smart little zombie comedy. Not all of the ideas in it came off but it was a clever concept, well shot, and the ending was magnificent!"

What next for Creativ Studios?
"It depends on what comes of Survival Instinct's theatrical release. Obviously, the hope is that it might just come to the attention of someone with access to higher levels of funding who is looking for new projects to invest in. If that's the case, I've got a number of scripts in the £100k-£250k region that are ready to be developed. If not, then it's back to low budget horrors, and I think first out of the gate will definitely be Killersaurus 2 - Weapons of Mass Extinction. I can assure viewers it will have much more dino-action, craziness and gore than the first one!

"In addition to actual production, we now have quite a substantial studio facility in Leicester which I want to make available to other film-makers. Most indie producers aren't aware of the benefits of shooting in a studio, and end up spending a lot of time begging for locations and then shuttling their cast and crew from one place to another. We want to offer film-makers a base to work from with studio space, production facilities like lighting and camera gear, and comfortable, warm rooms for actors and crew to sit and have a cup of tea when they're not working - and all at a price-point that even micro-budget producers can afford! Details can be found on my website."

website: www.creativ-studios.com

Director: Bernd Rendic
Writers: Bernd Rendic, Jason Rayment
Producers: Jason Rayment, Richard Hewison
Cast: Anthony Mark Streeter, Anita Constantine, Leoni Kibbey
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Website: www.whereseagullscryasong.com

Where Seagulls Cry a Song is a supernatural/psychological thriller about past life regression that ends in murder and rape. No-one seems to have ever reviewed it, commented on it or otherwise acknowledged its existence since it was made six years ago, and only 115 people have actually watched it online. This is a shame as it’s an original and generally well-made little movie with some clever ideas.

Eddie (Anthony Mark Streeter: Stormhouse, Bait) is an auditor who has taken on a new job that requires him to stay at a hotel near the sea, converted from an old manor house. He’s experiencing recurring dreams about having lived there in Victorian times, dreams which gradually impinge on his waking moments until he has difficulty distinguishing which reality/century he’s in and who he’s talking to. The twist is that his past life was a woman, Ada (Anita Constantine: The Snatching) who lived there with her domineering brother Richard (James Tweedy: Cold Blood). Ada falls in love with a writer (Graham Price: Intergalactic Combat) but Richard wants to rescue their strained financial circumstances by forcibly marrying her to old, fat, rich Mr Perkins (David Lee aka Daniel Jefferson, who was in Dark Rage, Dark Journey and The Dark Knight!).

As Eddie finds himself increasingly in love with Nicholas, he comes to doubt his own sexuality, as does his justifiably suspicious wife Denise (Sarah Bull) who thinks her husband is going mad or having a homosexual affair or both. Adding a further level of complication is that Eddie is also perceiving memories from another past life, albeit to a lesser extent. This is Elizabeth (Leoni Kibbey, also a casting director and organiser of the St Albans Film Festival), a 1940s nightclub singer. And – this I particularly liked – Elizabeth is worrying her beau George (Stuart Blackburn) by also having trace memories of her life as Ada. Which makes sense: if Eddie was Ada and Elizabeth in past lives, then by simple Boolean logic Elizabeth was Ada too. A motif of yellow flowers binds these three lives together and is explained at the end.

The acting’s generally good here and Streeter does a solid job of being feminine without being camp. The photography is flat and shows the tiny budget, and the sound mix is too quiet in places, but the way that the different time-frames are cut together within and between scenes is bang on the money. This is that rare thing – a film where you leave the theatre whistling the editing.

Not everything works. There are unavoidable anachronisms. For example Elizabeth meets George when they both shelter from an air-raid in a Tube station (a scene filmed at the Churchill Cabinet War Rooms) but there’s no-one else there. And they leave when the siren stops rather than when the All Clear sounds. And the aeroplane silhouettes representing the approaching German bombers are quite clearly four single engine fighters and a Lancaster.

In fact now I come to think of it, it’s probably the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The point is that a Lancaster looks nothing like a Heinkel or a Junkers, but this is a microbudget picture and the film-makers did what they could with what they had.

More problematic is the script’s use of extensive narration. Far too much of the story is explained to us by Eddie’s voice-over, to the extent that this sometimes seems like a dramatised book-reading. There’s an old saying ‘Show don’t tell’ but it doesn’t look like Rendic and Rayment got that memo. There is also an unexplained sequence early on when Eddie dreams himself in a Regency frock coat with blood on his hands. I kept waiting for some pay-off there and it was never mentioned or referred to again.

Jason Rayment works mostly as an editor, his credits including Community and Ibiza Undead. THis appears to be Bernd Rendic's only credit. An interesting and original feature, Where Seagulls Cry a Song played a few festivals in 2009/2010 - and picked up a few awards - before being posted onto YouTube in May 2010. It's split up into ten segments of eight to nine minutes each. Irritatingly the last one cuts off just a few seconds before the actual end of the credits.

MJS rating: B

Director: Sam Firstenberg
Writer: Stephen Brooks
Producers: Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner, David Varod
Cast: Stephanie Niznik, Greg Cromer, Daniel Quinn, Richard Moll
Year of release: 2001
Country: USA
Reviewed from: VHS screener

This has no discernible connection with Spiders. On the other hand, unlike the first film, the story is roughly the one on the publicity fliers.

Our protagonists are Alex and Jason Paulsen (Stephanie Niznik: Star Trek: Insurrection; and Greg Cromer), a young couple whose yacht is wrecked mid-Pacific in a storm but who are rescued by a passing cargo boat, among whose crew are the slimy Captain Bigelow (Daniel Quinn: Scanner Cop I and II) and the sinister Dr Grbac (cult favourite Richard Moll, from House, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and other memorable pictures).

Jason discovers that the radio isn’t broken, as the Captain claims, that the containers on deck are empty, that the ship is sailing in circles - and that there are dead people on meathooks in the freezer. Alex puts this down to hallucinations brought on by the constant antibiotic injections administered by Dr Grbac.

In fact, Grbac is conducting experiments in increased human immunity by combining human and spider DNA. He does this using unwilling victims kidnapped from passing boats by Bigelow and his crew; the victims are forcefully injected by the ovipositor of a giant (three metres or so) spider, and are then kept in sleep capsules until a baby (18 inches or so) spider bursts from their abdomen. This scientific side doesn’t actually make a lot of sense and is really just an excuse for some gruesome scenes and some cool giant spider shots. There’s no explanation of where the giant spiders originated - possibly they are descended in some way from the beastie in the first film, although that seems unlikely.

Spiders II (released in the USA as Spiders II: Breeding Ground) is an ambitious film which uses its limited budget well, especially with regards to depicting the mid-Pacific, given that the whole thing was shot in landlocked Bulgaria! The CGI spider effects by Scott Coulter, Chris Manabe and others are very good - more so than the puppet spiders - and the monsters are sensibly restricted to glimpses and partially hidden shots until the all-out arachnofest finale. Apart from a few crewmen, there are really only four characters, all of whom are well-acted, though Moll’s doctor is rather stereotypical (he even has an Igor-like assistant!). South African director Sam Firstenberg (Cyborg Cop I and II, whose second unit work on Crocodile got him this gig) keeps the pace going and builds tension, even though - apart from a pre-credits teaser - we don’t actually see any spiders until more than halfway through.

The mostly Bulgarian cast also includes Peter Antonov (a terrorist in Octopus), Dimiter Kuzov (a tugboat captain in Octopus 2) and Gerald Henderson, whose scenes in King Cobra were deleted - which many would consider a lucky escape. Special effects supervisor Willie Botha also worked on both Octopus films and cinematographer Peter Belcher lit the second one.

A fun romp this one, with some thrills, some shocks and plenty of eight-legged horrors.

MJS rating: B
Review originally posted 22nd May 2005.

Director: Gary Jones
Writer: Stephen Brooks
Producers: Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner
Cast: Lana Parrilla, Josh Green, Mark Phelan
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: Festival screening (Cannes 2000)

Spiders holds a special meaning for me, as it was seeing this Nu Image movie at Cannes 2000 that led to my two interviews on British breakfast TV that week. It’s a very enjoyable giant bug romp and let’s face it, you simply cannot go wrong with giant bug movies. Even the bad ones are good and Spiders is actually a pretty decent movie.

Intriguingly, the publicity fliers distributed at Cannes carried a synopsis for a story entirely unrelated to the finished film, all about an Incan mummy and a ‘proton interferometer’. What actually happens is that a space shuttle crashes near a military base, releasing a spider which was being used in orbital experiments but has become mutated. The title Spiders is, incidentally, a bit of a misnomer as there’s only ever one spider - well, one at a time.

Lana Parrilla (Spin City) and Josh Green (Curse of the Puppet Master) are the young people investigating what’s going on, while Mark Phelan (who has a healthy career playing cops, doctors and security guards in the likes of MANTIS, Doctor Mordrid and 12:01) is the government agent opposing them. Some of the spider effects are, frankly, embarrassing, as hapless actors struggle with largely inanimate puppets like a 1950s Tarzan wrestling a rubber alligator. But stick with the movie, because once the spider becomes large enough to render in CGI it’s absolutely awesome! The giant arachnid rampages through the town, crushing cars and knocking down lamp-posts - that’s what we want to see!

Spiders has a decent script by Stephen Brooks (a former Visual Effects Supervisor who also wrote the otherwise unconnected Spiders 2) and is smoothly directed by Gary Jones, helmer of Mosquito (another giant bug romp), Crocodile 2 (another Nu Image nature-amok flick) and various Hercules and Xena episodes. Cinematographer Jack Cooperman was responsible for the underwater footage in Star Trek IV and also worked on Hill Street Blues. Also in the cast are Billy Maddox (Deep Freeze), Jack Ott (Night Wars) and Jonathan Breck who played the title role in Jeepers Creepers and its sequel.

The US DVD sleeve image has no discernible connection with what happens in this film.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 22nd May 2005.